Issue Six: January 2010
Reginald Dwayne Betts has been awarded the Holden Fellowship from MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A Cave Canem fellow, his poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review and Poet Lore among others. He is a Breadloaf Writer’s Conference scholarship recipient. In August 2009 his memoir, A Question of Freedom, was published by Avery/Penguin and in May 2010 Alice James Books will publish his poetry manuscript Shahid Reads His Own Palm, which won the Beatrice Hawley Award.
Gabriel Blackwell is currently at work on a polycephalic, semi-biographical novel. His work has appeared in Conjunctions and Web Conjunctions.
Jennifer S. Cheng recently received her MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and she holds a BA from Brown University. Her essays have appeared in Seneca Review and Fifty-Fifty, an anthology of Hong Kong writing, edited by Xu Xi. She currently lives in San Francisco.
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.
Gabe Durham lives with his wife in Northampton, MA. His fictions have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Hobart, Keyhole, Mid-American Review, The Lifted Brow, and elsewhere. He MFAs and teaches English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He gives away free words and music at gatherroundchildren.com.
Mary Jo Firth Gillett has published three award winning chapbooks and a full-length collection, Soluble Fish, which won the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Poems have been published in The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Third Coast, Gettysburg Review, Green Mountains Review, Margie, The MacGuffin, and other journals. Mary Jo won the New York Open Voice Poetry Award and teaches poetry workshops for Springfed Arts, Metro Detroit Writers.
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour Press 2009) as well as the forthcoming TEAM SAD (Cinematheque 2010), collaboratively written with Zachary Schomburg. She teaches at Portland Community College.
John Madera stepped into a gallery of Gerhard Richter’s recent paintings. As he always did with paintings he liked, or that troubled him, he stood in front of every one and brought his face close to each canvas, wood panel, glass, or aludibond surface. Facing the white paintings in the first room, his eyes swam in their rippling surfaces, the places that shimmered like a frosted over lake, the colors poking through like things trapped in ice. He walked from room to room knowing these marbleized things, these squeegeed palettes, these eerie palimpsests weren’t meant to mean anything, or any such measly thing, but he couldn’t help seeing stalactites and waterfalls. After walking down a long corridor to the back room, he saw the large black paintings and the brilliant yellow and orange ones. Swathed in their longing for the era of color field painting, he thought of Mark Rothko. Walking back through the long corridor, he almost missed the ominous “Head” that was tucked away into a dark corner. A panel featuring a smudged face, it was Richter’s own eraserhead. The muted nostalgia John had felt from the paintings was swept away by this image. Trying to find the eyes in the face, John was swallowed into the painting and hasn’t been heard from since. www.johnmadera.com
Tina May Hall’s first story collection, Instructions for Contacting the Dead, will be published in the fall of 2010. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in 3rd bed, the minnesota review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Water-Stone Review, Fairy Tale Review, and other journals. Her novella in prose poems, All the Day's Sad Stories, was published by Caketrain Press in the spring of 2009. She lives with her husband and son in upstate New York in a skinny old house with a mouse in the pantry and a ghost in the furnace who knocks on their dreams all night long. www.tinamayhall.com
Stacy Muszynski writes. Her recent work appears at elimae, Opium, Everyday Genius, The Rumpus, more. She web edits American Short Fiction and co-hosts Five Things Austin.
Alan Michael Parker’s books include five collections of poems and a novel. New works are forthcoming or have recently appeared in The Believer, Kenyon Review, Tikkun, and elsewhere. He teaches at Davidson College, where he direct the program in creative writing, and in the Queens University low-residency M.F.A. program. www.amparker.com
Jeff Parker is the author of the novel Ovenman (Tin House) and the forthcoming story collection The Taste of Penny (Dzanc). His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, The Walrus, and other pubs. He co-edited the anthologies Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia and Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States. He teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto.
Padgett Powell is the author of four novels, including Edisto, which was nominated for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Esquire, and other publications, as well as in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.
Doug Ramspeck was awarded the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry for his collection Black Tupelo Country, which is published by BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City). His chapbook, Where We Come From, is published by March Street Press. Several hundred of his poems have appeared in journals that include EPOCH, Prairie Schooner, and Northwest Review. He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2009. He directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing at The Ohio State University at Lima. He lives in Lima with his wife, Beth, and their daughter, Lee. www.dougramspeck.com.
Angela Stubbs lives in Los Angeles and is a freelance writer who's going back to school to get her MFA in Creative Writing this year. Her work has appeared in PopMatters, LitPark and Bookslut with work forthcoming from Area Sneaks and The Rumpus. She is also the author of the column, Between the Pen and Paper which debuts in February at The Nervous Breakdown. angelastubbs.blogspot.com