Contributors to Issue III

Dexter Booth

Dexter Booth

Dexter L. Booth is the author of Scratching the Ghost (Graywolf Press, 2013), which won the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was selected by Major Jackson. His poems have been published in Blackbird, Grist, Willow Springs, Virginia Quarterly, Ecotone, and the anthology The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, as well as other publications. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California.

Hélène Cardona

Hélène Cardona

Hélène Cardona is the author of Dreaming My Animal Selves (Salmon Poetry, 2013); The Astonished Universe (Red Hen Press, 2006); and Life in Suspension (Salmon Poetry, 2016). She attended Hamilton College, where she also taught French & Spanish, the Universidad Menéndez Pelayo, Spain, and the Sorbonne, where she earned an MA in American Literature. She taught at the Ecole Bilingue, Paris, and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. Hélène translated the Lawrence Bridges film Muse of Fire for the NEA and What We Carry by Dorianne Laux into French, and the poetry of José Manuel Cardona, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Aloysius Bertrand, Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, and Jean-Claude Renard into English. She received fellowships from the Goethe Institut and the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía.

José Manuel Cardona

José Manuel Cardona

José Manuel Cardona is a poet from Ibiza, Spain. He is the author of El Vendimiador (Atzavara, 1953); Poemas a Circe (Adonais, 1959); and the anthology The Birnam Wood (Consell Insular d’Eivissa, 2007), published by the government of Ibiza. He was co-editor of several literary journals and wrote for many publications. He participated in the II Congreso de Poesía in Salamanca and wrote his thesis on the Mexican revolution at the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica de Madrid. The Franco regime forced him into exile in France. He is an attorney (University of Barcelona) and holds PhDs in Literature and Humanities (University of Nancy), and Political Sciences and Economy (IHEI, Geneva). He worked for the UN most of his life, in Geneva, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Belgrade, Sofia, Kiev, Tblisi, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Panama, among many places.

Jon Davis

Jon Davis

Jon Davis, Director of the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is the author of five chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry: Preliminary Report (Copper Canyon Press, 2010); Scrimmage of Appetite, for which he was honored with a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry; and Dangerous Amusements, for which he received a G.E. Younger Writers Award and the Peter I.B. Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Recent projects include a limited edition chapbook, Thelonious Sphere (Q Ave. Press, 2014); a letterpress chapbook, Loving Horses (Palace Press, 2014); a limited edition letterpress art book, Heteronymy: An Anthology, which is in production with La Nana Creek Press; and Dayplaces, which Davis translated from the Arabic with the author, Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan, which is forthcoming from Tebot Bach Press. He is currently Santa Fe Poet Laureate.

Tarfia Faizullah

Tarfia Faizullah

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (SIU 2014), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems appear in Oxford American, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2013, Poetry Daily, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin, 2015), and elsewhere. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, Ploughshares Cohen Award, fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, the Fulbright Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Vermont Studio Center, and other honors. She is the Nicholas Delbanco Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program and co-directs the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press and Video Series with Jamaal May.

Sylva Fischerová

Sylva Fischerová

Sylva Fischerová (born 1963) is one of the most formidable Czech poets of her generation. A distinguished classicist who teaches at Charles University in Prague, she writes poetry with a vivid imagination as well as historical reach. She has published eight volumes of poetry in Czech, and her poetry has been translated and published in numerous languages. An earlier selection of her poems, The Tremor of Racehorses, was published by Bloodaxe in 1990. She recently began to write prose, and books of her stories, Zázrak /Miracle/, and Pasáž /Passage/, appeared in the last few years, as well as two books for children and a “fictitious travelogue,” Evropa je jako židle Thonet, America je pravý úhel /Europe is like a Thonet Chair, America is a Right Angle/. The Swing in the Middle of Chaos: Selected Poems, co-translated with Stuart Friebert, was published by Bloodaxe in 2010. Stomach of the Soul, a new collection of her poems in translation, translated by the author with Stuart Friebert and Andrew J. Hauner, is to be published by Calypso Editions in 2014.

Stuart Friebert

Stuart Friebert has published ten volumes of translations, most recently Stomach of the Soul: Selected Poems of Sylva Fischerová (in co-translations with the author & A.J. Hauner/Calypso Editions); thirteen collections of poems, most recently Floating Heart (Pinyon Press); and a collection of stories, The Language of the Enemy (Black Mountain Press). He has co-edited several anthologies, among them The Longman Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry.

Ross Gay

Ross Gay

Ross Gay is the author of Against Which (CavanKerry, 2006), Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh, 2011), and the forthcoming Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh, 2015). He's also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of Pyrite and Lace: Letters from Two Gardens (Organic Weapon Arts, 2014). He is one of the editors of the online sports magazine, Some Call It Ballin’, and he’s doing some other really fun stuff. He teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Naseer Hassan

Naseer Hassan

Naseer Hassan is an Iraqi poet and translator of poetry and philosophy. He was born in Baghdad in 1962 and graduated with a degree in architecture from Baghdad University. He is a member of the Iraqi Writers Union and the Iraqi Journalists Guild and has published four poetry collections in Arabic: The Circle of Sundial (1998), Suggested Signs (2007), Being Here (2008), and Dayplaces (2010). Hassan’s collected poems appeared in 2010 from the Arabic Publishing House in Beirut. He has translated into Arabic three books of poetry and one of philosophy: Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems and Critical Readings (the first book on Emily Dickinson in Arabic); Luis Borges: 60 Selected Poems; Days of the Shore: Selections from the New American Poetry 1980-2010; and Asian Philosophies by John Koller. In addition, he has several poetic and philosophical translations forthcoming, including Kierkegaard: A Brief Introduction, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, and House of the Star: Poems from Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes. He is a winner of the 2008 David Burke Distinguished Journalism Award for working in a highly dangerous situation.

Gary Hawkins

Gary Hawkins

Gary Hawkins is a poet, teacher, and scholar, who grew up in the suburbs. A letterpress chapbook, Who Do We Know Who Works?, is forthcoming in 2014 from Trade Union Press. His poetry, pedagogy, and criticism have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Teaching Creative Writing in Higher Education, Emily Dickinson Journal, and other venues. He teaches writing and serves as associate dean at Warren Wilson College, and he thrills at having one of poetry's most enviable addresses in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s authored books include poetry: Dog Road Woman and Off-Season City Pipe (American Book Award); memoir: Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer (newly in paperback, January 2014, Bison Books); and verse-play: Blood Run. 2014 poetry books include Burn (MadHatPress) and Streaming (Coffee House Press). Hedge Coke has edited nine additional collections, including Effigies, Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, and the forthcoming Effigies II. She currently teaches for the University of Central Oklahoma and the University of California, Riverside, and came of age cropping tobacco and working fields, waters, and in factories.

Jenny Johnson

Jenny Johnson

Jenny Johnson’s poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2012, Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics, New England Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of Beloit Poetry Journal's Chad Walsh Poetry Prize for her poem “Aria.” She has also received awards and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, The Pittsburgh Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Currently, she is a Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches writing.

W. Todd Kaneko

W. Todd Kaneko

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor, 2014). His prose and poems have appeared in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, Barrelhouse, The Normal School, The Collagist, and many other places. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he teaches at Grand Valley State University. Visit him at toddkaneko.com.

Chip Livingston

Chip Livingston

Chip Livingston is the author of the story collection, Naming Ceremony (Lethe Press, 2014), and two collections of poetry, Crow-Blue, Crow-Black (NYQ Books, 2012) and Museum of False Starts (Gival Press, 2010). His essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Cimarron Review, Gargoyle, and Life Writing, among other journals and anthologies. Chip teaches creative nonfiction in the low-rez MFA program at Institute of American Indian Arts. Visit his website at chiplivingston.com.

Rose McLarney

Rose McLarney

Rose McLarney’s collection of poems Its Day Being Gone was published by Penguin Books in 2014, and her book The Always Broken Plates of Mountains was published by Four Way Books in 2012. Its Day Being Gone is the 2013 National Poetry Series winner. Additionally, Rose has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Fellowship of Southern Writers’ biennial George Garrett New Writing Award for Poetry, Alligator Juniper’s 2011 National Poetry Prize, and the Joan Beebe Fellowship at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, Orion, Slate, New England Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and dozens of other journals. Rose earned her MFA from Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers and has taught writing at the college. She is currently is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Oklahoma State University.

Donna Miscolta

Donna Miscolta

Donna Miscolta is the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced (Signal 8 Press, 2011). Her short story manuscript was a runner-up for the 2012 Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award and a finalist for the 2010 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Her story “Ana’s Dance” won the 2013 Lascaux Prize for Short Fiction. Other work appears most recently in Bluestem, Hawaii Pacific Review, and New California Writing 2013. A 2014 recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship, she has also received awards from 4Culture, the Bread Loaf/Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the City of Seattle, as well as residencies from Anderson Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Find her at donnamiscolta.com.

Emilia Phillips

Emilia Phillips

Emilia Phillips is a poet. She is the author of Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013) and three chapbooks including Bestiary of Gall (Sundress Publications, 2013) and Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, forthcoming in 2014). Her poetry appears in Agni, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of the 2012 Poetry Prize from The Journal, 2nd Place in Narrative’s 2012 30 Below Contest, and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, US Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. She is the 2013–2014 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, the prose editor for 32 Poems, and a staff member at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her second manuscript is Groundspeed.

Jeremy Singer

Jeremy Singer

Jeremy Singer was born in 1977 on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Tuba City, Arizona. Jeremy is a document-holding, certificate of Indian blood 4/4 member of the Navajo Indian tribe. He is of the Towering House People, and born for the Salt People. His maternal grandparent are of the Bitter Water People and his paternal grandparent are of the Red Bottom People. Jeremy attended school in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is 35 miles south of his paternal grandparents in Gray Mountain and 50 miles south of his maternal grandparents in Cameron, Arizona. Family has played an important role in Jeremy’s art making. Navajo textiles and humor are his main influences. The artist has attended both Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona. Jeremy works and resides in Tucson, Arizona.

Jon Steinhagen

Jon Steinhagen

Jon Steinhagen is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and company member of Signal Ensemble Theatre. His short fiction has appeared in print and online, recently in Barrelhouse, The Minetta Review, The American Reader, Serving House Journal, and Stoneboat. His musical, The Next Thing, had its world premiere in Chicago in May, 2014.

Nicole Walker

Nicole Walker

Nicole Walker’s Quench Your Thirst with Salt won the Zone 3 Award for Creative Nonfiction and was released in June 2013. She is the author of a collection of poems, This Noisy Egg (Barrow Street, 2010), and edited, with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (Bloomsbury, 2013), and with Rebecca Campbell — 7 Artists, 7 Rings — An Artist’s Game of Telephone for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment from the Arts, she’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Joseph Winkler

Joseph Winkler

Joseph Winkler is a freelance writer living in the Upper West Side. He is a staff writer for Vol1Brooklyn.com and has written for Vulture, Salon, The Rumpus, and Tablet Magazine, among other publications. He is working on a memoir about his transition from the world of the Yeshiva to a more secular life.

C. Dale Young

C. Dale Young

Photo: Marion Ettlinger, 2006

A fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time. The author of four collections of poetry, including The Halo from Four Way Books, he is at work on a linked collection of stories — which includes “Jewels,” as well as another story that appeared in Issue Two of Waxwing, "Desaparecido." He lives in San Francisco.

Thalia Zedek

Thalia Zedek

2013 was a notable year for Thalia Zedek. She released her first album in five years, Via, which PopMatters called a “rumbling, sweet, muscled set of tunes, as resilient as they are beautiful,” which was followed by a tour across North America with Low. She also reunited with Come, the classic band she formed with Chris Brokaw in 1990, reissuing their classic debut Eleven:Eleven and playing their first shows in over a decade across the US and Europe. In October, following this intense flurry of activity, Thalia regrouped with her band in Boston to record an EP, harnessing the creative energy she had accumulated during her time on the road. The resulting SIX opens with a full-band version of “Fell So Hard,” a characteristically mournful dirge that exudes a tenacious, slow-moving intensity. From there, Zedek explores the complexities of interpersonal relationships, employing some of the most sparse arrangements of her career. The spareness of tracks like “Julie Said” and “Afloat” achieve incredible emotional heft, letting Thalia’s lyrics, delivered in her unmistakable voice, take center stage. Alongside this new material is a cover of Freakwater’s “Flathand,” which was originally released on the Plum 7” box set in 2007. SIX was released in advance of Thalia’s most extensive European tour in six years.