2020 Fall

Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez is an international street artist who works at the intersection of graffiti, vinyl toys, contemporary art, fashion, and design, blending elements of street and pop culture with Mexican and indigenous aesthetics—a signature look the artist has coined “Neo Indigenous.” Quiñonez currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he and his wife and creative partner, Liza, run their award-winning creative agency, Street Theory.

Marissa Ahmadkhani holds an MA in English from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of California Irvine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the minnesota review, Radar Poetry, The West Review, and poets.org, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2015 and 2017.

Dana Alsamsam is a first generation Syrian-American from Chicago and is currently based in Boston where she works in arts development. A Lambda Literary fellow, she received her MFA in Poetry from Emerson College where she was the editor-in-chief of Redivider and senior editorial assistant at Ploughshares. She is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit(tenderness lit, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, The Shallow Ends, The Offing, Tinderbox, Salamander, BOOTH, The Common, and others.

Cameron Barnett is the author of The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water, winner of the 2017 Rising Writer Contest from Autumn House Press, and a finalist for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. He earned his MFA in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. His honors include the 2019 Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award for Emerging Artists. Cameron lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he works as a middle school language arts teacher and is a poetry editor for Pittsburgh Poetry Journal.

Emily Blair lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, The Journal, Copper Nickel, The Gettysburg Review, and the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, among other places. She has received New York Foundation of Arts Fellowships in both fiction and poetry.

Despy Boutris’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Palette Poetry, Third Coast, Raleigh Review, and more. Currently, she teaches at the University of Houston and serves as assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast.

Su Cho received her MA in English literature and MFA in poetry from Indiana University. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of Cream City Review. Her poems are forthcoming and/or found in POETRY, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, The Journal, Crab Orchard Review, BOAAT, Thrush Poetry Review, PANK, Sugared Water, and elsewhere. Cho is pursuing a PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is an Advanced Opportunity Fellow.

Javan DeHaven is a writer from Mount Vernon, Maine. He previously served as poetry editor and creative nonfiction editor for Sycamore Review. His most recent work appears in Kenyon Review Online.

Rebecca Morgan Frank’s fourth collection of poems, Oh You Robot Saints!, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2021. Her poems have appeared such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, The Southern Review, Poetry Ireland, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder and editor of the online literary magazine Memorious.

Benjamin S. Grossberg is director of creative writing at the University of Hartford. His books include My Husband Would (University of Tampa Press, November 2020); Space Traveler; and Sweet Core Orchard, winner of the 2008 Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Grossberg’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Boulevard, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, and AGNI, among other journals.

Paul Guest is author of four collections of poetry and one memoir. A Guggenheim fellow and a Whiting Award winner, his poems have appeared in Harper’s, POETRY, The Southern Review, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and elsewhere.

Katie Hartsock’s first poetry collection, Bed of Impatiens, was a finalist for the 2017 Ohioana Award. Her work appears in POETRY, The Greensboro Review, Arion, Ecotone, Pleiades, Image, The Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Oakland University in Michigan.

Andrew Koch is a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas, and his work has recently appeared in Yemassee, Hotel Amerika, The Rupture, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere.

Julia Koets is the winner of the 2017 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award for The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays. Her first poetry collection, Hold Like Owls, won the 2011 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, and her second, Pine, won the 2019 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and is forthcoming April 2021. Koets’s essays and poems have recently appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Indiana Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Portland Review. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of South Carolina and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. Koets is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of South Florida.

Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat and four poetry chapbooks. She is the recipient of a 2019 Al Smith Individual Artist fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council; her work has also been supported by a Sustainable Arts Foundation fellowship to Rivendell Writers’ Colony and by the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She met her husband in the Indiana University MFA program; together they have created the Rivertown Reading Series, Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art, and two awesome daughters.

Daphne Maysonet is a writer living in Memphis, Tennessee, where she earned her MFA in poetry. She is currently working as an educator at the high school, junior college, and university levels. When not teaching or attending local arts events, Maysonet is working on her manuscript titled Live Anyway.

Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill and Dirty Bomb, both from Oberlin College Press. His third book, Ticker, won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press. Neely is a professor of English at Ball State University and a senior editor at River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.

Carolyn Oliver’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Tin House Online, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, and the Frank O’Hara Prize from the Worcester Review, where she now serves as a poetry editor. Oliver lives in Massachusetts with her family.

Maxine Patroni graduated from New York University with an MFA in poetry where she was the Teachers and Writers Fellow. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, EcoTheo Review, and Raleigh Review. She teaches at Stockton University.

Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. She was a 2018-2019 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Margins, Wilderness, Cherry Tree, Hobart, and elsewhere. Shortlisted for the Judith Akbar Poetry Prize, she was also a recent resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts. Raees is a graduate of Bennington College, a current 2019 Brooklyn Poet’s Fellow, and serves as an assistant poetry editor at AAWW’s The Margins. She is from Lahore, Pakistan, and currently lives in New York City.

Britton Shurley is author of the chapbook Spinning the Vast Fantastic (Bull City Press, 2021), and his poetry has appeared in such journals as Southern Humanities Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and The Atticus Review. Shurley is an associate professor of English at West Kentucky Community & Technical College where he edits Exit 7: A Journal of Literature & Art with his wife, the poet Amelia Martens. They live in Paducah, Kentucky, with their daughters and curate the Rivertown Reading Series.

Anthony Sutton resides on former Akokiksas, Atakapa, Karankawa, and Sana land (currently named Houston, Texas) and has poems appear or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Indianapolis Review, The Journal, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Quarter After Eight, Third Coast, and elsewhere.

Michael Waters has published thirteen books of poetry, most recently Caw (BOA Editions, 2020), The Dean of Discipline, and Celestial Joyride. He has co-edited several anthologies, including Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020), Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies, Contemporary American Poetry, and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali. His poems have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, and Rolling Stone. Waters lives without a cell phone in Ocean, New Jersey.

Maria Zoccola is a writer living in Memphis, Tennessee, where she earned her MFA in poetry. She is currently working as an educator at the high school, junior college, and university levels. When not teaching or attending local arts events, Maysonet is working on her manuscript titled Live Anyway.

Jeremy Griffin is the author of short fiction collections A Last Resort for Desperate People: Stories and a Novella and Oceanography, winner of the 2018 Orison Books Fiction Prize. His work has appeared in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Indiana Review, and Shenandoah. Griffin has received support from the South Carolina Arts Commission, and he teaches at Coastal Carolina University, where he serves as faculty fiction editor of Waccamaw: A Journal of Contemporary Literature.

J. Stillwell Powers was born and raised in rural New England. A graduate of Greenfield Community College, he went on to earn his MFA in fiction from the University of Oregon. His work has appeared in Willow Springs Magazine, Shankpainter Journal, and on the Ploughshares Blog. His story “Salvage” won the 2017 Dogwood Prize in Fiction. In 2019-20, he completed a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He lives with his wife and son in Western Massachusetts.

Sam Ruddick’s work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, Prairie Fire, and The Sun. His stories have also been awarded the Henfield Prize and the PEN/O. Henry Prize and have been featured on Selected Shorts, NPR’s podcast dedicated to the short story form.

Martha Witt is the author of the novel Broken as Things Are. Her short fiction, some of which has been translated into Italian, has appeared in One Story, AGNI, Boulevard Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, and elsewhere. In collaboration with Mary Ann Frese Witt, she has translated Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV, as well as Grazia Deledda’s Ivy. Her translations of Giovanni Verga’s Rustic Chivalry and Leo Ferrero’s Angelica are forthcoming from Italica Press this year. Witt is professor of English and creative writing at William Paterson University.

Evan J Massey is a U.S. Army veteran who served his country in Afghanistan.

Mako Yoshikawa is the author of the novels One Hundred and One Ways and Once Removed. Her work has been translated into six languages; awards for her writing include a Radcliffe Fellowship. As a literary critic she has published articles that explore the relationship between incest and race in twentieth-century American fiction. After her father’s death in 2010, Yoshikawa began writing a memoir, chapters of which have been published in The Missouri Review, LitHub, Harvard Review, Story, and Best American Essays. She’s a professor in the MFA program at Emerson College, Boston.

Kirby Fields earned his MFA in playwriting from Carnegie Mellon University and is the artistic director of UP Theater in Manhattan. His plays have been produced or developed in New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Kansas City. Fields is from Joplin, Missouri, and currently lives in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City with his wife and two sons.