Contributors to Issue IV
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
Maya Abu-Alhayyat is a Palestinian who was born in 1980 in Lebanon. She has published two collections of poetry, three novels, and four children’s stories. Her latest novel No One Knows Their Blood Type was published recently by Dar Al Adab-Lebanon. Maya lives in Jerusalem with her husband and children, and works as a director of Palestinian writing workshop in Beirzeit.
Steven Alvarez
Steven Alvarez is the author of The Pocho Codex (Editorial Paroxismo, 2011), The Xicano Genome (Editorial Paroxismo, 2012), and Six Poems from the Codex Mojaodicus (Seven Kitchens Press, 2014). He is an Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. Follow him on Twitter @chastitellez and Instagram @stevenpaulalvarez.
Jeremy Bass
Jeremy Bass is a poet and musician based in Brooklyn. His poems and essays have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, New England Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, as well as the 2011 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. His debut solo album, Tenant, will be released on October 7th, 2014. For more information, please visit jeremybassmusic.com.
Eleanor Bennett
Eleanor Bennett is an internationally award-winning photographer and visual artist. She is the CIWEM Young Environmental Photographer of The Year 2013, and has also won first places with National Geographic, The World Photography Organisation, Nature’s Best Photography, and The National Trust. Her photography has been published in The Telegraph, The Guardian, The British Journal of Psychiatry, Life Force Magazine, British Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and has been exhibited in New York, Paris, London, Rome, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Copenhagen, Washington, Canada, Spain, Japan, and Australia. Bennett was the only person from the UK to have her work displayed in the National Geographic- and Airbus-run “See The Bigger Picture” global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010. Her written work has had permanent showcase on the official company blog of Zenfolio. In 2012 she was invited by the founder of the BCC to contribute an article to highlight the importance of the Day Of The Imprisoned Writer.
Caitlin Corrigan
Caitlin Corrigan received her MFA from Rutgers-Newark in 2014 and now lives in Portland, Maine. Her fiction has appeared in Word Riot, NANO Fiction, Juked, Tin House “Flash Fridays,” Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and elsewhere. She regularly reviews books and journals for Necessary Fiction and The Review Review, and her essays and articles have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, The New York Times’ education blog, and elsewhere. Reach her at caitlincorrigan.com.
Mary-Alice Daniel
Mary-Alice Daniel was born in Nigeria and raised in Reading, England, and Nashville, Tennessee. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Mid-American Review, PANK, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals. She enters USC’s PhD Program in Literature and Creative Writing as an Annenberg Fellow and is excited to make Los Angeles her home for the second time.
Cara Dees
Cara Dees holds an MFA in Poetry from Vanderbilt University and is currently an MFA in Translation candidate at the University of Arkansas. A former English teacher in France and editor at Nashville Review, she is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, and other publications.
Stuart Dybek
Photo: Jon Randolph, 2014Two new collections of fiction by Stuart Dybek, Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern, were published simultaneously by FSG in June 2014. His previous books of fiction are Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and I Sailed with Magellan. He has also published two volumes of poetry, Brass Knuckles and Streets In Their Own Ink. His work is widely anthologized and appears in publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Dybek is the recipient of many literary awards including the PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize for “distinguished achievement in the short story,” a Lannan Award, the Academy Institute Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Harold Washington Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and four O’Henry Prizes. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and in Best American Fiction. In 2007, he was awarded both a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Rea Award for the Short Story. He is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University.
Landon Godfrey
Born and raised in Washington, DC, Landon Godfrey now lives in Black Mountain, NC, where she works as a writer and artist. She is the author of the poetry collection Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown (Cider Press Review, 2011), and two chapbooks, In the Stone (RAPG-funded, 2013) and Spaceship (Somnambulist Tango Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Studium (in Polish translation), Broadsided, Best New Poets 2008, Verse Daily, and other places. She is the recipient of a 2013 Regional Artist Project Grant and a 2011-2012 North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship. Her short fiction and art appeared in Issue II of Waxwing.
Ysabel Gonzalez
Ysabel Y. Gonzalez, who is also known for her performance poetry under the alias Ancestral Poetisa, received her BA from Rutgers University and is currently an MFA in Poetry candidate at Drew University’s low-residency program. Ysabel works for the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and is also a VONA alumna. The poet has most recently been published in phati’tude Literary Magazine’s special issue WHAT’S IN A NOMBRE? Writing Latin@ Identity in America, Kalyani Magazine, Huizache Magazine, and Acentos Review. You may find more of her poems and recorded performances at ysabelgonzalez.com.
Mark Haunschild
Photo: Ethan Fichtner, 2014Mark Haunschild’s recent poetry appears in Watershed Review and The Drunken Boat. He is a member of the Community of Writer’s at Squaw Valley, and in 2009 won the Katherine C. Turner Prize from the Academy of American Poets. “27 Verses” was commissioned by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art to commemorate the exhibition, Julianne Swartz: How Deep Is Your. He teaches contemporary literature, creative writing, and composition at Arizona State University, where he also serves as the faculty advisor of poetry for Superstition Review.
Jim Heavily
Jim Heavily is the Poetry Editor at Hinchas de Poesía. His poems have appeared in poeticdiversity, Sol: English Writing in Mexico, The Salt River Review, and The Iowa Review; his poems have also been translated into Romanian and appeared in Vatra Veche.
Angélique Jamail
Angélique Jamail’s poetry and essays have appeared in over two dozen anthologies and journals, including Time-Slice, Improbable Worlds, Pluck Magazine, and The Milk of Female Kindness — An Anthology of Honest Motherhood (2013). Her work was selected as a Finalist for the New Letters Prize in Poetry in 2011. Her magic realism novella, Finis., which just came out this year, has been praised by fiction writer Ari Marmell as having “some of the most real people I’ve encountered via text in a long time,” and by poet Marie Marshall as “a witty tale of conformity, prejudice, and transformation, in a world that is disturbing as much for its familiarity as for its strangeness.” She teaches Creative Writing and English at The Kinkaid School in Houston. Find her online at her blog Sappho’s Torque.
Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah’s recent poetry collections, Alight and Textu, are from Copper Canyon Press. His most recent honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry.
Arian Katsimbras
Arian Katsimbras was born and raised in Reno, Nevada, where he earned his BA from the University of Nevada-Reno. He has been the recipient of the DQ Poetry Award and the Emily Morrison Prize in Poetry selected by Jamaal May. His poems have recently been published in THRUSH, Muzzle Magazine, and Vinyl Poetry, as well as other publications. He is currently an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech where he teaches English.
Patricia Killelea
Patricia Killelea is a mixed-heritage Chicana poet, musician, and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collection Other Suns, which is available from Swan Scythe Press (2011), and she is currently a PhD Candidate in Native American Studies at the University of California at Davis, where her scholarship focuses on contemporary experimental indigenous poetics. She holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and English, also from UC Davis. Originally from the Bay Area, CA, she has taught the Introduction to Native American Literature course at UC Davis since Fall 2009, and she also teaches Native American Film & Literature at the University of San Francisco and Creative Writing at Solano College. A former artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Patricia has recently completed her second manuscript, titled Counterglow, and is currently producing experimental video poems. Find out more about her work at patriciakillelea.com
Casandra Lopez
Casandra Lopez is a Chicana, Cahuilla, Luiseño, and Tongva writer raised in Southern California who currently lives in Seattle. She has an MFA from the University of New Mexico and has been selected for residencies with the Santa Fe Art Institute as well as the School of Advanced Research, where she was the Indigenous Writer in Residence for 2013. Winner of the 2013 Native Writers Chapbook Award from the Sequoyah National Research Center, her work can be found in various literary journals. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a founding editor of As/Us: A Space For Women Of The World.
Kyle McCord
Kyle McCord is the author of five books of poetry including You Are Indeed an Elk, But This is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze (Gold Wake 2015) and Gentle, World, Gentler (Ampersand Books 2015). He has work featured in Boston Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in Des Moines, Iowa.
Amy Minton
Amy Minton’s fiction and poetry appears in Indiana Review, Knee-Jerk Magazine, Monkeybicycle, Hobart, and others. Her short story, “Overhanded,” was selected for inclusion in Best of the Web 2008 (Dzanc Books), edited by Steve Almond. Her nonfiction appears in Gravel, Hobart, and The Collagist. She was a finalist for the 2013 and 2012 Artist Foundation of San Antonio Literary Arts Award as well as the 2009 Indiana Review Fiction Prize. She was recently named a semi-finalist for 2014 Nimrod Literary Awards: Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. She sips fine tea while her four dogs keep her feet toasty.
Wayétu Moore
Wayétu Moore is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the founder and publisher of One Moore Book (www.onemoorebook.com), a boutique publisher of multicultural children’s books. Her writing can be found in The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and Sea Breeze Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writings, among other publications.
Robin Myers
Robin Myers grew up in New Jersey and is currently based in Mexico City, where she works as a freelance translator and writes poems. Her poetry translations have been published in Poetry International Web, Hilda Magazine, the International Literary Quarterly, the Argentina Independent, and Palabras Errantes; her prose translations have appeared in the online anthologies Traviesa and Suelta and in MAKE Mag. Robin is a co-founder and editor of the translation blog mexicocitylit.com. She was named a Translation Fellow of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in 2009; this year, she was selected for a residency at the Banff Literary Translation Center (BILTC) in Alberta, Canada.
Javier Peñalosa
Javier Peñalosa is a writer and educator who was born and raised in Mexico City. He earned a BA in Education and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU. He is the author of the children’s books El día que María perdió la voz and co-author of Espejos, mocos, cucarachas…y otras pócimas; his third book is currently in the publishing process. As a screenwriter he has worked in the development of award-winning TV programs. As a poet he is the author of Aviario and Los trenes que partían de mí. Javier was twice the recipient of a fellowship for young writers from the Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas. In 2009 he was awarded a national poetry prize, and in 2011 he received a Young Artist Fellowship from the National Fund for the Arts in Mexico.
Cynthia Reeves
Cynthia Reeves’s novella, Badlands (MU Press 2008), was awarded Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ontario Review, Potomac Review, Booth, and elsewhere. Her short story “A Letter to My Mother” was performed as part of Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre Writing Aloud series. Reeves has won numerous awards and honors, including a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, several Pushcart Prize nominations, and prizes in Columbia’s Fiction Contest, the DeMott Short Prose Contest (Quarter After Eight), New Millennium’s Short Short Fiction Contest, and Potomac Review’s Fiction Contest. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA program, Reeves currently teaches in Bryn Mawr College’s Creative Writing Program and in Rosemont College’s MFA Program. She has been a visiting writer at Miami University and Penn State, conducted classes on the novella and experimental prose forms at conferences and seminars nationwide, and taught creative nonfiction in the Philadelphia Young Writers Program.
Martha Rhodes
Martha Rhodes is the author of four collections of poetry: At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance (Green Rose Prize), Mother Quiet, and most recently, The Beds. She is the director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry. A member of the faculties of Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she is also the director of Four Way Books. She lives in NYC.
Anis Shivani
The sonnets in this issue are part of Anis Shivani’s collection of 100 sonnets by the same title (forthcoming January 2015). Anis’s other books include Anatolia and Other Stories, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, and My Tranquil War and Other Poems. A novel, Karachi Raj, is also forthcoming in 2015. Books recently finished or in progress include the novels A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less and Abruzzi, 1936, and a collection of essays called Literature in an Age of Globalization.
Vesica Piscis
Carrie Ann and Kendall formed Vesica Piscis in New York in 1991. The Vesica Piscis sound is created with a variety of analog and digital synthesizers, modular synthesizers, hand-made electronics, voice, acoustic instruments, field recordings, and esoteric FX. Styles range from ambient, new age, and noise, to escapist techno, filthy beats, unsettling humor, and dirge emotionals — with over 20 albums in a variety of physical and digital formats released to date. Carrie Ann and Kendall are founding members of the free improvisational group Independent Noise Party and they are also known for their ongoing collaborations with 48 Cameras, an international band based out of Belgium. In 2010, they began showing their visual art, sometimes merging the images with their music. The six Vesica Piscis pieces here, made exclusively for Waxwing, were recorded from 2012-2014 in downtown Flagstaff, Arizona, where they have lived since 2000.
Travis Vick
Travis Vick is currently studying in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University. His home is in Texas.
Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien (1877-1909), was a highly public figure in the early 20th century, but her poetry and prose went neglected long after her premature death. Born in London to American and British parents, she moved to Paris in her early adulthood. In Paris, she lived openly as a lesbian, running in many of the same circles as Natalie Clifford Barney and Colette. Highly influenced by Symbolist imagery and the Greek poetry of Sappho, Vivien’s œuvre includes several collections of poetry, translations of Sappho, short stories, and at least one novel. Several of her contemporary critics reacted strongly against her poetry due to its frank portrayals of lesbianism and feminism, and only recently have French writers and critics revived significant interest in Vivien’s work.
