Issue Eighty-Seven: October 2016
James Tadd Adcox is the author most recently of a novella, Repetition, and a novel, Does Not Love. His work has appeared in Granta, Barrelhouse, and CutBank, among other places.
Laurie Blauner’s fourth novel, called The Solace of Monsters, won the 2015 Leapfrog Fiction Contest. She’s the author of three previous novels, all from Black Heron Press, and seven books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Caketrain, The Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, and The Best Small Fictions 2016, and many other magazines.
Amber Nicole Brooks currently serves as the Nonfiction Editor for The Chattahoochee Review. Her work appears in various literary journals and online magazines.
Safia Elhillo’s first full-length collection, The January Children, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in 2017. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, a Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor at Kinfolks Quarterly: a journal of black expression, she received an MFA in poetry at the New School. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize, and winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets.
Isabelle Gilbert is from Los Angeles, California and Atlanta, Georgia. She is a writer and a Pilates instructor and is currently living in Atlanta. She will soon have her MFA in creative writing from Cornell University.
Jacob S. Knabb is a Social Media and Communications manager for a large not-for-profit. In a past life he was Senior Editor at Curbside Splendor Publishing, Editor-in-Chief of Another Chicago Magazine, and taught publishing and creative writing at Lake Forest College. Follow him on instagram @hambonehambone.
Alexander Lumans was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. He was also awarded a fellowship to the 2015 Arctic Circle Residency, where he sailed around Svalbard, Norway in a tall ship. His fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Story Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Cincinnati Review, among others. He has been awarded fellowships to MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, Blue Mountain Center as well as scholarships to Sewanee and Bread Loaf. He received the 2015 Wabash Fiction Prize from Sycamore Review, the 2013 Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, and the 2011 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize from Yalobusha Review. He graduated from the MFA Fiction Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He lives and teaches in Denver, Colorado.
Alba Machado is currently finishing up a satirical novel inspired by her experience as Chicago Public School teacher, which is her last step towards earning an MFA in Fiction from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Reader, Curbside Splendor, Knee-Jerk Magazine, Gapers Block, and others.
Andrew McAlpine is a poet and teacher living in Amherst, MA. He is a member of both the Connecticut River Valley Poets’ Theater and Xfinity Theater, where he has played demons, henchmen, a werewolf, and Al Roker.
Hannah Rose Neuhauser lives in Louisville, KY. She has a BA in English from Centre College. Her work has appeared in Cactus Heart, Luna Luna, Maudlin House, and apt.
A founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, Kathleen Rooney is the co-editor of Rene Magritte: Selected Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and her second novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in January 2017.
Miranda Schmidt’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Driftwood Press, Gingerbread House, and other journals. She lives with her partner and two cats in Portland, Oregon where she edits the Sun Star Review and teaches at Portland Community College. A graduate of the University of Washington's MFA program, Miranda is currently at work on a project inspired by shapeshifting fairy tales.
Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a poet and essayist from Houston, Texas. She is the author of the poetry collection Fuego (Saint Julian Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in Pebble Lake Review, Storyscape Literary Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Hermeneutic Chaos, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Her personal essays have appeared in the Huffington Post, Houston Chronicle, The Toast, Ozy, and Dame Magazine. She holds an MFA in poetry from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a BA in English from Rice University.
Michael B. Tager is a writer of many short stories, essays and poems. He is the editor of Writers and Words, a monthly Baltimore reading series and the literary journal, The Avenue. He writes video game essays for Cartridge Lit.
Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren't: A Memoir and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in journals such as Brevity, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Paris Review Daily, Passages North, The Normal School, Slice Magazine and has been selected as Notable in Best American Essays 2014, 2015, and 2016.
Michael VanCalbergh received his MFA in Poetry from Rutgers-Newark where he currently teaches writing and comics. When not explaining the difference between collectibles and toys to his three year old, he is one half of the podcast Words for Dinner. His work has appeared in Apex, Naugatuck River Review, Weave, and others.