Contributors to Issue V

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Valerie Bandura

Valerie Bandura’s collection of poems, Freak Show (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), was a 2014 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. Her poems are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, and have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA, Mid-American Review, Cimarron, Third Coast, Best New Poets anthology, among other journals. Born in the former Soviet Union, Bandura received degrees from Columbia University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program, where she served as the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow. She was awarded a residency from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the James Merrill Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches writing at Arizona State University.

Matt Bell

Matt Bell is the author of the novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award. His next novel, Scrapper, will be published in 2015, in addition to Death Domestic, a book of poems. He teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Border Songs

Border Songs, a double-CD set of music and spoken word about the border and immigration, calls attention to the tragedy on the US-Mexico border, while raising money to aid migrants and people who have been deported to Mexico. More information about the Border Songs project and the organization that receives the proceeds, No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, is available here. Buy the complete two-disc set here.

Trevino L. Brings Plenty

Photo credit: Amy McMullen Photography

Trevino L. Brings Plenty is a poet and musician who lives, works, and writes in Portland, OR. He is singer/songwriter/guitarist for the musical ensemble Ballads of Larry Drake. He has read/performed his work at poetry festivals as far away as Amman, Jordan, and close to his home base at Portland’s Wordstock Festival. In college, Trevino worked with Primus St. John and Henry Carlile for this poetry work, studied with Tomas Svoboda for music composition, and with Jerry Hahn for Jazz guitar. Trevino is an American and Native American; a Lakota Indian born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, South Dakota, USA. Some of his work explores the American Indian identity in American culture and how it has through genealogical history affected indigenous peoples in the 21st century. He writes of urban Indian life; it’s his subject. Other titles by author include Real Indian Junk Jewelry (2012); Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (2008), and Ghost River (forthcoming 2015).

Melissa Buckheit

Melissa Buckheit is a poet, dancer/choreographer, photographer, English Lecturer, and professional Bodywork Therapist. She is the author of Noctilucent (Shearsman Books, 2012), Arc (The Drunken Boat, 2007), and her poems, translations, photography, essays, critical interviews, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in HerKind, The VOLTA, Denver Quarterly, Tarpaulin Sky, The Drunken Boat, Sinister Wisdom, Can-Can, Bombay Gin, Cutthroat, Spiral Orb, Shearsman Magazine, Blue Fifth Review, and Sonora Review, among others. Buckheit is a recipient of the American Poets Honorary Award, a Tucson-Pima Arts Council Dance grant, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. Buckheit began translating Ioulita Iliopoulou in 2000, as an undergraduate student at Brandeis University studying Modern Greek and translation with poet Olga Broumas. Since 2007, she has curated the innovative and diverse Edge Reading Series for Emerging and Younger Writers at Casa Libre in Tucson, AZ. Buckheit holds an MFA in Poetry from Naropa University and a BA in English/American Literature and Dance/Theatre from Brandeis University. She teaches at Pima Community College and Zuzi Dance Company. Find her at melissabuckheit.com.

Cathy Linh Che

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books, 2014), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. A Vietnamese American poet, teacher, and arts administrator from Los Angeles, she earned her BA from Reed College and MFA from New York University. She has received awards from Poets & Writers, Hedgebrook, Poets House, The Asian American Literary Review, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Jerome Foundation. She splits her time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

Michael Copperman

Michael Copperman’s prose has appeared in The Oxford American, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, Gulf Coast, Guernica, TriQuarterly Online, and Copper Nickel, among other magazines, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. His memoir of teaching in the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America is forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi in Spring 2016.

Sean Thomas Dougherty

Painting credit: Jeff Kuntz

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of thirteen books, including All You Ask for Is Longing: Poems 1994-2014 (BOA, 2014), Scything Grace (Etruscan, 2013), and Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (BOA, 2010). His awards include two Pennsylvania Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry, an appearance in Best American Poetry 2014, and a US Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans. He works in a pool hall in Erie, PA, and tours for readings.

Tom Faure

Tom Faure recently received his MFA in Fiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is a contributor at Numéro Cinq magazine. His work has also appeared in Zocalo Public Square, Splash of Red, Chattanooga Times Free Press, and The Journal News. He lives in New York, teaching English and Philosophy at the French-American School of New York.

Rodney Gomez

Rodney Gomez is the author of Mouth Filled with Night (Northwestern, 2014), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. His chapbook Spine won the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from NewFound. His poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, Blackbird, Devil’s Lake, Salt Hill, Fourteen Hills, Drunken Boat, Texas Poetry Review, and RHINO, where it won the Editors’ Prize. Born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, he earned a BA from Yale and an MFA from the University of Texas — Pan American. He has been awarded residencies to the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Santa Fe Art Institute. He has also served on the board of Migrant Health Promotion, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the health and wellbeing of migrants, immigrants, and related populations. He edits the accompanying anthology to El Retorno — an annual event honoring Gloria E. Anzaldúa held at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. He works as an urban planner in Weslaco, Texas.

Sarah Grieve

Sarah Grieve is an accidental sun follower — living in California, Florida, and Arizona. She’s a terrible California native: she doesn’t surf and didn’t eat sushi until she wasn’t living there any longer. She’s been lost in every major city she has ever visited and finds that is the best way to see the world and write about it. As a child, she wanted to be a dentist, an orphan, and a princess — all at the same time. She loves Broadway musicals and starred in several during high school. Her lifetime free throw percentage is better than Wilt Chamberlain’s, but that’s not saying much. She has been known to cry at television commercials, greeting cards, and movie previews. Her great grandmother used to say, “Don’t bother telling a story if you’re not going to embellish it.”

Jeremy Allan Hawkins

Jeremy Allan Hawkins was raised in the Hudson Valley and is an alumnus of the US Fulbright Program. His poetry and criticism have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from Tin House, Ninth Letter, Harvard Review, Rappahannock Review, Pleiades, and other journals. He currently lives in France.

Melanie Taylor Herrera

Melanie Taylor Herrera is a Panamanian author and a professional musician. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a Master’s in Music Therapy. Taylor Herrera writes poetry and prose and her works include Tiempos Acuáticos, Amables Predicciones, Microcosmos, Atrapasueño, and Camino a Mariato, which was awarded the 2009 Central American Rafaela Contreras prize. Her writing has received international recognition and has been translated into English, French, and Polish. English translations of her writing appear in Asymptote, Ezra, Metamorphoses, and PRISM International, and are forthcoming in Exchanges.

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is a fiction writer, memoirist, and dance critic. Her dance writing has appeared in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Hudson Review, and other venues. Her fiction and personal essays have appeared in such journals as ZYZZYVA, Canteen, Berfrois, and Gulf Coast (forthcoming spring 2015). She is the author of a memoir about her father’s unsolved murder, The Lost Night, and is finishing a novel.

Ioulita Iliopoulou

Ioulita Iliopoulou (Ἰουλίτα Ἠλιοπούλου) has studied Byzantine and Modern Greek Letters at the School of Philosophy, University of Athens, and Theatre Studies at the Drama School of the Athens Conservatory. She has published six poetry collections. Her recent editions are: 11 Places for 1 Summer (2007, poetry), The House (2012, poetry), and three children’s books: What Zinon Is Asking for? (2005); Little Green Cap (2008); and “That’s off the Wall” (2013). She has written lyrics for songs, the libretto for the opera by George Couroupos, The Fir-Ship, and the poetry for the lyric tragedy, Jocasta, by the same composer. She also writes essays — her recent edition is Searching for the Fourteenth Beauty: Essays on Odysseas Elytis. She works as a book editor, and cooperates with the Orchestra of Colours in the creation of programs based on music and literature.

Katarzyna Jakubiak

Photo credit: Beth Caldwell

Katarzyna Jakubiak is a fiction writer, translator and scholar, who was born and raised in Poland and now lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her short story collection Nieostre widzenia (Biuro Literackie, 2012) was a finalist for Gryfia Literary Prize in Poland. Her Polish translations of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry Pochwała miejsc ciemnych (Znak, 2005) won a “New Voices in Translation” award from the magazine Literatura na świecie. Her English translations of Polish poetry have appeared in anthologies New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008), Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird (Zephyr Press, 2004) and in magazines Aufgabe, Gulf Coast, Burnside Review, Lyric Poetry Review, and Poetry Wales. She is an Associate Professor of English at Millersville University of Pennsylvania.

Julia Leverone

Julia Leverone holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and is a PhD candidate at Washington University in St. Louis. She teaches college writing in Texas, where she lives with her partner. Her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, B O D Y, and Sugar House Review; her translations of Urondo have appeared in six literary publications and are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review and Poetry International. Julia is Editor of Sakura Review.

Shauna Osborn

Shauna Osborn is a mestiza artist, wordsmith, and community organizer. In 2013, she received the Luminaire Award from Alternating Current Press, a National Poetry Award from the New York Public Library, and the Native Writer Award from Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. She is working on a series of indigenous comic books based on Comanche folk tales and a book-length choreopoem. She is also the 2015 Visual Artist in Residence for A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Writing Retreat. You can find her work online at shaunamosborn.wordpress.com..

Ladan Osman

Photo credit: Tariq Tarey

Ladan Osman has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and the Michener Center for Writers. Her work has appeared in Apogee, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and Vinyl Poetry. Her chapbook, “Ordinary Heaven,” appears in Seven New Generation African Poets (Slapering Hol Press, 2014). Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize, The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony will be published by University of Nebraska Press and Amalion Press in April 2015. She lives in Chicago.

Penny Perkins

Penny Perkins is a member of the 2015 class of the MFA creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Her short story “Car Ride Through Corn Fields (1975)” was chosen by Manuel Muñoz as the winner of Beecher’s Magazine 2014 Fiction Contest. Her creative nonfiction essay “A Girl’s Mouth” appeared in the September 2014 issue of HOAX #10. Other publication credits for fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction include Salon, Conditions, The Portable Lower East Side, Curves, Girlfriend No. 1, and Book, among others. She currently lives in northeast Florida and teaches at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

Natanya Ann Pulley

Natanya Ann Pulley is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Dakota and is the Fiction Editor for South Dakota Review. A writer primarily of fiction and nonfiction with outbreaks into poetry, Natanya’s publications include Western Humanities Review, The Florida Review, Drunken Boat, The Collagist, and McSweeney’s Open Letters (among others). Links to publications can be found on her site: gappsbasement.com.

Patrick Rosal

Patrick Rosal is the author of Boneshepherds, named a notable title by the National Book Critics Circle and the Academy of American Poets. His newest collection, Brooklyn Antediluvian, will be published in 2016. His essays and poetry have appeared in Tin House, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Grantland, Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers-Camden.

Analicia Sotelo

Analicia Sotelo earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Houston. Her poems have recently appeared in The Antioch Review, The Indiana Review, West Branch, Subtropics, iO, and elsewhere. In 2014, she was a Junior Fellow at the Ithaca Text/Art Symposium, a collaboration at the intersection of photography and writing. She lives in Houston.

Ewa Sonnenberg

Photo credit: Krzysztof Sobczyk

Ewa Sonnenberg is a Polish writer, the author of nine books of poetry and two books of prose. Her first collection Hazard (Astrum, 1995) was the recipient of the 1996 Georg Trakl Award. Her other books include Pisane na piasku/Written on Sand (Ha-art, 2007), a bilingual collection with translations by Katarzyna Jakubiak, and a volume of collected poems Wiersze zebrine (Rita Baum, 2014). She holds a degree in piano from the Musical Academy of Wrocław and an M.A. in philosophy from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She is also a graduate of the Jagiellonian University’s Creative Writing Program. She has been awarded many national and international fellowships, including: Fellowship for Independent Culture in Paris (1998), two fellowships from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2000, 2008) and the fellowship of the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Gotland, Sweden (2008). Her work has been translated into sixteen languages, with full-length books in Serbian and Macedonian. In Macedonia, she received a Poetry Award of the 9th International Poetry Festival in Ilinden/Skopje (2008). She participated in multiple international literary festivals, including Vilenica (Slovenia) and Istambul (Turkey). English translations of her poems have been published in anthologies With Our Eyes Wide Open (West End Press, 2014), New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008), Aria (Mulfran Press, UK, 2010), and in magazines Gulf Coast and Lyric Poetry Review. She lives in Wrocław, Poland.

Francisco Urondo

Francisco Urondo (1930 – 1976) was an Argentine poet and militant who was killed at the start of the Dirty War. He was Minister of Culture in Santa Fe and director of the department of literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Urondo produced eighteen works of poetry, fiction, testimonial writing, and essays, along with plays and scripts for the stage and screen. His work has been otherwise untranslated, but formed an important part of the committed, conversational turn in Latin American poetry.

Christina Vega-Westhoff

Christina Vega-Westhoff is a poet, translator, and aerialist currently living in Merida, Yucatan. Her translations of Melanie Taylor Herrera’s work appear in Asymptote, Ezra, Metamorphoses, and PRISM International, and are forthcoming in Exchanges. Her poems most recently appear or are forthcoming in Horse Less Review, LIT, A Perimeter, Synecdoche, and Truck.

Laurie Saurborn Young

Laurie Saurborn Young is the author of the poetry collections Carnavoria (H_NGM_N BKS) and Industry of Brief Distraction (Saturnalia Books), as well as a chapbook, Patriot (Forklift, Ink.). Her poems, fiction, essays, reviews, and photographs have appeared in such publications as American Microreviews & Interviews, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, The American Reader, The Rumpus, and Tupelo Quarterly. A 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient, she lives in Austin, Texas, where she teaches creative writing.