Issue Ninety-Eight: August 2018
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain't Worth Much was released in 2016 and was nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in fall 2017 by Two Dollar Radio. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, will be released in 2019 by Tin House. His second collection of nonfiction, They Don't Dance No' Mo', will be released by Random House in 2020.
Kaveh Akbar's poems appear recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His first book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, was published by Alice James Books in 2017. Born in Tehran, Iran, he currently teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.
Jacob M. Appel is the author of fifteen books including Millard Salter's Last Day (2017) and The Amazing Mr. Morality (2018).
Fatimah Asghar is the creator of the Emmy-Nominated Web series Brown Girls, now in development for HBO. She is the author of If They Come For Us (One World/ Random House August 2018) and a recipient of a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. In 2017 she was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Nicholas Bredie's first novel Not Constantinople (Dzanc) was named of the best of 2017 by The Morning News. With Joanna Howard, he is the translator of Frédéric Boyer's novella Cows (Noemi Press). His writing has been published in Guernica, The Fairy Tale Review, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Puerto del Sol, Lucky Peach and The Brooklyn Rail among others.
Justin Brouckaert's work has appeared in The Rumpus, DIAGRAM and Bat City Review, among many other publications. A native Michigander, he now lives in the greater New York City area. He is at work on a novel.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, New England Review, AGNI, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpus.
Olivia Cronk is the author of Louise and Louise and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016) and Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012). With Philip Sorenson, she edits The Journal Petra.
Ally Day is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo and co-editor of the international peer-reviewed journal, Disability Studies Quarterly. She has published academic work in Feminist Formations, The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and a/b: Journal of Auto/biography Studies, among others. She is currently completing her first book manuscript, The Political Economy of Stigma.
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), recipient of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and a 2018 Arab American Book Prize. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia is a Cave Canem fellow and holds an MFA from The New School. Her work appears in several journals and anthologies and has been translated into Arabic, Japanese, Estonian, Portuguese, and Greek, and has been commissioned by Under Armour and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).
Camonghne Felix, M.A. is a poet, political strategist, media junkie and cultural worker. She received an M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, and has received Fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo and Poets House. The 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee is the author of the chapbook Yolk, and was recently listed by Black Youth Project as a "Black Girl From the Future You Should Know." Her first full-length collection of poems, Build Yourself a Boat, was a 2017 University of Wisconsin Press Brittingham & Pollak Prize finalist, a 2017 Fordham University Poets Out Loud semi-finalist, and is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2019.
Jessica Hudgins is a writer living in Mansfield, Georgia. Her work appears in Indiana Review, Pleiades, and The Journal.
Stewart Lindh is a Marine Corps veteran who received his doctorate under the direction of Roland Barthes at the École des hautes études. His poetry and prose have appeared in The Antioch Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, and Paris Voices. A feature-produced screenwriter and published novelist, Lindh now works with veterans writing groups.
Steven Markow is a writer and comedian in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been published by McSweeney's, Paste Magazine, and The New Yorker. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at @Steven_Markow.
David Nilsen is a writer living in western Ohio. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Millions, Rain Taxi, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Bright Wall Dark Room, and numerous other publications. When he isn't doing literary writing, he works as a beer and food journalist and educator, and is a Certified Cicerone.
Travis Price received his MFA in fiction from North Carolina State University. His work has appeared in pioneertown. He is from Philadelphia and currently lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Catie Rosemurgy has two collections of poetry, both published by Graywolf Press. She has received fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the College of New Jersey.
Maya Sonenberg's most recent publication is After the Death of Shostakovich Père, a chapbook of prose and photos from PANK. Other works have appeared in Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, Hotel Amerika, and elsewhere. Her short story collections are Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize) and Voices from the Blue Hotel. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Caitlin Vance is a poet and fiction writer from Washington state. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House,The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Washington Square Review, The Literary Review, and other magazines. She received an MFA from Syracuse University, and is currently a PhD student at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.