Contributors to Issue VII
Carrie Addington
Carrie Addington’s poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Collagist, American Literary Review, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Virginia Downs Poetry Award, the American Literary Review Poetry Award, and a Pushcart nomination. She received her MFA from George Mason University and currently lives in Northern Virginia, where she works as a Business Consultant in the fashion/beauty industry and teaches at Northern Virginia Community College. Additionally, she serves on the board of the American Poetry Museum in Washington, D.C.
Noh Anothai
Photo: Christopher FleckNoh Anothai was a researcher with the Thailand-United States Education Foundation (Fulbright Thailand) from 2011-12. In that time he translated programs and hosted cultural events for Thailand’s College of Dramatic Arts under the Ministry of Culture. Winner of Lunch Ticket’s inaugural Gabo Prize for Translation and Multilingual Texts in 2014, Anothai’s original poems and translations of Thai poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Words Without Borders, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Unsplendid, and Reunion: The Dallas Review.
José Angel Araguz
José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and winner of RHINO Poetry’s 2015 Editor’s Prize. He has had poems recently in Prairie Schooner, Borderlands, and The Laurel Review. He is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati. Author of the chapbook Reasons (not) to Dance, he runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence.
Alessandra Bava
When she is not translating, Alessandra Bava is writing the biography of a contemporary American poet. Her poems have appeared or are upcoming in journals such as Gargoyle, Plath Profiles, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and Left Curve. Her bilingual chapbooks Guerrilla Blues and Nocturne have appeared in Italy. Two of her chapbooks have been published in the States: They Talk About Death (Blood Pudding Press, 2014) and Diagnosis (dancing girl press, 2015). She has recently edited and translated into Italian Nuova Antologia di Poesia Americana / New Anthology of American Poets, and a collection of poems by Alejandro Murguía, current San Francisco Poet Laureate. She has just received her second Best of the Net nomination.
Yasmin Belkhyr
Yasmin Belkhyr writes. Her poetry has been in PANK, Hobart, Muzzle, and on Verse Daily. Her work has also been showcased at MOMA P.S. 1, the Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the US Hall of Nations. Yasmin founded and now runs Winter Tangerine and works on being a better person. Send her letters of love, hate, and indifference at yasminbelkhyr.com.
Simeon Berry
Simeon Berry lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He has been an Associate Editor for Ploughshares and received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant. His first book, Ampersand Revisited (Fence Books), won the 2013 National Poetry Series, and his second book, Monograph (University of Georgia Press), won the 2014 National Poetry Series.
P. Scott Cunningham
P. Scott Cunningham lives in Miami, FL, where he serves as Poetry Editor of The Miami Rail and Director of O, Miami and Jai-Alai Books. His work has appeared in The Awl, Harvard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Court Green, PANK, The Rumpus, RHINO, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, among others. He is the translator of The Sun Like a Big Dark Animal, a zine of selected work by Alejanda Pizarnik and, along with Hoyt Rogers, Dominican poet Frank Báez’s first published work in the United States, Last Night I Dreamt I Was a DJ (Jai-Alai Books, 2014).
Charles D’Ambrosio
Photo: Sandra L. DyasCharles D’Ambrosio is the author of two books of fiction, The Point and Other Stories and The Dead Fish Museum, and two collections of essays, Orphans, and Loitering: New & Collected Essays. Many of his stories originally appeared in The New Yorker, and he has also published fiction in The Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, and A Public Space. His work has been widely anthologized and selected for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Award.
Claudia Emerson
Claudia Emerson published six poetry collections with LSU Press, including Late Wife, Secure the Shadow, and The Opposite House. A professor of English and member of the Creative Writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Emerson served as the poet laureate of Virginia and won numerous awards for teaching and writing — including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry — before her death in 2014.
Javier Etchevarren
Javier Etchevarren was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1979. He is the author of the poetry books Desidia and Fábula de un hombre desconsolado. His poems were included in the anthology ME USA, published in Perú, and will appear in América invertida: An Anthology of Younger Uruguayan Poets, which is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press. His poems appeared in the UK in the Palabras errantes and are forthcoming in the US in the Notre Dame Review, the Colorado Review, and the Massachusetts Review.
Shamala Gallagher
Shamala Gallagher's poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, Verse Daily, Copper Nickel, VOLT, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and the author of a chapbook, I Learned the Language of Barbs and Sparks No One Spoke (dancing girl press). She has worked as a case manager for homeless families in San Francisco and HIV+ individuals in Austin, and she holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. She now lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.
Girls in Trouble
Open the Ground is Girls in Trouble’s third release of orchestral indie-folk about the complicated lives of Biblical women, where ancient stories of love, sex, betrayal and inheritance come to life in intimate songs ranging from old-timey ballads to indie-pop. Bandleader Alicia Jo Rabins is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring the intersection of faith and feminism, tradition and new ideas, spirituality and daily life. She is also known as a Torah scholar and teacher, a rock-opera showrunner (“A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff” was named a 2014 Best Performance of Portland by the Willamette Week) and a prize-winning poet. Her first full-length book of poetry, Divinity School, was recently awarded the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and was published in September 2015: a near-simultaneous release with this album. For Girls in Trouble, Rabins creates the lyrics, music, and performances of violin, viola, and voice, in partnership with her husband, bassist Aaron Hartman of Old Time Relijun (K Records). Read more about the band here, Alicia’s poetry here, and buy the complete album here. You can follow Girls in Trouble on Facebook and Twitter.
Luke Hankins
Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (both from Wipf & Stock). A chapbook of his translations of French poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, I Was Afraid of Vowels ... Their Paleness, was published by Q Avenue Press in 2011. Hankins’ latest book, The Work of Creation: Selected Prose, is forthcoming from Wipf & Stock in January 2016. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including 32 Poems, American Literary Review, The Collagist, Contemporary Poetry Review, Image, New England Review, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Chronicle, as well as on the American Public Media national radio program “On Being.” Hankins is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.
James Hoch
Prior to joining the faculty at Ramapo College of New Jersey, James Hoch taught at Lynchburg and Franklin and Marshall. He has worked as a dishwasher, cook, dockworker, social worker, and shepherd. His poems have appeared in POETRY, The Washington Post, American Poetry Review, Slate, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. His book, A Parade of Hands, won the Gerald Cable Award and was published in March 2003 by Silverfish Review Press. His second book, Miscreants, appeared in 2007 from W.W. Norton. He has received fellowships from the NEA (2007), Bread Loaf, and Sewanee writers conferences, St. Albans School for Boys, Summer Literary Seminars, and was the 2008 Resident Poet at The Frost Place and the 2008 Steinhardt Visiting Writer at Rutgers-Newark, and is currently Guest Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He resides with his wife and sons in Garrison, NY, and Seattle, WA.
Sayeh Homa
Sayeh Homa is a writer born in Tehran, Iran, who now lives in the US. She has recently received her MFA in Creative Writing.
Amorak Huey
Amorak Huey, a former newspaper editor and reporter, teaches in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University. He is author of the poetry collection Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015) and the chapbook The Insomniac Circus (Hyacinth Girl, 2014). His writing appears in The Best American Poetry 2012, The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, Essay Daily, The Collagist, and many other print and online journals.
Jennifer Jean
Jennifer Jean’s debut poetry collection is The Fool (2013). Her chapbooks include The Archivist (2011) and In the War (2010), and she’s released Fishwife Tales, a collaborative CD comprised of art songs, rock ballads, and accompanied recitations. Her poetry, essays, and book reviews have been published, or are forthcoming, in numerous journals including Rattle, Drunken Boat, Tidal Basin Review, Denver Quarterly, Caketrain, Solstice, and North Dakota Quarterly. Jennifer is the Poetry Editor of The Mom Egg Review, the Administrative Editor of Talking/Writing Magazine, and a Co-director of the Morning Garden Artist Retreats. She also teaches Free2Write poetry workshops to sex-trafficking survivors, and she’s on the advisory board of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. For more about Jennifer, visit fishwifetales.com.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of fifteen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She is also a translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her translations include Invisible Bridge / El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).
Karen An-hwei Lee
Photo: Michelle ChungKaren An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008), and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe 2002) and What the Sea Earns for a Living (Quaci Press 2014). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. She earned an MFA from Brown University and PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she serves as Full Professor of English and Chair at a liberal arts college in greater Los Angeles, where she is also a novice harpist. Lee is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Davis Maho
Davis R. Maho is descended from the Salt Clan people from Forest Lake, Arizona and the Roadrunner Clan people from the villages of First Mesa, Arizona. Davis works as a Hopi artist. He has always expressed an ancestral and cultural bond remaining from childhood. Growing up the youngest in his family, it was mainly the female influence of his mother and four older sisters who have all guided him on his way to becoming an artist. Not only has he developed a love of drawing and painting, but he has also mastered what he calls the “sister arts” of traditional value including Hopi textile and sash belt weaving. Davis developed his own style and technique by using a process where he asks questions to provoke thought. His creative experimentation has earned him numerous awards, accolades, and attention from art lovers worldwide, his peers in the traditional and nontraditional arts. He is involved in his artwork as if it could change the world for the better. Davis continues to develop his own way of creating, no matter how challenging, ambitious or problematic a project becomes. He loves completing a piece and having people love it back. “Madonna of the Katsinas” was inspired by Renaissance artists such as Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Bernini. Traditionally in Christian beliefs, Mary holds baby Jesus in her lap and cherishes him while he’s still a baby because she knows his fate on the cross. Davis has translated this idea to Hopi. The Hahai’i holds her son the koyemsi, who is a rambunctious sort of clown. Sometimes his punishment for being so silly is being whipped by thick yucca bunches until the whole bundle is worn, frayed, and coming apart. His mother wants to cherish him while he’s still a baby since she knows he will be too troublesome when he gets older.
Kamilah Aisha Moon
Kamilah Aisha Moon’s work has been featured in Harvard Review, jubilat, The Awl, and Poem-A-Day for the Academy of American Poets. She has been selected as a New American Poet presented by the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize winner, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. A native of Nashville, TN, Moon is the author of She Has a Name (Four Way Books) and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Clinton Crockett Peters
Clinton Crockett Peters has an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow and is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of North Texas. He is the recipient of North American Review’s Torch Prize for Creative Nonfiction and has nonfiction appearing in Shenandoah, Green Mountains Review, Hunger Mountain, DIAGRAM, Lake Effect, and The Dallas Observer, among others. He is accumulating his essays into a book about invasives, pests, pets, and humans.
Emilia Phillips
Emilia Phillips is the author of two poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, Signaletics (2013) and Groundspeed (2016), and three chapbooks. She's the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Centenary College (NJ) and the 32 Poems Interviews Editor. For more information, visit her website at emiliaphillips.com.
Sunthorn Phu
Though born a commoner, Phu (pronounced “pooh”; 1786-1856) was attached to Bangkok’s royal courts at several times throughout his life, most notably during the reign of King Rama II, when he become a favorite court poet and earned the title by which he is known today: Sunthorn Phu, Phu the Eloquent. Remembered for his travel poems and the epic-length Phra Aphaimanee, Phu is honored as Thailand’s national poet. Since his bicentennial in 1986, his birthday on June 26th has been designated Sunthorn Phu Day.
Antonia Pozzi
Torn between her creative aspirations and her family’s expectations, Italian poet Antonia Pozzi (1912-1938), on December 2, 1938, aged twenty-six, lay down in a field on the outskirts of Milan and ingested a lethal amount of barbiturates. She was found in the snow, almost frozen, the following day. She left an amazing number of diaries, letters, and poems. Poems she shared only with a few friends. A scholar in Philology, her poetry has often been compared to that of the well-known Italian Hermetic poets and Rainer Maria Rilke. The posthumous publication of her only collection, Parole 1930-1938, was funded by her family and received positive acclaim both in Italy and abroad. Her crystal-clear words with great emphasis to sound were praised by Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale, who admired her lack of sentimentality and poetic strength.
Mark Pritchard
Mark Pritchard is the author of two books of short stories, How I Adore You and Too Beautiful and Other Stories. He is the former editor of Frighten the Horses, a sex-and-politics zine he produced with Cris Gutierrez in the early 1990s. He lives in San Francisco.
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu was born in Romania and left the country permanently in 1983, at the height of the communist regime. She holds a PhD in French Language and Literature and has taught French at Loyola University and Northwestern University. Writing poetry in three languages, she has published numerous books in the United States, France, and Romania, including I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New & Selected Poems (Orison Books, 2015). Radulescu’s French books have received several awards, including the Grand Prix de Poésie Henri-Noël Villard and the Prix Amélie Murat. Although she writes in three languages, she does not translate her own work.
Wesley Rothman
Wesley Rothman’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, Harvard Review, Mississippi Review, Narrative, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Vinyl Poetry, and the newly released Poets on Growth anthology, among other venues. His criticism has appeared in The Rumpus, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Southeast Review, and Boston Review. He serves as a member of Salamander magazine’s board, an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and a regular contributor to American Microreviews and Interviews. Rothman’s work has recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and received a Vermont Studio Center fellowship. He teaches writing and cultural literatures throughout Boston.
Nathan Slinker
Nathan Slinker’s poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Fugue, CutBank, Hinchas de Poesía, The Greensboro Review, The Puritan, and Kenyon Review Online, among others. He has been a Fishtrap fellow, a semi-finalist for the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize and the OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize, and a finalist for New River Press’s Many Voices Prize. He lives in Northern California.
César Vallejo
César Vallejo (1892 – 1938) was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language.
Bill Wetzel
Bill Wetzel is a Blackfeet from Montana. His work has appeared in the American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Yellow Medicine Review, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere. He is the founder and curator of the Stjukson Indigenous reading series in Tucson, AZ. When not writing, and being a casual friend to the most gorgeous woman in the world (#TMGWITW), he enjoys a lucrative dual career in dogsitting and as Joan Kane’s joke writer. You can follow his thoughts on twitter at billthebutcher2.
Erika T. Wurth
Erika T. Wurth’s novel, Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend, was published by Curbside Splendor. Her collection of poetry, Indian Trains, was published by The University of New Mexico’s West End Press. She teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University and has been a guest writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, such as Boulevard, Drunken Boat, and Southern California Review. She is represented by Peter Steinberg. She is Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee and was raised outside of Denver.
