CONTRIBUTOR NOTES

 

DEREK ALGER was a graduate of the MFA fiction-writing program at Columbia University, a contributing editor for Serving House Journal, and a former editor-at-large at Pif Magazine, where more than 100 of his interviews with writers have been published. Derek Alger’s fiction and essays appear in Confrontation, Del Sol Review, Ducts.org, The Literary Review, and Writers' Notes, among others. For more of his interviews, visit Pif Magazine.

RENEE ASHLEY is a poet, novelist, and educator. Presently on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University and an editor at The Literary Review, Ashley is the author of five collections of poetry, two chapbooks and a novel. Her work has received several honors including the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships granted by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the NEA. Her poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including Poetry, American Voice, Bellevue Literary Review, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, and others.

MILDRED K. BARYA teaches creative writing and literature at UNC-Asheville and is a board member of African Writers Trust (AWT). She has published three poetry books and short stories in various journals and anthologies. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver-Colorado, a MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University-New York, and a B.A in Literature from Makerere University, Uganda.  She blogs at http://mildredbarya.com.

JÜRGEN BECKER was born in Köln, Germany, in 1932. He is the author of over thirty books, including drama, fiction, and poetry—all published by Suhrkamp,  Germany’s premier publisher. He won numerous prizes, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, the Hermann Lenz Prize, and the Georg Büchner Prize, the highest honor a German-language author can receive.

ROY BENTLEY is the author of Starlight Taxi (Lynx House), which won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize. Other books include The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine), which was the winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize; Any One Man (Bottom Dog); and Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama Press), which won the University of Alabama Press Poetry Series. Recipient of a Creative W riting Fellowship from the NEA, six Ohio Arts Council fellowships, and a Florida Division of Cultural Affairs fellowship, Bentley has published poems in Moon City Review, the Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and elsewhere.

JENNIFER BLACK is Assistant Professor of History and Government at Misericordia University. She holds a PhD in American History and Visual Culture from the University of Southern California, as well as an MA in Public History and a BA in Art History from Western Michigan University. Her work focuses on the ways in which visual culture influenced changes in law, society, and culture in the American past. She can be found online at jennifermblack.org.

DAVID BOWEN cofounded New American Press and MAYDAY Magazine. His work has appeared in The Literary Review, Colorado Review, Flyway, Great Lakes Review, Printer's Devil Review, Serving House Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

MICHELLE BROOKS has published a collection of poems, Make Yourself Small, (Backwaters Press) and a novella Dead Girl, Live Boy (Storylandia Press). She recently completed a book of essays titled Second Day Reported.

PETER BURZYNSKI is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing-Poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He holds a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a M.F.A. in Poetry from The New School University, and a M.A. in Polish Literature from Columbia University. In between his studies, he has worked as a chef in New York City and Milwaukee. He is an assistant poetry editor for the cream city review and Graduate Assistant Coordinator for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming from jubilat, The Best American Poetry Blog, Thin Air, Prick of the Spindle, Thrush Poetry Review, Your Impossible Voice, RHINO, and Forklift Ohio, amongst others. 

SIVAN BUTLER-ROTHOLZ is the contributing editor of the Saturday Poetry Series on As It Ought To Be. A professor, writer, editor, comic artist, and attorney emerita, she holds an MFA from Brooklyn College. She is also the founder of Reviving Herstory. Sivan welcomes feedback, poetry submissions, and solicitations of her writing via email at sivan.sf [at] gmail [dot] com.

DREW BUXTON's work has been featured or is forthcoming in Hobart, Vice, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Funhouse, and Hypertext, among other publications. He's from Texas and currently lives in Peru. Find his stuff at drewbuxton.com.

KELLY CHERRY was named the poet laureate of Virginia in 2010. She is the author of more than twenty-five books, including memoirs and collections of poems, stories, and essays. She published two translations of ancient Greek drama and received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and Yaddo. She retired from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1999 but still holds the positions of the Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and the Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities. The inaugural recipient of the Hanes Poetry Prize and the Ellen Anderson Award, Cherry was a Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 2010. She lives on a small farm in Virginia with her husband.

MICHAEL CHIN was born and raised in Utica, New York, and is an alum of Oregon State's MFA Program. His hybrid chapbook, The Leo Burke Finish, is forthcoming from Gimmick Press. He won Bayou Magazine's Jim Knudsen Editor’s Prize for fiction and has work published or forthcoming in journals including The Normal School, Passages North, and Hobart. He works as a contributing editor for Moss. Find him online at miketchin.com or follow him on Twitter @miketchin.

RAUL CLEMENT is a senior editor at New American Press and MAYDAY Magazine. His work has been published in American Literary Review, Blue Mesa Review, Coe Review, Surreal South '09, and elsewhere. His novel, The Doors You Mark Are Your Own (coauthored with Okla Elliott), was released by Dark House Press in 2015. For news, events, and links to online publications, visit raulclement.com.

PAUL CRENSHAW's work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, anthologies by W.W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, North American Review, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, and Brevity, among others.

MICHAEL DON teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an editor of Kikwetu: A Journal of East African Literature.

LARA EGGER's poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in the American Poetry Journal, Arts & Letters, Painted Bride Quarterly, The American Journal of Poetry, Confrontation, and elsewhere. An Australian native, Lara holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and currently lives in Boston where she co-owns and operates a Spanish tapas bar.

OKLA ELLIOTT (1977-2017) cofounded New American Press and MAYDAY Magazine. He was an assistant professor at Misericordia University in northeast Pennsylvania. He held a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Illinois, an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University, and a certificate in legal studies from Purdue University. His work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Numéro Cinq, Prairie Schooner, A Public Space, Subtropics, and elsewhere, as well as being included as a “notable essay” in Best American Essays 2015. His books include From the Crooked Timber (short fiction), The Cartographer’s Ink (poetry), The Doors You Mark Are Your Own (a novel coauthored with Raul Clement), and Blackbirds in September: Selected Shorter Poems of Jürgen Becker (translation). For more information, visit his website at oklaelliott.net.

KRISTA FOSS is a Hamilton, Ontario-based writer of novels, essays and short fiction. Her first novel Smoke River was published by McClelland & Stewart (2014). Her short fiction has twice been a finalist for The Journey Prize and her essay writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, won the PRISM International Creative Non-fiction Contest (2016)  and is featured in  the 2016 edition of Best Canadian Essays (Tightrope Editions.) She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.

KEITH GAUSTAD has never won a single poetry contest. He applied to a graduate program once and was even accepted but not awarded a TA-ship and couldn’t afford to go. He lives in Milwaukee, where he hosts a radio show on WXRW called There Goes The Neighborhood to which Okla Elliott was a guest caller. Keith's chapbook High Art & Love Poems came out in 2012 on Brokenbird Press. His band The November Criminals just released their second album, The Great War.

STEPHEN GIBSON is the author of seven poetry collections: Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, selected by Billy Collins, University of Arkansas Press), The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, Story Line Press), Paradise (Miller Williams finalist, University of Arkansas Press), Frescoes (Lost Horse Press book prize), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House book prize), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press).

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE was a German writer and statesmen best known for his dramatic poem Faust, often considered the ultimate work of German literature.

SOPHIA VALESCA GÖRGENS is a medical student at Emory University in Atlanta. She earned her undergraduate degree in biology and English with a minor in creative writing at Boston College. While at Boston College, she received the Cushing Award and the Bishop Kelleher Award. She was also Editor-in-Chief of Stylus, the literary and arts magazine of Boston College. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Styloid Process, the literary and arts magazine of Emory School of Medicine. Her work has been published in Stylus, The Laughing Medusa, the Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College, the Styloid Process, the Tokyo Weekender, Pulse, Eunoia Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and has upcoming work in the Journal of Emergency Medicine and CHEST.

JOHN GUZLOWSKI's poetry appears in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Rattle, Ontario Review, North American Review, Salon.Com, and many other journals. His poems and personal essays about his Polish parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany and refugees making a life for themselves in Chicago appear in his memoir Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica Press). He is also the author of three novels. He is the recipient of the 2017 Benjamin Franklin Poetry Award and the Eric Hoffer Foundation's Montaigne Award. Find out more at amazon.com/author/johnguzlowski.

IAN HAIGHT’s collection of poetry, Celadon, won Unicorn Press’ First Book Prize and is scheduled for release in the fall of 2017. He is the editor of Zen Questions and Answers from Korea, and with T’ae-yong Hŏ, he is the co-translator of Borderland Roads: Selected Poems of Kyun Hŏ and Magnolia and Lotus: Selected Poems of Hyesim—finalist for ALTA’s Stryk Prize—all from White Pine Press. Other awards include Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Translation, and grants from the Daesan Foundation, the Korea Literary Translation Institute, and the Baroboin Buddhist Foundation. For more information please visit ianhaight.com.

MATTHEW HINTON was born in the back seat of his great grandmother's Posten Taxi in Wilkes-Barre, PA. He is the Assistant Director of the Student Success Center at Misericordia University (Dallas, PA), where he teaches writing and literature, A scholar of the life and work of Norman Mailer, Matthew regularly produces new dramatic works with various theatre companies and has authored several plays, including Quiet Cowboy, Talk the Night, and Out Out. His collection of detective poetry, Instant Deaths and Stutter Guns, is forthcoming. He dreams in analog.

LIAM HYSJULIEN's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Crazy Horse, and elsewhere. He lives in the South.

ANDREA JANOV is a recent transplant to Pittsburgh who was raised by rock n’ roll parents who knew the importance of concerts and going past the no trespassing signs. She spent her adolescence in a small town punk rock scene where she moshed, fell in love, and produced a few cut and paste fanzines. She holds Creative Writing degrees from SUNY Purchase and Wilkes University. Please visit andreajanov.com to learn more.

SEAN KARNS is the author of Jar of Pennies, a collection of poetry published in 2015 by New American Press. His work has been anthologized in New Poetry from the Midwest (New American Press), and has appeared or is forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review, Cold Mountain Review, Folio, HOBART (online), MAYDAY Magazine, Pleiades, Rattle, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.

LAURIE KOVENS lives and works in Durham, NC. She is currently enrolled in Lenoir Rhyne University's Masters in Writing Program and has been published in Little Patuxent Review.

RUXANDRA LOOFT is a lecturer of German and International Studies and faculty affiliate in Women’s and Gender Studies at Iowa State University. She received her PhD in German and Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis in 2012. Her research focuses on visual and material culture with an emphasis in fashion, identity, and the public body. Her writing has appeared in Bitch Magazine, Dear Journal: A Feminist Anthology, and Shakesville. You can find her on Twitter @advising_daily.

PETER MARCUS is the author of Dark Square (Pleasure Boat Studios: A Literary Press). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming from The Antioch Review, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Notre Dame Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Spillway, and Witness.  He is the Off-Campus Academic Program Coordinator at Elms College Accelerated Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology Programs at Holyoke and Mount Wachusetts Community Colleges in western Massachusetts.

JENNY MCKEEL received her MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University in 2010. Her essays have been published in Fourth Genre and December magazine. Her essay “Saigon” was named the honorable mention in December magazine’s 2014 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Nonfiction. She lives and works in Oakland, California.

TRAVIS MULHAUSER was born and raised in Northern Michigan. His novel, Sweetgirl, (Ecco/Harper Collins) has been listed for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, was an Indie Next Pick, and named one of Ploughshares' Best Books of the New Year. He is also the author of Greetings from Cutler County: A Novella and Stories. Travis received his MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro and is also a proud graduate of North Central Michigan College and Central Michigan University. He lives currently in Durham, North Carolina with his wife and two children. Find him online at travismulhauser.com.

BIBHU PADHI's poems have been published in distinguished magazines throughout the English-speaking world including The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Stand, Wasafiri, The American Scholar, Colorado Review, Confrontation,  The New Criterion, New Letters, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Poetry (Chicago),  Southwest Review, The Literary Review, Rosebud, TriQuarterly, Xavier Review, Antigonish Review, Queen’s Quarterly, The Illustrated Weekly of India and Indian Literature. They have been included in numerous anthologies and textbooks. Three of the most recent are Language for a New Century (Norton), 60 Indian Poets (Penguin) and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (HarperCollins). Padhi has also written a book on D. H. Lawrence (Whitston) and (with Minakshi Padhi) a reference book on Indian philosophy and religion (McFarland).

RITA MAE REESE is the author of The Alphabet Conspiracy (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press). She is a recipient of numerous awards, including a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Stegner fellowship in fiction, a “Discovery”/The Nation award, and a Pamaunok Poetry Prize.

RON RINDO has published three story collections, including Love in an Expanding Universe (New Rivers Press, 2005), and recent work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Summerset Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Trumpeter, and The Best American Essays. Ron teaches English at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and lives with his wife Jenna and youngest son on a small hobby farm in Pickett, Wisconsin.

NICK ROSSI is a co-founder/editor at Sobotka Literary Magazine and Ursus Americanus Press. His work has appeared in Souvenir Lit, Vanilla Sex Magazine, Esoteric, Chicago Literati, and elsewhere. He holds a B.A. in History from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. 

BRIAN SATROM's home is in Minneapolis, but he also lived in L.A. for many years, among other places, and completed an MFA at the University of Maryland. His writing has appeared in journals like Knockout, TAB, and Poetry Northwest, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His book reviews have appeared on the Colorado Review’s Center for Literary Publishing website.

EMILY SCHULTEN is the author of Rest in Black Haw. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review, Barrow Street, and New Ohio Review, among others. She a professor of English and creative writing at Florida Keys Community College.

SANDRA SIMONDS is the author of six books of poetry: Orlando (Wave Books, forthcoming in 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems have been included in the Best American Poetry 2015 and 2014 and have appeared in many literary journals, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Court Green, and Lana Turner. In 2013, she won a Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand,” which was published on Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets website. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.

DAVID R. SLAVITT was born in White Plains, New York. He earned a BA in 1956 from Yale, graduating magna cum laude, and an MA from Columbia in 1957. He has since authored more than one hundred books of poetry, literary fiction, pulp fiction, memoir, criticism, and translation. He has translated text from Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Greenlandic, French, Italian, and Spanish, including The Metamorphoses of Ovid and The Book of the Twelve Prophets, as well as works by Sophocles, Horace, Seneca, Dante, Boethius, Marie de France, and others. Slavitt is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for translation, an award for literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Rockefeller Foundation artist’s residency. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

HANNAH STEPHENSON is a poet, writer, editor, and instructor living in Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of In the Kettle, the Shriek (Gold Wake Press), editor of The Ides of March: An Anthology of Ohio Poets (Columbus Creative Cooperative), and a poetry and arts blogger for The Huffington Post; her writing has appeared in publications that include The Atlantic, Hobart, 32 Poems, Sixth Finch, Poetry Daily, and The Nervous Breakdown. She is also the founder of Paging Columbus!, a literary arts monthly event series.

MARINA TSVETAEVA (1941-1982) was a Russian poet whom Joseph Brodsky claimed to be the greatest poet of the twentieth century.

AGNIESZKA TUSZYNSKA is an Assistant Professor of English at Queensborough Community College-CUNY, where she teaches African American literature and writing. She has also taught college-level writing and literature classes in prisons and jails in Illinois and New York since 2009.

RIMAS UZGIRIS' poems and translations have been published in Quiddity, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, Hudson Review, AGNI, The Drunken Boat, The Massachusetts Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, Lituanus, Prime Number Magazine, inter|rupture, Presa Magazine, The Literary Bohemian, Literary Laundry, Brooklyner, Umbrella, Per Contra, and other journals. His book reviews have been published in HTML Giant, Post Road, Words Without Borders, and Rumpus. His fiction appeared in Writer's Abroad: Foreign Encounters Anthology. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and received an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark University. Recipient of a 2013 Fulbright Scholar Grant and a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, he teaches literature and creative writing at Vilnius University.

JUDITA VAIČIŪNAITĖ (1937-2001) was one of Lithuania's leading poets of the second half of the twentieth century. She graduated Vilnius University in 1959, and spent most of her life in Vilnius. She published more than twenty books of poetry, as well as translations of poetry, poetry books for children, and plays. She worked as an editor for several leading literary journals in Lithuania. Her poetry has been translated into English, German, Russian and other languages. Her work has garnered numerous prizes, including the Lithuanian Writer's Union Prize in 2000, and the 1997 national award of the Gediminas Cross.

JEAN DE VITEL was a sixteenth-century poet and writer born in Normandy, France.

MARK WALLACE is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Most recently he has published a novel, Crab, and a book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy. He lives in San Diego, California.

ARNE WEINGART lives with his wife Karen in Chicago, where he is the principal of a graphic design firm specializing in identity and wayfinding. Recent poems have been published in Arts & Letters, Beecher’s Magazine, Coal Hill Review, Enizagam, Nimrod, Oberon, Plume, RHINO, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Georgetown Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Spoon River Poetry Review. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his book, Levitation for Agnostics, won the 2014 New American Press Poetry Prize.

MARY JANE WHITE received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. A NEA fellowship recipient, White's poems and Tsvetaeva translations have appeared in the New England Review, the Hudson Review, and several other literary journals and magazines.

GLENN WILLIS is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Misericordia University. He holds a Ph.D. from Boston College, and previously served on the staff of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.  He writes on devotion and refuge in Buddhist and Christian traditions. 

JOHN WILLIS is a writer and visual artist. He lives at the very end of Oregon Trail—Astoria, Oregon—where he loves rain, Pugs, and Sue. Ask him. He’ll tell you.

 

 

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