Poetry

Nonfiction

Fiction

Daniel was born in Spain. He studied French Literature as an undergrad (French Lycée in San Sebastian). He now lives and writes in Switzerland with his wife and two children. Daniel’s work is forthcoming or has been recently featured in Queen’s Ferry Press anthology The Best of Small Fictions 2016, LA Review, Superstition Review, Dewpoint, and Berkeley Poetry Review. Daniel was a Pushcart nominee (2015). His chapbook ‘Familya’ is coming up in late 2018 thanks to BPL Press.

Emily Banks lives in Atlanta, where she is a doctoral candidate and poetry lecturer at Emory University. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including Superstition Review, Cimarron Review, Free State Review, and Yemassee. Her first collection, Mother Water, is forthcoming from Lynx House Press.

Sayantani Dasgupta is the author of Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between—a Finalist for the 2016 Foreword Indies Awards—and the chapbook The House of Nails: Memories of a New Delhi Childhood. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Rumpus, Phoebe, and Gulf Stream, among other magazines and literary journals. Honors include a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and a Centrum Fellowship. Sayantani is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, and she has also taught in India, Italy, and Mexico.

Raisa Imogen was born in Portland, OR, grew up in Chicago, and currently lives in Queens. She is the co-founder of SIREN Magazine.

Khalypso is a Sacramento-based activist, actor, and poet. They are fat, black, neurodivergent, queer, and badass. Their work can be found in Calamus Journal, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Rigorous Journal, Wusgood Magazine, and Shade Journal, as well as a few others. Their chapbook, THE HOTTENTOT LIGHTS THE GAS HERSELF, was a runner up for the Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize. They are a Leo-Virgo cusp, they want to be your friend, and you can find them on Twitter at KhalypsoThePoet.

Stacy Boe Miller is a mother, writing consultant, and third year MFA Creative Writing candidate at the University of Idaho. Her work can be found in Frontier Poetry, Driftwood Press, and Midwestern Gothic, as well as other journals.

Grace Loh Prasad was born in Taiwan and raised in New Jersey and Hong Kong before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. Grace received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, and is an alumna of the VONA workshop for writers of color along with residencies at Hedgebrook and the Ragdale Foundation. Her essays have appeared in Catapult, Jellyfish Review, Ninth Letter, The Manifest-Station, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Hedgebrook Journal. She is a contributor to the anthology Six Words Fresh Off the Boat: Stories of Immigration, Identity and Coming to America, and her memoir-in-progress is entitled “The Translator’s Daughter.”

Anne Rasmussen lives in Portland, Oregon. She has taught writing in jail, advised graduate students, and constructed giant bear costumes worn by Rockettes. Her writing appears in or is forthcoming from Split Lip Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Sundog Lit, Cosmonauts Avenue and The Southeast Review. She edited Late Night Library’s Late Night Interview column from 2014-2017 and her interview with author Jim Grimsley is included in the paperback edition of How I Shed My Skin (Algonquin Books, 2016). She sympathizes with unreliable narrators.

Veronica Sandoval is a doctoral candidate of American Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Race, at Washington State University. She is Lady Mariposa, a spoken word artist from the Texas Rio Grande Valley, who has been writing and performing for over 18 years. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies and online publications including: Aunt Lute Press, University of Delaware, Lamar University Press and Texas A&M University Press. Her research includes the Chola Pinup Network, the Ovarian Psycos, Adelitas, Pachucas, homegirl aesthetics, chola agency, and an emphasis on Chicana feminist epistemology that centers community knowledges and Chicana legacies of resistance.

Renee Simms’ writing appears in Callaloo, Oxford American, Ecotone, Literary Hub, Southwest Review, North American Review, The Rumpus, Salon and elsewhere. She is a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellow, a 2018 John Gardner fiction fellow with BreadLoaf, and has received support from Kimbilio Fiction, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, Cave Canem, and PEN Center. Her debut story collection is Meet Behind Mars (Wayne State University Press, 2018).

Lynne Thompson was awarded the 2018 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize for her manuscript Fretwork, which will be published in 2019. Her previous collections were Start With a Small Guitar (2013) and Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award in 2007 and 2008, respectively. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Ecotone, New England Review, Barrow Street, Salamander, Poetry, as well as the anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Thompson is Reviews and Essays Editor for the literary journal, Spillway.

Book Review

Poetry

Nonfiction

Fiction

Benjamin Alfaro is a writer and educator from Michigan. He is a 2017 Kresge Artist Fellow and the co-author of Home Court (Red Beard, 2014). His work was anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Duende, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He has also appeared on the HBO Original Series Brave New Voices, Yahoo!’s Cities Rising: Rebuilding America, and Michigan Public Radio. His chapbook, Fantasma, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Dana Alsamsam is a queer, Syrian-American poet from Chicago and an MFA candidate at Emerson College. She is assistant poetry editor at Redivider and editorial assistant at Ploughshares. Dana’s chapbook (in)habit is forthcoming from tenderness, yea press and her poems are published or forthcoming in Poetry East, Hobart, DIALOGIST, The Collapsar, Bad Pony Mag, Tinderbox Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, BOOTH and others. @DanaAlsamsam.

Adrian Blevins is the author of the full-length poetry collections Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the Wilder Prize, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, and The Brass Girl Brouhaha; the chapbooks Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes; and the co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. She is the recipient of many awards including a Kate Tufts Discovery Award for The Brass Girl Brouhaha and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among others. She teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Peg Daniels’s creative nonfiction and fiction has appeared in Kaleidoscope Magazine, New Mobility, Rosebud, The Dos Passos Review, Little (Flash) Fiction, moonShine review, and Southern Women’s Review. One short story reached the finals of Black Warrior Review’s 2015 Fiction Contest. She holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, and she lives in Auburn, Alabama, with her husband and two cats.

Camille T. Dungy is an award-winning poet and editor and professor of creative writing at Colorado State University. She lives with her husband and child in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Robert Maynor is from the Lowcountry of South Carolina. He has worked as a commercial plumber, dishwasher, meter-reader, sprinkler-man, etc. His work has previously appeared in The Carolina Quarterly Online, Bartleby Snopes, and bioStories.

Jory Mickelson is a queer writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, Vinyl Poetry, The Florida Review, Superstition Review, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, and other journals in the United States and the UK. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize and a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry. His most recent chapbook Slow Depth was published by Argus House Press.

Corey Oglesby is a poet, musician, and illustrator from the Washington, D.C., area. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, DIAGRAM, Beloit Poetry Journal, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. Learn more at www.coreyoglesby.com

Laura Read’s chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, was the 2010 winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award, and her collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was the 2011 winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was published in 2012 by University of Pittsburgh Press. Her second collection, Dresses from the Old Country, will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2018. She teaches English at Spokane Falls Community College and currently serves as the poet laureate of Spokane.

Kathryn Smith is the author of the poetry collection Book of Exodus (Scablands Books, 2017). Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Mid-American Review, Redivider, The Collagist, The Boiler, and elsewhere. Her work has received a grant from the Spokane Arts Fund, and she was writer-in-residence at Whitworth University for fall 2017.

Laurie Stone is author most recently of My Life as an Animal: Stories. She was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation, and critic-at-large on Fresh Air. She won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle and has published numerous stories in such publications as Tin House, Evergreen Review, Fence, Open City, Anderbo, The Collagist, New Letters, TriQuarterly, Threepenny Review, and Creative Nonfiction. In 2005, she participated in “Novel: An Installation,” writing a book and living in a house designed by architects Salazar/Davis in the Flux Factory’s gallery space. She has frequently collaborated with composer Gordon Beeferman in text/music works. The world premier of their piece “You, the Weather, a Wolf” was presented in the 2016 season of the St. Urbans concerts. She is at work on The Love of Strangers, a collage of hybrid narratives.

Lucille Sutton was born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Louisiana, Mississippi, and California. She earned her BA in English and her MFA in fiction from Fresno State. Her work has appeared in SN Review, In the Grove, Prick of the Spindle, JMWW, and Bamboo Ridge Press. She was acknowledged in the Indiana Review: Writers of Color edition and as a top-ten finalist for the Dana Awards Short Fiction Contest. Her novel excerpts were finalists for the SLS/ St. Petersburg Writing Contest and SLS/ Kenya Writing Contest. Current nonfiction projects include experiences in the roller skating culture, both as a rink rat and flat track roller derby skater. She teaches writing at Fresno State and lives in Clovis, California with her husband, two dogs, and one very fancy cat.

Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the author of the collection of poems Fast Fat Girls in Pink Hot Pants (2012) about her experiences in the urban North and rural South. Recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as the Harvard Review, Poet Lore, Ecotone, The Account, Pleiades, and Solstice.  New essays, “Sonny Boy” and “A Lynching in North Carolina,” appear in The Hopkins Review and Tupelo Quarterly. Her most recent literary/cultural criticism, “Appalachian Literature and Race Relations in the Newer South: Homogeneity and History in Ron Rash’s Burning Bright and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard,” appears in Seeking Home: Marginalization and Representation in Appalachian Literature and Song (University of Tennessee Press, 2017). She has received The Mona Van Duyn Scholarship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Mary Hambidge Distinguished Fellowship from the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts for her nonfiction. She is visiting assistant professor of American cultural studies at Albright College in Pennsylvania.

Interview

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry

Interview

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry

Kim Barnes is the author of In the Kingdom of Men, named a best book of 2012 by San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, and The Oregonian, and long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, A Country Called Home, winner of the 2009 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, was named a best book of 2008 by The Washington Post, The Kansas City Star, and The Oregonian. She is a recipient of the PEN/Jerard Award in nonfiction for her first memoir, In the Wilderness, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The New York Times, WSJ online, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Fourth Genre, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Idaho.

Desiree Cooper is a former attorney, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and Detroit community activist. A 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, her fiction and poetry have appeared in Callaloo, Detroit Noir, Best African American Fiction 2010 and Tidal Basin Review, among other online and print publications. Her first collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, (Wayne State University Press, 2016), uses the compressed medium of flash fiction to dive unflinchingly into the intersection of racism and sexism. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets. She is currently a Kimbilio Fellow, a national residency for African American fiction writers.

Sean Thomas Dougherty was born in NYC and grew up in Brooklyn, NY, Toledo, OH, and Manchester, NH. Publisher’s Weekly describes Dougherty as “a blue-collar, Rust Belt romantic to his generous, enthusiastic core,” and Dorianne Laux praises him as “the gypsy punk heart of American poetry.” He is the author of 14 books including The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018, forthcoming), All You Ask for is Longing: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2014), Scything Grace (Etruscan Press, 2013), and Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (BOA Editions, 2010). His awards include the 2015 Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award from Texas Christian University’s descant, two PA Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry, a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans, and an appearance in Best American Poetry 2014. He works at Gold Crown Billiards in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Brenda Hillman is the author of nine full-length collections of poetry from Wesleyan University Press, most recently Practical Water (2009) and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013). Recently she collaborated with Garrett Caples and Paul Ebenkamp to edit Richard O. Moore’s Particulars of Place. Hillman is the Filippi Professor of Poetry at St. Mary’s College of California.

Jen Hirt’s memoir, Under Glass: The Girl With a Thousand Christmas Trees (University of Akron/Ringtaw Press, 2010), won the Drake University Emerging Writer Award. Her essay “Lores of Last Unicorns,” published in The Gettysburg Review, won a Pushcart Prize. She is the co-editor of Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers (SUNY Press, 2016). Her essays have also received the Gabehart Prize for Nonfiction from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, and three notable essay mentions in Best American Essays. She has an MFA from the University of Idaho, an MA from Iowa State University, and a BA from Hiram College. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Penn State Harrisburg.

Rebecca Gayle Howell is the author of Render /An Apocalypse (CSU, 2013), which was selected by Nick Flynn for the Cleveland State University First Book Prize and was a 2014 finalist for ForeWord Review’s Book of the Year. She is also the translator of Amal al-Jubouri’s Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books, 2011), which was named a 2011 Best Book of Poetry by Library Journal and shortlisted for Three Percent’s 2012 Best Translated Book Award. Among her awards are fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Carson McCullers Center, as well as a 2014 Pushcart Prize. Native to Kentucky, Howell is the Poetry Editor at Oxford American.

Brently Johnson’s work has been published in various journals such as Ascent, Riverteeth, Gray’s Sporting Journal, North American Review, Midwestern Review, and Yale Anglers’ Journal. He teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Pacific University outside Portland, Oregon. He is an avid cyclist, fly fisherman, husband and proud father of two sons.

Nathaniel Mackey is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Blue Fasa (New Directions, 2015); an ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, whose fourth and most recent volume is Bass Cathedral (New Directions, 2008); and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company. He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone and coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993). His awards and honors include the National Book Award for poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University.

Rachel Morgan is a co-editor of Fire Under the Moon: An Anthology of Contemporary Slovene Poetry (Black Dirt Press). Her work recently appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Barely South, Bellevue Literary Review, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, Barrow Street, and Hunger Mountain. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently she teaches at the University of Northern Iowa and is the Poetry Editor for the North American Review.

Lee Ann Roripaugh is the author of four volumes of poetry, the most recent of which, Dandarians, was released by Milkweed Editions in September 2014. Her second volume, Year of the Snake (Southern Illinois University Press), was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and her first book, Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin Books), was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The recipient of a 2003 Archibald Bush Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, she was also named the 2004 winner of the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the 2001 winner of the Frederick Manfred Award for Best Creative Writing awarded by the Western Literature Association, and the 1995 winner of the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize. Her short stories have been shortlisted as stories of note in the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and two of her essays have been shortlisted as essays of note for the Best American Essays anthology. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Roripaugh is currently a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as Director of Creative Writing and Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review. She is also a faculty mentor for the University of Nebraska low-residency M.F.A. in Writing, and served as a 2012 Kundiman faculty mentor alongside Li-Young Lee and Srikanth Reddy.