Issue Sixty-Five: December 2014
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over twenty books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), Petrarchan (BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories 2007-2014 (BlazeVOX Books, 2014). Her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She was recently selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.
Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. is a poet, translator and corporate consultant. Her collection of poems, SERIES | INDIA, will be published by Four Way Books in April 2015, and other work has appeared in Little Star, Talisman, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. She has published translations from classical and contemporary Persian, and is currently collaborating on a translation of an oral version of the Tibeo-Mongolian folk epic, The Life of King Kesar of Ling. She holds a B. A. and J. D. from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. She lives in New York City.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth (Eraserhead Press) and a few other things no one will ever read. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Verbicide, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Entropy, HorrorTalk, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, Z Magazine, Out of the Gutter, Spinetingler Magazine, and other print and online venues.
Matthew Kirkpatrick is the author of Light Without Heat (FC2) and The Exiles (Ricochet Editions) and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University.
Lavinia Ludlow is a musician, writer, and occasional contortionist. Her debut novel alt.punk can be purchased through major online retailers as well as Casperian Books’ website. Her sophomore novel, Single Stroke Seven, was signed to Casperian Books and will release in the distant future. In her free time, she reviews small press books at Small Press Reviews, American Book Review, and now The Next Best Book Blog.
Michael Mejia’s novel Forgetfulness was published by Fiction Collective 2, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies. A recipient of grants from the NEA and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, he is co-founding editor of Ninebark Press and editor of Western Humanities Review. He teaches creative writing at the University of Utah. "Three Tales from the Japanese" is excerpted from a larger project, "To Visit a Place for the First Time Is Thereby to Begin to Write It," a mashup of 37 texts by Japanese authors and Western authors writing on Japan to which Michael has not added a single word of his own. The tales' titles, like the title of the larger project, are appropriated from Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs.
Jen Michalski is the author of the novel The Tide King (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), the couplet of novellas Could You Be With Her Now (Dzanc Books 2013), and two collections of fiction (From Here, Aqueous Books 2014 and Close Encounters, So New 2007). She lives in Baltimore, where she runs the reading series Starts Here! and the journal jmww.
Joe Milazzo is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie (Jaded Ibis Press) and The Habiliments (Apostrophe Books; forthcoming, 2015), a volume of poetry. Along with Janice Lee and Eric Lindley, Joe edits the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing]. He is also a Contributing Editor at Entropy and the proprietor of Imipolex Press. Joe lives and works in Dallas, Texas.
Rachel Richardson was a 2013-14 NEA Fellow and is the author of Copperhead (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared most recently in Guernica, Radar Poetry, and New England Review. She is a Contributing Editor at Memorious, and currently lives in Greensboro, NC.
Martha Rhodes is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The Beds (2012). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry. She is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books.
Forrest Roth teaches at Marshall University in West Virginia. He is the author of a novella, Line and Pause (BlazeVOX Books), and a prose poem chapbook, The Sullen Pages (Little Red Leaves). "Execution Letters" is taken from a manuscript in progress, with other selections appearing in alice blue review, Anomalous, Black Sun Lit, Heavy Feather Review, theNewerYork, and Vestiges.
Staci R. Schoenfeld received an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is the Managing Poetry Editor at Revolution House. A recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Kentucky Foundation for Women and residencies from the Ragdale Foundation, Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the New York Mills Regional Cultural Center, her poems appear in or are forthcoming from Greensboro Review, Washington Square, Southern Humanities Review, Muzzle, Hayden’s Ferry Review, diode, and South Dakota Review, among others.
Christopher X. Shade is a writer and book reviewer with stories in about twenty national and small press publications, and a novel set in Spain and France in agent circulation. A member of the NBCC, his book reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Southern Literary Review, New Orleans Review, Saint Ann's Review, and elsewhere. He was raised in the South, and now lives and works in NYC's East Village.
Anna B. Sutton is a writer and publisher from Nashville, TN. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Brevity, Southeast Review, Third Coast, Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, and other journals. She received her MFA from UNC Wilmington and a James Merrill fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. She is the co-founder of The Porch Writers' Collective, web editor at One Pause Poetry, poetry editor at Dialogist, a reader at Gigantic Sequins, and works in book publishing in Winston-Salem, NC.
Martha Webster is a nurse living in Amityville, New York. Her work is also forthcoming in Prairie Schooner.