Issue Fifty: September 2013
Julie Babcock's recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in various journals including Plume, Bateau, PANK, H_NGM_N, and The Bakery. She occasionally blogs at Literature and Transformation, writes reviews for Rain Taxi, and teaches at The University of Michigan.
Writer, poet, and painter Pierre Bettencourt (1917—2006) was, despite coming from a prominent family, a retiring figure and lifelong outsider artist. He printed his first works on a family-owned press during the Nazi occupation, and later published Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge, Henri Michaux, and Jean Dubuffet. A friend of Jean Paulhan, he was a frequent contributor to the Nouvelle revue française; Gallimard later put out a volume of his selected works. Ingeborg Kohn has translated a selection of his prose poems, Fables (2003), for the Tucson-based independent poetry publisher Chax Press.
Weston Cutter is from Minnesota, and is the author of All Black Everything and You'd Be a Stranger, Too.
Chris Daley teaches creative nonfiction for Writing Workshops Los Angeles and academic writing at Caltech. She has reviewed fiction and nonfiction, primarily on music and L.A. history, for the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Review of Books. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center, and she enjoys wasting time.
CJ Evans is the author of A Penance (New Issues Press, 2012) and a chapbook, The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets series. He is the recipient of the 2013 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, and his work has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, and Massachusetts Review. He's the editor of Two Lines Press and a contributing editor for Tin House.
Winner of the John Dryden Translation prize, Edward Gauvin has received fellowships and residencies from PEN America and PEN England, the NEA, the Fulbright program, the Lannan Foundation, Villa Gillet, the Centre National du Livre, and Ledig House. His volume of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's selected stories, A Life on Paper (Small Beer, 2010) won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award and was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Other translations have appeared in The New York Times, Subtropics, Tin House, Conjunctions, and The Southern Review.
Greg Gerke's fiction and non-fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, The Kenyon Review Online, LIT, Film Comment, and others.
Suzanne Marie Hopcroft's poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Nashville Review, and The Normal School. This fall, Suzanne is starting her MFA in poetry at The University of California, Irvine.
Robert Kloss is the author of The Alligators of Abraham and The Desert Places (with Amber Sparks and illustrated by Matt Kish), forthcoming from Curbside Splendor.
Dolly Laninga lives in St. Louis.
Janice Lee is a writer, artist, editor, designer, curator, and scholar. Interested especially in the relationships between metaphors of consciousness, theoretical neuroscience, and experimental narrative, her creative work draws upon a wide variety of sources. Her obsessive research patterns lead her to making connections between the realms of technology, consciousness studies, design theory, the paranormal & occult, biological anthropology, psychology, and literary theory. She is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), and Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, October 2013). She currently lives in Los Angeles where she teaches at CalArts & is Co-Editor of the online journal [out of nothing], Reviews Editor at HTMLGIANT, and Founder/CEO of POTG Design.
Alexander Lumans will be the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Creative Writing Resident at Bucknell University. He has been awarded fellowships/scholarships to the MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, ART342, Norton Island, RopeWalk Writers Retreat, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Sewanee Writers' Conference. He received the 2013 Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, 3rd place in the 2012 Story Quarterly Fiction Contest, and the 2011 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize from The Yalobusha Review. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Story Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, and The Normal School, among others. He is co-editor of the anthology Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days (December 2012, Upper Rubber Boot Books). He graduated from the M.F.A. Fiction Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he learned at a very early age, about flight. His mother, a high school English teacher, read to him of the adventures of Daedalus and Icarus from the book Mythology written by Edith Hamilton, who was born in Dresden, Germany, but who also grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Martone remembers being taken by his father to Baer Field, the commercial airport and Air National Guard base, to watch the air traffic there. He was blown backward on the observation deck by the prop-wash of the four-engine, aluminum-skinned Lockheed Constellation with its elegant three-tailed rudder turning away from the gates. At the same time, the jungle-camouflaged Phantom F-4s did touch-and-goes on the long runway, the ignition of their after-burners sounding as if the sky was being torn like blue silk. As a child growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Martone heard many stories about Art Smith, "The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne," and the adventures of this early aviation pioneer. In the air above the city, Martone, as a boy, imagined, "The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne" accomplishing, for the first time, the nearly impossible outside loop and then a barrel-roll back into a loop-to-loop in his fragile cotton canvas and baling wire flying machine he built in his own backyard in Fort Wayne, Indiana, whose sky above was the first sky, anywhere, to be written on, written on by Art Smith, "The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne," the letters hanging there long enough to be read but then smeared, erased by the high altitude wind, turning into a dissipating front of fogged memories, cloudy recollection.
Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre, which won the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award (SIU Press, 2013). She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Nicole Sheets is an Assistant Professor at Whitworth University and the web editor at Rock & Sling. Her work has appeared in Image, Western Humanities Review, Mid-American Review, Hotel Amerika, and other venues. She's really zeroing in on a killer kale chips recipe.
Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collection May We Shed These Human Bodies, and the co-author, with Robert Kloss and Matt Kish, of the upcoming The Desert Places.
Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc. 2011) and Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). A Cave Canem graduate, he has received several Bread Loaf scholarships. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Callaloo, The Southern Review, Sou'wester, West Branch, Blackbird and others. Phillip is currently a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis and is working on his MFA in Creative Writing and the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.
Claudia Zuluaga was born in White Plains, NY, grew up both there and Port St. Lucie, Florida, and now lives in New Jersey. She earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine, JMWW, and Lost Magazine, and was included in Dzanc Books's Best of the Web series. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories. Claudia is a full time Lecturer in the English department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.