I came to know Harry Stoneback as a colleague and friend in the few short years we co-edited this volume together. We found our groove as co-editors quickly—I like to get things done early in the morning, while Harry was a night owl. I would find his work waiting for me in my inbox first thing in the morning and return it to him for him to review in the small hours of the night. In our time working together, I also came to appreciate the unexpected from these annual exchanges of poetry, ideas, and stories. None was more surprising than the cover art for our final issue together as co-editors.

Harry announced his retirement in the spring semester of 2019 and tipped me off early on that he had a special offering for the issue—an original portrait done of him by a world-famous artist, Everett Raymond Kinstler. This all sounded impressive, except I had never heard of him. I had read in draft an appreciation and poem Harry had dedicated to Kinstler for the issue and I wondered (as one did) if his praise was something of an embellishment—kind words for an old, obscure artist friend. I kept my ignorance to myself and pushed forward with the work of preparing the issue.

In April, right on the cusp of our deadline, I traveled to Washington, DC for the Shakespeare Association of America annual conference. Between sessions I was emailing with Harry and our graphic designer about final details before the Review was to be sent off to the printer, including the placement of the portrait. My family was with me on the trip, and so, taking a break from conferencing, I joined them one afternoon for some sightseeing around town. High on my list was a visit to the Supreme Court: in high school and college (before catching the bug for English literature) I harbored dreams of clerking for the court and have remained an avid follower of its business and history. There is a museum on the ground level of the building, where the hallways are lined with portraits of former justices. Wandering there, I came upon the painting of the great jurist Harry Blackmun, author of the majority opinion on Roe v. Wade (among many other precedent-setting decisions). I always admired Blackmun, a fellow Midwesterner and the kind of centrist justice it is hard to find in today’s judiciary. So I paused there in the quiet hallway and studied the stylish, modern portrayal of Justice Blackmun, when I caught sight the artist’s signature in the bottom right corner: Kinstler. I must have laughed out loud. “You got me, Stoney,” I thought to myself, smiling and shaking my head.

The artist’s portrait of Harry would be on the cover of that final volume—his 30th as editor. Kinstler died shortly after that, early in the summer of 2019. In my final correspondence with Stoney, dated April 2021, he wrote this note to me about his friend Ray. It turns out to be a fitting reflection on life and the surprising unexpectedness of death:

We always want to think that those we love, those we must honor, will live forever. But on the eve of the pandemic, as the longest In Memoriam season approached, two more Memorials surprised me. One was for my dear friend Everett Raymond Kinstler, the famous painter widely celebrated as the world’s greatest living portraitist. Ray’s portraits of Presidents are displayed in the White House, his depictions of leaders and luminaries are in museums worldwide, and more than 100 of his works are in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. At first, I deflected his insistence that I sit as subject for his portraiture by asking him to do a portrait of Hemingway that I could unveil and feature at the 2018 International Hemingway Conference in Paris. Remarkably, though he usually required his subjects to have several live sittings, he produced in a few days a now much-acclaimed portrait of Hemingway. Seeing what he could create working from photographs alone, I raised the subject of his doing a portrait of Elizabeth Madox Roberts [EMR]. He was amenable to my idea and asked me to supply as many photographs of EMR as I could assemble. I was in the midst of that process when we lost him. Alas! What a treasure it would have been to have a Kinstler portrait of EMR. Ray was only 92 and of all my accomplished friends and elder exemplars he seemed the youngest at heart. We had just had lunches and dinners together in Manhattan and at his home in Connecticut and we were discussing our collaboration on a book (featuring his paintings and my poems about them) and then one morning he was gone.

Harry was always seeking new opportunities to collaborate, to bring together communities in scholarship, song, and verse. The Shawangunk Review is a record of that generous collaboration that could have only stemmed from its founder. Where else would you find the paintings of Ray Kinstler alongside poetry from our graduate student community? The work of leading fiction writers with commentary by department faculty? For me, working as co-editor with Stoney was about more than broadening my cultural vocabulary (and remembering to look up the names of artists). I found faith in his vision of what a community in the region of the Shawangunks can be.