Issue Ninety-Seven: June 2018
Elise Blackwell is the author of five novels, most recently The Lower Quarter. Her short prose has appeared in Witness, Brick, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. Her work has been named to various best-of-the-year lists, translated, adapted for the stage, and served as inspiration for a Decemberists' song.
Karen Brennan is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is a hybrid short fiction collection, Monsters. The micro-memoirs in this issue are part of a longer work-in-progress, Television. She teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Brian Burmeister teaches communication at Iowa State University. He is a regular contributor at Cleaver Magazine, and his writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He can be followed on Twitter.
Thomas Carrigan lives in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City, and has been an educator in several schools and colleges. As a librarian, he has managed digital resources, taught information literacy, promoted poetry in classrooms, and integrated graphic novels in the ELL curriculum. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, and Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature.
Derick Dupre's work is featured or forthcoming in publications including NOON, New York Tyrant, Eyeshot, and Hobart. He lives in southern Arizona.
Steven Felicelli is the author of two novels (White/Purgatorio Press, Notes Toward a Monograph of the Moment/Six Gallery Press) and essays/reviews appearing in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Rumpus, Rain Taxi, 3 AMMagazine, Minor Literature(s), Berfrois, and The Millions.
Charles Holdefer is an American writer currently based in Brussels. His short fiction has appeared in the New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Slice,as well as in the 2017 Pushcart Prize anthology. Recent books include Dick Cheney in Shorts (stories) and George Saunders's Pastoralia: Bookmarked (nonfiction).
Dylon Jones is a poet, essayist and journalist based in Louisville, Kentucky, where he serves as the web editor for Louisville Magazine. His narrative journalism has earned him first-place awards in feature writing and profile reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists. His poems also appear in Tinderbox Poetry Journal.
Colleen Kolba is a writer and cartoonist. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, and Entropy, among others. Currently, she is a Digital Teaching Fellow at the University of South Florida.
Mai Nardone is a Thai and American writer. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Catapult, Electric Literature, Guernica, Indiana Review, the Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. He lives in Bangkok.
Lance Olsen is author of more than 25 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novel Dreamlives of Debris. The excerpt that appears in this issue is from his novel My Red Heaven, forthcoming from Dzanc in 2020. A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah, where he directs the creative writing program.
Caryl Pagel is the author of two collections of poetry, Twice Toldand Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death; her essays have appeared in AGNI, Entropy, Essay Press, Wave Composition, and The Mississippi Review. Caryl is the co-founder and editor of Rescue Press and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center as well as an assistant professor at Cleveland State University, where she teaches in the NEOMFA program.
Ron Riekki's books include And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017, Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal Great Lakes Best Regional Fiction and finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award), The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book awarded by the Library of Michigan and finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, Midwest Book Award, Foreword Book of the Year, and Next Generation Indie Book Award), and U.P.: a novel.
Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of three books, most recently Ruination (Spuyten Duyvil, forthcoming 2018). Other prose, poetry, and criticisms can be found in or are forthcoming from Flaunt Magazine, The Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, Washington Square Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She serves as co-Poetry Editor of DIAGRAM, and is an Assistant Professor of English at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio.
Sarah J. Sloat splits her time between Frankfurt and Barcelona, where she works as a news editor. Her poems and prose have appeared in The Offing, The Journal, and Sixth Finch, among other journals and anthologies.
Liza St. James is a writer and translator from San Francisco. She is editor-at-large for Transit Books and associate editor of the literary annual NOON. Her fiction has been translated into Finnish.
Robert E. Tanner is a novelist no longer living in Brooklyn. This essay made possible with the generous support of Jentel.
Hope Wabuke, poet, essayist, and critic, is the author of the chapbooks The Leaving, Movement No.1: Trains, and her, forthcoming in late 2018. She is a contributing editor for The Root, where she originated a column on literature of the global African diaspora, and has published widely in various magazines, among them The Guardian, Salon, Ms. Magazine online, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, and The Sun. Hope has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Times Foundation, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers, Yale University's THREAD Writer's Program, and the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA). She is also an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Daniel Davis Wood is a novelist and essayist based in Birmingham. His début novel, Blood and Bone, won the 2014 Viva La Novella Prize, and his literary criticism has been shortlisted for the Observer/Anthony Burgess Foundation Prize for Arts Journalism and a Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellowship. He blogs at Infinite Patience and he also edits and writes for Splice, a small press and online review of adventurous, unconventional literature.