Contributors to Issue XVI
Kelli Russell Agodon
Kelli Russell Agodon’s most recent book, Hourglass Museum, was a Finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Poetry Prize. Her second book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, won the Foreword Book of the Year Prize in poetry. Kelli is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press, where she works as an editor and book cover designer. She also co-directs Poets on the Coast, a yearly writing retreat for women in La Conner, Washington. She is an avid paddleboarder and hiker who has a fondness for vinyl records and kingfishers.
Igor Barreto
Born in San Fernando de Apure, Venezuela, May 26th 1952. Poet. Professor of the Dept. of Literature Workshops of the School of Letters of Universidad Central, Caracas. He has published ten books of poems, the latest entitled El Muro de Mandelshtam (Editorial Bartleby, 2017, Spain). In 2008 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. He has published several anthologies: Tierranegra (Ediciones Idea, 2008, Tenerife-Spain), Terranera (Rafaelli Editore, 2010, Italy), El campo / El ascensor (Complete works. Editorial Pre-textos, 2014, Spain). Parts of his work have been translated into several languages.
Neil Anderson
Neil Anderson is a teacher and translator living in Savannah, Georgia. His translations of Galician poetry have appeared in journals such as M–Dash, Asymptote, Drunken Boat, Pleiades, The Literary Review, Circumference, and Two Lines.
C.R. Becker
C.R. Becker lives and writes in Boulder, where she’s currently completing her MFA in Fiction at the University of Colorado. In addition to her fascination with exploring desperation and connection through her writing, she holds a stereotypical interest in cats and a less stereotypical interest in competitive baking. She is the 2018-2019 Managing Editor of Timber journal. Sporadic tweets can be followed at @remotelyactive.
Adrian Blevins
Adrian Blevins is the author of the full-length poetry collections Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the Wilder Prize, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, and The Brass Girl Brouhaha; the chapbooks Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes; and the co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. She is the recipient of many awards including a Kate Tufts Discovery Award for The Brass Girl Brouhaha and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among others. She teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Eleanor Mary Boudreau
Eleanor Mary Boudreau has poems forthcoming in Tin House, Barrow Street, APR, and Willow Springs, and has been published recently in FIELD, Copper Nickel, and New American Writing. She has worked as a dry-cleaner and as a radio reporter. Currently, she lives in Tallahassee where she is working on her Ph.D.
Clara Burghelea
Clara Burghelea is a Romanian poet and translator. She serves as editor-at-large of Village of Crickets, the literary website of Adelphi University, where she was awarded the Robert Muroff Prize in Poetry and her MFA degree in Poetry in 2018. Her poems and fiction have appeared in numerous literary online and print journals in the US and abroad: Peacock Journal, Full of Crow Press, Quail Bell Magazine, Ambit Magazine, The Write Launch, Headstuff, and elsewhere.
Kell Connor
Kell Connor lives in Nebraska and works at a library. Her work appears in Big Lucks, Peach Mag, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook For Destruction (Doom Town, 2018). Please direct all correspondence to PO BOX 29255 Lincoln NE 68529.
Krista Christensen
Krista Christensen was the Denali National Park Writer-in-Residence for Winter 2018. Her essays “World, Heaving,” which appeared in Booth 11, and “O,” which appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of River Teeth, were each nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her essay “Etymologies,” which appeared New Ohio Review 19, has been named a Notable Essay in the 2018 edition of Best American Essays. Her other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Potomac Review, Harpur Palate, Blue Earth Review, Hypertrophic Literary, and Hippocampus Magazine. She got an MFA a few years back, and calls Interior Alaska home for now, where she teaches high school and college English.
Lynette D’Amico
Lynette D’Amico’s work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Ocean State Review, Brevity, and Slag Glass City. Her novella Road Trip, was short-listed for the Paris Literary Prize, the centerpiece of a collection that was a finalist for the 2012 Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction, and the first runner-up of the 2014 Quarterly West Novella Contest. Lynette holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Laura Espósto
Laura Espósto is a current MFA candidate at the University of Arizona. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Rattle, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Word Riot.
Laurette Folk
Laurette Folk’s fiction, essays, and poems have been published in upstreet, Literary Mama, pacificREVIEW, and Boston Globe Magazine, among others. Her novel, A Portal to Vibrancy, was published by Big Table in June 2014 and won the Independent Press Award for New Adult Fiction. Totem Beasts, her collection of poetry and flash fiction, was published by Big Table in May 2017. She is a Best of the Net nominee and graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing program.
Devereux Fortuna
Devereux Fortuna is a writer, visual artist, and educator from Arizona. She received an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she was awarded the Goldwater Fellowship for mentoring in poetry at Coler-Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island. She is currently a C. Glenn Cambor Fellow at the University of Houston, pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing. She is Poetry Editor at Gulf Coast Magazine, teaches college writing at UH, and leads creative workshops as a resident teacher for Writers in the Schools. Her poetry is forthcoming in American Chordata.
Emmalee Hagarman
Emmalee Hagarman is an MFA poetry candidate at The Ohio State University, where she serves as poetry editor of The Journal. Recently her work was selected by Kenyatta Rogers to receive the Academy of American Poets Award/The Arthur Rense Prize, and also selected by Ruth Awad to receive the Helen Earnhart Harley Fellowship in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Rattle, and The Laurel Review, among others.
Wren Hanks
Wren Hanks is the author of The Rise of Genderqueer, a 2018 selection for Brain Mill Press’s Mineral Point Poetry Series and a finalist for Gold Line Press’s chapbook contest. He was a finalist for the 2018 Indiana Review 1/2 K Prize, and his recent work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He is also the author of Prophet Fever (Hyacinth Girl Press), an Elgin Award finalist. A 2016 Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow, he lives in Brooklyn and tweets @suitofscales.
James Tate Hill
James Tate Hill is the author of Academy Gothic (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2015), winner of the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Literary Hub, Writer’s Digest, Story Quarterly, Sonora Review, and The Museum of Americana, among others. Fiction Editor for the literary journal Monkeybicycle, he lives in North Carolina with his wife. Find out more at jamestatehill.com or follow him on Twitter @jamestatehill.
Rowena Hill
Born in England in 1938. She studied at universities in New Zealand, Italy and India (University of Mysore), and taught English Literature at the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida, Venezuela, where she has lived for more than forty years. She has published five books of poems in Spanish, as well as poems, essays and translations in periodicals in both Spanish and English. She has translated into English some of Venezuela’s best known poets, including Rafael Cadenas and Eugenio Montejo, as well as an anthology of Venezuelan women poets. Her translations of Indian writers include Naming the Nameless, metaphysical poems from ancient Kannada, selected poems of the dalit poet Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy, and Flores de tierra dura, women poets of South India.
Adalber Salas Hernández
Adalber Salas Hernández was born in Caracas, A poet, essayist, and translator, he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at New York University. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, the most recent of which is La ciencia de las despedidas, published this year by Pre-Textos (Spain). He has also published two collections of essays, as well as numerous translations from English and French. He has been a member of the editorial board for Revista POESÍA and Buenos Aires Poetry. He coordinates the collection Diablos Danzantes published by Amargord Ediciones.
Abby Horowitz
Abby Horowitz’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, Black Warrior Review online, and Memorious, among other journals. She is a recent winner of the Goldenberg Fiction Prize from Bellevue Literary Review and holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.
Rebecca Gayle Howell
Rebecca Gayle Howell is the author of American Purgatory and Render/An Apocalypse. Her awards include fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Carson McCullers Center, as well as a Pushcart Prize. Howell is the James Still Writer-in-Residence at the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky, and the poetry editor for Oxford American.
Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar is the author of the novel The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018). Joukhadar’s work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review Daily, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net.
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley
Ben Kingsley is best known for his Academy-Award-winning role as Mahatma Gandhi. A touch less famous, Affrilachian author Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley has not acted since his third-grade debut as the undertaker in Music Man. Ben is currently the Tickner Writing Fellow and recipient of a Provincetown FAWC fellowship as well as scholarships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sewanee, and VONA. He belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. Peep his work from last year in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Boston Review, the Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, Narrative, PEN America, the Poetry Review, Tin House, and West Branch, among others. His first book is out this fall: Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot, selected by Bob Hicok.
Anni Liu
Anni Liu is a writer and translator from Xi'an, Shaanxi, and Bowling Green, Ohio. Her honors include an Undocupoets Fellowship and a Katherine Bakeless Nason Scholarship to Bread Loaf Environmental Conference. Her work is published or forthcoming in Pleiades, cream city review, Third Coast, The Margins, and elsewhere. These poems are her first published translations.
Ștefan Manasia
Ștefan Manasia is a poet and journalist, editor of Tribuna cultural magazine. He founded Thoreau’s Nephew Reading Club in Cluj, 2008, alongside Szántai János and François Bréda, which became the largest Romanian-Hungarian literary community in Transilvania. He published 6 volumes of poetry and had his poems translated in Hungarian, French, German, Polish and Modern Hebrew. He is also the author of a collection of essays and literary chronicles published in 2016: Stabilizator de aromă/ The aroma stabilizer. His poetical credo is “Man, this mystic bug.”
Chloe Martinez
Chloe Martinez’s poetry has appeared in The Collagist, Crab Orchard Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing MA and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she lives in Claremont, CA, where she teaches on South Asian religions at Claremont McKenna College. See more of her work at chloeAVmartinez.com.
Kevin McIlvoy
Kevin McIlvoy has published four novels, A Waltz (Lynx House Press), The Fifth Station (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; paperback, Collier/Macmillan), Little Peg (Atheneum/Macmillan; paperback, Harper Perennial), Hyssop (TriQuarterly Books; paperback, Avon) and a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf Press). His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines. His short-short stories and prose poems have appeared in The Collagist, Pif, Kenyon Review Online, The Cortland Review, Prime Number, r.k.v.r.y, the premiere issue of Waxwing, and various online literary magazines. A collection of his prose poems and short-short stories, 57 Octaves Below Middle C, has recently been published by Four Way Books (October 2017), and his newest novel, At the Gate of All Wonder, by Tupelo Press (October 2018). For twenty-seven years he was fiction editor and editor-in-chief of the New Mexico State University national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He has lived in Asheville, North Carolina since 2007. Through his literary service, mcthebookmechanic.com, he mentors writers and edits full-length book manuscripts.
Tamzin Mitchell
Tamzin Mitchell is a proofreader and editor. She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Hippocampus, cahoodaloodaling, Crannóg, and elsewhere. She moves often but is currently based in Prague.
Robin Myers
Robin Myers was born in New York and is based in Mexico City. Her translations have appeared in Anomaly, Tupelo Quarterly, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Latin American Literature Today, Asymptote, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Inventory, and elsewhere; her own poems have been published or are forthcoming in Sixth Finch, the Beloit Poetry Review, Narrative Magazine, Washington Square, jubilat, and The Offing, among other publications. Her translation of La lírica está muerta / Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg (Argentina) is forthcoming from Cardboard House Press.
Arlene Naganawa
Arlene Naganawa is the author of three chapbooks — The Ark & the Bear (Floating Bridge Press); The Scarecrow Bride (Red Bird Chapbooks), and Private Graveyard (Gribble Press). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Caketrain, Belletrist, New Delta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Crab Creek Review, Pontoon, Washington 129, and on Seattle Metro buses. She lives in Seattle.
Kathryn Nuernberger
Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of the essay collection Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, and the poetry collections The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. Other essays about witches have appeared in Brevity, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Florida Review, and Paris Review. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, American Antiquarian Society, and H. J. Andrews Research Forest, she teaches in the creative writing program at University of Minnesota.
Rainie Oet
Rainie Oet (formerly Jacob) is a nonbinary writer. They are the author of the chapbooks No Mark Spiral (CutBank Books, 2018) and With Porcupine (winner of the 2015 Ruby Irene Prize from Arcadia Press). Their work appears in Adroit Journal, Poetry Review, jubilat, Colorado Review, and Sycamore Review, among other publications. They are an MFA candidate in Poetry at Syracuse University, where they were awarded the Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction. Say hi at rainieoet.com.
Sophia Parnok
Sophia Parnok was a queer Russian-Jewish poet, journalist, translator, and librettist who lived from 1885 to 1933. She published literary reviews under the name Andrei Polianin. At a time when Stalin’s government termed homosexuality a disease, Sophia Parnok wrote openly of her romantic relationships with women, including the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Parnok’s works remained censored until 1979, when an edition of her collected poems was published in the United States. Despite the strength of her work and her influence on the poetry of her contemporaries (Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, etc.), Parnok remains relatively unread and unknown.
Catherine Pierce
Catherine Pierce’s most recent book of poems is The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia 2016). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, and elsewhere, and has won a Pushcart Prize. She co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.
Ismael Ramos
Ismael Ramos was born in Mazaricos, Galicia, in 1994. He is the author of two collections of poems: Os fillos da fame (2016), which won the Johan Carballeira prize, and Lumes (2017). His poems have appeared in print and online publications such as A Bacana, Clarín, Dorna, Grial, Luzes, Oculta Lit, PlayGround, and Tr3s Reinos, and have been translated into English, Portuguese, and Spanish. His pieces have also appeared in the anthologies No seu despregar, published by Apiario in 2016, and 13. Antoloxía da poesía galega próxima, published by Chan da Pólvora / papeles mínimos in 2017.
Sam Ross
Sam Ross is the author of Company (Four Way Books).
David Rutschman
David Rutschman is the author of Into Terrible Light (Forklift Books, 2017). His work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review; Forklift, Ohio; Kenyon Review Online; The Massachusetts Review; The Sun; Waxwing; Witness, and many other journals. A Soto Zen priest and hospice grief counselor, he lives in California with his wife and two young children.
Joseph Scapellato
Joseph Scapellato was born in the suburbs of Chicago and earned his MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University. His fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Post Road, PANK, Unsaid, and other literary magazines, and has been anthologized in Harper Perennial’s Forty Stories, Gigantic Books’ Gigantic Worlds: An Anthology of Science Flash Fiction, and &NOW’s The Best Innovative Writing.
Krystal A. Sital
A free island spirit in every way, Krystal A. Sital calls the beach home and would rather be at the water’s edge than anywhere else in the world. Recently, she’s taken to mastering the cello and hopes to play it on the beach one day while her family sits at her feet in rapt attention (will never happen as they’ll be too busy with the water).
While she thoroughly enjoys frolicking, Krystal does have a serious side and is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad. A PEN award finalist and Hertog fellow, her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Well Section, Today’s Parent, Salon, The Margins, LitHub, The Caribbean Writer, and elsewhere. She’s taught writing, women and gender studies, and peoples and cultures of the Caribbean at New Jersey City University and Fairleigh Dickenson University. Krystal now teaches in the low residency program at Sierra Nevada College in Lake Tahoe.
Claire Solomon
Claire Solomon teaches Latin American and comparative literature at Oberlin College. She is the author of a book about literary prostitutes, Fictions of the Bad Life, and essays on avant-garde theater, Manic Pixie Dream Girls, translation theory and contemporary music. She has translated Roberto Arlt, Lidia Falcón and Juan Goytisolo, and is currently writing a novel about higher education.
Melissa Stephenson
Melissa Stephenson’s writing has appeared in publications such as Lit Hub, The Washington Post, ZYZZYVA, and Fourth Genre. Her memoir, Driven, was released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in July of 2018. She lives in Missoula, Montana, with her two kids.
Melissa Studdard
Melissa Studdard is the author of the poetry collection I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast and the young adult novel Six Weeks to Yehidah. Her writings have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Psychology Today, Harvard Review, New Ohio Review, Bettering American Poetry, Poets & Writers, and more. In addition to writing, she serves as executive producer and host of Voices & Views for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and president of the Women’s Caucus for AWP. To learn more, visit melissastuddard.com.
Sylvia Sukop
Sylvia Sukop is 2018–19 Senior Fellow in Creative Nonfiction at Washington University in St. Louis, where she recently completed her MFA. Previous fellowships include PEN Emerging Voices, Lambda Emerging Writers, and a Fulbright in Germany. She was a finalist for AWP's 2018 Kurt Brown Prize for Nonfiction and for The Southeast Review's 2017 Narrative Nonfiction Contest. Her work is published or forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Exposure, Flaunt, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Palimpsest, Soliloquies Anthology, and in the following collections: “They Said”: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press), Emerge (Lambda Literary), LAtitudes: An Angeleno’s Atlas (Heyday), and Strange Cargo (PEN USA).
Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad
Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad’s poetry has appeared in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Missing Slate, Painted Bride Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She is the poetry editor for Noble / Gas Qtrly; and a Best of the Net, Pushchart Prize, and Best New Poets nominee. She currently lives in New York where she practices matrimonial law.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American writer of Palestinian, Syrian, and Jordanian heritage. Her book of poems, Water & Salt, finalist for the 2018 Washington State Book Award, is published by Red Hen Press. She is the winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize for her chapbook Arab in Newsland. She has been published in journals including Kenyon Review Online, Black Warrior Review, Michigan Quarterly, and New England Review. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and anthologized in books including Being Palestinian and Bettering American Poetry v.2. To learn more, visit lenakhalaftuffaha.com.
Tracy Winn
Tracy Winn is the author of Mrs. Somebody Somebody, a reader’s circle selection from Random House.
Du Ya
Du Ya was born in 1968 in Henan Province. Before becoming an editor and writer, she worked as a nurse for ten years. She is the author of The Wind Uses Its Bright Wings (1998), Selected Poems (2008), and Sunset and Dawn Light (2016). She is the recipient of the Liu Lian Poetry Prize, the Yangtze Poetics Award, and was named one of the top female Chinese poets of the new century. Some of her poems have been translated into German, Russian, Czech, Italian, Japanese and other languages. She lives in Xuchang, Henan Province.
Emily Yang
Emily Yang hails from Taipei, Taiwan and currently attends Brown University, where she studies Literary Arts and Psychology. She is learning how to be a writer-person, and when she’s not busy imposing meaning on the most trivial of her experiences, she eats a lot of three cup chicken. Two summers ago, she translated a children’s book called No Means No! from English to Mandarin.
Danielle Zaccagnino
Danielle Zaccagnino has an MFA from Texas State University. She was the winner of the Rita Dove Prize in Poetry (2017) and the Sonora Review’s Essay Prize (2016). Her writing appears in journals such as Diagram, The Pinch, and Puerto del Sol. Danielle is from Queens, New York.
