Parting words from Frank Stewart, head of Mānoa, from the editor’s note for In the Silence, the winter 2022 volume. Pictured is Stewart with Quinn White, the journal’s summer 2022 intern from Bennington College.
Over the last thirty-five years, Mānoa has been dedicated to presenting literature and art from throughout the world. Writers, translators, and artists are essential, we have asserted, for their ability and willingness to put into words and images the reality of individual suffering as well as celebrate the hopes and actions that contribute to a sane civil society. Earlier this year, Mānoa published Out of the Shadows of Angkor, the first comprehensive anthology of work from Cambodia. In 2020, Mānoaa’s volume Tyranny Lessons featured international work exploring the social, political, and personal consequences of intolerance, racial injustice, and despotism. The writers from China, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Latvia, Slovenia, Syria, Taiwan, Tibet, Turkey, and the U.S. contributed works that explore many kinds of freedom—and its opposite. Over the years, previous issues of Mānoa have focused on the themes of reconciliation, minority communities, displaced persons, and war. Mānoa has offered to English-speaking readers the literature and art from many places and people off the map and out of mind taking readers and these subjects seriously; to that end, the editors and guest editors have attempted to present works that are as strong as possible as literature and art, worthy of enduring interest. This is the last issue being produced by the team that has headed Mānoa since its founding by Robert Shapard and Frank Stewart in 1989. During those decades, Māhealani Dudoit and then Pat Matsueda were the managing editors and Barbara Pope the art editor, who also provided the original design upon which the journal is based. Students, volunteers, interns, and staff have been dedicated to the journal’s success, for which we thank them. The University of Hawai‘i Press has always been supportive. Mānoa is grateful to the organizations, individual readers, contributors, and others who have understood our mission and sustained us. In short, we have been favored by countless, unseen angels. The departing team wishes the best for Mānoa’s future.