Issue Eighty-One: April 2016
manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is a poet and artist from the Bronx. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming at Rhizome, the Offing, HOUSE Gallery, General Fine Arts, Apogee Journal, Gauss PDF, and elsewhere. Their first book, List of Consonants, is available from Bottlecap Press. Find them @Deezius.
Kaveh Akbar founded and edits Divedapper. His poems are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, will be out with Sibling Rivalry Press in early 2017.
Zsófia Bán (b. Rio de Janeiro, 1957) grew up in Brazil and Hungary. A writer, essayist, and critic of art and literature, she made her fiction debut in 2007 with Esti iskola [Night School: A reader for adults]. Her short stories have been widely anthologized. She lives and works in Budapest.
Ruth Gila Berger lives in Minneapolis too long now to say she's a New York transplant but she does. In her house are her wife, three cats and a youth there from the Avenues GLBT Host Home program. Ruth has been published by a wide variety of journals and been a finalist for a variety of awards. Freeze Frame is one piece of a hot mess memoir collection that seeks to answer the question can damage heal damage.
Meghan Dunn lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she teaches high school English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Southern Humanities Review, Inch, and Post Road, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and a BA in English from Boston College.
Holly Iglesias’s works include Angles of Approach, Souvenirs of a Shrunken World, and Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Edward Albee Foundation. Her current projects are The Sturdy Child of Terror, a poetry collection about Cold-War childhood, and translation of the work of Cuban poet Nicolás Padrón.
Melinda (Mindy) LePere, a retired Detroit teacher, holds an MFA from Vermont College and has participated in the Springfed Arts writing community for many years. Her work has been published in the anthology At the Edge of Mirror Lake, in The Paterson Review, The MetroTimes, The MacGuffin, The Valparaiso Review, Juked, Mantis and The Ambassador Poetry Project. She received a nomination for a Pushcart. Mindy’s affinity for the surreal is manifest in a fascination with puppets, fairy tales and the ordinary strangeness of life. It lurks in missing body parts and was incubated while teaching 20 years in the Detroit Public Schools.
Denton Loving is the author of the poetry collection, Crimes Against Birds (Main Street Rag, 2014), and editor of Seeking Its Own Level, an anthology of writings about water (MotesBooks, 2014). He serves as executive editor of drafthorse literary journal.
Ilana Masad is an Israeli-American writer and editor living in New York. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Printer's Row, McSweeney's, Tin House, Hobart, Hypertext Magazine, and more. She is the founder and host of The Other Stories, a podcast featuring new, emerging, and struggling writers.
Erika Mihálycsa is a lecturer in 20th century British literature at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania, and editor, together with Rainer J. Hanshe, of the literary and arts journal Hyperion, issued by Contra Mundum Press. She has translated Flann O'Brien, Beckett, Patrick McCabe, Jeanette Winterson and others into Hungarian.
Maggie Millner lives and writes in California. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Prelude Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, The Sonora Review, TYPO Magazine, and other publications.
Heather Nagami is a Kundiman fellow and the author of Hostile (Chax Press). Her poems have recently appeared in Zocalo Magazine and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. She was a finalist for the 2015 Rita Dove Poetry Prize.
David Peak's writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, 3:AM, Pank, Electric Literature, and Flaunt, among others. His book on horror, speculation, and extinction, The Spectacle of the Void, was published by Schism Press in 2014. He lives in Chicago where he is slowly working on a novel.
Mike Puican has had poems in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Bloomsbury Review, Cortland Review, and New England Review, among others. His poetry reviews have appeared in TriQuarterly, Kenyon Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and MAKE Magazine. He won the 2004 Tia Chucha Press Chapbook Contest for his chapbook, 30 Seconds. Mike was a member of the 1996 Chicago Slam Team and for the past ten years has been president of the board of the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago.
Emily Pulfer-Terino is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Stone Canoe, The Louisville Review, Juked, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, Stays The Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. She has been a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholar at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference and has been granted a fellowship for creative non-fiction at the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and she lives in Western Massachusetts.
Matt Runkle is a writer, cartoonist, printer, and book artist. His short fiction collection, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, was published in 2014 by Brooklyn Arts Press. "Plans" is excerpted from The Hitch: An Agamist Manifesto, an ongoing material novel consisting of ten wedding-themed chapbooks of various genres.
Adrian Van Young is the author of The Man Who Noticed Everything, a collection of stories, which won Black Lawrence Press’s St. Lawrence Book Award in 2011, and the novel Shadows in Summerland, forthcoming from ChiZine Publications this month. His fiction and non-fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, VICE, Slate, The Believer, and The New Yorker, among others. His work has also appeared in the anthologies States of Terror II and Gigantic Worlds. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is a regular contributor to Electricliterature.com. He lives in New Orleans with his wife Darcy and son Sebastian, where he teaches creative writing at Tulane University.
Ross White is the author of How We Came Upon the Colony (Unicorn Press) and the director of Bull City Press. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Best New Poets, and The Southern Review, among others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.