BATON ROUGE, LA. (AP) - Jeanne Leiby, editor of Louisiana State University’s literary quarterly, The Southern Review, was killed in a traffic accident near Baton Rouge.
State police said Leiby, 46, was westbound Tuesday on Interstate 10 when she tried to change lanes, lost control of the car and hit a guard rail.
Leiby, a fiction writer and teacher, was named editor of The Southern Review in 2008 after serving as editor of The Florida Review at the University of Central Florida. She had also been fiction editor of Black Warrior Review while a graduate student at the University of Alabama, LSU said.
“This is a great loss to the LSU community, both personally and professionally,” LSU Chancellor Michael Martin said in a news release Wednesday. “The students, faculty and staff with whom she worked will miss her greatly.”
Leiby’s stories appeared in several literary publications including Fiction, New Orleans Review, Greensboro Review and Indiana Review. Her collection of short stories, Downriver, was published by Carolina Wren Press in fall 2007.
Leiby grew up in Detroit. She earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan, a Master of Arts at the Bread Loaf School of English-Middlebury College, and a Master of Fine Arts at Alabama.
At LSU, she was working on plans to merge The Southern Review with another literary arm of the university, the LSU Press, a move brought on by state higher education budget cuts.
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