An endless amount of gratitude to Maurice Carlos Ruffin for serving as guest Selecting Editor.

Maurice is the author of National Bestseller, The American Daughters, a New York Times Editor's Choice published by One World Random House. He is the recipient of the 2023 Louisiana Writer Award and the Black Rock Senegal Residency. He also wrote The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You, which was published by One World Random House in August 2021. It is the 2023 One Book One New Orleans selection. The book was a New York Times Editor's Choice, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and longlisted for the Story Prize. The book was also selected to represent Louisiana at the 2023 National Book Festival. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was longlisted for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The novel was also a New York Times Editor's Choice. His work appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Ruffin was the 2022 Grand Marshal of the Mardi Gras Krewe of House Floats and recipient of the 2022 Louisiana Board of Regents ATLAS grant. Ruffin has taught at numerous residencies and conferences including Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Maine Media, Randolph College MFA, and Longleaf. Ruffin was a co-curator of the Read My World Literary Festival (Amsterdam) in 2017 and a contributor in 2022. Ruffin is part of the Artist Network of Narrative 4, an organization dedicated to aiding the educational opportunities of young people.

Maurice's words leave a powerful impact on the literary universe and beyond—epic and poetic and emotional and profound, his language creates echoes upon echoes, forever vibrating in the minds of readers all around the world. Thank you, Maurice, for your time, thought, and care given to this series, and thank you for inspiring us all read, write, and love. For more information about Maurice, please visit his website.

Every year, I am humbled and grateful for The Wigleaf Top 50 Masthead. The infinite amount of time they give to read an ocean of various literary journals to celebrate the art of very short fictions, storytelling, writers, editors, and magazines—I am forever thankful for their passion and enthusiasm to continue to push forward and recognize this particular craft from all around the world. Thank you all so much for all that you do for this literary community and for keeping The Wigleaf Top 50 thriving and full of energy. 

With immense sincerity—with such immense sincerity,  thank you to our Associate Series Editors Sudha Balagopal, Michelle Dove, Alice Maglio, and Colleen Rothman, and our Readers Sacha Bissonnette, Vincent Chavez, Casey Hannan, Ruth Joffre, LaToya Jordan, Sydney S. Kim, Sean Lovelace, Jeneé Skinner, Anne Weisgerber, and Erica L. Williams.

Thank you, Scott Garson, the editor of Wigleaf, for providing a path to share the love for very short fictions and all that it encompasses.  

Thank you to all the editors, writers, and literary magazines for incessantly promoting and publishing this particular craft of writing. Such fiction continues to push boundaries of what storytelling can do in such a short space, and it can only happen with your visions and inspirations.

Soil and mulch—leaves and stems and petals. Light—rain, roots and bark and beds. Nourishment. Feed and flower. So, a garden—a garden of words blooming in every season, regardless of ice or heat. A frozen sun or otherwise. Such nature grows from every obstacle and flourishes in all sentiments. Sediments. Sedimental, a journey through minerals and blades. We found ourselves covered in dirt—scrapes and splinters and sweat, and we found ourselves breathing mud and puddles and thorns, drenched in souls— soulful; soul filled, from one word to the next, and from sentence to sentence, dearth and luster, deluge and earth. So let's shine—upward we go from one story to the next, until that bit of space, that little bit, in between it all, between us all and in that bit of air, lets us realize that we can only exist in these worlds never created. So let's share our love and raise each other up—uplift and spring, for we are all a part of the same garden found between the lines, a bit of air.     

Love.

Onward and onward.

—-shome dasgupta