Jeanne Leiby flipped through an original 1935 edition of The Southern Review on Wednesday morning as she sat in the main parlor of the Old President’s House. The house on Highland Road holds the publication and features autographed photos of Robert Penn Warren, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and poet laureate, and his co-founder and editor at the Review, Cleanth Brooks.Co-founded in 1935, disbanded in 1942 and revived in 1965, the University-published literary journal is at a new crossroads — It has its first female editor. Leiby, who began her editorship in January, is a Detroit native. She said it’s funny the University hired a Northern girl to run a prominent Southern magazine.But to Leiby, gender doesn’t play a role in the Review’s quality.”I don’t think it matters,” she said. “Times are changing … I’m well aware it’s a paradigm shift.”She said whatever changes manifest in future publications will be a result of her personal aesthetic, which differs from editor to editor and isn’t a result of her gender. But there is long-standing perception of the Review, she said — that the publication has always tended toward the male Southern writer.”Just by virtue of me being here, that shifted,” said Leiby, who also teaches an English course at the University. “LSU’s not a place afraid to hire women.”Leiby was working as a literary agent in Los Angeles during the writers’ strike in 1988 when she took a leave of absence for the summer to work on a master’s degree at the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College. She never went back to California — a move she said was no mistake. Leiby brings teaching, editing and writing to The Southern Review’s pages. She taught English and edited The Florida Review at the University of Central Florida and edited the Black Warrior Review at the University of Alabama. Her compilation of short stories, “Downriver,” was published in 2007 and won the Doris Bakwin Prize from the Carolina Wren Press. But she said the way she reads has been permanently altered by her position as an editor — she can’t turn off critical reading. Leiby and her staff thumb through 12,000 to 15,000 manuscripts submitted for every issue. When she reads manuscripts for the Review, Leiby said she must leave her preferences behind and look at pieces with objective criticism.”Whether or not I like them doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate them artistically,” Leiby said. Leiby left the University of Central Florida, where she edited The Florida Review and taught creative writing, to come to LSU.”If you’re offered a job as editor of The Southern Review … You don’t pass that up,” Leiby said.She said she takes in the mail every morning and looks at the return addresses on letters like “a kid in a candy shop,” as the Review receives work from prominent writers and often poet laureates. “They come to us,” Leiby said.The Review publishes established writers alongside emerging ones, and Leiby said the upcoming issue will feature poet laureate Charles Simic and emerging talent Alex Lemon.The Review was co-edited until 2004 but the duos have constantly disagreed, Leiby said. Her predecessor was the first to forego the option of a co-editor, and she said she has turned down the option, as well. To make use of the other editor’s salary, Leiby has made her mark on the publication by establishing the unique Resident Scholar Program. The two-year fellowship is one of the first to incorporate editing, teaching and writing for postgraduate scholars. Up to two participants provide 20 hours of work per week at the Review and teach in the English department. Each receives a stipend of $32,000.Christina Thompson, editor of Harvard Review, commended the program and Leiby’s accomplishment in the editor’s note of her publication this summer.Andrew Ervin, 37, is the first fellow of the program, which will stagger the hiring of new scholars so a new person is brought in each year.”When you can get paid to sit around and read and write … there’s nothing really wrong with the world,” Ervin said.Ervin is a fiction writer and a book reviewer for The New York Times. He is looking to publish three novellas in the very near future. Ervin said the fall issue, which will be available Nov. 1, is stocked with “shocking” poetry.”People who don’t typically read poetry are going to love this issue,” Ervin said. Leiby, 44, received her first Louisiana birthday present this September — a drawn-out power outage from Hurricane Gustav. The storm was her fifth hurricane in four years, two of which hit on her birthday. She said she and a friend could not stand the heat one night and drove to the Old President’s House, where air conditioning had been restored within a day of the storm, to spend the night.But a hurricane isn’t enough to keep her from Baton Rouge.”I admit it’s not as sexy as New Orleans … but I think there’s something genuine about these people,” Leiby said of Baton Rouge. “The food is amazing.” She said she especially enjoys Chelsea’s Cafe and Parrain’s but was reduced to reading a waitress’s lips in Lafayette this year because she could not make out her heavy Cajun accent. —-
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