2015 Spring

Michael Aakhus has been professor of printmaking and painting at the University of Southern Indiana since 1977, and currently serves as the dean for the College of Liberal Arts. He was born in Minnesota on the Canadian border and attended Bemidji State University where he earned a BA in art and art history. Aakhus received an MFA in printmaking, painting, and drawing from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and in 1976-77 he was the recipient of a grant to continue his creative work with the Roswell Artist in Residence Program where he spent a year painting and making prints in New Mexico.

Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator; his most recent collection of poetry is The Real Cause for Your Absence (C&R Press, 2013); his recent translations include Eros Is More, by Juan Antonio González Iglesias (Alice James Books, 2014); From Behind What Landscape, by Luis Muñoz (forthcoming from Vaso Roto Ediciones in 2015); and Baghdad and Other Poems, a bilingual chapbook of poems by Jorge Gimeno (forthcoming from Poets@Work Press in 2015). Bauer is the publisher and editor of Q Avenue Press Chapbooks and Broadsides, Spanish Translations editor for From the Fishouse, and he teaches at Texas Tech University.

Jenna Bazzell has an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. She won the 2010 AWP Intro Journal Award for her poem “Wet Field” and received publication in Hayden’s Ferry Review. She received Honorable Mention from the Academy of American Poets Prize for her poems “Into the Damp Woods” and “Drought.” Other publications are in Passages North, Cream City Review, Crab Orchard Review, Sou’wester, and Southern Indiana Review. She is the associate editor of Cimarron Review and publishes interviews of contemporary poets on PoemoftheWeek.org.

Adam Clay is the author of A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). A third book of poems is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review Online, Black Warrior Review, Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Clay co-edits TYPO Magazine and teaches at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Ansel Elkins is the author of Blue Yodel, which won the 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Believer, Oxford American, Parnassus, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as a “Discovery”/Boston Review award. In 2014 she was The Paris Review Writer-in-Residence at the Standard East Village. Born in Anniston, Alabama, she was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Stephen Frech has published three volumes of poetry: Toward Evening and the Day Far Spentwon the 1995 Wick Poetry Chapbook Contest; If Not For These Wrinkles of Darkness won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize (2001); and The Dark Villages of Childhood won the 2008 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Prize. A fourth volume, A Palace of Strangers Is No City, a sustained narrative of prose poetry/flash fiction, was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2011. His translation from the Dutch of Menno Wigman’s book of poems Zwart als kaviaar/Black as Caviar was published in 2012. He has been the recipient of the Elliston Poetry Writing Fellowship, the Milton Center Post-Graduate Writing Fellowship, and grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council. Frech is founder and editor of Oneiros Press, publisher of limited edition, letterpress poetry broadsides, and associate professor of English at Millikin University.

Benjamin S. Grossberg earned an MFA and PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. He is the author of the chapbook The Auctioneer Bangs His Gavel(2006), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Series, and the full-length poetry collections Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath (2007); Sweet Core Orchard (2009), winner of a 2010 Lambda Literary Award; and Space Traveler (2014). He teaches English and creative writing at the University of Hartford. Grossberg is the assistant poetry editor of the Antioch Review.

Rebecca Gayle Howell is the author of Render/An Apocalypse (CSU, 2013), which was selected by Nick Flynn for the Cleveland State University First Book Prize. She is also the translator of Amal al-Jubouri’s Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation(Alice James Books, 2011). Among her awards are two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and a Pushcart Prize. Native to Kentucky, Howell is the poetry editor at Oxford American.

Josefine Klougart is one of Scandinavia’s most important writers. Her debut novel Rise and Fall (Rosinante, 2010) contributed to her receiving the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2010. She has since published three other novels: The Halls (2011), One of Us is Sleeping (2012), and On Darkness (2013). Her work has appeared in Salamander, World Literature Today, and Fjords. She is the editor of the Danish literary journal The Blue Gate.

Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection, The Book of Men, winner of The Paterson Prize, is available from W.W. Norton. Her fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake(Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary); What We Carry (finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award); and Smoke, as well as two fine small press editions, The Book of Women and Dark Charms, both from Red Dragonfly Press. Co-author of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, Laux is the recipient of three Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Shara Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale. Her poems have appeared in Plougshares, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Colorado Review, The Kenyon Review, and Pleiades, among others. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Lessley is the recipient of a 2015 Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Ada Limón is the author of three books of poetry, Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She received her MFA in poetry from New York University. Limón has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and was one of the judges for the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry. She works as a freelance writer and splits her time between Lexington, Kentucky, and Sonoma, California (with a great deal of New York in between). Her new book of poems, Bright Dead Things, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in fall 2015.

Marc McKee is the author of What Apocalypse?, which won the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM 2008 Chapbook Contest; Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011); and Bewilderness (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). His work has appeared in journals such as Barn Owl Review; Boston Review; Cimarron Review; Conduit; Crazyhorse; DIAGRAM; Forklift, Ohio; LIT; and Pleiades, among others. He teaches at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray.

Nick McRae is the author of Mountain Redemption (Black Lawrence Press, 2013) and The Name Museum (C&R Press, 2014) and editor of Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets(Sundress Publications, 2013). His work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, Third Coast, and other journals. He is an associate editor of 32 Poems. McRae received an MFA in writing from Ohio State University, and he is currently Robert B. Toulouse Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of North Texas.

Fabio Morábito is a Mexican writer and poet. Born in Egypt to Italian parents, he spent his childhood in Milan. From the age of fifteen he has lived in Mexico City where he has written—in Spanish—three books of poetry, Lotes baldíos (which won the 1995 Carlos Pellicer Prize), De lunes todo el año (which won the Aguascalientes National Prize for Poetry in 1991), and Alguien de lava; a book of prose, Caja de herramientas (1989); three collections of short stories, La lenta furia (1989), La vida ordenada (2000) and Grieta de fatiga (which won the ntonin Artaud Prize in 2006); and three books of essays, El viaje y la enfermedad (1984), Los pastores sin ovejas (1996), and El idioma materno (2014).

Jon Tribble’s first collection of poems, Natural State, will be published by Glass Lyre Press in 2016. His poems have appeared in print journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, South Dakota Review, and The Jazz Poetry Anthology, and online at The Account, Levure littéraire, Prime Number, and Story South. Tribble teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he is the managing editor of Crab Orchard Review and the series editor of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry published by SIU Press

Mark Wagenaar is the winner of numerous poetry awards, including, in the past two years, the New Letters Poetry Prize, The Pinch Poetry Award, the James Wright Poetry Prize, the Poetry International Prize, and the Yellowwood Poetry Award. This past summer he served as the University of Mississippi’s 2014 Summer Poet in Residence. His debut manuscript, Voodoo Inverso, was the 2012 winner of the University of Wisconsin Press’ Felix Pollak Prize, and his second manuscript, The Body Distances, was first runner-up in Tupelo Press’ 2014 Dorset Prize. Recent acceptances or publications include The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, Field, the Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and the Laurel Review. He and his wife, poet Chelsea Wagenaar, are doctoral fellows at the University of North Texas in Denton.

Alexander Weinstein is the director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and his short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Cream City Review, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, PRISM International, Quarter After Eight, Sou’wester, Zone 3, and other journals.

Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois, native. He is the author of Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016). A Cave Canem graduate and recipient of scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anti-, Callaloo, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, The Southern Review, West Branch, and others. Williams received his MFA in creative writing from Washington University in St. Louis. He is the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.

Contributing editor Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is a poet, professional editor, and educator living in Denver, CO. He is the author of a collection of poems, Ghost Gear; editor of Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days; series editor of Floodgate Poetry Series: Three Chapbooks by Three Poets in a Single Volume; founder of FineArtsEditing.com; and founder and managing editor of PoemoftheWeek.org. Learn more at AndrewMK.com.

Sam Grieve was born in Cape Town, and lived in Paris and London prior to settling down in Connecticut with her husband and two sons. She graduated from Brown University; received an MA in English from King’s College, London; and has worked as a librarian, a bookseller and an antiquarian book-dealer. Her stories and poems have recently appeared in 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, Cactus Heart, Forge, Grey Sparrow Journal, Qwerty, Sanskrit, and [PANK], amongst others.

Leyna Krow has previously appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University.

David James Poissant’s stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The New York Times, One Story, Playboy, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in the New Stories from the South and Best New American Voices anthologies. His writing has been awarded the Matt Clark Prize, the George Garrett Fiction Award, the RopeWalk Fiction Chapbook Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and the Alice White Reeves Memorial Award from the National Society of Arts & Letters, as well as awards from The Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic Monthly and Playboy magazines. Poissant teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters. His debut short story collection, The Heaven of Animals, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2014. He is currently at work on a novel, Class, Order, Family, also forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

Kevin Callaway is a graduate of Belmont University and winner of the 2013 Treadway Creative Writing Award. He lives in Milan, where he works as a linguistic assistant and educator. His essays have appeared in SLAB, Gravel, and Extract(s).

Lisa Nikolidakis’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, Passages North, The Rumpus, [PANK], The Greensboro Review, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches creative writing in the Midwest.

Michael Waters has written eleven books of poetry, including Celestial Joyride (BOA Editions, 2016); Gospel Night (BOA, 2011); Darling Vulgarity, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (BOA, 2006); and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems, finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize (BOA, 2001). His poems have appeared in various journals, including The Yale Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Georgia Review, and Rolling Stone. Among his awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation and fellowship residencies at Yaddo,MacDowell, The Tyrone Guthrie Center (Ireland), Le Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), and The St. James Centre for Creativity (Malta). He is professor of English at Monmouth University and also teaches in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. Waters lives with his wife, poet Mihaela Moscaliuc, in Ocean, New Jersey.

Kathryn Wilder’s essays and stories have appeared in such places as River Teeth, Midway Journal, Fourth Genre, Southern Indiana Review, Bugle, Sierra, many Hawai`i magazines, and half a dozen anthologies. Wilder and her son Ken run a small family ranch on the Colorado Plateau, on which they raise species generationally adapted to the desert environment of the Southwest, including Navajo-Churro sheep and Corriente cattle. “Sundance,” from the in-progress manuscript Woman Chasing Water, was the beginning.