Issue Sixty-Seven: February 2015
Sarah Blackman is the director of creative writing at the Fine Arts Center, an arts dedicated public high school in Greenville, South Carolina. She is also the co-Fiction Editor at DIAGRAM and the founding editor of Crashtest, Some of her recent prose has appeared in Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Western Humanities Review and the anthology Meta-Writings; Towards a Theory of Nonfiction among other journals. Her story collection Mother Box was published by FC2 in 2013.
Nora Boydston is a founding editor of Broke literary journal and earned her MFA at The New School. She currently resides in Chicago and teaches writing and communication.
Marie Curran lives and writes in Marquette, Michigan. Her writing has been published in Rind Literary Magazine and Mutha. She is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University.
Jeremy M. Davies is the author of two novels, Rose Alley (2009) and Fancy (Ellipsis Press, February, 2015). He has for some time been Senior Editor at Dalkey Archive Press.
Melissa Ferrone attends West Virginia University’s MFA program, where she also teaches Composition and Rhetoric. Her nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, The Baltimore Review, The Pinch, and The Fourth River, among others. She has essays forthcoming in The Normal School, and The Colorado Review.
Jeannine Hall Gailey recently served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of four books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, and the upcoming The Robot Scientist's Daughter. She reviews poetry for The Rumpus and her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Iowa Review. Her web site is www.webbish6.com.
Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (both from Wipf & Stock). He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives. He also serves as Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review, and his poems, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including American Literary Review, Contemporary Poetry Review, Image, New England Review, Poetry East, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Chronicle.
Joshua R. Helms is Assistant Editor for Corium Magazine. Their work has appeared in Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review, Gertrude, New England Review, Redivider, and Sonora Review, among others. Machines Like Us, Josh's first collection of poetry, was chosen by C. Dale Young as the winner of Dzanc's inaugural Poetry Collection Award and will be published in 2015.
Nick Kocz's short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine (ACM), Black Warrior Review, Five Chapters, Mid-American Review, and Web Conjunctions. His essays and book reviews have appeared in The Collagist, Entropy, and The Nervous Breakdown. He has an MFA from Virginia Tech, and is the recipient of fellowships from Virginia Tech and the MacDowell Colony. He currently lives in Blacksburg, VA with his wife and three rambunctious children.
Leslie Pietrzyk's collection of unconventionally linked short stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and is forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in fall 2015. Included is "One True Thing." She is the author of two novels, Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and A Day, and her short fiction has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Sun, and other journals. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and teaches fiction in Converse College's low-residency MFA program. (@lesliepwriter)
Nick Francis Potter lives in Missouri with his wife and two boys. His first book, New Animals, will be published by Subito Press this fall. (nickfrancispotter.tumblr.com)
Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, performer and Torah teacher. Her book, Divinity School, was awarded the APR/Honickman First Book Prize and is forthcoming in fall 2015. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Boston Review, 6x6 and American Poetry Review. Alicia tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, an art-pop song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two small children.
Danez Smith is the author of "[insert] boy" (YesYes Books, 2014) and the chapbook "black movie", winner of the 2015 Button Poetry Prize. He is a 2014 Ruth Lilly-Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and holds other fellowships from Cave Canem, VONA, and the McKnight Foundation. He lives in Minneapolis.
Justin Thurman’s work has appeared in Cimarron Review, The Masters Review, Fiddleblack, Corium Magazine, and Monday Night Lit, among others. He earned his Ph. D. with a concentration in rhetoric and writing studies from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He teaches at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia.