CONTRIBUTOR NOTES

HANNAH DELA CRUZ ABRAMS received the 2013 Whiting Writers' Award for her novella The Man Who Danced with Dolls and her memoir-in-progress The Following Sea. She has also been accorded a Rona Jaffe National Literary Award and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. Her work has most recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Oxford American, Waccamaw, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. Abrams currently lives and teaches in coastal North Carolina.

AMY GIGI ALEXANDER writes memoir, fiction, and tales about place. Her work can be seen in World Hum, AlterNet, The Nervous Breakdown, STIR, Too Young to Wed, and BBC Travel. Some of her stories will be included in Lonely Planet’s literary anthology An Innocent Abroad, and The Best Travel Writing. She’s working on two memoirs—one about living and working with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, and a second book about life with the Ngabe people in Panama. Read more at www.amygigialexander.com, or find Amy on Twitter: @amyggalexander.

EFRAÍN BARTOLOMÉ, born in 1950 in Ocosingo, State of Chiapas, Mexico, is an internationally recognized poet and prize-winning environmental activist. His verses have been collected in Agua lustral (Holy Water: Poems, 1982-1987); Oficio: arder(Poet Afire: Poems, 1982-1997); and El ser que somos (Being Who We Are). Bartolomé is the recipient of the Mexico City Prize; Aguascalientes National Poetry Award (1984); Carlos Pellicer Prize for published work (1992); Gilberto Owen National Literary Prize (1993); and the Jaime Sabines International Poetry Prize (1996). The Mexican government awarded him the National Forest and Wildlife Merit Prize. He received the Chiapas Arts Prize in 1998. In 2001, he received the International Latino Arts Award in the United States. He is a member of the National Council of Creative Artists, and his poems have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, Arabic, Galician, Nahuatl, Peninsular Mayan, and Esperanto. He works as a psychotherapist in Mexico City. Ocosingo War Diary: Voices from Chiapas was his first book-length prose publication.

KEVIN BROWN, born in 1960 in Kansas City, Missouri, is a biographer, essayist and translator. He is author of the biographies Romare Bearden: Artist (1994) and Malcolm X: His Life and Legacy (1995). He was also a contributing editor to The New York Public Library African-American Desk Reference (2000). Brown’s articles, essays, interviews, reviews and translations from Spanish into English have appeared in Afterimage, Apuntes, Asymptote, The Brooklyn Rail,eXchanges, Hayden’s Ferry Review, K1N, The Kansas City Star, Kirkus, the London Times Literary Supplement, Metamorphoses, The Nation, Ozone Park, Review of Latin American Studies, Threepenny Review, Two Lines, and the Washington Post Bookworld. The complete English translation of Ocosingo War Diary: Voices from Chiapas is available from Calypso Editions. Brown is currently working on a family memoir about 1920s Harlem.

HENRYK CIERNIAK was born in 1956 in Bielsko-Biala in the Silesian region of Poland. His works have appeared in Zalew Kultury and the socio-cultural monthly Śląsk. He published his first book, The Believer of Skin, in 2011. His poems are frequently read on Polish Radio Katowice.

ROBERT COWAN is Associate Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Indo-German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765-1885 (Camden House, 2010) and his nonfiction, short fiction, and poetry have appeared in journals such as Bayou, Skidrow Penthouse, and Word Riot.

PAUL CRENSHAW’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Essays, anthologies by W. W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, and in journals such as Ecotone, Glimmer Train, and Brevity, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University.

VINCENT CZYZ is the author of Adrift in a Vanishing City, a collection of short fiction. He is also the recipient of the 1994 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction and two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts. The 2011 Capote Fellow at Rutgers University, his short stories have appeared numerous publications, including Shenandoah, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Georgetown Review, Quiddity, Tampa Review, Tin House online, Louisiana Literature, Southern Indiana Review, Camera Obscura, Skidrow Penthouse, Wasafiri International Contemporary Writing, and in Turkish translation.

NANCY P. DAVENPORT was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and lives there still. She has been a legal secretary, a yoga instructor, and a hamburger chef; she has also worked at the Palo Alto Chapter of the American Red Cross and many local coffee houses. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Burning Grape, The Mountain Gazette, The Bicycle Review, FEARLESS, Turbulence Poetry, Ygdrasil, The Rose Red Review, Ravenous Butterflies, Poetry Quarterly, The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Lilliput Review, Blue Fifth Review, Red Fez, Danse Macabre, Twizted Tungz, Full of Crow Poetry, Shwibily Press, and Del Sol Review, as well as in the anthology And It Happened Under Cover (NightWing, 2014). Her first chapbook, La Brizna, was published by Mountains & Rivers Press in May 2014.

OKLA ELLIOTT is an Illinois Distinguished Fellow 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 nonfiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, A Public Space, and Subtropics, among others. He is the author of the fiction collection, From the Crooked Timber, and the poetry collection, The Cartographer’s Ink. His novel, The Doors You Mark Are Your Own (co-authored with Raul Clement), is forthcoming in early 2015 from Dark House Press, and his book of translation, Blackbirds in September: Selected Shorter Poems of Jürgen Becker, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in late 2015.

MICHAEL ENNIS teaches in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He publishes on Mesoamerican history and culture and has contributed to exhibits on the Maya at Denver's Museum of Nature and Science and Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art.

GARY FINCKE's most recent poetry collection, The History of Permanence, won the Stephen F. Austin Poetry Prize and was published in 2011. His latest prose works are a collection of stories, The Proper Words for Sin (West Virginia, 2013), and a novel, How Blasphemy Sounds to God (Braddock Avenue Books, 2014). He is the Charles Degenstein Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.

MICHAEL GILLS is author of Why I Lie: Stories (University of Nevada Press, 2002), Go Love: A Novel (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2011), The Death of Bonnie and Clyde and Other Stories (Texas Review Press, 2012) and White Indians (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2013). His stories and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Texas Review, New Madrid, International Workers of the World Book Page, and Lost Dogs and Hard Rain:  Writing from the Other America. Gills’ collected papers are archived at Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Currently, he is Associate Professor/Lecturer at the University of Utah where he is mustering strength to teach a year-long novel workshop for undergraduates.

GRAHAM GUEST teaches in the Literature Department at Dominican University of California. He lives with his wife and daughter in the San Francisco Bay Area.

JOHN GUZLOWSKI’s writing appears in Garrison Keillor’s Writers’ Almanac, The Ontario Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Poetry East, Exquisite Corpse, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Mississippi Review, Rattle, Atticus Review, Manhattan Review, The Drunken Boat, and other print and online journals in the United States and elsewhere. The poems in his book Language of Mules won an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship Award in 2001. He's been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes.

BARBARA HAMBY was born in New Orleans and raised in Hawai’i. She now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with her husband, the sublime poet and all-around molto fun guy, David Kirby. She teaches creative writing in the English Department at Florida State University. In 2010, Hamby’s book of stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize/John Simmons Award, she was named a Distinguished University Scholar at Florida State, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She also published Seriously Funny, an anthology of poetry that she co-edited with her husband David Kirby, and Amy Gerstler chose five of her Lingo Sonnets for Best American Poetry 2010. Her other books are All-Night Lingo Tango (University of Pittsburgh Press: 2009); Babel (University of Pittsburgh Press), which was chosen by Stephen Dunn to win the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize; The Alphabet of Desire (NYU Press, 1999), which won the 1998 New York University Prize for Poetry and was chosen by The New York Public Library as one of the 25 best books of 1999; Delirium, which won the 1994 Vassar Miller Prize and two prizes for the best first book of poems published in 1995, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Hamby received a fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2000, 2009, and 2010, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2001. She has been teaching in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, since 1998.

GREG HLAVATY's work has appeared in Arts and Letters, Barrelhouse, Yale Anglers’ Journal, and Bird Watcher's Digest.

JANET JOYNER grew up in the South Carolina Low Country. Until her retirement, she was professor of French Language and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Her short stories have appeared in the Crescent Review, and she is the South Carolina Poetry Society’s 2010 winner of the Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, Pembroke Magazine and Bay Leaves, of The NC Poetry Council, where her poems won distinctions in 2010 and 2011. She was a featured poet in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature’s (April 2013). More recently, her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Emrys Journal, The Comstock Review, and The Journal of Kentucky Studies, and will appear in forthcoming issues of Main Street Rag and Flying South 2014. She is the translator of Le Dieu désarmé, by Luc-François Dumas. She lives and writes in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

SARAH KATHARINA KAYß was born in Koblenz, Germany, in 1985 and grew up in the Ruhr district. Her poems, essays, and photography have been published in newspapers, magazines, anthologies, and journals in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Britain, Italy, New Zealand, the USA and Canada. See more of her work at www.sarahkatharinakayss.com.

MELISSA KING ROGERS teaches high school literature, composition, journalism, and creative writing at Druid Hills High School in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds an MA and PhD from the University of Georgia and has studied at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in Decatur with her teacher-writer husband and Lego specialist first-grade son.

DAVID KIRBY's collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” His most recent poetry collection is A Wilderness of Monkeys. For more information, see www.davidkirby.com.

Individual entries on RICHARD KOSTELANETZ’s work in several fields appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster's Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in American Art, NNDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born.

SIDDHARTHA SEBASTIAN LARSSON was born in the south of Sweden, Helsingborg, in 1981. He studied literature and religious history at Lund University and holds a master's degree in Literary Creation. His books include No Advertising Please (Isaberg Press, 2010), Buddha in Las Vegas (Note Press, 2011), and On the Road (Miders Press, 2013). His work has appeared in more than fifteen journals and magazines, as well as in the anthology Young in Europé (Little August Strindberg Award). He was also editor of the Swedish literary magazine Wordart, and lives by the Gary Snyder rule: “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”

ED MAKOWSKI is a writer of poems and essays and lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As Eddie Kilowatt, he released two books of poetry: Manifest Density and Carrying a Knife into the Gunfight. His third book, A Device that is called a Vice, is forthcoming from BlazeVOX Books. Ed prefers the carving of motorcycles and bikes to the sitting of cars. More of his work can be found at Ed Makowski's Kitchen Table.

MICHAEL MEYERHOFER’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae ("damned memory"), won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. He is also the author of a fantasy trilogy. For more information and at least one embarrassing childhood photo, please visit www.troublewithhammers.com.

SETH MICHELSON's most recent poetry collection, Eyes Like Broken Windows (Press 53, 2012) won the poetry category of the 2013 International Book Awards. He also translates poetry, with his most recent book in translation being roly poly (Toad Press, 2014), his English-language rendering of bicho bola (Yaugurú, 2012), by the Uruguayan poet Victoria Estol. He teaches the literature of the Americas in the Department of Romance Languages at Washington and Lee University.

JOSEPH MILLS teaches at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He has published five collections of poetry with Press 53. His most recent, This Miraculous Turning, deals, in part, with education, race, and adoption.

JOSHUA PRESTON attended the University of Minnesota-Morris where, in 2013, he graduated with a degree in Political Science and History. Currently, he is a Research Fellow at Baylor College of Medicine's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. At night, he writes fiction. Find him online at www.JPPreston.com.

MICHAEL KARL (RITCHIE) is a Professor of English at Arkansas Tech University, where he serves as advisor to the undergraduate literary magazine, Nebo. He has published three poetry chapbooks along with work in various literary magazines, including Gihon River Review, The Salt River Review, Nebula, The Mississippi Review, Margie, The Red Earth Review, and The Arkansas Literary Forum, as well as in OR Panthology: Ocellus Reseau, an anthology published by Other Rooms Press (2013).

DAVID R. SLAVITT, educated at Andover, Yale, and Columbia, is the author of more than a hundred and ten books—novels, poetry, reportage, and translations. He was the movie reviewer for Newsweek in the sixties and was co-editor of the Johns Hopkins Complete Roman Drama as well as the Penn Complete Greek Drama.  Among his recent publications: The Sonnets and Short Poems of Francesco Petrarch (Harvard University Press, 2012), Civil Wars (Louisiana State University Press, 2013), The Four Other Plays of Sophocles (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), and The Crooning Wind: Three Greenlandic Poets (New American Press, 2013), Shiksa (C&L Press), and “From the Fragrant East” by Pietro Bembo (Letterpress of Austin, TX).

CAROL SMALLWOOD has published more than four-dozen books. Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching was named one of Poets & Writers' Best Books for Writers. Recent and forthcoming poetry collections include Water, Earth, Air, Fire, and Picket Fences (Lamar University Press, 2014) and Divining the Prime Meridian (WordTech Editions, 2015). Her work has appeared in such journals as Drunken Boat, The Writer's Chronicle, Main Street Rag, Serving House Journal, Jelly Bucket, and English Journal. Carol has founded and supports Humane Societies.

CHRISTIAN SORACE is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. His research focuses on social transformations and political economic development in rural China, China’s urbanization process, everyday politics in authoritarian states, political aesthetics, and post-Marxist theory. His recent publications include: “Ai Weiwei: China’s Last Communist” (Critical Inquiry, Winter 2014) and  “China’s Vision for Developing Sichuan’s Post-Earthquake Countryside: Turning Unruly Peasants into Grateful Urban Citizens” (The China Quarterly, June 2014).

TONY WHEDON is the author of A Language Dark Enough: Essays on Exile and two poetry collections from Mid-List Press and Fomite Press. His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in over a hundred magazines, including American Poetry Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, and Threepenny Review.

P. J. WILLIAMS was born and raised in North Carolina, where he taught high school English for three years before moving to Tuscaloosa to pursue his MFA at the University of Alabama. His work appears or is forthcoming in PANK, Salamander, Crab Creek Review, Nashville Review, DIAGRAM, Weave Magazine, Cincinnati Review, and others.

 

 

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