After months of germination, our Spring issue is out today! Shrug off the winter doldrums with the bright splashes of color on our cover, painted by the Lebanese artist Etel Adnan especially for the issue. Look between the covers for a portfolio of her color-infused landscapes, text-based works, and abstractions, curated by our interim editor Nicole Rudick.

The issue features two Art of Fiction interviews. The Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, winner of the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2013, discusses a career devoted to chronicling the experiences of women and the poor:

My own deepest interest as a writer is in fiction but as I have learned, it is my work that is most socially engaged that is also the most valued by my readers … There is a moral obligation to write of this. I could not ignore it.

And Charles Johnson, author of the National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage, describes the philosophical novel and writing about black America:

I know that black life, like all life, outstrips our perceptions, that so much of black life still remains—to invoke Ellison here—invisible, unseen.

Also: A new story by Joy Williams (“Sometimes I ride in the chthonic with the luggage, the boots and coats, the boxes of fruit and gin and books”), her tenth for the magazine. Williams will receive the Hadada, the Review’s lifetime-achievement award, at the Revel on April 3.

Plus: fiction by Rachel Cusk, Kathleen Collins, Chia-Chia Lin, JoAnna Novak, Katherine Kilalea, and Danielle Dutton (you may notice a commonality in this list); and poems by Ishion Hutchinson, Dorothea Lasky, Mónica de la Torre, Alejandra Pizarnik, Major Jackson, Ange Mlinko, Nick Laird, Peter Cole, and Michael Hofmann.

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