CONTRIBUTOR NOTES

DAVID ABRAMS is the author of Fobbit (Grove/Atlantic), a New York Times Notable Book for 2012. It was also selected as both an Indie Next pick and for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salon, Electric, Literature, Salamander, Connecticut Review, Five Chapters, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, and other literary quarterlies.

JACOB M. APPEL is a bioethcist and medical historian. He has taught most recently at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was honored with the Undergraduate Council of Students Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003, and at New York University. His essays on matters at the nexus of law, medicine and philosophy have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Providence Journal, The Tuscon Citizen, and many regional newspapers. He also contributes to the Journal of Medical Ethics, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, the Hastings Center Report, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and numerous other academic publications. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a member of the bar in New York State and Rhode Island.

M. C. ARMSTRONG was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Esquire, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Epiphany, The Literary Review, The Virginia Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the guitarist and vocalist for Viva la Muerte, and lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

AGNAR ARTÚVERTIN is a writer, poet, publisher and translator with seventeen publications to date. He lives and works in the Faroe Islands.

ANNE BARNGROVER is a PhD candidate in Poetry at University of Missouri.

DAVID BOWEN is an editor at New American Press and MAYDAY Magazine, as well as a contributing editor at Great Lakes Review. His work has appeared in such journals as The Literary Review, Monkeybicycle, and Flyway. He's currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

GLENN BRADY was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1966. He started painting in 1993, and since has had more than twenty solo shows in Brisbane and Melbourne. He won first prize overall in the 2006 Gold Coast Show, and was a finalist in the Churchie National Emerging Art Exhibition in 2007 and 2009. He lives in Cabarita, New South Wales, where he spends a lot of time in his studio, with his dog Larry, producing large acrylics and pastel works on canvas.

JEREMY BRITTON grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He has a PhD in civil engineering and now practices writing and engineering in Portland, Oregon. His short stories have appeared in amphibi.us, LITnIMAGE, and Prick of the Spindle.

RAUL CLEMENT is an editor at New American Press and MAYDAY Magazine.

MATTHEW COOPERMAN is the author of Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath Press, 2011), DaZE (Salt Publishing Ltd, 2006) and A Sacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize, as well as three chapbooks, Still: (to be) Perpetual (dove | tail, 2007), Words About James (phylum press, 2005) and Surge (Kent State University Press, 1999). A founding editor of Quarter After Eight, and current poetry editor of Colorado Review, he teaches at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, where he lives with the poet Aby Kaupang and his two children. More information can be found at www.matthewcooperman.com.

PAUL CRENSHAW’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Essays 2005 and 2011, anthologies by W.W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, and numerous literary journals, including Shenandoah, North American Review, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University.

MICHAEL CZYZNIEJEWSKI teaches at Missouri State University, where he also serves as the Arts and Letters Editor at Moon City Press.

STEVE DAVENPORT is the author of two poetry collections: Overpass (2012) and Uncontainable Noise (2006). He keeps a website/blog at www.gasolinelake.com.

KELLY DAVIO is the former Managing Editor of Los Angeles Review, Associate Editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal, and a reviewer for Women’s Review of Books. Her work has been honored in Best New Poets and has appeared in journals including Gargoyle, The Cincinnati Review, Bellingham Review, The Evansville Review, The Portland Review, Pank, and others. In Burn This House, her debut poetry collection, Davio takes on her upbringing in the fundamentalist Christian church, examining the ideas of sin, virtue, and the space between them from the point of view of a spiritual truant. Born and raised in Central California, Davio studied English at Westmont College and The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Oxford University. She earned her MFA in Poetry at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, Whidbey Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Seattle, Washington, where she teaches English as a second language to high school students.

VALENTIN DISHEV was born in 1962 in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. He holds a PHD in Philosophy. He has served as a publisher and editor for many years. He is the author of several poetry and prose books. For over 10 years he hosts literary radio programs in Radio Blagoevgrad of Bulgarian National Radio.

OKLA ELLIOTT is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois where he works in the fields of comparative literature and trauma studies. He also holds an MFA from Ohio State University. His drama, non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Letters, A Public Space, and Subtropics, among others. He is the author of a full-length collection of short fiction, From the Crooked Timber, and three poetry chapbooks. His novel, The Doors You Mark Are Your Own (co-authored with Raul Clement), is forthcoming in 2014.

KATY E. ELLIS is a freelance writer who lives in Seattle, Washington. Her poetry has recently appeared in Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women and Alehouse: Poetry on Tap, as well as in Sycamore Review, Rinse & Repeat, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Faultline, and in the Canadian journals Grain and Fiddlehead. Her chapbook Urban Animal Expeditions was published by Dancing Girl Press in July 2012.

ALICE B. FOGEL's third book, Be That Empty, was a national poetry bestseller in 2008. She has been a recipient of an NEA fellowship, and a five-time Pushcart nominee; work has appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Robert Hass’s Poet’s Choice, and many other anthologies and journals such as Spillway, Hotel Amerika, Ploughshares, and Crazyhorse. Her 2009 book, Strange Terrain, is a readers’ guide to how to not “get” poetry. She teaches writing and other arts in various venues, and edits manuscripts for authors and publishers. In another life, she's a custom clothier and “clothing surgeon,” refashioning old clothes into new ones (www.LyricCouture.com).

TERRANCE GUTBERLET lives in New Orleans, where he teaches autistic students. This is his first published book review.

JOHN GUZLOWSKI’s writing appears in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, The Ontario Review, Exquisite Corpse, Manhattan Review, Modern Fiction Studies, and other journals both here and abroad. Guzlowski’s poems about his parents’ experiences in Nazi concentration camps appear in his book Lightning and Ashes.

CALVIN HAUL lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

ANDREW HUDGINS is the author of The Joker (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2013), American Rendering: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010), Shut Up, You're Fine: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children (Overlook Press 2009), Ecstatic in the Poison (Sewanee/Overlook Press 2003), Babylon in a Jar (Houghton Mifflin 1998), The Glass Anvil (University of Michigan 1997), Saints and Strangers, After The Lost War: A Narrative, The Never-Ending: New Poems, and The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood. His poems, short stories, and essays appear in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Oxford American, The American Scholar, The Washington Post Magazine and other publications. Hudgins is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ohioiana Award for lifetime contributions to poetry in Ohio, two NEA fellowships, and other awards. In 2007, he was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

IRENE JIMENEZ (Murcia, 1977) has published four books of short stories: La hora de la siesta (2001), El placer de la Y (2003), Lugares communes (2007) and La suma y la resta (2011), from which the present story comes. Her stories have also been included in anthologies gathering important new writers of the Spanish short story, such as Siglo XXI. Los nuevos nombres del cuento español actual and Pequeñas resistencias 5. Antología del nuevo cuento español (2001-2010).  She resides in Cádiz.

STEPHEN KUUSISTO is the author of Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and the memoir Planet of the Blind, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has also published the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges, both out from Copper Canyon Press. Recognized by the New York Times as “a powerful writer with a musical ear for language and a gift for emotional candor,” Kuusisto has made appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline NBC, National Public Radio, and the BBC.

MATTHEW LANDRUM holds an MFA from Bennington College. His translations have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Asymptote, and Ice Floes.

MARIUS LEHENE is a native of Romania. Lehene holds an MFA in Drawing and Painting from Southern Methodist University (2001) and a BA in Economics from Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania (1996). Lehene is currently Associate Professor, and Director of Drawing in the Department of Art at Colorado State University. His work has been shown widely in the United States, and internationally in Eastern Europe and India. More information can be found at www.mariuslehene.com.

J. R. LONGFELLOW lives in Honolulu, Hawai'i.

ETHAN MADARIETA was born in the small town of Grandview, Idaho. He lived in Mexico City, where he studied chilango, and Euskadi, where he studied euskara. He co-produces the monthly poetry journal Poetry Brothers and is currently working on a novel, and a short story trilogy concerned with the U.S./Mexico border and literary theory. He is a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Comparative Literature and Translation, and has been working as a hairstylist at H2O Salon since 2009. He aspires to be a novelist, poet, hairstylist, and professor—simultaneously.

CHRISTOPHER MERKNER co-directs the creative writing program at West Chester University. His first book, The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic, will be coming out from Coffee House in January 2014. He and his wife and kids live in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

GEORGE MOORE has new collections forthcoming from FutureCycle, called The Hermits of Dingle, and from Salmon Poetry, called Children's Drawings of the Universe. New work is likewise soon to appear in Danse Macabre, Camel Saloon, I-70 Review, and IthacaLit. He teaches at the University of Colorado.

KYLE MUNTZ is the author of four novels, most recently Green Lights, forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms in early 2014.

CATHERINE NELSON is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Nebraska Wesleyan University and literary translator. Her translation of “Ursula,” also by Irene Jiménez, appears in the April issue of InTranslation.

AMADO NERVO (August 27, 1870 – May 24, 1919) also known as Juan Crisóstomo Ruiz de Nervo, was born and raised in the town of Tepic in Nayarit, Mexico.  As a teenager, Nervo studied philosophy, science and religion and completed the first year of law in a Roman Catholic Seminary.  His interest in the mystical and spiritual led him to want to become a priest, but due to economic struggles he withdrew from his studies and began working for a lawyer and as a journalist.  He then moved to Mexico City where he worked for the modernist literary magazine Revista Azul with the Mexican poet Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera.  He was also an important and prolific writer for the newspapers El Universal, El Mundo and El Nacional.  It was in Mexico City where he became known and respected not only as a journalist, but also as a poet.  After spending some time at the turn of the 20th century in Paris, where he met and married his greatest love Ana Cecilia Luisa Dailliez, and in Madrid, where he acted as secretary at the Mexican embassy, he returned to Mexico and was appointed ambassador to Argentina and Uruguay.  Within his lifetime Nervo published more than 12 books of poems and several novels, essays, a zarzuela (traditional Spanish opera) and a biography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.  He died in Montevideo and by the order of the Uruguayan president Baltasar Brum, was returned to Mexico City to be buried.  Much of Nervo’s poetry reflects his interest in mysticism and the spiritual experience.

FELIKS NETZ is a respected Polish playwright, novelist, and poet. He has been short-listed for the Nike Prize in Poland, and his radio play, A Room with a View of the War, came in second in the Prix Italia competition. He is also the editor of Slask, a Polish cultural journal in the Krakow region.

OCTAVIO QUINTANILLA’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander, RHINO, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Bitter Oleander, Los Angeles Review, Border Crossing, Conium Review, and elsewhere. His critical reviews have appeared in Texas Books in Review and in Southwestern American Literature. He has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. His first collection of poetry, If I Go Missing, will be published by Slough Press in early 2014.

GEORGE SAUNDERS received a B.Sc. (1981) from the Colorado School of Mines and an M.A. (1988) from Syracuse University. He worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer at Radian International in Rochester, New York (1989-1996), prior to joining the faculty of Syracuse University, where he is currently a professor of creative writing. His fiction has appeared in such publications as the New Yorker, Harper's, and Esquire, among many others. He won a National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2004 and his work is included in Best American Short Stories 2005. His most recent book is Tenth of December, released by Random House in 2013. His political novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil was published by Riverhead Trade Paperbacks in September 2005. He is also the author of Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, both New York Times Notable Books, and The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, a New York Times children's bestseller.

MICHAEL SCHMELTZER earned an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. His honors include five Pushcart Prize nominations. He has been a finalist for the Four Way Books Intro Prize, the OSU Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, the Slapering Hol chapbook contest, and a semi-finalist for the Zone 3 Press First Book Prize and Miller Williams Arkansas Prize. He is the Poetry Editor of A River and Sound Review and has been published in numerous journals.

JAY SHEARER lives in Chicago, where he teaches (University of Illinois at Chicago) and writes (fiction, essays, reviews). His work has appeared in Other Voices, Beloit Fiction Journal, Southeast Review, Southern Indiana Review, and Peregrine, among other publications (several forthcoming). His long story/novella The Pulpit vs. the Hole won USC’s Gold Line Press chapbook competition and was published in 2012. Recently, he was selected as a finalist for the 2013 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (Univ. of Georgia Press). His novel Five Hundred Sirens (the story in this issue is the title chapter) is forthcoming from Cairn Press.

ALEXIS M. SMITH is from Soldotna, Alaska, and she lives in Portland, Oregon. She received her MFA from Goddard College. Glaciers is her debut novel. You can read more about her at www.alexismsmith.com.

R. CLIFTON SPARGO, a Chicago-based fiction writer and cultural critic, is the author of Beautiful Fools, The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the Provost’s Postgraduate Visiting Writer in Fiction in the Department of English at the University of Iowa for 2013-14. A past winner of Glimmer Train’s Award for New Writers as well as their Fiction Open Contest, he has published stories in The Antioch Review, FICTION, Glimmer Train, SOMA, and The Kenyon Review, among other places.  His essays and reviews on literature, culture, and rock music have been featured in Raritan, Commonweal, The Yale Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, Newcity, and the fashion magazine Glo. And he writes a blog called “The HI/LO,” on the interplay between high and low culture, for The Huffington Post. He has taught creative writing at Yale University, Marquette University, and the University of Iowa. He has also been a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a John D. and Rose H. Jackson Fellow at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and an Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

JENNIFER SPIEGEL is the author of two books, The Freak Chronicles (Dzanc Books 2012) and Love Slave (Unbridled Books 2012). Additionally, she blogs at "Bosco's Going Down," and she's half of Snotty Literati. Visit her at www.jenniferspiegel.com.

KATERINA STOYKOVA-KLEMER is the author of three poetry books, most recently The Porcupine of Mind (Broadstone Books, 2012). Katerina is also the founder of poetry and prose groups in Lexington, Kentucky. She hosts Accents, a radio show for literature, art, and culture on WRFL, 88.1 FM, Lexington. In January 2010, Katerina launched Accents Publishing.

RICHARD THOMAS is the author of three books—Transubstantiate, Herniated Roots and Staring Into the Abyss. His over 75 publications include Cemetery Dance, PANK, Gargoyle, Weird Fiction Review, Midwestern Gothic, Arcadia, Pear Noir, and Shivers VI. He is also the editor of three anthologies out in 2014: The New Black (Dark House Press), The Lineup (Black Lawrence Press) and Burnt Tongues (Medallion Press) with Chuck Palahniuk. In his spare time he writes for The Nervous Breakdown, LitReactor, and is Editor-in-Chief at Dark House Press. For more information visit www.whatdoesnotkillme.com or contact Paula Munier at Talcott Notch.

JON THOMPSON's first collection was The Book of the Floating World (2007), endorsed by Susan Stewart. His collection of lyrical essays, After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing (2009), was endorsed by Susan Howe. His current project, Landscape with Light, is in the venerable tradition of landscape poetry, but with a difference: it meditates upon rural and urban landscapes in iconic American films. In addition to writing poetry and essays, he edits Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, an online poetry journal of poetry, poetry in translation, interviews and reviews. I also edit the single-author perfect-bound, paperback poetry series, Free Verse Editions, which since 2005, has published original poetry and translations by leading poets in the Anglophone poetry world and outside it: Brenda Hillman, Cole Swensen, Adam Clay, Peter Riley, Attilio Bertolucci, Molly Bendall, Caroyn Guinzio and others. For more on his work, go to www.jon-thompson.net

ÄNNE TROESTER spent her childhood and adolescence in Germany, Austria, and the U.S. She wrote her PhD thesis on the novels of Paul Auster and worked in academia, as a translator, and as a film critic before she turned to dubbing scripts. Her German script for Extras won a dubbing award, and she has adapted films ranging from David Lynch's Inland Empire to the Argentinian Oscar-winner El secreto de sus ojos to the two recent Star Trek films. She lives in Berlin, Germany.

LEE UPTON's most recent book is a collection of essays, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy. Her collection of short stories, The Tao of Humiliation, will be available from BOA Editions in spring 2014.

RIMAS UZGIRIS's 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 Ph.D. 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.

AVNI VYAS is a PhD candidate in Poetry at Florida State University.

KATHERINE L. WIEGELE has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and has traveled extensively, including around four years of residence in the Philippines, as a researcher and Peace Corps Volunteer. Her book, Investing in Miracles: El Shaddai and the Transformation of Popular Catholicism in the Philippines, was published in both the US (2005, University of Hawai’i Press) and the Philippines (2007, Ateneo de Manila Press), where in 2007 it was awarded a National Book Award (first place in religion/theology) by the Manila Critics Circle and the National Book Development Board. She has also published numerous articles and book chapters dealing with cultural life in the Philippines.

THEODORE WOROZBYT's work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Best American Poetry, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, The Mississippi Review 30 Year Anthology, New England Review, Po&sie, Poetry, Sentence, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly Online, and Quarterly West. His first book, The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press, 2006), won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and his second, Letters of Transit, won the 2007 Juniper Prize and was published by UMass Press. Scar Letters, a chapbook, is online at Beard of Bees Press. Objectless Fragments, a new chapbook, appears in the premier issue of The Chapbook.

BRIGIT KELLY YOUNG's fiction and poetry have appeared in in Drunken Boat, Midwestern Gothic, Gargoyle Magazine, The North American Review, 2River View, Eclectica Magazine, and others. She is originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, but now lives and works in New York City. More information can be found at brigitkellyyoung.com.

IVAN YOUNG studied with the late James Dickey at the University of South Carolina, where he received his MFA, and is a 2011 winner of the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. His manuscript Smell of Salt, Ghost of Rain was a semi-finalist in the Waywiser 2012 Poetry Book Contest. Some of his more recent publications are in Tupelo Press's forthcoming Erotic Poem Anthology, Challenges for the Delusional (an anthology), Zone 3, The Summerset Review, Innisfree, Crab Orchard Review, Undefined Magazine, Barnwood, and Blue Mesa Review. He is currently an Instructor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland.

JANUSZ ZALEWSKI’s Polish translations of Polish-American poets have been published in Polish literary magazines Nowa Okolica Poetów and Odra. His translations of Charles Bukowski and the beat generation poets—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and others—were also published in Poland. Zalewski teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers.

 

 

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