Social Virtues Series
Editor’s Note
Mi gente—
Bienvenidos to something new here at GMR—welcome to the Social Virtues Series! It gives me great honor to work with the rest of the editorial team here at Green Mountains Review to add in a new layer of care and critical thought in the literary landscape. This new series is a dream child, a great conversation and a blessing all wrapped into one. It is my hope that this new space provides you the reader and fan of GMR’s work a new way to engage with writers. We offer this safe space to BIPOC writers and other social justice writers to provide a platform for their creative works and dedicated space for the issues they are the most passionate about and consider the most pressing.
I want you to engage with the work here, not as just a mere reader, but if you are so moved, involve yourself in the issues presented. Reach out, donate, share info—do whatever feels right.
We know we want to uplift voices from around the country and in doing so, we want to uplift their communities too. Using this new platform, it is my hope that GMR becomes more than just a dynamic journal; we can be a resource in supporting good, just causes as well.
The format is not unique, but the individual issues and the writers are. I have curated the first three entries (two poets a month), and later, we will open up the Submittable to encourage other writers to send us their work + social justice issues. What I am saying is—con gusto mi gente, we are here for you.
A la orden,
Lupe Mendez
GMR, Associate Editor
2022 Texas Poet Laureate
When they come for my things,
there will be a note left on my pillow:
I was going to live
for all my cotton tees, folded all the same—
Call that buzzword your songbird, your chirp in the wood, the branch-snap cackle freak-deep in a stone throat.
War is a spider
legs thick as knuckles
in the chest.