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Spring 2017


Artwork

, who is best known for his sustained, prolific songwritingand recording, was creating collages even before he was writing songs. Oftensatirical, political, dark, and sarcastic, his collages have been exhibited atMichael Imperioli’s Studio Dante in New York, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famein Cleveland, and Merge Records headquarters in Durham, North Carolina.

Poetry

Benjamin Alfaro is a writer and educator from Detroit. He is the co-author ofHome Court(Red Beard, 2014), and his work has been featured in The BreakBeatPoets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, on HBO, and elsewhere. Alfarois a teaching artist with InsideOut Literary Arts Project where he currently servesas the youth leadership coordinator.

is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy(Steel Toe Books, 2015). He won the 2015 Poetry Competition at ColumbiaJournal, and his recent and upcoming publications include poetry in The MissouriReview, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2014, The Journal, ColumbiaPoetry Review, Mid-American Review, The Iowa Review blog, and Hayden’s FerryReview and creative nonfiction in Boulevard, Passages North, and Colorado Review.Citro received his MFA from Indiana University and lives in Syracuse, New York.

is an assistant professor of English and creative writing atWashington & Jefferson College. His first book, Reveille (University of ArkansasPress, 2015), won the Miller Williams Prize, and his more recent work can befound in AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Image, The NewCriterion, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He edits the journal 32 Poems andlives with his wife and their three young children in Washington, Pennsylvania.

is a writer and lyricist from Pennsylvania and the author ofa chapbook, Love and a Loaded Gun, forthcoming from Minerva Rising Press.She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Ruminate Magazine, and theAcademy of American Poets, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming inNimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, and The Arkansas International, among others. Cole holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondaleand is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. You can reachher on Twitter via @EmilyColeWrites.

first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series and isforthcoming from the University of Georgia Press in 2017. Her work appears inThe Southeast Review(winner of the Gearhart Poetry Contest), Washington SquareReview, Southern Humanities Review (finalist for the Auburn Witness Prize),Arcadia (finalist for the Dead Bison Editor’s Prize), Sugar House Review, AmericanLiterary Review, and Carolina Quarterly, among others.

Gregory Fraser is the author of three poetry collections: Strange Pietà, Answeringthe Ruins, and Designed for Flight. His poetry has appeared in journals includingThe Paris Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and The Gettysburg Review.He is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and theJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Fraser serves as professor ofEnglish at the University of West Georgia.

John Gallaher’s most recent collection is In a Landscape (BOA, 2015), and otherpoems appear in New England Review, Poetry, FIELD, and Pleiades.

holds a PhD in creative writing from Florida StateUniversity. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Mid-AmericanReview, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Copper Nickel, and others. They also appear in the anthologies Best New Poets 2013, It Was Written: PoemsInspired by Hip-Hop, and Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems. Honors include aTennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a scholarship toMartha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and a residency at Vermont Studio Center. She is a contributing editor for Organic Weapon Arts chapbook press.

is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things,which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry,a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a finalist for the 2015 NationalBook Critics Circle Award, and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Yearby The New York Times. Her other books include Lucky Wreck, This Big FakeWorld, and Sharks in the Rivers. She serves on the faculty of Queens University ofCharlotte Low Residency MFA program and the 24Pearl Street online programfor the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Limón also works as a freelance writer, splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky, and Sonoma, California.

The winner of a 2014 Lannan Literary Fellowship and three Pushcart prizes, is the author of Reaper, Habeas Corpus, Oh, James!, andWhere You Live. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Public Library, the Libraryof Congress, and Stanford’s Stegner program, and has taught incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program for thirteen years.Her work has appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Nation, The Threepenny Review, andThe Best American Poetry. McDonough teaches in the MFA program at UMass-Boston and directs 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center online. Her fifthpoetry collection, Here All Night, is forthcoming from Alice James Books.

is the author of Beasts of the Hill and Dirty Bomb, both from OberlinCollege Press. His awards include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, an Indiana IndividualArtist’s grant, and the FIELD Poetry Prize. Neely teaches at Ball State Universityand at Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program.

is the author of the poetry collections Best Bones,winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and Darwin’s Mother, whichis forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh in fall 2017. Her poems and essaysappear widely in journals such as Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, AGNI,The Kenyon Review Online, and Copper Nickel. Native to North Carolina,Nordgren is currently a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Cincinnatiand associate editor at 32 Poems.

has been published in Best New Poets 2009, Quarterly West, Hobart,PANK, and The Rumpus, among others. Her chapbook Forget Me, Hit Me, Let MeDrink Great Quantities of Clear, Evil Liquor is out at Split Lip Press. Schmid was a2011 AWP Intro Journals Winner. She lives and writes in Nebraska.

is the author of three books of poetry: Weep Up (Tupelo Press,September 2017), The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Lamp of the Body. Smithis also the author of three prizewinning chapbooks. Her poems appear in The BestAmerican Poetry, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Guernica,Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” wentviral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. PublicRadio International called it “the official poem of 2016.”

A singer-songwriter and poet from Atascadero, California, is the author of The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire which won the2016 Patricia Bibby First Book Award and was published in February of 2017 byTebot Bach Press. Recent essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming inBeloit Poetry Journal, cream city review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Verse Daily,and elsewhere. Having received his PhD from Western Michigan University,Ephraim currently teaches creative writing on the graduate faculty at theUniversity of Central Florida and lives with his fiancé in Orlando.

2016 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award winnerRichard Thompson was recently awarded Sigma Tau Delta’s Eleanor P. NorthPoetry Award. His poetry has appeared in Skive Journal, Empirical Journal, and TheAvenue, among others. He grew up in rural Canada, and now lives with his wife,Sherise, and son, Jacob, in Houston, Texas, where he is a clinical psychologistand studies creative writing at the University of Houston.

Michael Waters has written eleven books of poetry, including Celestial Joyride;Gospel Night; Darling Vulgarity, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize;and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems, finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize.His poems have appeared in various journals, including The Yale Review, The ParisReview, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Georgia Review, and Rolling Stone. He isprofessor of English at Monmouth University and also teaches in the DrewUniversity MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. Waters lives withhis wife, poet Mihaela Moscaliuc, in Ocean, New Jersey.

Interview

Philip Metres is the author of Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera(2015), A Concordance of Leaves (2013), and others. His work has garnered aLannan fellowship; two NEAs; six Ohio Arts Council grants; the Hunt Prizefor Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters; the Beatrice Hawley Award; twoArab American Book Awards; the Watson Fellowship; the Creative WorkforceFellowship; the Cleveland Arts Prize; and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.Metres is professor of English and the director of the Peace, Justice, and HumanRights Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

Fiction

2016 Mary C. Mohr Fiction Award winner Bradford Kammin’sshort stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Arts &Letters, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the University ofMichigan’s MFA program in creative writing, and is currently pursuing a PhD inEnglish and creative writing at Western Michigan University, where he teachescreative writing and serves as fiction editor of Third Coast.

Andrew Mitchell’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares,Gulf Coast, Sycamore Review, Tin House’s “The Open Bar,” and elsewhere. He is the2016 recipient of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. Mitchell lives in Dover,New Hampshire.

Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of This Angel On My Chest, which received the2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by University of PittsburghPress. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in many publications, includingThe Hudson Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Midwestern Gothic,Salon, and The Washington Post Magazine.

Nonfiction

Catherine Pond has been published in Boston Review, Narrative, the Los AngelesReview of Books, and more. She teaches poetry at the Fashion Institute ofTechnology, and she is assistant director of the New York State Summer WritersInstitute. In the fall, she will begin her PhD in creative writing at the Universityof Southern California.

Lee Zacharias is the author of a collection of short stories, Helping MurielMake It through the Night; two novels, Lessons and At Random; and a collection ofpersonal essays, The Only Sounds We Make, which won a silver medal in creativenonfiction in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her nonfiction hasappeared in numerous journals, including The Southern Review, The GettysburgReview, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah, among others, and has beenreprinted in The Best American Essays. Zacharias is emerita professor of English atthe University of North Carolina Greensboro.