Issue Seventy: May 2015
Justin Bigos is the author of the poetry chapbook Twenty Thousand Pigeons (iO 2014). His poems and stories have appeared or will appear in magazines such as New England Review, Ploughshares, McSweeney's, The Gettysburg Review, and Ninth Letter, as well as Best American Short Stories 2015. Justin co-edits Waxwing and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University. He once killed Tim Cook on The Collagist.
Laurie Blauner is the author of three novels, Infinite Kindness, Somebody, and The Bohemians, all from Black Heron Press, as well as seven books of poetry. A novella called Instructions for Living was published in 2011 from Main Street Rag. Her most recent book of poetry, It Looks Worse than I Am, was published in 2014 as the first Open Reading Period selection from What Books Press. A poetry chapbook was published in 2013 from dancing girl press. She has received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship as well as Seattle Arts Commission, King County Arts Commission, 4Culture, and Artist Trust grants and awards. She was a resident at Centrum in Washington state and was in the Jack Straw Writers Program in 2007. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, and many other magazines. She lives in Seattle, Washington. Her web site is www.laurieblauner.com.
Maria Burns is a doctoral candidate at The University of Southern Mississippi, where she also teaches. Her short fiction has appeared in Euphony, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, The Panhandler, and Blackwater Review. Her non-fiction “Grand Guignol” is forthcoming in The Intentional.
Adam Day is the author of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and is the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, a PEN Emerging Writers Award, and an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Lana Turner, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He coordinates The Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia, Scotland, and the Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest.
Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of 13 books including All You Ask for Is Longing: Poems 1994- 2014 (2014 BOA Editions) and Scything Grace (2013 Etruscan Press). Recent poems in North American Review, and Best American Poetry 2014. He works in a pool hall in Erie, PA.
Janalyn Guo lives and writes in Austin, Texas. Her fiction has appeared in Interfictions, LIT, Birkensnake, The Bat City Review, Tarpaulin Sky, and other places. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Brown University. She is currently at work on a comic about the ghost of a sea captain.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth (Eraserhead Press), Zero Saints (coming this summer from Broken River Books), and a few other things no one will ever read. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Verbicide, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Marginalia, Entropy, HorrorTalk, The Lazy Fascist Review, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, Z Magazine, Out of the Gutter, Spinetingler Magazine, and other print and online venues.
Julie Iromuanya has short stories and novel excerpts appearing or forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Passages North, the Cream City Review , and the Tampa Review , among other journals. Her writing has been shortlisted for several awards, including the Glimmer Train Family Matters and Very Short Fiction prizes, the Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned her PhD from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Post-Graduate Fellow at the University of Dayton. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing and African and American studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Mr. and Mrs. Doctor is her first novel.
Trevor Ketner is a second year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Minnesota. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Bayou Magazine, Thrush Poetry Journal, the Sycamore Review, Pif Magazine, and other journals, as well as in Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland. Recently he received the 2014 Gesell Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2013 Wabash Prize for Poetry. He currently serves as a poetry reader for Slice Magazine and as a marketing assistant for Graywolf Press.
Eddie Kim received his MFA in Poetry from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is a Kundiman fellow from Seattle who served as the inaugural Pacific Northwest Kundiman Regional Chair. He spent two summers as poetry faculty at UVA's Young Writers Workshop and was invited as a poetry guest speaker for the Robinson School for Young Scholars. He is currently experiencing major life changes.
Meghan Lamb currently lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with her filmmaker husband, Jason, and her snow-eating dog, Greg. Her novella, Sacramento, was recently released on Solar Luxuriance Press. Her book, Silk Flowers, is forthcoming this year from Birds of Lace. Her work can also be found in Artifice, Pank, Alice Blue, Necessary Fiction, Spork, and Wigleaf.
Michael Jeffrey Lee is the author of Something in My Eye, a collection of stories. He lives in New Orleans.
Anne Sanow is the author of the linked story collection Triple Time, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Fiction, and has stories published in Dossier, the Kenyon Review, Web Conjunctions, and elsewhere. Her awards include the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction from the Chicago Tribune and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of The Arson People (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015), from which this excerpt appears, as well as Our Prayers After the Fire (Blue Square Press, 2014). She serves as Associate Editor of Denver Quarterly.
Judith Sollosy studied for her B.A. in English literature at Barnard College, Columbia University, and her M.A. at SUNY, Buffalo. Between 1975 and 2010 she was senior editor at Corvina Books, Budapest. Since 1982, she has been teaching translation, creative writing and American literature at ELTE, Budapest. Though she has translated Ady, Csáth, Dalos, Déry, Karinthy, and Nádas, she is best known as the translator of contemporary Hungarian writers Péter Esterházy (five novels, including Celestial Harmonies), Mihály Kornis (plays and short stories), István Örkény (two One Minute Story collections), and Lajos Party Nagy (one play and various). In 2010 she guest edited Writing from Hungary, the special Hungarian issue of Words Without Borders. She has co-authored Netting America: Introduction to American Culture and Literature and a college textbook on translation, Angol fordítóiskola (Corvina, Budapest, 1996). Her Hunglish into English. A Modern Guide for Modern Students, was published in 2007 by Corvina. Her own writings on translation have appeared in New European Writers, PEN America, and Words without Borders, among others. Her awards include the Hungarian PEN Club’s Ady Medal for popularizing contemporary Hungarian literature in the U.S.
Sándor Tar was born in the town of Hajdúsámson in 1941. Though he worked most of his life as a tool-maker in a medical equipment factory, he began publishing as a samizdat writer with the support of the Democratic opposition. After his works appeared in the progressive journal Holmi, he soon lost his job, but his writing career took off. One of the most highly respect novelists and short story writers of recent years, he was as popular with his fellow writers as he was with the public. (Péter Esterházy and Péter Nádas are but two of his admirers.) He died on January 30, 2005, at the height of his popularity, leaving behind what many consider the most unsparing depiction of the human cost of the post-Kádár era and the 1989 regime change. His publications include, among others, the existential-surrealist political thriller Szürke galamb (Gray Pigeon, Magvető, 1996), and ten collections of interconnected short stories many of which, such as A Mi utcánk (Our Street, Magvető, 1995), are regarded as novels. During his lifetime, he received fourteen prizes for his work, including the prestigeous Attila József Prize (1997) and the Sándor Márai Prize (1998).
Christian TeBordo is the author of four previous books, mostly recently a collection of short fiction called The Awful Possibilities. He lives with his family in Chicago, where he is director of the MFA Program and assistant professor of English at Roosevelt University.
Lisa Zerkle’s poems have appeared in the Southern Poetry Anthology, Broad River Review, Tar River Poetry, Nimrod, Sixfold, poemmemoirstory, Crucible, and Main Street Rag, among others. She is the author of Heart of the Light. She lives in Charlotte, NC where she is an editor of Kakalak.