Issue Eighty-Four: July 2016
Terry Blackhawk is the author of three chapbooks and four full-length collections of poetry including Escape Artist (BkMk Press), winner of the John Ciardi Prize, as well as The Dropped Hand and The Light Between. Among her awards are six Pushcart Prize nominations, the Foley Poetry Prize, the 2013 Springfed Arts Poetry Prize and the 2010 Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize from Nimrod International. A 2013 Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow, she has work on line at Verse Daily, Solstice and The Collagist, and in anthologies such as Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry, A Detroit Anthology, and When She Named Fire: Contemporary Poems by American Women.
Charlie Clark’s poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Smartish Pace, Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals. He has studied poetry at the University of Maryland and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Lee Conell lives in Nashville, where she was a fiction fellow in Vanderbilt University's MFA program. She currently leads fiction workshops in high schools, libraries, and hospitals, and is on faculty at the Sewanee Young Writers Conference. Her stories have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review online, Indiana Review, The Normal School, The Masters Review, Guernica, and elsewhere.
B.J. Hollars is the author of several books, most recently From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death, and Being Human, as well as a collection of essays, This Is Only A Test. In February, he’ll release Flock Together: A Love Affair With Extinct Birds. He serves as the reviews editor for Pleiades, a mentor for Creative Nonfiction, the founder of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Regan Huff lives in Seattle, Washington. Her work has appeared in publications including Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and poemmemoirstory.
Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and two story collections, Asunder and Good People. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches fiction writing at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College. A new novel, All Back Full, will be published by Dzanc Books in March, 2017.
Victoria McArtor holds an MFA from Oklahoma State University; works for a luxury residential mortgage team; and is cofounder of a new poetry and collaborative arts nonprofit, MUSED. Her book, Reverse Selfie, is coming soon and will be taught in local high schools with the intention of turning our perspectives from self to community.
Kate Petersen is from Arizona. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Zyzzyva, Epoch, Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She has received a Wallace Stegner fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a scholarship to the Tin House Writer’s Workshop, and currently teaches at Stanford University as a Jones Lecturer.
Veronica Popp is an Organizer for the United Academics Campaign, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. Her recent publications include Bust, Bitch, The Last Line, Gender Forum and The Fandom Studies Journal. The work titled Chiraq: War Cries, Love and Other Stories will be published by Northwestern University Press in Fall 2016. Find her tweeting about precarity at @veronicapopp.
Forrest Roth is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Marshall University in West Virginia. His novel Gary Oldman Is A Building You Must Walk Through will be forthcoming from What Books Press in Fall 2017, an excerpt from which appeared in issue #65 of The Collagist.
Ellen Stone teaches at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her poems have appeared recently in Passages North, Rust + Moth, and Lunch Ticket. Ellen’s chapbook, The Solid Living World was published by Michigan Writers Cooperative Press.
Michael VanCalbergh is a professor at Rutgers-Newark, where he also received his MFA in Poetry. When not writing or teaching, he spends his time doing whatever his two year old demands of him. His work has appeared in Apex, Per Contra, The Naugatuck River Review, and others.