Issue Fifty-Seven: April 2014
Amy Benson’s book, The Sparkling-Eyed Boy (Houghton Mifflin 2004), was the 2003 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize winner in creative nonfiction, sponsored by Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Recent work has appeared in journals such as Agni, BOMB, Boston Review, New England Review, Triquarterly, PANK, diagram, Seneca Review, Hotel Amerika, Denver Quarterly, and Black Warrior Review. She teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University and is the co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series in Harlem.
Meagan Ciesla holds an MFA from University of Wyoming and a PhD from University of Missouri. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Cimarron Review, The Long Story, Iron Horse Literary Review, and others.
Christi Clancy's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Milwaukee Journal, Glimmer Train Stories, Hobart, on Wisconsin Public Radio and elsewhere. She teaches English at Beloit College.
William Emery is the author of Kodoku, a children's book about the first man to sail alone across the Pacific Ocean, the nonfiction travelogue Edges of Bounty: Adventures in the Edible Valley, and the "sustainability punk" webcomic Engine. His work has appeared in Mastodon Dentist, The Leveler, The Collagist, ditch, and To the Stars Through Difficulties: A Kansas Renga in 150 Voices. He is a founding member of Ad Astra Books and Coffee, a worker-owned cooperative bookstore in Salina, Kansas, and former acquisitions editor at Heyday Books.
Raina Lauren Fields is a poet and nonfiction writer and a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Callaloo, The Rumpus, PANK, Gargoyle, Sweet, Diverse Voices Quarterly, The Bakery, and Emerge, among others. She lives in Richmond with her husband, the poet, Ross Losapio.
J. Andrew Goodman is an MFA graduate from Murray State University and is currently interning for White Pine Press. He lives and works from his home in Louisville, Kentucky.
Amorak Huey, a longtime newspaper editor and reporter, teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His chapbook The Insomniac Circus is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press, and his poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2012, Hayden's Ferry Review, Rattle, Menacing Hedge, and other journals.
Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago (CavanKerry Press) and two chapbooks: Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts), winner of the David Blair Memorial Prize, and Subways (Thrush Press). Recent works appeared in Poets.org, jubilat, diode, BLOOM, Codex Journal, Water~Stone Review and the anthology Coming Close (Prairie Lights/University of Iowa Press). He co-founded Kundiman (http://www.kundiman.org/), a non-profit organization serving Asian American poetry.
Henry W. Leung is a Kundiman Fellow and the author of a chapbook, Paradise Hunger (Swan Scythe Press, 2012). He earned his MFA from the University of Michigan and has served as a columnist for the Lantern Review. He has prose and poetry appearing in or forthcoming from Crab Orchard Review, Kartika Review, and ZYZZYVA.
Ravi Mangla is the author of the novel Understudies (Outpost19). His stories have appeared in Mid-American Review, American Short Fiction, Corium Magazine, Wigleaf, and Tin House Online.
Douglas W. Milliken is the author of the novel To Sleep as Animals (Publication Studio / Pilot Editions, 2014) and the codex White Horses (Nada, 2010). Other work also appears in McSweeney's, Slice, and the Believer. "Buoyancy" was written as part of a fellowship with the I-Park Foundation.
Matt Morton was a 2013 Finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a Finalist in Narrative’s 30 Below Contest. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Branch, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, New Ohio Review, and 32 Poems, among others. Originally from Rockwall, Texas, he lives and teaches in Baltimore, where he is an Owen Scholars Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars.
Nathan Oates's debut collection of short stories, The Empty House, won the 2012 Spokane Prize and is now available. His fiction has appeared in The Antioch Review, The Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, and elsewhere. His stories have been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories (2008 & 2012) and in Forty Stories (Harper Perennial). He teaches creative writing at Seton Hall University, where he also runs the Poetry-in-the-Round reading series. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and children.
Ali Shapiro is recent graduate of the MFA program in poetry at the University of Michigan, where she sometimes teaches composition and creative writing. Her comics and poems have been published in Anti-, Cutbank, Hobart, Linebreak, PANK, RATTLE, and The Rumpus, and her posts are regularly featured on the Ploughshares blog. She's the recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Vermont Studio Center, and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes in various denominations. She lives in Ann Arbor with a neurotic dog.
Travis Smith is a bookseller in Providence, RI. His poems have appeared in Redivider, Crazyhorse, Anti-, Parcel, Meridian, and Another and Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series (Bull City Press 2012). He has an MFA from the University of Mississippi and serves as poetry editor for Wag's Revue.
Justin Thurman earned his Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he studied contemporary American literature, rhetoric, and writing studies. He currently teaches writing at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His fiction and scholarship have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cimarron Review, Ekleksographia, Monday Night, Stymie: A Journal of Literature and Sport, and Fiddleblack among others.
Rosalynde Vas Dias earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College’s Low Residency Program for Writers. Her first book, Only Blue Body, was winner of the 2011 Robert Dana Award offered by Anhinga Press. Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Cincinnati Review, West Branch, The Pinch, Laurel Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Shelley Wong is a Kundiman fellow and a poetry editor for The Journal. Her poems have appeared or will appear in Devil's Lake, Ninth Letter Web Edition, CutBank, The Adroit Journal, Adrienne, and Nashville Review.