As your newly elected Regent for a second term, I look forward to seeing many of you in Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Portland, and whatever similarly magic city our Executive Director and my fellow Board members decide upon for spring 2014.  It was a pleasure to caucus with a few familiar but some mainly unfamiliar student faces in St. Louis; as for the many chapter sponsors I now recognize after four years of service as your Southern Regent, thanks and more thanks.  We hope the Friday luncheon which several of you attended will become an annual fixture at the convention.

I’ve been reflecting on the geography of it all of late—partly because my upper division specialty courses at Union University tend to cluster around American literature in general and Southern prose writers of the twentieth century in particular.  Also, our Board has had a healthy debate the past couple of years about the viability of splitting this organization into regions.  It will continue to do so, thus mirroring the rapidly growing National English Honor Society (NEHS) among our high school ranks.  Though I think I could make the case that Arkansas, for instance, would work well as a Southern entity, let’s not quibble; besides, the work of former Sigma Tau Delta Student Advisor Micah Hicks which you see in these pages is now fully claimed by us—Micah having matriculated at Southern Mississippi University for his graduate studies after a fine career as an undergraduate at Southern Arkansas University.

Those of you at convention were no doubt made aware of the presence of a delegation (two students; one faculty advisor) from the American University of Kuwait.  Having attended their knockout panel session on Friday afternoon, I speculated as to where this institution fell in our occasionally arbitrary scheme of things: It’s an Eastern chapter!  While I don’t begrudge our Mid-Atlantic and New England kin this fact, I do wonder about the designation—Middle Eastern in Asia equal Eastern U.S., perhaps?  No matter: While I’d love the opportunity to publish either Dana Al-Failakawi’s or Amnah Ibraheem’s prose in this regional newsletter, I won’t be surprised if their plans for Rectangle submission come to full fruition.

Speaking of that esteemed print document, the award-winning poet Beth Ann Fennelly—director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi—told me recently that her first ever published poem appeared in the Rectangle.  Considering that W. W. Norton has become her publisher for her last three books, I find that of note—and reason to ask her to say something in our pages here about this phenomenon. 

So if any of us—me, your SR Atinuke (Tina) Sode, or your ASR Sarah Fredericks—can be of assistance, please call upon us.  For now, enjoy this newsletter and the simple phenomenon of springtime in the American South.