This year we get to celebrate carefully crafted prose pieces as well as fine art and enlivening poetry. While good poetry has been a mainstay of Crosscurrents since the magazine’s inception, we have included in this issue spare and honest short stories and well-honed essays. While the political landscape might become increasingly bleak and frustrating sometimes, Crosscurrents just gets richer and more multi-dimensional, like a rare vintage that gets better with age. And while most art has a way of opening the world wider than tired clichés and sleeve-worn habits and reverses entropy in any age, Crosscurrents is unique in that all the work is done by community college instructors for no pay other than a few contributor copies and in spite of those teachers often having heavy teaching commitments. The work is bright and refreshing and seldom weighed down by a stack of papers to be corrected. Once again, enjoy the fruits that a lot of work and time has condensed into a few moments of reading.

- Michael Kiefel