Issue Twenty-Three: June 2011
Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (forthcoming from W.W. Norton), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She was the 2008-09 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and currently teaches at Western Michigan University, where she is a doctoral associate and King/Chávez/Parks Fellow.
Mary Lou Buschi’s work has appeared in The Laurel Review, Indiana Review, Swink, Southern Indiana Review, Dark Sky, GLASSCHORD, RHINO 2011, and is forthcoming in RHINO 2012 and Caper Literary Journal. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, as well as a NYC Teaching Fellow working with young men and women with autism.
Tom De Beauchamp's fiction and criticism are available online and in print from Burrow Press, Smalldoggies Magazine, Hobart, and Pilot Books Seattle (RIP). Google search him and you will find royalty.
Anna Clark is a writer from Detroit who is on a Fulbright fellowship in Kenya in 2011. Her writing has appeared in The American Prospect, Salon, The Nation, The Daily Beast, UTNE Reader, AlterNet, The Detroit Free Press, Hobart, and BloodLotus, among other publications. Anna edits the literary and culture website, Isak, and has been a fellow with the Peter Jennings Center for Journalists and the Constitution. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan's Residential College and Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers.
Christy Crutchfield's works have appeared or are forthcoming in Mississippi Review online, PANK, Everyday Genuis, and Dark Sky Magazine, among others. She is an Associate Editor for Keyhole Magazine. Christy blogs about writing and other monsters at thehopelessmonster.blogspot.com.
Alex Dimitrov's first book of poems, Begging For It, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. He is the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and Best New Poets 2009. Dimitrov works at the Academy of American Poets and frequently writes for Poets & Writers magazine.
Kathryn Houghton holds an MFA in fiction from Eastern Washington University. She blogs weekly for the Willow Springs blog, Bark. Find out more at kathrynhoughton.com.
Jamie Iredell is the author of Prose. Poems. a Novel., and The Book of Freaks. This essay is excerpted from a nonfiction book, "Last Mass," about growing up Catholic in California, the Spanish Franciscan friar who founded the first California missions, and random trivia concerning Catholicism and contemporary American pop culture.
A D Jameson is the author of two books: the prose collection Amazing Adult Fantasy (Mutable Sound, 2011), in which he tries to come to terms with having been raised on '80s pop culture, and the novel Giant Slugs (Lawrence and Gibson, 2011), an absurdist retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh. He has taught classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lake Forest College, DePaul University, Facets Multimedia, and StoryStudio Chicago. He is also the nonfiction / reviews editor of the online journal Requited. This fall, he will become a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In his spare time, he contributes to the group blog Big Other.
Dr. Charles Johnson is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Washington, a 1998 MacArthur fellow, author of Middle Passage, which received the 1990 National Book Award for fiction, and a 2002 recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction includes the novels Faith and the Good Thing, Oxherding Tale, and Dreamer, and three story collections, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Soulcatcher and Other Stories, and Dr. King's Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories. You can visit his author's website at oxherdingtale.com. Read his weekly essays on literature, philosophy and contemporary issues on E-Channel.
Christian Moody’s fiction has been published by Esquire, Best New American Voices, Best American Fantasy, Indiana Review, and other literary journals. He has an MFA from Syracuse University and received the support of an artist grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. He is currently a Taft Dissertation Fellow in fiction at the University of Cincinnati, where he is also associate editor of The Cincinnati Review.
Kate Petersen's writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The New England Review, The Los Angeles
Review, The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, Brevity, The Pinch, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her interview with James Salter recently appeared at The Paris Review Daily. She lives and studies in Minneapolis, and writes on pharma issues for PostScript.
Rob Roensch has work out recently in Slice, Avery, Hobart, PANK, and Redivider. He teaches at Towson University.
Brynn Saito was born and raised in the Central Valley of California. She is the recipient of a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship (2008), the Poets 11 award from the San Francisco Public Library (2010), and the Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Memorial Award (2011). Her work has been anthologized in Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, 3rd edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press) and From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas 1900-2002, edited by Ishmael Reed (Thunder Mouth’s Press). Currently, she lives and writes in San Francisco, CA.
Originally from Michigan, Scott Sparling lives outside Portland, Oregon, with his wife and son. Wire to Wire is his first novel.
M Thompson lives in Seattle. His work has previously appeared in places like Unsaid, Everyday Genius, Monkeybicycle, and Spork. Naturally predisposed to wandering off for long bouts of time, he has crisscrossed the U.S. playing music for people, seen the south of France as an organic farmer, and been a bicycling bag artist living in Berlin. Now, it’s mostly fiction writing and running long distances. Mostly.
Bob Thurber worked independently at writing every day for twenty years before attempting to publish. Over the last decade his short fiction has appeared in dozens of literary magazines and a couple hundred places online, including The New Yorker’s website, and received more than forty awards & citations, including The Barry Hannah Fiction Prize. In addition to Paperboy, a collection of his acclaimed “small fictions” will be available later this year.
Vicente R. Viray recently completed his MFA at the University of San Francisco. His fiction has appeared in the Greensboro Review, Mary: A Journal of New Writing, and Tattoo Highway. He lives in San Francisco with his partner Paul.
Robert Alan Wendeborn's poems and reviews have been published widely online and in print, including PANK, > kill author, and Ghost Ocean Magazine, and is forthcoming from Uncanny Valley and Owl Eye Review. He is a former editor of Puerto del Sol and the founding editor of Extended Play, a short journal of long literature. You can listen to his thoughts by following @rawbbie on the Twitter. He is currently moving from the desert (Las Cruces, NM), where he received an MFA from NMSU, to a rain forest (OR) to work at OCAC as a camp counselor.
Marcus Wicker’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Beloit, jubilat, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Harpur Palate, Rattle, Ninth Letter, Sou’Wester, DIAGRAM, and cream city review, among other journals. He is an Ann Arbor, Michigan native who holds fellowships from Cave Canem and Indiana University, where he received his MFA. Marcus is also a 2010-2011 Fine Arts Work Center Fellow.
Tom Williams is the author of the novella The Mimic's Own Voice (Main Street Rag Publishing Co). His short fiction, essays and reviews have appeared recently in Barrelhouse, RE:AL, and SLAB. An associate editor of American Book Review, he will start service as Chair of English at Morehead State University this July.