Issue Eighty: March 2016
Sarah Blackman is the director of creative writing at the Fine Arts Center, a magnet arts high school in Greenville, South Carolina, where she lives with her partner, poet John Pursley III, and their two daughters. She is the co-fiction editor of DIAGRAM and the founding editor of Crashtest, an online magazine for high school age writers and artists. Her poetry and prose have recently appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, APR, Conjunctions, Western Humanities Review, and The Collagist among other magazines. Her story collection, Mother Box and Other Tales, was the winner of the 2012 Ronald Sukineck/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Award from Fc2 and her novel, HEX, is brand-spanking new from the same press in April, 2016.
Catherine Carberry is a writer and editor based in Spain. Her fiction has appeared in journals including North American Review, Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Sou'wester, Greensboro Review, and Tin House online. Her interviews and criticism appear in The White Review and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she served as Assistant Editor of Mid-American Review, and has more recently read for The Paris Review.
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and received her MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. The recipient of awards from Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest, Nimrod Journal's Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets, her work appears in Best New Poets 2015, Narrative, North American Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.
James M. Chesbro’s essays have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, The Washington Post, Brain, Child Magazine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Connecticut Review, The Huffington Post, Under the Gum Tree, AOL.com, The Good Men Project, Superstition Review, Pilgrim, The Connecticut Post, and Spiritus, among others. His essays have been listed as notable selections in The Best American Sports Writing 2014 and The Best American Essays 2012, 2014, 2015. Follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Jamie_Chesbro.
Francine Conley is a maker who writes, performs, and teaches. She works on poems and a manic mixture of things. She has a chapbook, How Dumb the Stars (Parallel Press, 2001) and otherwise poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as: New England Review American Literary Review, Juked, Paris-Atlantic, Shadowgraph Magazine, Asteri(x) Journal, Naugatuck Review, Hartskill Review, and Palaver. She earned an MFA from Warren Wilson.
Robert Long Foreman's fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Shirley, and River Teeth, among others. A collection of his essays, Among Other Things, isforthcoming from Pleiades Press. He has written an unpublished novel about Weird Pig, and more Weird Pig stories are available at Cannibal Alley. He is Fiction Editor at The Cossack Review and can be found on Twitter @RobertLong4man.
Rochelle Hurt is the author of two poetry collections: In Which I Play the Runaway (forthcoming in 2016), winner of the Barrow Street Book Prize, and The Rusted City, published in the Marie Alexander Series from White Pine Press (2014). Her work has been included in Best New Poets 2013 and awarded prizes from Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, and Poetry International. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have also appeared in journals like Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, and The Southeast Review. She is a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati and Assistant Editor for the Cincinnati Review.
Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit and is a poetry student in University of Michigan's MFA program. His writings have been given homes by The Journal, Word Riot, The Puritan, and CURA, among others. You can find him on Twitter @Marlin_Poet.
Kjerstin Kauffman taught creative writing at Johns Hopkins University before moving recently to Valparaiso, Indiana. Her poems appear in or are forthcoming from Gulf Coast, 32 Poems, Unsplendid, and elsewhere, and her essays are forthcoming from The Cresset and The American Poetry Review.
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.
Matthew Minicucci is the author of two collections of poetry: Translation (Kent State University Press, 2015), chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the 2014 Wick Poetry Prize, and Small Gods (New Issues, 2017), forthcoming from New Issues Press in 2017. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2014, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily, among others. He currently teaches writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign.
Liz Purvis is an MFA candidate in poetry at NC State and poetry editor for The Fem, an online inclusive and intersectional literary magazine. Her work has been published in Deep South Magazine, Damselfly Press, and Colonnades, among others. In 2015, her poem “Before the Movie” was nominated for Independent Best American Poetry by Cahoodaloodaling.
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.
Quinton Soemardi is a writer currently living in Asheville North Carolina. He is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College Creative Writing Department and his work has appeared in The Peal, The Swannanoa Journal, and Wussy Mag.
Angela Woodward’s collection Origins and Other Stories won The Collagist 2014 prose chapbook competition, and will be out from Dzanc in 2016. Her novel Natural Wonders, also forthcoming in 2016, was the winner of the 2015 Fiction Collective Two Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. She is also author of the collection The Human Mind and the novel End of the Fire Cult.