Issue One: August 2009
Chris Bachelder is the author of the novels Bear v. Shark (Scribner) and U.S.! (Bloomsbury). He teaches fiction at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.
Ryan Call is the author of Pocket Finger (Publishing Genius), a chapbook on which he and his sister Christy Call collaborated. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, Caketrain, New York Tyrant, Keyhole, Sonora Review, Mid-American Review, and others. He and his wife live in Houston.
Kim Chinquee is the author of Oh Baby (Ravenna Press), the forthcoming Pretty (White Pine Press), and is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Online Writing: Best of the First Ten Years (Snowvigate Press). She lives in Buffalo, New York.
Anna Clark's writing has appeared in The American Prospect Online, AlterNet, Blood Lotus, Utne Reader, Common Dreams, Women's eNews, Religion Dispatches, The Women's International Perspective, ColorLines, Bitch Magazine, Writer's Journal, RH Reality Check, truthout, and many other publications. She edits the literary and social justice website, Isak. She lives and writes from Detroit, MI.
Oliver de la Paz is the author of two books of poetry, Names Above Houses and Furious Lullaby, both published by Southern Illinois University Press. He is the chair of the Advisory Board for Kundiman, a non-profit organization dedicated to the discovery and promotion of Asian American poetry. A recipient of a GAP grant from Washington state and a NYFA grant, he teaches creative writing at Western Washington University.
Laird Hunt is the author of a book of short stories, mock parables and histories, The Paris Stories (2000), from Smokeproof Press, and three novels, The Impossibly (2001), Indiana, Indiana (2003), and The Exquisite (2006), all from Coffee House Press. A new novel, Ray of the Star, is forthcoming from Coffee House in September 2009.
Charles Jensen is the author of four collections of poetry, including The First Risk, is forthcoming in September 2009 from Lethe Press. A past recipient of an Artist’s Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, his poetry has appeared in Bloom, Columbia Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, The Journal, New England Review, spork, and West Branch. He is the founding editor of the online poetry magazine Locuspoint, which explores creative work on a city-by-city basis. He serves as director of The Writer's Center, one of the nation's largest independent literary centers.
Christina Kallery’s work has appeared in Mudlark, Rattle, The Hiram Poetry Review, Boxcar Poetry Review and other publications. One of her poems has been included in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2008 Anthology and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is Associate Poetry Editor for the online literary and art journal Failbetter. She recently moved to New York City from Detroit.
Gordon Lish gained, and never relaxed, his grip on renown when, in 1967, before an audience of traveling Austrians, he succeeded in refuting Fichte and Schelling’s recipe for meatless sauerbraten.
*This version of "I'm Wide" originally appeared in the 1996 paperback edition of Lish's story collection What I Know So Far: Stories, published by Four Walls Eight Windows.
John Madera is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. You may find him at elimae, ArtVoice, Underground Voices, Little White Poetry Journal #7, hitherandthithering waters and My Pet Earworm, and forthcoming at Opium Magazine and Publishing Genius Press. He reviews for The Diagram, The Quarterly Conversation, 3:AM Magazine, New Pages, Open Letters Monthly, The Rumpus, and Word Riot, and edits the online journal The Chapbook Review. He sings and plays guitar for Mother Flux.
Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and grew up there. His father was a conductor working on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s passenger trains running to and from Chicago, and Martone often deadheaded into the city on the Broadway Limited, spending the layover there with his father. They liked to go to the observation decks of the tallest buildings. They went to the observation deck of the Prudential Building when it was the tallest building and watched from there when they were building the Hancock Building and then went there when the Hancock Building was finished. From the Hancock Building, they observed the Standard Oil Building being built with its marble cladding that would later sheet off in the famous wind of the city and be replaced by a granite veneer that looked like marble. The Standard Oil Building didn’t have an observation deck so they watched from the John Hancock Building as the Sears Tower was topped off and then went there to the top of the Sears Tower to observe. Martone still wonders what the Standard Oil Building was hiding by not having an observatory, what it didn’t want him to see, inside or out. On the train ride home, he did see the ruins of the dangerous marble, taken from the façade, crushed now and sparkling even in the filtered sunlight of the industrial region, used in the minimal landscaping of a Standard Oil refinery outside of Whiting, Indiana.
David McLendon is an Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellow. He is the founder and editor of Unsaid. He divides his time between Ann Arbor and Brookyln.
Ander Monson is the author of a host of paraphernalia including a decoder wheel, several chapbooks and limited edition letterpress collaborations, a website, and three books: Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, Other Electricities, and Vacationland. In 2010 Sarabande Books will publish The Available World, a poetry collection, and Graywolf Books will publish a nonfiction project, Vanishing Point. The assembloir in this issue is from the accompanying website for that book. He edits the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press.
Dawn Raffel is the author of a novel, Carrying the Body (Scribner), and a collection, In the Year of Long Division (Knopf). Her new collection, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, will be published by Dzanc Books in March 2010.
Matthew Salesses was born in Korea. He is the author of the chapbook, We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius Press). His stories appear or will soon appear in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, Pleiades, Mid-American Review, The Lifted Brow, and others. He edits Redivider.
His blog is http://live-essays.blogspot.com/.
Kevin Wilson is the author of the story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009). His fiction has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, and elsewhere.