CONTRIBUTORS

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Jeffrey Alfier’s latest works are Fugue for a Desert Mountain¸ Anthem for Pacific Avenue: California Poems, Bleak Music—a photo and poetry collaboration with Larry D. Thomas, Southbound Express to Bay Head: New Jersey Poems, and The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems. Recent publication credits include Spoon River Poetry Review, Kestrel, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and december magazine. He is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review.

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is also the author of BETWEEN, winner of the 2017 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Prize from Finishing Line Press. A two-time Academy of American Poets prize winner and a Pushcart nominee, her recent work in various genres appears in Rambutan Literary, The Shallow Ends, The Recluse, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP/J, and other venues. She lives in Maryland and teaches at Washington College.

Kathleen Balma is a teacher, librarian, translator, and veteran of the US Navy. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, The Hopkins Review, Hotel Amerika, The Journal, Rattle, and other magazines. Her awards include a Fulbright year in Spain, a Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from Rivendell Writers’ Colony. In 2015 she was a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, and in 2016 she was a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in New Orleans.

Devon Balwit writes in Portland, OR. She has five chapbooks out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press), Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press), In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books), and The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, The Stillwater Review, Red Earth Review, Tule Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, Noble Gas Quarterly, Muse A/Journal, and more.

Jack B. Bedell is professor of English and coordinator of creative writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. His latest collections are Elliptic (Yellow Flag Press, 2016), Revenant (Blue Horse Press, 2016), and Bone-Hollow, True: New & Selected Poems (Texas Review Press, 2013). He has recently been appointed by Governor John Bel Edwards to serve as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017–2019.

John Blair’s collection Playful Song Called Beautiful was the 2015 winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Iowa Press. He’s also published five other books, including two poetry collections, The Occasions of Paradise (U. Tampa Press, 2012) and The Green Girls (Pleiades Press, 2003).

Shevaun Brannigan is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, as well as The Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House at The University of Maryland. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Best New Poets, Rhino, Redivider, and Crab Orchard Review. She is a 2015 recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant. Her work can be found at ShevaunBrannigan.com.

Chanel Brenner is the author of Vanilla Milk: a memoir told in poems, (Silver Birch Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2016 Independent Book Awards and honorable mention in the 2014 Eric Hoffer awards. Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Cultural Weekly, Muzzle Magazine, and others. Her poem “July 28th, 2012” won first prize in The Write Place At the Write Time’s contest, judged by Ellen Bass.

Stephen Brown is a poet living in Mexico City. His recent work investigates the spatial (inter)textualities of psychogeographic urban life on the mind-body of both the city and its occupants. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Phoebe, The Indiana Review, A Bad Penny Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Exile Literary Quarterly, and Hotel Amerika. He teaches, behind the wall, in the modern languages and cultural management program at Universidad Anahuac in Mexico City.

Teresa Cader is the author of three poetry collections (History of Hurricanes, The Paper Wasp, and Guests). Her awards include the Norma Farber First Book Award, The Journal Award, the George Bogin Memorial Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from The Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Plume, Memorious, Poetry, Harvard Review, AGNI, Slate, The Atlantic, and other journals. Her poems and prose have been translated into Polish and published in Poland. Her work has also been translated into Icelandic.

Rob Carney is the author of four previous books of poems, most recently 88 Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2015), which was named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, as well as the forthcoming collection The Book of Sharks (Black Lawrence Press). In 2014, he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry. His work has appeared previously in Sugar House Review, and he writes a regularly featured series called “Old Roads, New Stories” for Terrain.org. He lives in Salt Lake City.

Heather Derr-Smith is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop with four books of poetry: Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008), Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016), and Thrust (Persea Books, 2017). Her poems were recently featured in The Missouri Review.

Jennifer Dorner’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cloudbank, VoiceCatcher, The Timberline Review, Verseweavers, and The Inflectionist Review. In 2016, she was selected as a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. She lives in the beautiful city of Portland, OR, and is an MFA student at Pacific University.

Danielle Beazer Dubrasky’s poetry has been published in Terrain.org, Pilgrimage, Sugar House Review, Salt Front, Cave Wall, Contrary Magazine, and Quill&Parchment. Her poems were also published in a limited edition art book Invisible Shores by Red Butte Press of the University of Utah. Her chapbook Ruin and Light won the 2014 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Competition. She has been a finalist for White Pines Press, a semi-finalist for Backwaters Press and Elixir Press, and a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is also a two-time recipient of the Utah Arts Council first-place award in poetry.

Elizabeth Ehrlich is the author of Miriam’s Kitchen: A Memoir, which won a National Jewish Book Award, a Washington Irving Book Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her short-short story “Friday Night” was included in Sudden Flash Youth (Persea Books), and she has published in Tipton Poetry Journal (Winter 2017). Ehrlich, who has taught writing at Columbia University, has twice been a resident fellow of Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

Jeff Ewing is a writer from northern California. His poems and stories have recently been published or are forthcoming in ZYZZYVA, Willow Springs, Catamaran Literary Reader, Atlanta Review, Saint Ann’s Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Dunes Review, ELJ, and Bridge Eight. He lives in Sacramento, CA with his wife and daughter.

Howard Faerstein’s full-length book of poetry, Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn, was published in 2013 by Press 53. His poetry can be found in numerous journals including Great River Review, Nimrod, Off the Coast, Rattle, Upstreet, Mudfish, Gris-Gris, and Connotation. He is an associate editor of CutThroat and lives in Florence, MA.

Richard J. Fleming is a survivor of three Chicago blizzards. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, The Rusty Nail, Inkwell Mag, Curio, Otoliths, Rain, Party & Disaster Society, One Sentence Poems, Unbroken, Poetry Super Highway, Rattle, Stoneboat Journal, and Hotel Amerika. Right Hand Pointing published his first chapbook, Aperture.

John Gallaher’s forthcoming book of poetry is Brand New Spacesuit (BOA 2020). He lives in rural Missouri.

Matthew Gellman’s poems are featured or forthcoming in Thrush, The Journal, The Adroit Journal, MUZZLE, H.O.W. Journal, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize and a scholarship from the NYS Summer Writer’s Institute. Currently, Matthew lives in New York, where he edits Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight and is an MFA candidate at Columbia University.

Tanya Grae won the 2016 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Prize, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, and is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Little Wekiva River (Five Oaks Press, 2017). A recent finalist for the Four Way Books Intro Prize and the Brittingham and Pollack Prizes, her poems have appeared in AGNI, New Ohio Review, Fjords, New South, The Los Angeles Review, Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Tallahassee and teaches at Florida State University while pursuing her doctorate fueled by one chocolate truffle after another. Find out more at TanyaGrae.com.

Julie Henson was a finalist for Washington Square Review’s 2015 poetry contest, Iowa Review’s 2014 poetry contest, and a semi-finalist for Boston Review’s 2015 and 2014 Discovery contest. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Salt Hill Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Devil’s Lake, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Iowa Review, Quarterly West, The Collagist, Crab Orchard Review, cream city review, Spoon River Poetry Review, CutBank, Southern Indiana Review, and others.

A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the National Endowment for the Arts, Vedran Husić was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina and raised in Germany and the United States. His collection of stories, Basements and Other Museums, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018. He has poetry published or forthcoming in Salamander, Silk Road, Pleiades, Spillway, and Denver Quarterly.

Elaine Johanson is a writer, teacher, and videographer in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.

Fred Johnson teaches American literature and film studies at Whitworth University in Spokane. He used to see a lot of possums on the backroads in Indiana, but he doesn’t see so many in Washington. Except, really, he sees them everywhere.

Andrea Jurjević, a native of Croatia, is the author of Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize. Her poems, as well as her translations of contemporary Croatian poetry, have appeared in journals such as Epoch, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets, The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Hambidge Fellowship. Her translation of Mamasafari (and other things) from Croatian will be published by Diálogos in 2018.

Mia Kang is an Oregon-born, Texas-raised writer, named the 2017 winner of Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest by Mónica de la Torre. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in journals including Poetry Northwest, The Margins, and the PEN Poetry Series. A Brooklyn Poets Fellow and runner-up for the 2017 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest, she is currently a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University.

Natasha Kessler-Rains is the author of Dismantling the Rabbit Altar. Living in Omaha, she teaches writing at area universities and works as a writing consultant for Metro Community College. Natasha also helps facilitate a community workshop called the Seven Doctors Project, a Nebraska Writers Collective program. Natasha spends her free time tying knots and reading books to her daughter.

Ben Kingsley is best known for his Academy Award winning role as Mahatma Gandhi. This Ben is a touch less famous. (He hasn’t acted since a third grade debut as the undertaker in Music Man.) He is a Michener Fellow, VONA: Voices of our Nation Art Institute Scholar, & belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. Most recently his work has been published in The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Prairie Schooner, and PANK.

Ananda Lima’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Rattle, The Offing, Public Pool, Origins, and elsewhere. She has an MA in linguistics from UCLA, was selected for the AWP Writer to Writer Program, and has attended workshops at Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Tin House. She has taught at UCLA and the Montclair State University. In 2017, Ananda returned to Sewanee to serve as staff and began a fellowship-funded MFA in fiction at Rutgers-Newark.

Born in Superior, WI, Jacob Lindberg is an MFA student at the University of Arkansas and a recipient of the James T. Whitehead Award for poetry. He serves as the director of outreach for The Arkansas International and the editor-in-chief of Up North Literary Journal, a literary annual for high school students in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. His poetry can be found in The Fairy Tale Review, cream city review, and The Pinch Journal.

Matt Mason has won a Pushcart Prize and two Nebraska Book Awards. He lives in Omaha with his wife, the poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown, and daughters Sophia and Lucia.

Kevin McLellan is the author of Ornitheology (The Word Works, forthcoming 2018), Hemispheres (Fact-Simile Editions, forthcoming 2018), [box] (Letter [r] Press, 2016), Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010). He won the 2015 Third Coast Poetry Prize and Gival Press’ 2016 Oscar Wilde Award, and his poems appear widely, including a few times in Sugar House Review. Kevin lives in Cambridge, MA.

Bridget O’Bernstein is from Brooklyn where she runs a poetry reading series called Sang for Nothing. She is currently an MFA candidate for poetry at Syracuse University, where she is poetry editor for Salt Hill Journal. Her poems have been published in or are forthcoming in The Bennington Review, The McNeese Review, Jet Fuel Review, and Forklift, Ohio.

Dan O’Brien’s poetry collections include War Reporter, winner of the Fenton-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, published in 2013 by CB Editions (UK) and Hanging Loose Press (US); Scarsdale, published in 2014 by CB Editions and in 2015 by Measure Press (US); and New Life, published in 2015 by CB Editions and in 2017 by Hanging Loose Press. In 2015–16, he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Drama & Performance Art. A collection, Dan O’Brien: Plays One, was published in 2017 from Oberon Books in London. He frequently teaches playwriting at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Leah Osowski’s first book Hover Over Her (Kent State University Press 2016) won the 2015 Wick Poetry Prize, chosen by Adrian Matejka. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her poetry and creative nonfiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, among others. In the summer of 2017, Leah was the Paul Mariani Fellow at Image Journal’s Glen Workshop.

Christa Romanosky grew up in northern Appalachia. She received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2011. Her writing is published in Glimmer Train (1st Place, Very Short Fiction Award), The Kenyon Review Online, The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, EPOCH magazine, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Christa is the recipient of a Barbara Demming grant for fiction and currently teaches creative writing and STEM classes to K-8 students through Carnegie Mellon University’s Gelfand Center. She volunteers as a hotline advocate for Pittsburgh Action Against Rape.

Joyce Schmid’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Chautauqua, Atlanta Review, and other journals and anthologies. She lives in Palo Alto, CA, with her husband of half a century—too far from their grandchildren.

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She is the author of the poetry collection, a lesson in smallness, which was a finalist for the Rousseau Prize for Literature and the Eric Hoffer Award in poetry. Her writing has appeared in 32 Poems, Carolina Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, Five Chapters, Raleigh Review, Kenyon Review Online, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, among other places. She is an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she is also editor-in-chief of NELLE, a literary journal that publishes writing by women.

Melissa Stein’s collection Rough Honey won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Mark Doty. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Tin House, Yale Review, New England Review, Harvard Review, Best New Poets, and others. She’s received fellowships from the NEA, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Melissa’s a freelance writer and editor in San Francisco.

Kailey Tedesco’s books These Ghosts of Mine, Siamese (Dancing Girl Press) and She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publications) are both forthcoming. She is the director of Rag Queen Periodical and a performing member of the NYC Poetry Brothel. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. You can find her work featured or forthcoming in Prelude, Prick of the Spindle, Vanilla Sex Magazine, Rogue Agent, and more.

David Thacker is a PhD student in poetry at Florida State University and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho. A recipient of the Fredrick Manfred Award from the Western Literature Association, his poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Ploughshares, Subtropics, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

Kaja Weeks has been published in Bluestem Literary Magazine, District Lines: An Anthology, Fickle Muses: A Journal of Mythic Poetry and Fiction, The Potomac Review (nominee, Pushcart Prize), Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, The Arts and Humanities, and elsewhere. Her writing can also be found at LyriCoverTones.wordpress.com.

Jeff Whitney is the author of five chapbooks, two of which were co-written with Philip Schaefer. His poems can be found in journals such as 32 Poems, Adroit, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, and Verse Daily.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of Meadow Slasher.

Jess Williard’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, North American Review, Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Sycamore Review, Lake Effect, Borderlands, Oxford Poetry, and other journals. He is from Wisconsin.

Aubree Else Woelber is an Iowa native. She is a poetry editor for the Blue River Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review, Bear Review, Upwrite Magazine, Ruminate, and The Flat Water Stirs: An Anthology for Emerging Nebraska Poets. She lives with her husband in Omaha.

Lauren Yarnall is a second-year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Idaho. She is also currently managing editor for Fugue. She enjoys purple-tinted thunderstorms, the sounds of a distant train, and carbohydrates. She writes about none of those things. Lauren’s previously published or forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Slipstream, Permafrost, Spillway, etc.

Holli Zollinger is a self-taught artist who has made a career of her talents: drawing, painting, and surface design. She is continually inspired by her surroundings living in the desert town of Moab, UT. She is highly motivated by the art of creativity and incorporates the color, texture and pattern she sees in the world around her. An accomplished designer, Holli Zollinger’s work has been published and featured worldwide. HolliZollinger.com