Contributors to Issue #1
Joan Aleshire
Joan Aleshire’s fifth book of poems, Happily, came out from Four Way Books in 2012. She has studied Russian for many years, and has done translations of Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva, as well as Mandelstam. She has taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson since 1983, and lives in Vermont.
Anonymous
Anonymous writes in English and is working on a collection of poems, From Behind the Veil, that chronicles the varied experiences of women who wear the hijab around the world.
Curtis Bauer
Curtis Bauer is the author of three poetry collections: his first, Fence Line (2004), won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize; Spanish Sketchbook (2012) is a bilingual English/Spanish collection published in Spain; and The Real Cause for Your Absence was published this year by C&R Press. Bauer is also a translator of poetry and prose from the Spanish, his publications including Talisman (Editorial Anantes, 2012), by José de María Romero Barea; Eros Is More (Alice James Books, 2014), by Juan Antonio González Iglesias; as well as individual poems and prose from numerous Spanish and South American writers in The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, The Indiana Review, and The American Poetry Review, among others. He is the publisher and editor of Q Ave Press Chapbooks, the Spanish Translations Editor for From the Fishouse, and Assistant Editor and “Emerging Spanish Poets” Series Editor for Vaso Roto Ediciones. He teaches Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.
Kara Candito
Kara Candito is the author of Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and Spectator (University of Utah Press, 2014), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in such journals as The Kenyon Review, jubilat, The Rumpus, Indiana Review, and AGNI. A recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony, Candito is a creative writing professor at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville, and a co-curator of the Monsters of Poetry reading series in Madison, WI. (karacandito.com)
Anna Clark
Anna Clark is a journalist living in Detroit. Her reporting, essays, and book reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Grantland, The American Prospect, Salon, The Christian Science Monitor, Next City, and many others. She is also a political media correspondent with the Columbia Journalism Review’s United States Project. Anna is a writer-in-residence in city high schools and the founder of Literary Detroit.
Vievee Francis
Vievee Francis is the author of Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), which won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection, and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University, 2006). Her work has appeared in numerous journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2010 and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry. She is currently an Associate Editor for Callaloo and a Visiting Professor in the undergraduate creative writing program at Warren Wilson College.
R.J. Gibson
RJ Gibson holds an MFA in Poetry from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is the author of the chapbooks Scavenge (co-winner of the 2009 Robin Becker Prize) and You Could Learn a Lot, both from Seven Kitchens Press. His work has appeared in Court Green, Columbia Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, the Cortland Review, and in the anthologies My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them; Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality; and the forthcoming Writing into the Forbidden. In 2008 he was a Poetry Fellow during the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Retreat for New and Emerging Writers. He is currently a Visiting Professor of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College.
Jorge Gimeno
Jorge Gimeno was born in Madrid in 1964. He is the author of the poetry collections Espíritu a saltos (Pre-Textos, 2003) and La tierra nos agobia (Pre-Textos, 2012). He has published essays and poems in Revista de Occidente; Claves de razón prática, and Signos; and the ground-breaking anthology La inteligencia y el hacha: Un panorama de la Generación poética de 2000, edited by Luis Antonio de Villena (Visor, 2010). Gimeno has translated into Spanish Rainer Maria Rilke, Vivant Denon, Paul-Jean Toulet, Wallace Stevens, Eça de Queirós, Fernando Pessoa, el Príncipe de Ligne, and Hérault de Séchelles. He is the editor of the anthology El amor negro: Poesía del Barroco francés (Pre-Textos, 2009). He has been a professor at the University of Bagdad, and Director of the Institutos Cervantes in Fez, Morocco, and Lisbon, Portugal, and has received grants and creative fellowships from the Spanish, French, and Portuguese Ministries of Culture.
Kate Greenstreet
Kate Greenstreet is currently on the road with her third book, Young Tambling. Her previous books are The Last 4 Things and case sensitive, all with Ahsahta Press. New writing is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly and Everyday Genius. For more information, visit her site at kickingwind.com. Her poems in this issue of Waxwing are from the manuscript The End of Something.
Joan Naviyuk Kane
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. Kane’s awards include a 2007 individual artist award from the Rasmuson Foundation, a 2009 Connie Boochever Fellowship from the Alaska State Council on the Arts, a National Native Creative Development Program grant, and a Whiting Writers’ Award for her first book, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife. She received the 2012 Donald Hall Prize for her second book, Hyperboreal, and is a recipient of the 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, the 2013 Creative Vision Award from United States Artists, a 2013 Rasmuson Foundation Artist Fellowship, and will be the 2014 Indigenous Writer in Residence at the School for Advanced Research and faculty for the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Along with her husband and sons, she lives in Anchorage, Alaska.
Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the author of three collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Harvard Review, Poetry Daily, and The New Yorker. She is currently a judge for the 2013 National Book Award and is at work on a new book of poems, a novel, and a book of essays.
Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam, along with his contemporaries Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, began to publish in the period of artistic freedom before the Russian Revolution of 1917; all would suffer from political oppression under Lenin and Stalin. Mandelstam’s poems and essays show him to be the equal of Yeats for his strong sense of poetic structure and of metaphor, but from the time of his death in a labor camp in 1938, until the publication of his collected poems in 1960 in Berlin, he was unknown to non-Russian readers. Poem #54 comes from an early book; #296 and #341 were written in internal exile, smuggled out of Russia by his wife and friends, and published only after his death.
Kevin McIlvoy
Kevin McIlvoy has been a learner-teacher for thirty-three years. He edits manuscripts and mentors writers through his website mcthebookmechanic.com. These pieces are from 57 Octaves Below Middle C, a new (unpublished) collection of short-short stories, short stories, and prose poems.
Omar Pimienta
Omar Pimienta is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who lives and works in the San Diego/Tijuana border region. He received his MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, and he is currently a PhD student of Literature at UCSD. His work as a visual artist has been shown at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Oceanside Museum of art; Centro Cultural Tijuana; Museum MACAY Yucatán México; Museum MACO, Oaxaca México; among other venues. He has been awarded the National Foundation for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) as a young creator, the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts grant, and the Emilio Prado 10th International Publication prize from the Centro Cultural Generación del 27 Malaga Spain, 2009. He has published three books of poetry: Primera Persona Ella (Ediciones de La Esquina, 2004), La Libertad: Ciudad de Paso (CECUT, 2006), and Escribo desde Aquí (Pre-textos, 2010).
John Pluecker
John Pluecker is a writer, interpreter, translator, and co-founder of the language justice and literary experimentation collaborative Antena. His work is informed by experimental politics, radical aesthetics, and cross-border cultural production. His texts have appeared in journals in the US and Mexico, including The Volta, Mandorla, Aufgabe, eleven eleven, Third Text, Animal Shelter, HTMLGIANT, and Literal. His work extends off the page to text-based improvisational performances in collaboration with experimental musicians and performance artists, as well as projects at the intersections of visual art and poetry. He has translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke University Press, 2012) and Feminism: Transmissions and Retransmissions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He has published three chapbooks, Routes into Texas (DIY, 2010), Undone (Dusie Kollektiv, 2011), and Killing Current (Mouthfeel Press, 2012).
Stanley Rayfield
Stanley Rayfield is a visual artist specializing in portraiture. His portrait Dad was displayed at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, where it won second place in the 2009 Outwin Boochever Portrait Contest, and was subsequently featured in The Washington Post. His work is also displayed in the permanent collection of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, where he received his BFA. Zenzile, the cover of Issue One of Waxwing, is part of Rayfield’s “The Girls Next Door” series, which was featured at a solo exhibit at the Glave Kocen Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, in 2011. Rayfield’s sample works and rates can be found at stanleyrayfield.com.
Sacco and Vanzetti
Sacco and Vanzetti is a five-piece from Denton, TX, who make interior-rock. What you’d hear if your body were a radio station. One that channeled static not as static, but communion with ghosts. Sacco and Vanzetti are ready to make contact: Ghost, the ensemble’s first EP, is available September 10. In the coming fall and spring, S&V will push farther from Denton, into the rest of TX and beyond. Sacco and Vanzetti are here to bring you epic indie-rock-elegies, to make your skeleton groove.
Tiphanie Yanique
Tiphanie Yanique is the author of How to Escape from a Leper Colony, published by Graywolf Press. Her writing has won the 2011 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Fiction, Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for, and by the National Book Foundation as one of the 2010 “5 Under 35”, a list announcing the next generation of fiction writers. Her writing has been published in Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction, and other places. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and is a professor in the MFA program at the New School in New York City. Her first novel, Land of Love and Drowning, will published by Riverhead/Penguin in Summer 2014.
