Issue Twenty-Eight: November 2011
Roberta Allen is the author of eight books, including two collections of short fiction, The Traveling Woman (Vehicle Editions) and Certain People (Coffee House Press); a novella in short short stories, The Daughter (Autonomedia); a memoir, Amazon Dream (City Lights); the novel The Dreaming Girl (Painted Leaf, 2000, and Ellipsis Press, 2011); and several writing guides. Allen was on the faculty of The New School for many years and has also taught at Columbia University. She was a Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction in 1998. An established visual artist, she has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Josh Billings is a writer and translator who lives in Portland, Maine. He is currently attending nursing school. His translation of Alexander Kuprin's The Duel was released by Melville House Publishing in August.
After studying law Melissa Chadburn obtained an MFA from Antioch University. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Guernica, PANK Magazine, WordRiot, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Splinter Generation, Northville Review, and she is a regular contributor to The Nervous Breakdown. Reach her at fictiongrrrl(at)gmail.com or follow her on twitter.
Renée E. D’Aoust’s memoir Body of a Dancer is forthcoming from Etruscan Press, December 2011. She divides her time between northern Idaho, where she manages her family’s stewardship forest, and southern Switzerland, where she hikes with her husband Daniele and dachshund Tootsie. D’Aoust teaches online at North Idaho College and has published widely, including most recently in Cavalier Literary Couture, Culture Vulture, Drunken Boat, Rhino, and Trestle Creek Review. For more information about Body of a Dancer and upcoming readings, please visit www.reneedaoust.com.
Peter Fontaine is a PhD student in Creative Writing-Fiction at Georgia State University. You can find more of his book reviews in The Southeast Review, The Montserrat Review, and here at The Collagist.
Angie Macri’s recent work appears in Ecotone, Limestone, and The Pinch, among other journals, and is included in Best New Poets 2010. A recipient of an individual artist fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council, she teaches in Little Rock.
Michael C. Peterson is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, but is currently without a state to call his own. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Fence, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, american letters & commentary, and elsewhere. He has been recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Ryan Ridge is the author of the story collection Hunters & Gamblers and the poetry collection Ox. In 2013, Mud Luscious Press will publish his novel(la) American Homes. He lives in Long Beach, California, and is working on the second book of his American trilogy, American Literature. Visit him online at ryanridge.com.
Joseph Salvatore has published fiction and criticism in The Brooklyn Rail, The Collagist, Dossier Journal, H.O.W. Journal, LIT, New York Tyrant, Open City, Post Road, Salt Hill, Sleeping Fish, Willow Springs, 110 Stories (NYU Press, 2001), and Routledge's Encyclopedia of Queer Culture (2003). His debut collection of short stories, To Assume A Pleasing Shape, will be published this month by BOA Editions. He is a frequent fiction reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, a contributing book review editor at The Brooklyn Rail, and an assistant professor at The New School, where he founded their literary journal, LIT, and was awarded the University's Award for Teaching Excellence. He lives in New York.
John Shortino is currently pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Temple University. His essays and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Opium, and The Sonora Review.
Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle with his cat, Emmett. He is the author of the novella A Jello Horse (Publishing Genius Press, 2009), and the short collection The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge (Keyhole Press, 2010).
Emma Smith-Stevens is from New York City and currently lives in Gainesville, where she is an MFA candidate at the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions.
Mark Snyder’s play As Wide As I Can See will be produced off-Broadway this winter in New York by At Hand Theatre. His plays include Lila Cante, Corsets, Wipe Away, The Beanbag Game, Lilith on Today, The Sounds of Ice, and A Decent Stretch. For three summers, he hosted and performed in Red Light Nights at New York’s The Slipper Room (Firecracker Productions). His plays have been produced and developed in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Portland. His interviews and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The New Gay, Queerty, ThePeeq, and at Maud Newton.com, and he has read new work at Pete’s Candy Store (courtesy of the2ndHand.com) and throughout downtown NYC. BA, Otterbein College. MFA, Ohio University. Mark was born in Warren, Ohio and lives in Brooklyn.
Christian TeBordo's most recent book, a collection of short fiction called The Awful Possibilities, is available from featherproof. He lives in Philadelphia where he co-curates the TireFire Reading Series.
J. A. Tyler is the author of Inconceivable Wilson, A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed, and A Shiny, Unused Heart. He is also founding editor of Mud Luscious Press. For more, visit: www.chokeonthesewords.com.
Ross White is the editor of Inch, a magazine of short poetry and microfiction, and the publisher of Bull City Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Poetry Daily, BOXCAR Poetry Review, and Meridian, among others. Ross is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a co-founder of The Hinge Literary Center, which serves writers in North Carolina.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is the author of the chapbook Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010) and is currently an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He was a semi-finalist for the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and has received an Academy of American Poets award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations. Poems appear in RHINO, diode, Lantern Review, Softblow, Crate, and PANK, among others. He keeps a blog at www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com.
Gabriel Welsch writes both fiction and poetry. His third collection of poems, The Death of Flying Things, is due in June 2012. Previous collections are Dirt and All Its Dense Labor(2006) and An Eye Fluent in Gray, a chapbook (2010). Recent work appears in Southern Review, New Letters, PANK, Whiskey Island, Knock, and Chautauqua. He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his family, and works as vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College.