Issue Fifty-Nine: June 2014
Lâle Davidson’s stories have appeared in a variety of magazines including The North American Review, The Little Magazine, Phoebe an Interdisciplinary Journal, Artists Unite and Eclectica Magazine. Her magical realist novel, The Ciphery was a finalist for the Heekin Group Foundation James Fellowship. She collaborated to write the novel Feeding Christine by Barbara Chepaitis (Bantam 2001). With contemporary composer Tina Davidson she wrote the libretto for the experimental opera Billy and Zelda, which was performed by OperaDelaware in 1998. She has been teaching fiction, public speaking and composition at SUNY Adirondack for 20 years, plays viola, and lives with her small, happy family.
Anne Germanacos’s collection of short stories, In the Time of the Girls, was published by BOA Editions in 2010. Her novel, Tribute, published by Rescue Press, appears in 2014. Together with her husband, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Study Program in Greece on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete. She runs the Germanacos Foundation in San Francisco.
Caroline Goodwin’s collection is Trapline by JackLeg Press (May 2013). Born and raised in Alaska, she moved to California in 1999 to attend Stanford’s creative writing program. She teaches in the MFA Writing program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and is currently serving as San Mateo County’s first Poet Laureate.
Kenji C. Liu is a 1.5-generation immigrant from New Jersey living in Southern California. A Pushcart Prize nominee and first runner-up finalist for the Poets & Writers 2013 California Writers Exchange Award, his writing is in or forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, Barrow Street Journal, CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action, The Baltimore Review, RHINO Poetry, Best American Poetry's blog, and many others. His poetry chapbook You Left Without Your Shoes was nominated for a 2009 California Book Award. A three-time VONA alum and recipient of a Djerassi Resident Artist Program fellowship, he holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation.
Lavinia Ludlow is a musician, writer, and occasional contortionist. Her debut novel alt.punk can be purchased through major online retailers as well as Casperian Books’ website. Her sophomore novel Single Stroke Seven was signed to Casperian Books and will be released in the distant future. In her free time, she reviews small press books at Small Press Reviews, The Nervous Breakdown, American Book Review, and The Next Best Book Blog.
Matthew Jude Luzitano received his BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maine at Farmington and his MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from Brilliant Corners and Weave. He lives in Mansfield, Massachusetts with his wife Andrea and his little dog, too.
C. L. O'Dell's poems are published or forthcoming in Ploughshares, New England Review, Barrow Street, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. He is founder and editor of The Paris-American, a poetry e-zine and reading series at Poets House in New York City.
Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead, a Library Journal Best Books of 2013, and The California Poem, as well as a hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon, which was a Barnes & Noble Best of the Year. A California native, longtime New Yorker, and world traveler, she now lives in Boulder with her husband, the novelist Laird Hunt, and their daughter, Eva Grace.
Nina Solomon received her BA and MA from Columbia University. Her novel SINGLE WIFE (Algonquin 2003) was optioned for film by Warner Brothers. Her second novel, THE LOVE BOOK, will be published by Akashic Books in January 2015. She is on the faculty of Wilkes University where she teaches fiction in the low-residency MFA program. She was born in New York and has lived in the same zip code since she was five.
Keith Taylor has published some fourteen books or chapbooks of poetry, short stories, or edited volumes. He teaches at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Bear River Writers' Conference and works as the Poetry Editor for Michigan Quarterly Review.
Mika Taylor lives in Willimantic, Connecticut (a.k.a. Romantic Willimantic, a.k.a. Heroin Town USA, a.k.a. Thread City, a.k.a. Vulture Town) with her writer husband, PR Griffis, and Petunia von Scampers their crime-solving dog. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, Guernica, Hobart, The Kenyon Review Online, Black Warrior Review, and Diagram.
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy was named a 2014-2016 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her fiction has appeared in Narrative, Glimmer Train, SLICE, and elsewhere.
Adrian Van Young is the author of the story collection The Man Who Noticed Everything, out now on Black Lawrence Press. His fiction and non-fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Lumina, Gigantic, Electric Literature, Black Warrior Review, The American Reader, The Believer and Slate, among other publications. He lives in New Orleans and teaches creative writing at Tulane University.
Paul Vega is a fiction editor for Pacifica Literary Review and received his MFA from the University of Washington. He has been published or has work forthcoming in BULL: Men’s Fiction, The Portland Review, theNewerYork, Hot Metal Bridge, Ambush Review, and elsewhere. He teaches writing and has worked a variety of odd jobs since moving to Seattle, including commercial fisherman, fake high school teacher, and Amazon lackey.
D’Anne Witkowski received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan where she currently teaches writing. Her poems have been published in the Dunes Review, Rattle, and Gertrude. She also writes a nationally syndicated weekly column for the LGBT press.