2012 Fall

As a photographer, Jan Theun van Rees is self-trained. He received his master’s in painting at the Academy of Visual Arts (Groningen, Netherlands). Through the years van Rees used photography to document his ideas for paintings and drawings. Since 2000 he has worked exclusively with photography, seeking the tension between documenting what is there and using the photographic document to trigger the imagination about what could have been. In 2007, van Rees published a photo book, One Wall Away–Chicago’s Hidden Spaces, commissioned by U.S. Equities in Chicago. Spring 2013, van Rees will publish Hidden City, a survey of the photographs he made of dismantled museums and theaters in Amsterdam between 2003 and 2012. His work has been acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Museum of Jewish History in Amsterdam. Van Rees works as an art instructor for Central College of Iowa at the Study Abroad program in Leiden, Netherlands.

"December" — Jennifer Luebbers currently serves as editor for Indiana Review at Indiana University, where she is an MFA candidate in creative writing. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2011, Crab Orchard Review, cream city review, Ninth Letter, and Washington Square Review, among others.

"Ramshackle Ode to Two Syllables" & "Ramshackle Ode in the Headwinds of a Fable" — Keith Leonard was born and raised on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. He has held scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Indiana University, where he received an MFA. A recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, Mid-American Review, and Washington Square Review, among other journals. 

"Stone" & "Manzanar: Desert Voices" — Brynn Saito is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and forthcoming from Red Hen Press (March, 2013). Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, and Drunken Boat. Brynn was born in the Central Valley of California to a Korean American mother and a Japanese American father. She received an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in religious studies from NYU. Currently, Brynn lives in the Bay Area and teaches in San Francisco.

"Reliquary for the Finger Bone of Galileo Galilei" & "On Chan Sho-an's Sunflower (Autumn Colors After the Rain)" — Ryan Teitman is the author of Litany for the City, selected by Jane Hirshfield for the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and published by BOA Editions. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. He was formerly a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and this year he is the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.

"suicide note #10: wet condoms" — francine j. harris is originally from Detroit and has recent work appearing in Rattle, Ploughshares, Hanging Loose, and Meridian. Her first collection, allegiance, published in the spring of 2012, reached the number one spot on the national poetry bestseller's list within a month of publication. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and received her MFA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she lives, teaches and writes. 

"Kissing the Fire Eater" — Karrie Waarala is a poetry editor at the museum of americana and a teaching artist at The Rooster Moans poetry cooperative. Her work has appeared in several journals such as Iron Horse Literary Review, PANK, The Collagist, Vinyl, and Arsenic Lobster, and she holds an MFA from the Stonecoast Program at University of Southern Maine. Recipient of the 2012 Pocataligo Poetry Prize and a Pushcart nominee, Karrie has also received critical acclaim for LONG GONE: A Poetry Sideshow, a one-woman show based on her collection of circus poems. She really wishes she could tame tigers and swallow swords. 

"Family Portrait at Boi Bumbá" & "Litany for the Agnostic Minister" — Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), winner the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (SIU Press, 2010), winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, VQR, New England Review, and elsewhere. A former Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she’s currently a doctoral candidate and King/Chávez/Parks Fellow at Western Michigan University. 

"Against Grief" — Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of fourteen books including the forthcoming All I Ask for Is Longing: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014 (BOA Editions), Scything Grace (2013 Etruscan Press), and Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (2010 BOA Editions). His awards include two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships in poetry and a Fulbright Lectureship for poetry to the Balkans. He currently works in a pool hall, gives readings around the nation, and teaches creative writing part-time at Cleveland State University.

"How to Preserve" & "How to Time the Kill" — Rebecca Gayle Howell is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Jules Chametzky Prize in Literary Translation, and longterm support from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her translation of Amal al-Jubouri’s Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books) was selected by the Library Journal as a Best Book of 2011 and by Three Percent as a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. Her collection of poems, Render / An Apocalypse, was selected by Nick Flynn to receive the CSU Poetry Center's 2012 First Book Prize; it will be published this spring.

"Gorge" — Stevie Edwards currently resides in Ithaca, NY, where she is working toward completing an MFA in creative writing at Cornell University. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Good Grief, was published by Write Bloody Publishing in April 2012. She is currently working on her second book, tentatively titled No Apocalypse. She is the editor-in-chief of MUZZLE Magazine, editor of 4th & Verse Books, assistant editor of EPOCH, and a proud alumna of Chicago's Real Talk Avenue. Her work has appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Night Train, PANK, and a number of other publications.

"Hunting Rabbits" — Brad Johnson is an associate professor at Palm Beach State College, FL and has published two chapbooks,Void Where Prohibited and The Happiness Theory, with Pudding House Press. His third chapbook, Gasoline Rainbow, was published by Finishing Line Press. Work of his has recently been accepted by Nimrod, Poet Lore, The South Carolina Review, The Southeast Review, Willow Springs, and others.

"Sea Anemones" & "Hippopotamuses" — Brian Barker is the author of The Black Ocean (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition, and of The Animal Gospels (Tupelo Press, 2006), winner of the Tupelo Press Editor’s Prize. His poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, American Book Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Indiana Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, fugue, and storySouth. His awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2009 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. He has earned degrees in Creative Writing and Literature from Virginia Commonwealth University, George Mason University, and the University of Houston. Barker is married to the poet Nicky Beer and teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, where he co-edits Copper Nickel.

"Paper Tiger to Wind" & "Looks Like a Boy" — Jamaal May is the author of Hum (Alice James Books 2013), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, as well as two poetry chapbooks (The God Engine, 2009 and The Whetting of Teeth, 2012). Recent work has appeared in New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Verse Daily, Blackbird, Callaloo, Indiana Review, WDET Radio, and elsewhere. Honors include scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Cave Canem, and Callaloo, as well as multiple nominations to both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets anthologies. Jamaal is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program for writers and recipient of the 2011-2013 Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University.

"We're Only Good at Making Things that Kill" — Taylor Collier currently lives in Syracuse, NY. Work is forthcoming in The American Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, the Minnesota review, and Yemassee.

"[You Learn to Pattern Everything]" & "[I am at My Best]" — Lillian-Yvonne Bertram has been a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference work-study scholar, a writer-in-residence at the Montana Artists’ Refuge, and is a Cave Canem alumna. Her poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Narrative Magazine,Subtropics, and other journals. She received first place in the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars poetry contest, has won the Gulf Coast magazine Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, and has received second place in Narrative Magazine’s poetry contest. Bertram is a graduate of the writing programs at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was a 2009-2011 Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College where she taught creative writing and literature. Her first book, But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise, won the Red Hen Press 2010 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, judged by Claudia Rankine.

"Nightmare Before the Foreclosure" — Anna Journey is the author of two collections of poetry: Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.

"At the Moment of Composition: Brian Barker and the Gospel of Poetry" — Contributing editor Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum's poems, essays, reviews, podcasts, and interviews recently appear or are forthcoming in The Writers Chronicle, The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume VI, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Missouri Review, storySouth, Glimmer Train, and InsideHigherEd.com among others. He is editor of an E-anthology, Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days, to be published by Upper Rubber Boot Books on December 21, 2012. He is also founder and editor of PoemoftheWeek and managing editor of AdHominem.weebly and is a lecturer of creative writing and English at the University of Colorado-Denver.

"The Girl at the Party" — Meghan Wynne is a graduate of the MFA program at The Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in The Sun, StoryQuarterly, and The Journal. She teaches in the English Department at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio, where she lives with her daughter and her husband-to-be.

"The Faces of Christ" — Gary Fincke’s fifth collection of stories,The Proper Words for Sin, will be published by West Virginia University Press in 2013. His collection Sorry I Worried You won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and was published by the University of Georgia Press. His latest collection of poems, titled The History of Permanence, won the Stephen F. Austin University Press Poetry Prize and was published in the fall of 2011. He is the Charles Degenstein Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.

"Leave" — Soma Mei Sheng Frazier’s recent work has placed as winner/finalist/semifinalist in the 2012 Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the 2012 Carve Magazine Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, the 2012 RopeWalk Press Editor’s Fiction Chapbook Prize, the 2011 Zoetrope: All-Story short fiction contest, and the 10th Annual Slope Edition Book Prize contest, among others. Her work has earned praise from Robert Olen Butler, Nikki Giovanni, and Jim Shepard.

“Secrets of the Sun” — 2012 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Nonfiction Award winner Mako Yoshikawa’s first novel, One Hundred and One Ways, was published by Bantam in 1999. A national bestseller in the States, it has been translated into six languages. Her second novel, Once Removed, was published by Bantam in 2003. Writing awards include fellowships from the Bunting Institute of Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College, Boston.