2018 Fall

Brianna McCarthy is a mixed media visual communicator working and living in Trinidad and Tobago. She is a self-taught artist and aims to create a new discourse examining issues of beauty, stereotypes, and the intricacies and dynamics of representing Afro-Caribbean women who are portrayed as being strong, long-suffering, exoticised and picturesque beings against a backdrop of poverty, hardship, abuse and/or scorn. Her form takes shape through masking and performance art, fabric collage, traditional media, and installation pieces.

Lindsay Remee Ahl has work published or forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Hotel Amerika, Barrow Street, BOMB Magazine, The Offing, and many others. She was a Fletcher Fellow at Bread Loaf for her novel, Desire (Coffee House Press). Ahl holds an MFA from Warren Wilson in poetry.

“Aubade in the Old Apartment” — Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar; grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation; and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems have received awards from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest and 10th Annual Poetry Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets. Chatti is the consulting poetry editor for the Raleigh Review, and her work appears in Ploughshares, Tin House, The American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.

Caroline Crew is the author of Pink Museum (Big Lucks, 2015), as well as several chapbooks. Her poetry and essays appear in Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, and Gulf Coast, among others. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at Georgia State University.

Tommy D’Addario was born in Detroit, Michigan, and has lived on both of the Mitten’s coasts. He has worked as a barista, a university writing instructor, and a chef on a ranch in Wyoming. He’s a second-year poet in the MFA program at the University of Montana. D’Addario’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Susquehanna Review, RHINO Poetry 2017, and Columbia Journal.

Raphael Dagold’s first book, Bastard Heart, was published in 2014 and was a finalist for the Utah Book Award in Poetry. Recent awards include fellowships from the Jentel Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Moulin à Nef Studio Center in Auvillar, France. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, The Offing, Diode Poetry Journal, and The Normal School. For the past two years, he was an assistant professor of humanities and creative writing at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and he is now an instructor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.

Rebecca Hazelton is an award-winning poet and writer. She’s the author of Fair Copy, winner of the 2011 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, and Vow, from Cleveland State University Press. She was the 2010-11 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison Creative Writing Institute and winner of the “Discovery” / Boston Review 2012 poetry contest. A two-time Pushcart Prize winner, her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry 2013 and 2015.

Matthew Kilbane is a graduate of Purdue University’s MFA program and currently a PhD candidate at Cornell University. His work can be found, now or soon, in The GettysburgReview, The Adroit Journal, DIAGRAM, Jacket2, the Best of the Net, and elsewhere.

“Get Out of the Goddamn Car,” — Ben Kingsley is best known for his Academy Award-winning role as Mahatma Gandhi. A touch less famous, Affrilachian author BenjamÌn Naka-Hasebe Kingsley has not acted since his third-grade debut as the undertaker inMusic Man. A Kundiman alum, Kingsley is currently the Tickner Writing Fellow and recipient of a Provincetown FAWC fellowship. He belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. Peep his work from 2018 in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Tin House, among others. His first book, Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot, selected by Bob Hicok for the Backwaters Prize, was released fall 2018.

“On the Haunted Hayride with Audrey” — Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, all from BOA Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize; The Keys to the Jail (2014); and All Its Charms (2019). Kuipers’ poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in Best American Poetry, Narrative, American Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf’s Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, and the recipient of fellowships from the Lucas Artist Residency, the Jentel Artist Residency Foundation, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Kuipers lives with her wife and daughter on an island in the Salish Sea, where she is a faculty member at Seattle’s Hugo House and senior editor at Poetry Northwest. 

“white girl interrogates her recurring dreams” — Marty McConnell is the author of wine for a shotgun (EM Press, 2013); when they say you can’t go home again, what they mean is you were never there, winner of the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize (SIR Press, 2018); and Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop (YesYes Books, 2018). She is the co-creator of underbelly, an online magazine focused on the art and magic of poetry revision. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, and Indiana Review. McConnell lives in Chicago with her wife, visual artist Lindsey Dorr-Niro.

“The Earth Is Rude, Silent, Incomprehensible” — Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Novena, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize (Pleiades Press, 2017), and the chapbook In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). He has held poetry fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Rancourt’s poems have appeared in the The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets 2014, among others. He lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Frances Simán is a communications professional and translator. She is a member of the Alicanto Poetry Workshop, annually organizing the Alicanto Poetry Week in Honduras, and a contributor for the editorial board of the Cisne Negro publishing house. Simán has translated to Spanish works by poets from the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Serbia, Romania, Austria, Palestine, Georgia, China, and Hungary. She lives in Honduras.

Brian Tierney’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in New England Review, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Best New Poets 2013, Boston Review, and others. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a graduate of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars, he was named among Narrative’s “30 Below 30” emerging writers in 2013, and most recently was a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s 2018 Industry Prize. He is winner of this year’s George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and currently lives in Oakland, California, where he teaches poetry at The Writing Salon.

“December at Faribault Prison” — Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California, where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Water~Stone Review, among others. He has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Jerome Foundation. A CantoMundo Fellow and VONA alum, Torres has been a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize and a semi-finalist for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Currently he teaches creative writing at Minnesota State University, Mankato and through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

K Chess is the author of the novel FAMOUS MEN WHO NEVER LIVED, forthcoming from Tin House Books in 2019. Her short fiction has appeared in The Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, PANK, phoebe, and others. She received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology, won Midwestern Gothic’s Lake Prize, and was runner-up for the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction. Chess lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Follow her on Twitter @kchessok.

R. M. Cooper’s writing has appeared in publications including The Baltimore Review, Best American Experimental Writing, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Fugue, Oxford Magazine, Passages North, Redivider, and Wisconsin Review and has received awards and recognition from UC Berkeley and American Short Fiction. Cooper is the managing editor of Sequestrum.

Rochelle Hurt is a poet and essayist living in Pittsburgh. She is the author of the poetry collection In Which I Play the Runaway (2016), which won the Barrow Street Book Prize, and The Rusted City: a Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). Her work has been included in the Best New Poets anthology series and she’s been awarded prizes and fellowships from Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. Hurt teaches at Slippery Rock University.

Nancy McCabe’s work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, Los Angeles Review of Books, Newsweek, Every Father’s Daughter: 24 Women Writers Remember Their Fathers, and Oh Baby! True Stories about Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy Pregnancy, Labor, and Love. McCabe is the author of five books, and her work has received a Pushcart and been listed as Notable in seven Best American anthologies.

James Armstrong holds an MFA in dramatic writing from Carnegie Mellon University. His plays have been performed across the United States, as well as in Canada, Australia, and Japan.

Dave Harris is a poet and playwright from West Philly. His plays have been featured at Theater503 in London, Victory Gardens Ignition Fest, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Great Plains Theater Conference, and The Kennedy Center. He is a member of The Working Farm at SPACE, a two-time finalist for the O’Neill Theater Conference, and a semi-finalist for the Relentless Award. He is a Cave Canem poetry fellow, Callaloo poetry fellow, and the 2018 winner of the Rattle Poetry Prize. His first full-length collection of poetry, Patricide, is
forthcoming in spring 2019 from Button Poetry. Harris is a second year MFA playwright at UC San Diego.

Wynne Hungerford’s work has appeared in EPOCH, American Literary Review, and The Boiler, among other places. She recently graduated from MFA@FLA, the writing program at the University of Florida.