Jan Lee Ande has created a steady, contemplative and sometimes playful voice, often melding the factual and the fanciful, the hallowed and the sensual. These poems bring new perspectives to the commonplace - a stone, an avocado, a sea urchin - and a celebration to the mysteries of human experience.

Texas Review Press attempts to meet the needs of an international as well as domestic and local audience. We continue to conduct four international competitions: the George Garrett Fiction Prize for a short novel or collection of stories, the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize for a full-length collection of poems, the newly named Clay Reynolds Novella Prize for best novella, and the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize for best poetry chapbook of up to thirty-two pages. The X. J. Kennedy Prize winner for 2002 was Reliquary, by Jan Lee Ande of La Jolla, California. Nancy Carlson of Missouri won the 2002 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize for Complications of the Heart, and Armadillo, by Stephen March (Elizabeth City, North Carolina), was selected winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize for 2002. All winners were selected by nationally known American writers through a "blind submission" process. Dedicated as always to the state and region, we recently released Ars Poetica, a novel by Clay Reynolds of Denton, Texas, and Cabin Fever, by A. Carolina Castillo Crimm.