Contributors: Summer 2015

Cover

(Front) Untitled: Hands Up. Watercolor, pen, and varnish, 20 x 30 in. 2015.
(Back) Pride #3. Marker and pen, 20 x 30 in. 2015 © Adrian Armstrong.

Adrian Armstrong is a graduate of the University of Nebraska currently living and working in Nebraska. His work consists of mixed media portraits, often pointillism, focused in surrealistic and often abstract portraiture exploring American culture. His website is: www.adrianarmstrongart.com.

Prose

Adrienne Celt’s debut novel, The Daughters, will be published by W. W. Norton/Liveright in August 2015. Her short fiction appears (or is forthcoming) in Esquire, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, EPOCH, Puerto del Sol, Carve Magazine, and many other journals. Her comics and essays can be found in the Rumpus, The Toast, The Millions, The Tin House Open Bar, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. She publishes a webcomic at loveamongthelampreys.com.

Emily Geminder’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Witness, the Mississippi Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. She is currently a Durwood fellow at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Gabe Herron lives outside a small town near Portland, Oregon. He’s had a winning story in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. He has worked at Powell’s Books for twelve years.

Lawrence Lenhart Lawrence Lenhart holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. His work appears or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. Currently living in Sacramento, he is the reviews editor and assistant fiction editor of DIAGRAM.

Kate Southwood’s debut novel, Falling to Earth, was published by Europa Editions in March 2013 and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. She is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Program for Writers and Poets.

Wil Weitzel is currently at work on a novel set in alpine Pakistan that showcases mountain ecologies and contemporary human relations to wild spaces. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Southwest Review, New Orleans Review, Chautauqua, Conjunctions, and the Kenyon Review. In 2014, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and awarded a NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship at the Center for Fiction. He also won the 2014 Washington Square Flash Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2014 David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction.

Poetry

Jeff Alessandrelli is the author of recently published full-length collection The Last Time Will Be the First. His other work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, and four chapbooks. The name of Jeff’s dog is Beckett Long Snout. The name of his micro-press is Dikembe Press.

Hala Alyan’s Hala Alyan is a Palestinian-American poet and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals including the Missouri Review, Third Coast, and Columbia Poetry Review. Her poetry collection Atrium (Three Rooms Press) was awarded the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry. Four Cities, her second collection, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press later this year. Her third collection, Hijra, was recently selected as a winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and will be published by Southern Illinois University Press.

Jose Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and has had poems recently in Salamander, RHINO, Borderlands, and Pilgrimage. He runs the poetry blog titled the Friday Influence. He is presently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. His chapbook, “Reasons (not) to Dance,” is due out in the summer of 2015 from FutureCycle Press.

Bonnie Arning Bonnie Arning’s first book, The Black Acres, has been selected by the Mountain West Poetry Series and is forthcoming in spring 2016. A New Mexico native, she currently resides in Albuquerque with her young son Arlo.

Miguel Avero Miguel Avero was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1984. He is the author of a poetry collection Arca de aserrín. His poems, translated by Jona Colson, have appeared in Palabras errantes and in Prairie Schooner and are forthcoming in América invertida: An Anthology of Younger Uruguayan Poets.

Michelle Boisseau received her second NEA poetry fellowship in 2011. Her fourth books of poems, A Sunday in God-Years, was published by the University of Arkansas Press. New poems have appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Yale Review, Hudson Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a VONA fellow, and the founder of the Glitter Pomegranate Poetry Series. She is the author of three poetry collections, Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows and Convincing the Body. She is also a graduate of Stonecoast MFA Poetry Program. Her poems are published in numerous anthologies including: ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Bowery Women, The Mom Egg Review, Callaloo, Pank, and Killens Review of Arts & Letters.

Anders Carlson-Wee Anders Carlson-Wee is a 2015 NEA Fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, the Missouri Review, the Southern Review, West Branch, Blackbird, Best New Poets 2012 and 2014, and elsewhere. He is the winner of Ninth Letter’s 2014 Poetry Award and New Delta Review’s 2014 Editors’ Choice Prize. A recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Residency Fellowship, Andrews is currently an MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University.

Colin Channer’s first collection of poems, Providential, will be published in fall 2015 by Akashic Books in the United States and Peepal Tree Press in the United Kingdom.

Martha Collins’s eighth book of poetry, Admit One: An American Scrapbook, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in early 2016. Collins is also the author of seven earlier books of poetry, including Day Unto Day, White Papers, and Blue Front, and cotranslator of four collections of Vietnamese poetry. She is editor at large for FIELD magazine and an editor for Oberlin College Press.

Jona Colson’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Suptropics, The Southern Review, and the Florida Review. He teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland. He teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

Kevin J. Craft is the editor of Poetry Northwest. His books include Solar Prominence (Cloudbank Books, 2005) and five volumes of the anthology Mare Nostrum, an annual collection of Italian translation and Mediterranean-inspired writing. Recent poems appear in Poetry, Kenyon Review, NER, and West Branch. He has been awarded fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, Camargo Foundation, 4Culture, and Artist Trust. He lives in Seattle, where he directs both the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College and the University of Washington’s Creative Writing in Rome Program.

Patricia Fargnoli’s latest collection is WINTER, Hobblebush Books, 2013. Her three previous books were all award-winning. She is a former New Hampshire Poet Laureate and MacDowell fellow. She has published most recently in Harvard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Barrow Street, and Paterson Literary Review.

Jennifer Givhan was a PEN/ Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellow and a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship recipient, as well as the 2013 DASH Literary Journal Poetry Prize winner, an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist, and a 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize finalist for her collection Karaoke Night at the Asylum. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College, her master’s in English from Cal State Fullerton, and her work has appeared in more than seventy literary journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2013, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Rattle, Collagist, cream city review, and Columbia Review. She teaches at Western New Mexico University and online at the Rooster Moans Poetry Coop. You can visit Givhan online at jennifergivhan.com.

J. P. Grasser’s poetry explores the diverse regions he has called home, most persistently his family’s fish hatchery in Brady, Nebraska. He studied English and Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South and received his M.F.A in poetry from John Hopkins University, where he currently teaches. His work appears or is forthcoming from Crab Orchard Review, Quarterly West, Ecotone, Salt Hill, West Branch Wired, Ninth Letter Online, and Redivider, among others. His website can be found at www.jpgrasser.com.

Linda Hillringhouse was a first-place winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (2014) and the second-place winner of Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (2012). She has received fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Ann Hudson’s first book, The Armillary Sphere, was chosen by Mary Kinzie for the Hollis Summers Prize and was published by Ohio University Press. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Chautauqua, Cider Press Review, Crab Orchard Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Chicago area.

Jonathan Johnson’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, the Missouri Review, Witness, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, and other magazines. His poems have also appeared in Best American Poetry and been read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. In addition to two poetry books, he has published a memoir, Hannah and the Mountain. He migrates between Upper Michigan, Scotland, and the Inland Northwest, where he is a professor teaching in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.

Betsy Johnson-Miller’s work has appeared in Boulevard, Agni (online), Gray’s Sporting Journal, Mid-American Review, and Cortland Review. She lives and teaches in Minnesota.

Julia Spicher Kasdorf has published three collections in the Pitt Poetry Series, most recently, Poetry in America. A professor of English and women’s studies at Penn State, she is currently working on a documentary poetry project about shale gas drilling in northern and southwestern Pennsylvania.

John Kinsella’s new volume of poetry is Jam Tree Gully (Norton), and his new volume of short stories is In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio UP).

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. He is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” His most recent poetry collections are The Biscuit Joint and A Wilderness of Monkeys. For more, see www.davidkirby.com.

Sandra Kolankiewicz has had nearly 200 poems and stories appear in journals over the past thirty-five years. They have been featured in such places as Mississippi Review, North American Review, Confrontation, Gargoyle, Rhino, Prick of the Spindle, Cortland Review, Fifth Wednesday, Appalachian Heritage, Per Contra, Louisville Review, and in the anthologies Sudden Fiction and Four Minutes Fiction. Her chapbook Turning Inside Out won the Black River Chapbook Competition at Black Lawrence Press. Blue Eyes Don’t Cry won the Hackney Award for the Novel. The Way You Will Go is available from Finishing Line Press. She teaches at a community college in West Virginina.

Jacqueline Kolosov’s third poetry collection is Memory of Blue (Salmon, 2014). She has new poetry and prose in Sewanee Review, Stand (UK), the Moth (UK), and others. In 2015 Luminis Books is publishing two of her young-adult novels: Along the Way and Paris, Modigliana, and Me. She lives with her family in West Texas.

Jacqueline Jones LaMon is the author of two collections, Last Seen, a Felix Pollak Poetry Prize selection, and Gravity, U.S.A., recipient of the Quercus Review Press Poetry Series Book Award; and the novel, In the Arms of One Who Love Me. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at Adelphi University.

Karen An-Hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Lee wrote two chapbooks, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe, 2002) and What the Sea Earns for a Living (Quasi Press, 2014). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria, 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. She earned an MFA from Brown University and a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of an NEA grant, she serves as full professor of English and chair at a liberal arts college in greater Los Angeles.

Julia Levine has won numerous awards for her work, including the 2003 Tampa Review Prize for her collection, Ask, the 1998 Anhinga Poetry Prize and bronze medal from Foreword magazine for her collection, Practicing for Heaven, as well as a Discovery/The Nation award. Her latest poetry collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, inaugurated the Barataria Poetry Series for Louisiana State University Press in 2014. She has work appearing in several new anthologies, including The Places That Inhabit Us, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She received a PhD in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley, and lives and works in Davis, California.

Caitlin Maling is a Western Australian poet whose first collection Conversation I’ve Never Had was published in 2015 by Fremantle Press.

Elisa Mastromatteo Elisa Mastromatteo was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1988. She is the author of Tan simple como eso. Her work has appeared in the Palabras errantes and will appear in América invertida: An Anthology of Younger Uruguayan Poets which is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press.

Orlando Menes Orlando Ricardo Menes is the author of four poetry collections including Fetish. His translations include  My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni.  He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame and is the poetry editor of the Notre Dame Review.

Robert Newman is the president and director of The National Humanities Center and Dean Emeritus of the University of Utah. He has published six books and numerous articles, reviews, and poems.

Greg Nicholl lives in Baltimore and works in academic publishing. His poetry recently appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, Ecotone, Mid-American Review, Natural Bridge, Post Road, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere.

Molly Peacock’s newest book is Alphabetique: 26 Characteristic Fictions, with illustrations by Kara Kosak (McClelland & Stewart, 2014). Her latest poetry is The Second Blush, and her recent nonfiction is The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72. A former New Yorker and co-creator of Poetry in Motion, she now lives in Toronto where she serves as series editor of The Best Canadian Poetry. She writes in dual genres, and she is a dual citizen. The poems in this issue are from her book-length sequence-in-progress, The Analyst.

Jen Pelto is the assistant editor of PANK Magazine and a graduate student in the Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture Program at Michigan Technological University.

Simon Perchik Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, the Nation, Osiris, Poetry, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013).  For more information, free e-books, and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

Donald Platt’s latest book, Tornadoesque, is forthcoming in 2016 through CavanKerry Press’s Notable Voices series. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the NEA the Paumanok Poetry Award, and the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize. One of his poems will be included in Best American Poetry 2015. Currently he is a full professor of English at Purdue University.

Alison Prine’s poems have appeared in journals including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Shenandoah. Her first collection of poems, Steel, was chosen by Jeffrey Harrison for this year’s Cider Press Review Book Award and will be published in 2016. She lives in Burlington, Vermont where she works as a psychotherapist.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which, Animal Eye, is the winner of the University of North Texas Rilke Award and finalist for the Kingsley Tufts award. Her work has received NEA Guggenheim, and Fulbright fellowships as well as various state arts council awards.

Lisa Sewell is the author of several books, including Impossible Object, which won the 2014 Tenth Gate Prize from Word Words Press. She is also co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21^st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan 2007) and Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21^st Century: Poetics Across North America (Wesleyan 2012). She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Villanova University.

Charif Shanahan has studied poetry at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and, most recently, New York University, where he earned his MFA as a Starlight Foundation Fellow. The recipient of the 2010 Academy of American Poets University Prize and a semi-finalist for the 2013 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, his poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Republic, Barrow Street, A Public Space, Circumference, Manhattanville Review, and elsewhere. He work as the programs director for the Poetry Society of America and as the poetry editor for Psychology Tomorrow magazine.

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Catacombs, a chapbook of poetry and essays, published by Argos Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review, Journal, Devil’s Lake, Atlas Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from Aspen Summer Words, and an Academy of American Poets Prize; she has won the 2013 Devil’s Lake Driftless Prize in Poetry and The Journal’s Annual Poetry Contest in 2013. She is currently pursuing a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where she is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow.

Kathleen Spivack is the author of nine books of prose and poetry. Unspeakable Things, a novel, is forthcoming from Knopf. With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Plath, Sexton, Bishop, Kunitz, and Others was published in 2012 by the University Press of New England. Her earlier books have been published by Doubleday, Graywolf, and others, and have won numerous prizes, among them those of the London, Los Angeles, and other book festivals. Publications with her work include the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, and more. She teaches in Boston and Paris.

Matthew Ulland’s poems, stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in MiPResias, Illuminations, the Inquisitive Eater: New School Food, Coe Review, Meadowland Review, Border Crossing, LIT, caesura, Hanging Loose, Rusty Nail, and other journals. He is the author of the chapbook The Sound in the Corn and the novel The Broken World.

Nance Van Winckel’s newest books are Ever Yrs., a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road, 2014), Pacific Walkers, her sixth collection of poems (U of Washington P, 2013), and Boneland, her fourth book of linked stories (U of Oklahoma P, 2013). The recipient of two NEA poetry fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Poetry Northwest, Field, and Gettysburg Review. She is on the MFA faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts and a professor emerita in Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers.

Nicole Walker’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She has had a collection of poems published by Barrow Street and also received a grant from the NEA.

Reviews

Joe Benevento teaches creative writing, American and Latin American literature, and mystery at Truman State University. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in about three hundred places, including Poets & Writers and Bilingual Review. Two books of poetry and a novel, bringing his total to a dozen, will be published in 2015.

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Professor of Film Studies, Coordinator of the Film Studies Program, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His newest book, Black & WhiteCinema : A Brief History, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in 2015.

Chris Haug Chris Haug is a high school creative writing and world literature teacher. He recently graduated from Pacific University’s MFA program, and his poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in places like Silk Road, North American Review, Harpur Palate, Punchnel’s, and Potomac Review.

Maria Nazos has work that has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Ohio Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of A Hymn that Meanders, published in 2011 by Wising Up Press and the recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.