Interview

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry

Karen Babine is the author of Water and What We Know (University of Minnesota, 2015), winner of a Minnesota Book Award, finalist for the Midwest Book Award and the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award. She also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Her work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Slag Glass City, Quarter After Eight, Sweet, North American Review, Passages North and others. She lives and writes in Minneapolis.

Moya Cannon was born in County Donegal, Ireland. Keats Lives (Carcanet Press, Manchester) is her fifth collection of poetry. She is a winner of the Brendan Behan Award and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award. She has been editor of Poetry Ireland Review and was 2011 Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University, Pennsylvania.

Nadia Chaney is a spoken word poet and community arts facilitator who has appeared on hundreds of stages. Her essays and poetry have recently appeared or will appear with Terrain.org, Locked Horn Press, Flycatcher Journal and the Chicago Quarterly Review. She is currently working on a series of inter-disciplinary performances based on a large collection of surreal automatic drawings. She is a first generation Indian-Canadian born in Saskatoon, grown up in Ottawa, matured in Vancouver, and currently in Montreal—all of which she recognizes as the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples, who are its rightful stewards.

Maxine Chernoff chairs the Creative Writing Department at SFSU. She is the author of 14 books of poetry and six collections of fiction. Winner of a 2013 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, she also was selected for the 2009 PEN Translation Award for her co-translation of The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin.

Grace Curtis’ book, The Shape of a Box, was published in 2014 by Dos Madres Press. Her chapbook, The Surly Bonds of Earth, was selected by Stephen Dunn as the 2010 winner of the Lettre Sauvage chapbook contest and she has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Her prose and poetry can be found in such journals as Sou’wester, The Baltimore Review, Waccamaw Literary Journal, and others.

Angie M. Chatman writes fiction and creative nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, fwriction : review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Chicago, Angie now lives in Avon, Connecticut, and teaches at the University of Hartford. She is a member of the inaugural class of fellows of the Kimbilio Center for African American fiction, and the book reviews editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal. Her MFA is from Queens University in Charlotte and she holds an MBA from the Sloan School at MIT.

Born in Calcutta and raised in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta teaches at the University of Idaho. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Rumpus, Phoebe, and Gulf Stream, among other magazines and literary journals. She edits nonfiction for Crab Creek Review, and previous honors include a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and a Centrum Fellowship. In Fire Girl, her debut collection of essays, Sayantani examines her personal story against the history, religion, popular culture, and mythology of South Asia and her current home in the American West. She is also the author of the chapbook The House of Nails, published by Red Bird Chapbooks.

Alison Hicks is the author of Kiss, a full-length collection of poems (PS Books, 2011), a chapbook Falling Dreams (Finishing Line Press, 2006), and a novella, Love: A Story of Images (AWA Press, 2004). Her new collection of poems, You Who Took The Boat Out, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in March 2017. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Broad River Review, Crack the Spine, Eclipse, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Gargoyle, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Louisville Review, Passager, Permafrost, Sanskrit, Whiskey Island, among other journals. Awards include the 2011 Philadelphia City Paper Poetry Prize and two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.

Karen Houppert’s writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times, Newsday, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Mother Jones, Ms., The Village Voice, City Paper, The Baltimore Sun, The Bennington Review, The Alaska Quarterly, and others. She is the author of three nonfiction books, The Curse (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), Home Fires Burning (Ballantine, 2005), and Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice (New Press, 2013). She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, teaches in the Johns Hopkins University graduate writing program, and is the editor of Baltimore City Paper.

Jami Macarty teaches contemporary poetry and creative writing at Simon Fraser University, serves as a Poetry Ambassador for Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, edits the online poetry journal The Maynard, and writes Peerings & Hearings–Occasional Musings on Arts in the City of Glass, a blog series for Drunken Boat. A recipient of fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Banff Center, and BC Arts Council, and the winner of the 2016 Real Good Poem prize, her poems appear or are forthcoming in Arc Poetry Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Minola Review, Prism international, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Vallum, and Verse Daily. Her chapbook Landscape of the Wait, a poetic response to her nephew William’s car accident and year-long coma, is forthcoming in 2017 with Finishing Line Press.

Maria Theresa Maggi received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine. Her poems and essays about contemporary poetry have appeared in a number of literary publications over the years. She taught poetry and writing at University of California, Irvine and the University of Idaho. Also a visual artist, she created the cover art for her first book of poems, The Rings Around Saturn, from Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada and her chapbook, If A Sparrow, from Finishing Line Press. She also writes and illustrates a blog called Plant-Based Slow Motion Miracle, about living well with Multiple Sclerosis. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and spends as much time as possible on the Oregon Coast.

Michael Wasson’s poems appear in American Poets, Drunken Boat, Narrative, Passages North, and Bettering American Poetry. He is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho and lives abroad.

Joe Wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry, winner of a 2014 GLCA New Writers Award—an honor that has previously recognized early work by the likes of Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, and Alice Munro—and two previous books of poetry, Notes from the Journey Westward and Killing the Murnion Dogs. His most recent full-length collection, When We Were Birds, was selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series and is now out from the University of Arkansas Press. A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award finalist, Wilkins has published essays, poems, and stories in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Ecotone, The Sun, Orion, and Slate. Wilkins lives with his wife, son, and daughter in the Willamette Valley, where he teaches writing at Linfield College.

Robert Wrigley is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho. A new book of poems, Box, will be published by Penguin in the spring of 2017. Currently at work on a collection of essays, he lives in the woods on Moscow Mountain, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes.