Influential editor leaving Border Crossings after 33 years at the helm

They say that a picture tells a thousand words, but also not to judge a book by its cover.

Meeka Walsh isn’t much one for platitudes. Surveying three decades of Border Crossings’ covers, the back stories she gives — relaying what the pictures may only hint at — are peppered with qualities one recognizes from her writing as the magazine’s flagship editor: the ironic asides, the sculpted turns of phrase and the innocent name-dropping.

Walsh says she remembers every cover, too — though some are judged more warmly than others, even in an exalted light.

Currently, she’s eying the great Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank’s Watching the Crows on issue no. 152 from February 2020. Frank’s best known for his landmark The Americans — a sad, funny, rambling road chronicle of postwar America, a little like On the Road in pictures, that also electrified Jack Kerouac.