Contributors to Issue XVII

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JP Allen

JP Allen’s poems have appeared in The Normal School, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. He has received an MFA in poetry from Johns Hopkins, as well as scholarships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Narrative Magazine.

Cheyenne Autry

Cheyenne Autry is a writer and teacher living in Fayetteville, AR. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and was a founding editor of The Arkansas International. Her stories have appeared in Tin House Online, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and elsewhere, and she was a finalist for the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award. You can follow her on Twitter @cheyautry.

Timea Balogh

Timea Balogh is a Hungarian American writer and translator with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A 2017 American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellow, her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in the Offing, Split Lip Magazine, Two Lines Journal, Modern Poetry in Translation, Arkansas International, and the Wretched Strangers anthology by Boiler House Press. Her debut original short story was published in Juked magazine and was nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She divides her time between Budapest and Las Vegas. You can tweet her at @TimeaRozalia.

Erik Bitsui

Erik Bitsui, a Navajo from Blue Gap, Arizona, has an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Hostiin Bitsui lives with wife and two daughters in East Flagstaff, where he is DJ for a weekly heavy metal radio show on KSZN 101.5 FM.

Conor Bracken

Conor Bracken’s poems appear or are forthcoming in the Colorado Review, Indiana Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the fifth Frost Place Chapbook Competition, and translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, September 2019). A graduate of Virginia Tech and assistant poetry editor at Four Way Review, he teaches English at the University of Findlay. Scorpionic Sun will be the first book of Khaïr-Eddine’s to appear in English.

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Florida Book Award bronze medal for poetry, and was a finalist for the 2017 Milt Kessler Poetry Award. She has received poetry fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, among others. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The Sun, and more. She is on the advisory board for Sundress Publications, and serves as a program coordinator for Miami Book Far.

Nancy Naomi Carlson

Nancy Naomi Carlson is the recipient of a Literature Translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Arts Humanities Council of Montgomery County. She has authored three books of poetry, and six books of translations, including Hammer with No Master (Tupelo Press, 2016), translations of René Char, which was a finalist for the 2017 CLMP Firecracker Poetry Award. The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper (Seagull Books, 2015), her translations of Abdourahman Waberi, from Djibouti, was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. She holds a Master’s degree in French Language and Literature and a doctorate in Foreign Language Methodology, and was decorated by the French government with the Order of the French Academic Palms.

Monika Cassel

Monika Cassel is former Chair of Creative Writing and Literature at New Mexico School for the Arts in Santa Fe. She was raised bilingual in the United States and Germany. Her chapbook Grammar of Passage won the Venture Award and is forthcoming from flipped eye publishing. Her translations have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Guernica, Asymptote, Harvard Review Online, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, and her poetry has appeared in The Laurel Review and Phoebe Journal. In 2016 she was awarded a Travel Fellowship for the American Literary Translator Association’s annual conference. She lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches German at Oregon State University.

Brooke Champagne

Brooke Champagne was born and raised in New Orleans, LA and now writes and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. She was recently awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay which was published in The Normal School, and was a finalist for the 2019 Lamar York Prize in Nonfiction for her essay “Bugginess,” which is forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review. Her writing has appeared most recently in The Florida Review, Cherry Tree, and Full Grown People. She is at work on her first collection of personal essays, and her memoir about her grandmother, Lala.

Daniela Danz

Daniela Danz was born in Eisenach in 1976. She studied art history and German and wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the construction of hospital chapels in the Weimar Republic. She has published three books of poetry, Serimunt, Pontus, and V, two novels, Lange Fluchten and Türmer, and an art history monograph. She has received numerous grants and awards for her writing, including being named poet laureate of Tübingen in 2012, the Rainer-Malkowski-Preis, and the Casa Baldi Residency Award at the German Academy of Rome. Danz’s work has been widely anthologized and Pontus has been translated into Bulgarian and Arabic. She is the director of the Schillerhaus in Rudolstadt.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, as a Jewish refugee when she was six. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her poems are forthcoming from POETRY, DIODE, and Poetry Northwest. Julia edits Construction Magazine and when not busy chasing her three-year-old around Philly, she writes a blog about motherhood.

Sarah Deckro

Sarah Deckro is a writer, teacher and photographer with a passion for stories. She received a bachelor’s degree in history from Connecticut College and has studied storytelling in a variety of venues. Sarah is a preschool teacher in Boston, MA, where she works to support the development of self-esteem and empathy in young children. Sarah’s photographs have appeared in Pidgeonholes, The Esthetic Apostle, Camas Magazine, and Arkana Magazine. Her poetry has been published by Persephone’s Daughters, Francis House, Gordon Square Review, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, and An Outbreak of Peace, an anthology by Arachne Press Limited.

Danielle DeTiberus

Danielle DeTiberus teaches creative writing at the Charleston School of the Arts. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Arts & Letters, The Missouri Review, Rattle, River Styx, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her manuscript, Better the Girl Know Now, was a finalist for Black Lawrence Press’ 2018 Hudson Prize. She received a poetry fellowship from the South Carolina Academy of Authors, and currently serves as the Program Chair for the Poetry Society of South Carolina, bringing nationally renowned poets to Charleston for readings and seminars. More of her work can be found here.

Chelsea Dingman

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). She has won prizes such as The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, Water-stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and The South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s Creative Writing Award for Poetry. Her recent work can be found in Redivider, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among others. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.

Avra Elliott

Avra Elliott is a writer and toymaker from New Mexico. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, Elliott's fiction has been published in Sweet Tree Review, Shadowgraph Quarterly, Contrary, and Noctua Review, where she was runner-up for the Neo Americana Fiction Contest. Elliott's poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Crab Orchard Review, Tinderbox, Cider Press Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Glass, Comstock Review, Barrow Street, Fairy Tale Review, and other journals. Her chapbook, Desert Selkie, was a semifinalist for the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize.

Kate Finegan

Kate Finegan is very fond of crows and has trouble focusing on anything else when birds are around. She is Assistant Fiction Editor at Longleaf Review. Her chapbook, The Size of Texas, is available from Penrose Press. You can find her at katefinegan.ink and @kehfinegan.

Ariel Francisco

Ariel Francisco is the author of A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020) and All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941 – 1995) was a Moroccan Amazigh (aka Berber) writer who wrote over a dozen books in his lifetime, among them Agadir (winner of the Enfant Terrible prize, founded by Jean Cocteau), Soleil Arachnide, Le déterreur, and Legende et vie d’Agoun’chich. A member of the Francophone avant-garde in the late ’60s, he assisted Abdellatif Laabi, Mostafa Nissaboury, and others in founding Souffles, a groundbreaking literary magazine which propounded new, radical approaches to postcolonial literature, art, and politics. Due to his outspoken views against King Hassan II, Khaïr-Eddine lived fourteen years in exile in France, where he worked as a laborer and wrote, continuing what he called his “linguistic guerrilla war” against the French language and its hegemony.

Emily Koehn

Emily Koehn’s poems have appeared in FENCE, Thrush, Crazyhorse, Cincinnati Review, Vinyl, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and Best New Poets. Emily is from Hot Springs, Arkansas, and currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

E. J. Koh

E. J. Koh is the author of A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize (Louisiana State University Press, 2017). Her memoir, The Magican Language of Others, will be published by Tin House Books in 2020. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Columbia Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, TriQuarterly, Seattle Review of Books, The Margins, PEN America, The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean Press, 2014) and elsewhere. Koh accepted fellowships and scholarships from The American Literary Translators Association, The MacDowell Colony, Kundiman, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and The Jack Straw Writers Program. She earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Poetry with a joint-degree in Literary Translation in Korean and Japanese. She is completing her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle for English Language and Literature. She has been featured on Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, Culture Trip’s “10 Americans Changing the Face of Poetry,” The Seattle Channel, Brit + Co’s “16 Modern Poets” and others.

Iris A. Law

Iris A. Law is a poet, editor, and educator living in the San Francisco Bay area. A Kundiman fellow and Pushcart nominee whose poems have appeared in journals such as wildness, Dusie, The Collagist, and Phoebe, she is also founding coeditor of the online literary magazine Lantern Review. Her chapbook, Periodicity, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.

J. Estanislao Lopez

J. Estanislao Lopez lives and teaches in Houston, TX. His work has appeared in The Shallow Ends, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.

Kristine Langley Mahler

Kristine Langley Mahler is a memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska. Her work received the Rafael Torch Award from Crab Orchard Review and has been recently published in The Normal School, New Delta Review, The Collagist, Superstition Review, and The Rumpus. More at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.

Erin Murphy

Erin Murphy’s word work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Brevity, Memoir Magazine, The Normal School, Field, Southern Humanities Review, North American Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She is the author or editor of nine books, including Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers (SUNY Press, 2016), winner of the Gold Medal Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona.

Matthew Olzmann

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design, both from Alice James Books. His writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Currently, he teaches at Dartmouth College and also in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Miranda Perrone

Miranda Perrone is a writer, environmental scientist, philosopher, map-maker, and outdoor educator. Her varied work focuses on climate change, animal rights, and the preservation of wild places — may it spur socioecological change. Her recent publications can be found at terrain.org and The Rumpus.

Dean Rader

Dean Rader’s debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize and Landscape Portrait Figure Form (2014) was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book. Three books appeared in 2017: Suture, collaborative poems written with Simone Muench (Black Lawrence Press), Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon), and Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, edited with Brian Clements & Alexandra Teague (Beacon). Recent books include They Said: A Multigenre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, edited with Simone Muench (Black Lawrence) and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversation, edited with CMarie Fuhrman, (forthcoming from Tupelo Press). Dean writes regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, BOMB, and The Kenyon Review. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco.

Francisco Layna Ranz

Francisco Layna Ranz has worked as a professor of Spanish literature at universities in Spain and abroad for over 20 years. He has published two collections of poems: Y una sospecha, como un dedo (2016) and Espíritu, hueso animal (2017).

Dina L. Relles

Dina L. Relles’ work has been/will be in matchbook, Monkeybicycle, Hobart, CHEAP POP, Passages North, DIAGRAM, and Wigleaf, among others. She is the Nonfiction Editor at Pidgeonholes and an Assistant Prose Poetry Editor at Pithead Chapel. More at dinarelles.com or @DinaLRelles.

Jacques Viau Renaud

Jacques Viau Renaud (1941 – 1965) was born in Haiti and raised in the Dominican Republic following his father’s exile in 1948. During the Dominican Revolution of 1965, he joined the rebel forces in support of ousted president Juan Bosch, fighting against the US-backed dictatorship. He was killed in battle at age twenty-three. His collected poems (Poesia Completa) was published in its original Spanish by Ediciones del Cielonaranja in 2006.

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.

Marvin Shackelford

Marvin Shackelford is the author of the collections Endless Building (poems) and Tall Tales from the Ladies’ Auxiliary (stories, forthcoming). His work has, or soon will have, appeared in Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, Bird’s Thumb, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. He resides in Southern Middle Tennessee, earning a living in agriculture.

Samyak Shertok

Originally from Nepal, Samyak Shertok’s honors include an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship in Poetry, a Northern Greece International Fellowship, the Bondurant Prizes for Poetry and Fiction, and a Best New Poets nomination. His poetry and prose appear in House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal, The Kathmandu Post, La.lit, Papercuts, and elsewhere. A recipient of scholarships from the Tebot Bach Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he recently performed his poetry at TEDxUniveristyOfMississippi. This August, he’ll be in Woody Creek, CO as the Aspen Words Writer in Residence.

Martha Silano

Martha Silano is the author of five books of poetry, including the just-released Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. She also co-edited, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for your Writing Practice. Martha’s work has recently appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She teaches at Bellevue College.

Márton Simon

Márton Simon was born in 1984 in Kalocsa, Hungary. His debut poetry collection was published in 2010 under the title Dalok a magasföldszintről (Songs from 3:45AM) and was reprinted in 2014. Simon rose to popularity in Hungary with his second book, Polaroidok (Polaroids), which appeared in 2013. He is now considered to be the most widely read contemporary poet in Hungary. His latest collection, Rókák Esküvője (Fox Wedding), hit bookshelves in the fall of 2018. Simon, along with a core group of poets he often collaborates with, brought slam poetry to Hungary and wove it into the fabric of Hungarian culture by organizing and presenting slam poetry performances, competitions, and workshops. In 2017, he and drummer Levente Boros released an experimental spoken word album titled Mielőtt megszólalsz (Before You Speak). In 2015, Simon earned a degree in Japanese from the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church. He translates English-language and Japanese writers such as Jennifer Egan, Etgar Keret, Shuntaro Tanikawa, and Ryuichi Tamura into Hungarian. He has received numerous awards and grants for his work, including the Makói Medal, the Móricz Zsigmond Literary Fellowship, the Visegrad Fund Literary Scholarship for Krakow, Horváth Péter Literary Fellowship. He lives in Budapest.

Rose Strode

Rose Strode is a poet and essayist whose work has been published in The Gettysburg Review and Poet Lore, and is forthcoming in The Broad River Review. She is a grateful recipient of the 2018-19 Gulick Fellowship at Valpariso University, and a student in the Poetry MFA program at George Mason University. Rose teaches at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and works as a volunteer gardener at a Buddhist Temple.

Khal Torabully

Khal Torabully is a critically acclaimed poet, essayist, film director, and semiologist who has authored over twenty-five books. He was born in 1956 in Mauritius — an African island nation located in the Indian Ocean, 1200 miles from the continent’s southeastern coast — and mainly writes in French and Mauritian Creole. His father was a sailor from Trinidad, and his mother, of Indian and Malaysian ancestry, came from a long line of migrants who came to Mauritius. Torabully likes to say that his mother tongue is “poetry.” His work is almost entirely unknown in the United States.

Lee Upton

Lee Upton is the author of Visitations: Stories, and Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles: Poems, as well as The Tao of Humiliation and other books. She is the writer in residence at Lafayette College.

Laura Villareal

Laura Villareal is from a tiny town in Texas with more cows than people. She earned her MFA from Rutgers University — Newark. Her writing can be found in Black Warrior Review, Vinyl, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the author of The Cartography of Sleep (Nostrovia! Press 2018). More of her writing can be found at lauravillareal.com.

Arriel Vinson

Arriel Vinson is an Indiana native who writes about being young, black, and in search of freedom. She is an MFA Fiction candidate at Sarah Lawrence College and received a B.A. in Journalism from Indiana University. Her poetry has appeared in [PANK], HeART Journal Online, and also won third place prize in LUMINA Journal, judged by Donika Kelly. Her fiction has been featured in Lunch Ticket. Arriel's work has also appeared in Electric Lit.

Rushi Vyas

Rushi Vyas was named a finalist for the 2018 National Poetry Series and runner-up for the 2018 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. He holds a degree from the University of Michigan and an MFA from the University of Colorado-Boulder where he taught creative writing and served as Managing Editor of Subito Press and TIMBER Journal. Recent poems have been published in Tin House, Adroit Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, the Offing, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

Wendy Wimmer

Wendy Wimmer is a Black Mountain Institute fiction fellow at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. She is the fiction editor of Witness literary journal and the founder of UntitledTown book and author festival in Wisconsin. Her work has been published in Barrelhouse, Blackbird, Per Contra, ANMLY, Drunken Boat, Paper Darts, Non-Binary Review, Salt & Syntax, and more. She was most recently a featured reader at Believer Fest 2018 and her short story collection was a semi-finalist for the Hudson Prize. She lives in Nevada but her heart remains in the Midwest. Follow her on Twitter or her very irregular website.

Kathleen Winter

Kathleen Winter is the author of two poetry collections, I will not kick my friends (2018), winner of the Elixir Prize, and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, which won the Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, New Republic, New Statesman, Agni, Cincinnati Review, Memorious, and Poetry London. She was granted fellowships by Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Dora Maar House, James Merrill House, Cill Rialaig Project, and Vermont Studio Center. Awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award, and the Johnston Fellowship at University of Texas’s Dobie Paisano Ranch.

Robert Wrigley

Robert Wrigley lives in the woods in northern Idaho, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes. His most recent book is Box (Penguin, 2017).