Why Blood Orange?

Blood Orange Review is the joint effort of Stephanie Lenox and Heather K. Hummel. The review publishes fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, book reviews, and interviews with interesting people actively involved in the literary world. The aim is to publish and make readily accessible the best, freshest, most exciting work by new and established writers.

Editors Stephanie and Heather became friends during their term of service with Literacy AmeriCorps in Seattle, Washington. In order to escape their cubicles in the book distribution center of the King County Public Library, they scheduled weekly "committee meetings" at the Caffeine Messiah (where coffee is a religion) among other Seattle coffee shops. There they journaled, shared work, and discussed ways to incorporate poetry into the E.S.L. classes they were teaching for the library.

Later, they shared a house in Cheney, Washington where Heather attended Eastern Washington University. With a limited decorating budget, they started scribbling poems on the kitchen wall. They spent time with the poems over morning coffee and evening wine, learning as each poem revealed its intricate stories like actors against a drive-in movie screen—gargantuan against the skyline.

Now, thousands of miles between them, with one foot in the desert and one foot on the coast, without a communal kitchen wall to scribble on, they've created Blood Orange Review as a common space where they can share and contemplate writing they enjoy.

The blood orange in the title originates from an old poem (by Heather) that uses the startling fruit as a way to articulate those things in life, like good writing, that we inexplicably taste and carry with us because they are bold, unusual, and necessary.