Issue Eighty-Six: September 2016
Sasha Banks is a poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Kinfolks Quarterly, Alight, Austin IPF, B O D Y Literature, and has been performed in Tulane University’s Vagina Monologues. Sasha is the creator of Poets for Ferguson and a MFA candidate at the Pratt Institute. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she is learning to be Black and spectacular at the same damn time.
Cristina J. Baptista is a Portuguese-American writer, educator, and bibliophile. Her work has appeared in Adanna, Structo Magazine, DASH, The Cortland Review, CURA, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection The Drowning Book is forthcoming (Finishing Line Press, 2017). A 2016 participant of The Home School Miami Writing Workshop, she is also the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award (2012) and winner of The Baltimore Review’s 2008 Poetry Contest. Cristina currently teaches American Literature at a private school in Connecticut and, in 2014-15, created a collection of poetry about her experience as a 38th Voyager—one of 85 people in the world selected to travel on the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, an 1841 wooden whaleship that is the last remaining one in the world. She served as a documenter of the Portuguese immigrant experience aboard whaleships during this Voyage.
Margo Berdeshevsky, born in New York city, often writes in Paris. Her recent poetry manuscript was finalist for the National Poetry Series, 2015. Her published poetry collections are Between Soul & Stone, and But a Passage in Wilderness (Sheep Meadow Press). Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough (University of Alabama Press), received Fiction Collective Two’s Innovative Fiction Award. Her works appear in Poetry International, New Letters, Kenyon Review, Plume, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, among others. A multi-genre novel, Vagrant, is at the gate, and a new story collection, Dark Muse Can Dance waits for lift off. She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, or somewhere new—in the world. Her "Letters from Paris" may be seen in Poetry International.
Elisabeth Lloyd Burkhalter graduated from the University of Virginia's Area Program in Poetry Writing and moved to Paris, where she organized conferences in the wood construction industry. Her poetry has appeared in the Mississippi Review and Cleaver Magazine. She now writes fiction in Bandjoun, Cameroon.
Christy Call and Ryan Call are sister and brother. Excerpts from their ongoing field guide to North American weather have been published by sleepingfish, Everyday Genius, NANO Fiction, LIT, Necessary Fiction, and Puerto del Sol. They live in Chattanooga and Houston respectively, but were born in Utah.
Christopher Citro is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy. He won the 2015 Poetry Competition at Columbia Journal, and his recent and upcoming publications include poetry in Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Best New Poets, Sycamore Review, The Journal, Sixth Finch, Columbia Poetry Review, Rattle, DIAGRAM, and Mid-American Review, and creative nonfiction in Boulevard and Colorado Review. He lives in Syracuse, NY.
Melanie Finn was born and raised in Kenya until age 11, when she moved with her family to Connecticut. After studying journalism at NYU, she worked as a freelance journalist and screenwriter for twenty years, living and working in six different countries. In 2004, her first novel, Away From You was published to international acclaim. The following year, she and her husband, the wildlife filmmaker Matt Aeberhard, moved to a remote region of Tanzania to make DisneyNature’s beautiful, haunting flamingo epic, The Crimson Wing. During the filming, Melanie became the medic to the local Masai community and established The Natron Healthcare Project. She now lives on a hill in Vermont with Matt, their twin daughters, three Tanzanian mutts and two very old horses.
Sara Greenslit has published two novels—As If a Bird Flew By Me, winner of the FC2 Sukenick/ABR Innovative Fiction Award, and The Blue of Her Body, winner of the Starcherone Innovative Fiction Award. She works as a small animal veterinarian in Madison, WI.
Stephen Massimilla’s (co-authored) volume Cooking with the Muse: A Sumptuous Gathering of Seasonal Recipes, Culinary Poetry, and Literary Fare is just out from Tupelo Press. Acclaim for his other books includes an SFASU Press Prize for The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat; the Bordighera/CUNY Prize for Forty Floors from Yesterday; the Grolier Prize for Later on Aiaia; a Van Renssalaer Award, selected by Kenneth Koch; and other honors. His poems have appeared in hundreds of publications from AGNI to Verse Daily. Massimilla holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia University and the New School.
Catherine McNamara is an Australian author living in Italy after many years in West Africa. Her collection Pelt and Other Stories was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in publications including Ambit, Structo, Southerly, Literary Orphans, Two Thirds North, Short Fiction, Litro, and Trafika Europe.
Susan Neville won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Richard Sullivan Prize for her collections of short fiction. She is the author of four books of creative nonfiction, including Fabrication and Sailing the Inland Sea, and she teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis and the Warren Wilson MFA for Writers.
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 has been published in Open Letters Monthly, Rain Taxi, Pithead Chapel, Punchnels, Bright Wall /Dark Room, the National Book Critics Circle Critical Mass journal, and many other places around the web. You can find him on Twitter @NilsenDavid.
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.
Michael B. Tager is a writer and editor. He is the author of the short story collection Always Tomorrow, the poem cycle Pop Culture Poems (Mason Jar Press, 2015) and the monthly column Retrogamer at Cartridge Lit. He is from Baltimore, where he lives with his wife and cats. He is frightened of clowns, wary of bears, and terrified of The Price is Right.