2017 Spring

Robert Pollard, who is best known for his sustained, prolific songwriting and recording, was creating collages even before he was writing songs. Often satirical, political, dark, and sarcastic, his collages have been exhibited at Michael Imperioli’s Studio Dante in New York, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and Merge Records headquarters in Durham, North Carolina.

Benjamin Alfaro is a writer and educator from Detroit. He is the co-author of Home Court(Red Beard, 2014), and his work has been featured in The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, on HBO, and elsewhere. Alfaro is a teaching artist with InsideOut Literary Arts Project where he currently serves as the youth leadership coordinator.

Christopher Citro is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). He won the 2015 Poetry Competition at Columbia Journal, and his recent and upcoming publications include poetry in The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2014, The Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, The Iowa Review blog, and Hayden’s Ferry Review and creative nonfiction in Boulevard, Passages North, and Colorado Review. Citro received his MFA from Indiana University and lives in Syracuse, New York.

George David Clark is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Washington & Jefferson College. His first book, Reveille (University of Arkansas Press, 2015), won the Miller Williams Prize, and his more recent work can be found in AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Image, The New Criterion, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He edits the journal 32 Poems and lives with his wife and their three young children in Washington, Pennsylvania.

Emily Rose Cole is a writer and lyricist from Pennsylvania and the author of a chapbook, Love and a Loaded Gun, forthcoming from Minerva Rising Press. She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Ruminate Magazine, and the Academy of American Poets, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, and The Arkansas International, among others. Cole holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. You can reach her on Twitter via @EmilyColeWrites.

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press in 2017. Her work appears in The Southeast Review(winner of the Gearhart Poetry Contest), Washington Square Review, Southern Humanities Review (finalist for the Auburn Witness Prize), Arcadia (finalist for the Dead Bison Editor’s Prize), Sugar House Review, American Literary Review, and Carolina Quarterly, among others.

Gregory Fraser is the author of three poetry collections: Strange Pietà, Answering the Ruins, and Designed for Flight. His poetry has appeared in journals including The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and The Gettysburg Review. He is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Fraser serves as professor of English at the University of West Georgia.

John Gallaher’s most recent collection is In a Landscape (BOA, 2015), and other poems appear in New England Review, Poetry, FIELD, and Pleiades.

Anna Claire Hodge holds a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Copper Nickel, and others. They also appear in the anthologies Best New Poets 2013, It Was Written: Poems Inspired by Hip-Hop, and Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems. Honors include a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a scholarship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and a residency at Vermont Studio Center. She is a contributing editor for Organic Weapon Arts chapbook press.

Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her other books include Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency MFA program and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Limón also works as a freelance writer, splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky, and Sonoma, California.

The winner of a 2014 Lannan Literary Fellowship and three Pushcart prizes, Jill McDonough is the author of Reaper, Habeas Corpus, Oh, James!, and Where You Live. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and Stanford’s Stegner program, and has taught incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program for thirteen years. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Nation, The Threepenny Review, and The Best American Poetry. McDonough teaches in the MFA program at UMass-Boston and directs 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center online. Her fifth poetry collection, Here All Night, is forthcoming from Alice James Books.

Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill and Dirty Bomb, both from Oberlin College Press. His awards include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist’s grant, and the FIELD Poetry Prize. Neely teaches at Ball State University and at Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program.

Sarah Rose Nordgren is the author of the poetry collections Best Bones, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and Darwin’s Mother, which is forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh in fall 2017. Her poems and essays appear widely in journals such as Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review Online, and Copper Nickel. Native to North Carolina, Nordgren is currently a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate editor at 32 Poems.

Katie Schmid has been published in Best New Poets 2009, Quarterly West, Hobart, PANK, and The Rumpus, among others. Her chapbook Forget Me, Hit Me, Let Me Drink Great Quantities of Clear, Evil Liquor is out at Split Lip Press. Schmid was a 2011 AWP Intro Journals Winner. She lives and writes in Nebraska.

Maggie Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Weep Up (Tupelo Press, September 2017), The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Lamp of the Body. Smith is also the author of three prizewinning chapbooks. Her poems appear in The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Public Radio International called it “the official poem of 2016.”

A singer-songwriter and poet from Atascadero, California, Ephraim Scott Sommers is the author of The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire which won the 2016 Patricia Bibby First Book Award and was published in February of 2017 by Tebot Bach Press. Recent essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, cream city review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Having received his PhD from Western Michigan University, Ephraim currently teaches creative writing on the graduate faculty at the University of Central Florida and lives with his fiancé in Orlando. 

2016 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award winner Richard Thompson was recently awarded Sigma Tau Delta’s Eleanor P. North Poetry Award. His poetry has appeared in Skive Journal, Empirical Journal, and The Avenue, among others. He grew up in rural Canada, and now lives with his wife, Sherise, and son, Jacob, in Houston, Texas, where he is a clinical psychologist and studies creative writing at the University of Houston.

Michael Waters has written eleven books of poetry, including Celestial Joyride; Gospel Night; Darling Vulgarity, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems, finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in various journals, including The Yale Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Georgia Review, and Rolling Stone. 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.

Philip Metres is the author of Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015), A Concordance of Leaves (2013), and others. His work has garnered a Lannan fellowship; two NEAs; six Ohio Arts Council grants; the Hunt Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters; the Beatrice Hawley Award; two Arab American Book Awards; the Watson Fellowship; the Creative Workforce Fellowship; the Cleveland Arts Prize; and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. Metres is professor of English and the director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

2016 Mary C. Mohr Fiction Award winner Bradford Kammin’s short stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Arts & Letters, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program in creative writing, and is currently pursuing a PhD in English and creative writing at Western Michigan University, where he teaches creative writing and serves as fiction editor of Third Coast.

Andrew Mitchell’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Sycamore Review, Tin House’s “The Open Bar,” and elsewhere. He is the 2016 recipient of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. Mitchell lives in Dover, New Hampshire.

Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of This Angel On My Chest, which received the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in many publications, including The Hudson Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Midwestern Gothic, Salon, and The Washington Post Magazine.

Catherine Pond has been published in Boston Review, Narrative, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. She teaches poetry at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and she is assistant director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. In the fall, she will begin her PhD in creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Lee Zacharias is the author of a collection of short stories, Helping Muriel Make It through the Night; two novels, Lessons and At Random; and a collection of personal essays, The Only Sounds We Make, which won a silver medal in creative nonfiction in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her nonfiction has appeared in numerous journals, including The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah, among others, and has been reprinted in The Best American Essays. Zacharias is emerita professor of English at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.