Issue Forty-Five: April 2013
Tory Adkisson received his MFA from The Ohio State University in 2012. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Linebreak, Colorado Review, 32 Poems, Third Coast, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Links to more of his work, along with an infrequently updated blog, appear at www.toryadkisson.com.
Beth Alvarado's "Vessels of Light" is from a story cycle in process called Tiny Broken Dolls. Other recent stories have appeared in, or will appear in, Western Humanities Review and The Southern Review. Her books include Anthropologies (University of Iowa Press, 2011) and Not a Matter of Love (New Rivers Press, 2006). She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she teaches writing and is the fiction editor of Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.
LW Compton's fiction and non-fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Lilith, Mid-American Review, Rubbertop Review, and Lumina. She is an instructor in the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program at CWRU and devotedly tutors Cleveland public school students in reading competence. Lori shares her meditation journey at slowbreathsoftheart.com.
Farnoosh Fathi was born in 1981. She's the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Poetry Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the MacDowell colony, and her poems, translations, and prose have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, Everyday Genius, Poetry, Jacket2, and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California.
Robert Fernandez was born in Hartford, grew up in Miami, and now lives in Iowa City. He's the author of the We Are Pharaoh (2011) and Pink Reef (2013), both published by Canarium Books. His poems have also appeared in Boston Review, Conjunctions, Volt, The Canary, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere. He was selected as a New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America, and is the recipient of a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, Pot Farm, Barolo, and Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It (the latter forthcoming from W.W. Norton: Liveright) the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and the chapbooks Four Hours to Mpumalanga and Aardvark. Recent work appears in The New Republic, Epoch, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Quarterly West, The Best Food Writing, The Best Travel Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Hotel Amerika, Gastronomica, and others. He was born and raised in Illinois, and currently teaches Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he prepared his first batch of fried trout ice cream. Stalk him at www.matthewgfrank.com.
Crystal Hoffman's poetry has been published, or is forthcoming, in journals such as Whiskey Island, WomenArts Quarterly, PANK, 3AM, and Strange Horizons. She has taught creative writing and literature at the American University of Beirut and various community colleges in the US. Crystal is presently embarking on a poetry pilgrimage wherein she will be walking alone with a typewriter from Windber, Pa to the Great Pacific Northwest. She is recording her journey at www.poetrypilgrim.com. Her chapbook Sulfur Water is available from Hyacinth Girl Press.
Paul Killebrew was born and raised in Tennessee. He is the author of two full-length collections, Ethical Consciousness (2013) and Flowers (2010), both published by Canarium Books. His chapbook, Forget Rita (2003), was published by the Poetry Society of America, and Ugly Duckling Presse published another, Inspector vs. Evader (2007). From 2008 to 2012 he served as a staff attorney at Innocence Project New Orleans, and he currently resides in Maryland with his wife and son.
Brian Kubarycz lives in Salt Lake City, where he teaches Intellectual Traditions for The Honors College of The University of Utah. His work has appeared in The Collagist, The Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Black Warrior Review, Unsaid, Tarpaulin Sky, and other literary venues.
Aubrey Lenahan is the author of the chapbook Note Pinned to the Back of a Dress (H_NGM_N BKS 2013). Recent poems can be found in Forklift, Ohio, Leveler Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, Boog City, and The Greensboro Review. She teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, and curates the Fusebox Reading Series. She is from New York City, and claims the South.
Alexander Lumans graduated from the M.F.A. Fiction Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Story Quarterly, Fifty-Two Stories, Blackbird, PANK, The Normal School, Cincinnati Review, among other journals. He received 3rd place in the 2012 Story Quarterly Fiction Contest, won the 2011 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize from The Yalobusha Review, and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2010 Sewanee Writers' Conference. He is co-editor of the anthology Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days (December 2012, Upper Rubber Boot Books). He has been awarded fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and ART342 Residency. He now lives and teaches in Denver, CO.
Stephanie Marker is a fiction PhD student at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She got her M.F.A. in fiction at Bowling Green State University, where she was the assistant fiction editor for Mid-American Review. She has also served as fiction editor and copy editor for Asylum Lake Press, an independent literary journal and zine that operates out of Kalamazoo, MI, and is the founding editor of Lazy Mouse Press. Her creative work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review and Third Coast, and her music and book reviews have appeared in West Michigan Noise and Asylum Lake Press, respectively.
Jocelyn Sears grew up in northern California. She is pursuing her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, where she is a Poe Fellow and an editor for Meridian.
Michael J. Seidlinger is the author of My Pet Serial Killer, The Sky Conducting, In Great Company, The Day We Delay, and a limited edition collection of experimental musings called The Artist in Question. He can be found at michaeljseidlinger.com.
Michael Stewart writes odd, short things that have been published in an array of journals and a couple of anthologies. He is the author of A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic (The Cupboard), Almost Perfect Forms (Ugly Duckling), Sebastian, an illustrated book for adults (Hello Martha Press) and The Hieroglyphics (Mud Luscious Press). Later this year, Mud Luscious will be printing his next book, Answers, a series of unhelpful, but hopefully interesting answers to questions submitted by strangers. Currently, he lectures at Brown University. More of his work can be found at: strangesympathies.com.
Joshua Unikel has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. Currently, he's an MFA candidate and Dean's Fellow in the University at Buffalo's Department of Visual Studies. He also serves as the assistant editor of the Seneca Review. His work has appeared in [PANK], Sonora Review, TriQuarterly Online, The Normal School, Drunken Boat, Fugue, and > kill author.
C. Dale Young is the author of three collections of poetry, the most recent being Torn (Four Way 2011). He practices medicine full-time, edits poetry for New England Review, and teaches for the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, he lives in San Francisco.