Fall 2025

Dear Avalon Readers, 

Welcome to the Fall 2025 edition of Avalon Literature & Arts Magazine! We are honored you have once again returned to be a part of our literary community. Our journal's deep roots in Shenandoah University continue to spread and flourish both on and off campus. This semester, we were delighted to bring the message of Avalon to more classes than ever before, as well as facilitate increased engagement in the Guest Writer Series. Now, we are reaching out into the community to celebrate our first Fall launch party in downtown Winchester. 

Our contributors’ pieces are breaths in between moments. They invite us to bask in the stillness, and we linger with them–between, above, and around the worlds they create. The present edition challenges our linear notion of time, insisting that the past, present, and future are part of us and continuously shape us. But as we interact with the world, none of us ever truly stands on their own. We cannot escape our reality or try to forcibly seize what we are granted; we must embrace what we are dealt, and we must embrace one another. 

When sifting through the sands of time with burning hands of passion, the glass may distort into fractals that spiral us out of control. To remain grounded, our editors sought from this semester’s submissions a high level of intentionality, totality, and purpose. We reflect on what agonizes us, take inspiration from what plagues us, and meditate on what is yet to come. So find your footing in the insight and savor the spontaneous joy, as these moments too will surely pass in the greedy clutches of time. We hope as you read this edition, the vignettes find a home within the arrangement of your life. 

Our editorial team would like to thank our dear readers for their ongoing support! We are humbled that Avalon can be a home for so many artists and writers to use their voices and showcase their talent. If you cannot get enough of this issue (which surely is inevitable), please check out our Instagram for more poetry, prose, and artwork from our editors, as well as keep tabs on our first-ever Fall contest! With that, we are gruntled to present to you our Fall 2025 edition of Avalon!