The 2021 issue explores North Carolina authors writing toward healing. The issue opens with George Hovis's interview with one of North Carolina's most beloved writers, Lee Smith, and includes Kirstin Squint's interview with Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, author of the first novel published by a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Between these two interviews, read essays on Smith's fiction by Sharon E. Colley and on Charles Frazier's Nightwoods by Paula Rawlins. Also in this section, North Carolina Humanities' Linda Flowers Award essay by Mildred Kiconco Barya and Christie Hinson Norris's keynote address, Teaching the Darkness Away: Humanities, History, and Education, given at North Carolina Humanities' 2020 Caldwell Award ceremony honoring James W. Clark. The special feature section closes with an essay by Laura Hope-Gill about her journey toward developing a Narrative Medicine program in North Carolina. One of the medical doctors who graduated from that program, Daniel Waters, also contributed an essay for the issue.

The Flashbacks section includes the year's John Ehle Prize winner, an ecocritical reading of Ehle's The Road by Savannah Page Murray, followed by an essay on the women in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and Ron Rash's Serena by John Hanley. Find here too Jim Coby's interview with Nathan Ballingrud, who writes speculative fiction in the tradition of North Carolina's Manly Wade Wellman, an essay by Timothy Nixon on a short story by Randall Kenan, and a few of the honorees of the 2020 James Applewhite Poetry Prize, whose poems relate to special feature topics of issues past.

More of the Applewhite Prize honorees, including the winner, are in the issue's North Carolina Miscellany section, along with the 2020 winners of the Doris Betts Fiction Prize, Molly Sentell Haile, and the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize, Andrew Scrimgeour. All three of the 2020 prize winners are new to NCLR. Keely Hendricks's Applewhite Prize poem is, in fact, the poet's first publication.