CONTRIBUTOR NOTES

PAUL ADLER received his MFA from Columbia University, where Matthew Zapruder selected his thesis manuscript as winner of the 2012 David Craig Austin Prize. Paul currently works as the Assistant Editor of Westchester Magazine.

JACOB M. APPEL is the author of the novels The Biology of Luck and The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up. His fourth collection of short stories, Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets, was published in July 2015. Jacob teaches creative writing at the Gotham Writers' Workshop and practices medicine in New York City.  More at: www.jacobmappel.com.

DAVID ARMSTRONG's stories have won the Mississippi Review Prize, Yemassee’s William Richey Short Fiction Contest, the New South Writing Contest, Jabberwock Review’s Prize for Fiction, and Bear Deluxe Magazine’s Doug Fir Fiction Award, among others. His story collections include Going Anywhere (Leapfrog Press, 2014), drive/memory (Emergency Press, forthcoming 2015), and Reiterations (New American Press, forthcoming 2015). Reiterations was awarded the 2014 New American Fiction Prize, judged by Nicole Louise Reid. Armstrong's latest stories appear or are forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Best of Ohio Short Stories. He received his PhD in Creative Writing (Fiction) from UNLV and now serves on faculty at Gonzaga University.

ARTUR AZEVEDO (Brazil, 1855-1908) was a writer of plays, short stories and poetry. He is best known for popularizing the comedy of manners in Brazil, a genre for which "Top-Down" is a fine example.

LAURIE BLAUNER is the author of seven books of poetry, three novels, and a novella. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in several publications, including The New Republic, The Nation, The Georgia Review, The Seattle Review, The New Orleans Review, Poetry, and American Poetry Review. She has received grants and awards from the NEA, the King County Arts Commission, the Seattle Arts Commission, Artist Trust, and Centrum. Her new novel, The Solace of Monsters, that this excerpt is from, has won the 2015 Leapfrog Fiction Contest and will be published in Fall 2016. Laurie received an MFA from The University of Montana and currently lives in Seattle, Washington.

PETER BURZYNSKI is a PhD student in Creative Writing-Poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a MFA in Poetry from The New School University, and a MA in Polish Literature from Columbia University. In between his studies, he has worked as a sous-chef in New York City and Milwaukee. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry Blog, Thrush Poetry Review, Your Impossible Voice, RHINO, and Forklift, Ohio, among others.

JAMES CAPOZZI has been the recipient of fellowships from the James Michener Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. His first book of poems, Country Album, was published by Parlor Press. He currently lives in Richmond, VA.

RICHARD CECIL’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, River Styx, The Journal, Atlanta Review, and many other magazines. He teaches in both the English Department and the Honors College at Indiana University as well as in the Spalding University brief-residency MFA Program in Louisville.

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.

ALEX CIGALE's own poems can be found in the Colorado, Green Mountains, and The Literary Reviews, and online in Asymptote, The Common, Drunken Boat, McSweeney’s. His translations of the Russian Absurdists Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky and of the Neo-Futurist Serge Segay appeared in issue 4 of MAYDAY Magazine. Other translations are in the Cortland Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, PEN America, Talisman, Triquarterly, World Literature Today, and Brooklyn Rail InTranslation. He is on the editorial boards of Plume, The St. Petersburg Review, and Third Wednesday. From 2011 to 2013 he was Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia, in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. A 2015 NEA Literary Translation Fellow for his work on Mikhail Eremin of the St. Petersburg philological school, he guest edited the Spring 2015 Russia Issue of the Atlanta Review.

VINCENT CZYZ is a graduate of Rutgers-New Brunswick, Columbia University (MA), and Rutgers-Newark (MFA). The 2011 Capote Fellow in Fiction, his short stories have appeared in Shenandoah, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Tampa Review, Quiddity, Georgetown Review, Tin House Online, Camera Obscura, Southern Indiana Review, Louisiana Literature, Skidrow Penthouse, Hot Street, Archaeopteryx, and Wasafiri Journal of International Contemporary Writing (London). His nonfiction has been published by New England Review, the Boston Review, AGNI, West Branch, Logos Journal, Sports Illustrated, Rain Taxi, and New Millennium Writings. He has received the W. Faulkner-W. Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction as well as fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts. His work has also been translated into Turkish and anthologized in Istanbul'da Kan Var (There is Blood in Istanbul). He spent nearly a decade in Istanbul, Turkey, before settling in Jersey City.

SAMUEL R. DELANY is the author of numerous science fiction books including Dhalgren and The Mad Man, as well as the best-selling nonfiction study Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. He lives in New York City and teaches at Temple University. The Lambda Book Report chose Delany as one of the fifty most significant men and women of the past hundred years to change our concept of gayness, and he is a recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to lesbian and gay literature.

OKLA ELLIOTT is an assistant professor at Misericordia University. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Illinois and an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University. His nonfiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, A Public Space, and Subtropics, among others. His books include From the Crooked Timber (short fiction), The Cartographer’s Ink (poetry), and The Doors You Mark Are Your Own (a novel co-authored with Raul Clement). His book of translation, Blackbirds in September: Selected Shorter Poems of Jürgen Becker, is forthcoming in late 2015. You can find him online at www.oklaelliott.net.

MARC FRAZIER’s work has been published in journals including The Spoon River Poetry Review, ACM, Caveat Lector, Slant, Permafrost, Plainsongs, Poet Lore, Rhino, The Broome Review, descant, and The G W Review. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry. His books The Way Here, The Gods of the Grand Resort, and After are available on Amazon. His second full-length collection, Each Thing Touches, was published by Glass Lyre Press in June 2015. His website is www.marcfrazier.org.

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.

JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL is the author of thirteen books of poetry, fiction, and memoir including Cinema Muto, winner of the Crab Orchard Open Selection Award, and The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize, as well as a translator specializing in Uruguayan poetry. She is the editor of América invertida: an anthology of younger Uruguayan poets which is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press.

GARNETT KILBERG COHEN has published three collections of short stories, Lost Women, Banished Souls (U of Missouri Press) and How We Move the Air (Mayapple Press), and most recently, Swarm to Glory (Wiseblood Books). Some of her awards include a Notable Essay citation from Best American Essays 2011; the Lawrence Foundation Prize; the Crazyhorse National Fiction Prize (2004); and four awards from the Illinois Council of the Arts, including an Individual Artist's Fellowship for prose. Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including American Fiction, Ontario Review, TriQuarterly, The Antioch review, Brevity, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, The Rumpus, The Gettysburg Review, and writes regularly for The Prague Revue. A former fiction editor of The Pennsylvania Review and Hotel Amerkia, Garnett has also served as the review editor at Another Chicago Magazine, the former editor-in-chief of The South Loop Review, and the Guest Nonfiction Editor at Fifth Wednesday for its Fall & Spring 2014-15 issues. Garnett is a professor in the Creative Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. Her website is garnettcohen.com.

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.

ANNA LEAHY's book Constituents of Matter won the Wick Poetry Prize, and her poems and essays appear in anthologies and journals. The three poems published in this issue of MAYDAY also appear in her chapbook Sharp Miracles, which will launch a new series from Blue Lyra Press in spring 2016. Leahy teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Chapman University, where she curates the Tabula Poetica reading series and edits the international journal TAB. She also co-writes the Lofty Ambitions blog.

CIRCE MAIA was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1932, but she has lived most of her life in the northern city of Tacuarembó. Her collected poems Circe Maia: Obra poética was published in Uruguay in 2011. Invisible Bridge/ El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia, a bilingual edition of her work with translations by Jesse Lee Kercheval, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY (1893-1930) was a poet, playwright, artist, and actor associated with the Russian Futurist movement. The grudgingly respectful words of Marina Tsetaeva sum up well his life and work: “A rebel among poets; a poet among rebels.” Having lost his father at an early age, Mayakovsky moved with his family to Moscow in 1906 from Baghdati, Georgia, where he was born. He began to compose poetry in 1909 during a period of solitary confinement following one of his arrests for political activity. The 1912 Futurist publication A Slap in the Face of Public Taste contained Mayakovsky’s first published poems, along with the influential manifesto of that name. Alex Cigale’s translations of Mayakovsky’s poems are available online in Asymptote, Eleven Eleven, EM-Review, and Off Course.

KELLY McQUAIN is a writer, artist and college professor living in Philadelphia. He grew up in West Virginia surrounded by the wooded mountains of Monongahela National Forest. His family back home still live on a dirt road bearing the McQuain name. He is the author of Velvet Rodeo, which won the 2013 Bloom Chapbook Prize, judged by poet C. Dale Young. The collection includes poems published in several journals and magazines, including “Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers,” nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Kestrel.

MATTHEW PITT is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at TCU in Fort Worth. His first collection, Attention Please Now, won the Autumn House Fiction Prize, and was later a winner of Late Night Library’s Debut-litzer Prize, and finalist for the Writers League of Texas Book Award. His fiction appears in more than two-dozen journals and anthologies, including Best New American Voices, Oxford American, BOMB, and The Southern Review, and been included in numerous end-of-year anthologies. His work has received honors from the Bronx Council of the Arts, Mississippi Arts Commission, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Taos Writers’ Conferences. Pitt holds a B.A. from Hampshire College and an MFA from New York University, where he was a New York Times Fellow in Fiction.

AMANDA SARASIEN is a writer and literary translator whose short fiction, reviews, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in The Literary Review, The MacGuffin, and FLAPPERHOUSE, among other publications. She can be found online at amandasarasien.com and on Twitter @amandasarasien.

CAROL SMALLWOOD is a literary judge, reviewer, and multiple Pushcart-nominee. She edited Bringing the Arts Into the Library (American Library Association, 2014); Writing after Retirement (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); and Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching (McFarland, 2012), which was included on Poets & Writers Magazine list of Best Books for Writers. Her more than four dozen nonfiction books have been published by Peter Lang, Libraries Unlimited, American Library Association, Scarecrow Press, and others.

DARIEL SUAREZ is a Cuban-born writer who’s lived in the U.S. since 1997. He’s the author of a chapbook, In The Land of Tropical Martyrs, available fromBackbone Press. Dariel earned his M.F.A. in fiction at Boston University, where he was a Global Fellow and instructor. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and magazines, including Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Florida Review, Southern Humanities Review, and The Caribbean Writer, where his work was awarded the First Lady Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize. His short story collection, A Kind of Solitude, was a finalist for the New American Fiction Prize. Dariel is currently teaching fiction at GrubStreet and finishing revisions on a novel about a Cuban political prisoner, titled The Playwright’s House. More can be found at www.darielsuarez.com.

ELIZABETH SWITAJ holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the Evergreen State College and an MFA in Poetics & Creative Writing from New College of California. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the School of English at Queen's University Belfast. She is also the Assistant Managing Editor of Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and a Contributing Editor to Poets' Quarterly. She has lived in both China and Japan, where she taught English.

MARY LANGER THOMPSON was born in Illinois and traveled to California on Route 66. She is active in the California Writer's Club, High Desert Branch, and was California's Senior Poet Laureate in 2012-13. She has given poetry and writing workshops in schools, colleges, and prisons. Mary currently lives in the high desert of California, where she opened a public school and serves as its principal.

IRENE TURNER is the co-screenwriter of the Showtime drama An American Crime, starring Catherine Keener, Ellen Page, and James Franco. The New York Times named it "One of the best television movies in years." Previously, Irene produced the Sundance hit Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss and directed the feature film The Girls' Room, called "a terrific discovery" by the L.A. Times. It played thirty-four festivals worldwide, winning eight prizes before premiering on Showtime. An L.A.-based writer, Irene is a member of Mystery Writers of America and the Writers Guild of America, west.

ARNE WEINGART lives in Chicago, where he is the principal of a graphic design firm specializing in identity and wayfinding. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his book, Levitation for Agnostics, was chosen as the 2014 winner of the New American Poetry Prize and will be published in 2015.



Return to table of contents.