Issue Seventy-Nine: February 2016
Dilruba Ahmed’s debut book of poems, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), won the Bakeless Literary Prize for poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, and New Orleans Review. New poems are recent or forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Dusie, Memorious, and Rhino. Ahmed’s work has appeared or will appear in several anthologies, including Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s); Becoming: What Makes A Woman (University of Nebraska); and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas). Her writing has also appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review blog, the National Book Foundation blog, and The Kenyon Review Online. Ahmed is currently a Creative Writing Lecturer at Bryn Mawr College.
Desiree Bailey is a writer whose poetry and short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Best American Poetry, Transition, Muzzle and other publications. She has an MFA from Brown University and has received fellowships from Princeton in Africa, the Norman Mailer Center and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. She is also a recipient of the Poets and Writer's Amy Award. Desiree was born in Trinidad and Tobago and grew up in Queens, NY. She currently lives in Harlem where she is an educator and the fiction editor of Kinfolks Quarterly. Her work can be found at desireecbailey.com.
Robert Campbell’s poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Murray State University and an M.S. in Library Science from the University of Kentucky. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where he serves as Reference & Instruction Librarian at Transylvania University and Reviews Editor for DIALOGIST, an online journal of poetry and art.
Teresa Carmody's books include Maison Femme: a fiction and the short story collection Requiem. Additional work has appeared in Two Serious Ladies, Faultline, Entropy, Anomalous 11, and more; and her translation of a story by Gabriela Torres Olivares was recently published in Web Conjunctions. Carmody is co-founding director of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles and a PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at the University of Denver.
Les Kay is the author of Home Fronts (Sundress Publications, forthcoming 2016), and the chapbooks The Bureau (Sundress Publications, 2015) and Badass (Lucky Bastard Press, 2015) as well as a co-author of the chapbook Heart Radicals (ELJ Publications, 2016). He holds a PhD with a focus on Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from the University of Miami. His poetry has appeared widely in journals such as Ghost Town, Redactions, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, Sugar House Review, and The McNeese Review. He is also an Associate Editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection. Follow him at: http://www.leskay.com.
Meghan Lamb lives with her husband in St. Louis. Her novella Sacramento was recently released on Solar Luxuriance. Her book Silk Flowers is forthcoming in early 2016 from Birds of Lace. Her work can also be found in Necessary Fiction, Spork, wigleaf, and other places.
Fred Leebron has published several novels and numerous short stories, and has received both a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Award; he is also co-editor of Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology and co-author of Creating Fiction: A Writer’s Companion. He directs writing programs in Charlotte, Roanoke, Europe, Latin America, and Gettysburg.
Eric Magnuson's fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review Online, Camera Obscura, and Paper Darts, among other journals, while his journalism has been published in many magazines, including Rolling Stone, The Nation, and The Art Newspaper.
Ilana Masad is an Israeli-American writer for McSweeney's, Broadly, and Read It Forward. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Hobart, Hypertext, Split Lip, One Throne and more. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Other Stories, a podcast-cum-zine that features work by and interviews of new, emerging, and struggling writers. You can find her tweeting about stuff @ilanaslightly.
Jerry McGuire’s most recent book of poems, Venus Transit, won the 2012 Outriders Poetry competition. He teaches film studies, creative writing, and poetics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he is co-Director of the program in Creative Writing.
Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre, winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award (SIU Press 2013). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Boston Review, The Believer, Georgia Review, and Blackbird, and her creative nonfiction won the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize in Prose. She is editor-in-chief of The Account and an Assistant Professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Jessica Newman currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is a PhD student at the University of Louisville. Her work has been published in Caketrain, Redivider, PANK, Lac!/Lake and elsewhere. You can see more of her writing at outofskinpress.com.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Lucky Fish. She is the poetry editor of Orion magazine and her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Brevity, Poetry, Tin House, and in The Best American Poetry series. She is professor of English at The State University of New York at Fredonia, and in 2016-17, she will be the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
David Nilsen is a librarian and writer from Ohio. He is the lead critic for the Fourth & Sycamore literary journal and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He can be found on Twitter at @NilsenDavid and on his website at davidnilsenwriter.com.
Rachel 'Lemon' Reimer is a freelance artist living in Upstate New York, who is pursuing her secondary education at the New College of Florida. She is currently working on a career in sequential art and illustration through various webcomics, animatics, and personal projects. Her work has been published in the Good Life Journal and has been featured in various local galleries. You can find her work at www.rachelreimer.tumblr.com.
Jacob Singer’s work can be found at Curbside Splendor, The Handshake, and Anobium. He is currently finishing a picaresque novel inspired by corporate conspiracies, punk rock, and video games. He can be found on Twitter @jacobcsinger