2013 Spring

An eye for detail combined with a desire to maintain freshness and spontaneity has led Chris Thomas to his current style of painting. From childhood, Thomas exhibited a great interest in drawing and began developing his skills in watercolor. He attended the Arts Students League in New York City and has pursued a career in art since 1992. Upon completion of his formal training, Thomas spent the next three year studying the masters, learning their technique, and then developing his own. He has made his living as an artist since 1995. His work has been included in a number of private and corporate collections and has also been featured in several publications such as American Art Collector. He is represented by galleries in San Francisco, CA; Jackson Hole, WY; Fredericksburg, TX; Cincinnati, OH; and Evansville, IN. Thomas’s teaching experience includes workshops and a weekly class in his studio. He currently resides in Kentucky with his wife, Shakira, and their son, Aaron.

"Maggot Therapy," "Against its Own Ringing" & "When I Come to the Valley of the Black Pig," — Roger Reeves's poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. Kim Addonizio selected “Kletic of Walt Whitman” for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology. He was awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and two Cave Canem Fellowships. Recently, he earned his PhD at the University of Texas and is currently an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His first book, King Me, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in October 2013.

"Blessed Are" — Robert Wrigley's most recent books include Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems (Penguin, 2013) and The Church of Omnivorous Light (Bloodaxe, 2013, in the UK). He teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Idaho and lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, in the woods on Moscow Mountain.

"Anything that wasn't a dugong" — Erika Meitner is the author of three books of poems: most recently, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (Anhinga Press, 2011) and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her poems have been published in The New Republic, VQR, Tin House, The Best American Poetry 2011, and elsewhere. A fourth collection of poems, Copia, is due from BOA Editions in 2014. Meitner is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program.

"Confessions with Fire" — Kendra DeColo’s poems have appeared in The Collagist, Best Indie Lit New England, CALYX, Muzzle Magazine, Vinyl Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and residencies from the Millay Colony and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She is the founding poetry editor of Nashville Review and a book review editor at Muzzle Magazine. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

"The Seventh Circle of Earth" & "Anaphora as Coping Mechanism" — Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is the author of the chapbook Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010). A Kundiman fellow, he was a finalist for the 2011 Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Other honors include a 2012 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for Younger Poets, an Academy of American Poets prize, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations. Poems appear in American Poetry Review, RHINO, Diode, The Collagist, Verse Daily, Drunken Boat, Linebreak, South Dakota Review, and Guernica, among others. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

"Thirty-Eight" — Jenna Bazzell is a PhD candidate in poetry at Oklahoma State University. She received her MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University–Carbondale. Bazzell won the 2010 AWP Intro Journal Award for her poem “Wet Field” and received Honorable Mention for the Academy of American Poets Prize for her poem “Into the Damp Woods.” Two of her poems have recently been anthologized in Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Saxifrage Press, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Naugatuck River Review, and Sou’wester.

"Origen de Las Dos Fridas" — Erin Murphy’s fourth book of poems is Word Problems (Word Press, 2011). She is co-editor of Making Poems (SUNY Press, 2010). Her works have been published in numerous journals and anthologies and featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. She is an associate professor of English at Penn State Altoona.

"Echoes — Katie Chaple is is the author of Pretty Little Rooms, winner of the 2012 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Poetry through Southern Illinois University–Carbondale. She teaches poetry and writing at the University of West Georgia and edits Terminus Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Antioch Review, Crab Orchard Review, Mead, New South, Passages North, Story South, The Rumpus, Washington Square, and others.

"Such Art" — Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois, native. He is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011) and Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). He is a Cave Canem graduate and received a Bread Loaf work-study scholarship in 2011 and social staff scholarship in 2012. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, The Southern Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sou'wester, West Branch, Blackbird, and others. Williams is currently a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis, working on his MFA in creative writing. He is the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.

"Blue Arabesque" — Mark Wagenaar is this year’s winner of the James Wright Poetry Prize. His debut book of poems, Voodoo Inverso, won the 2012 Pollak Prize, and his poems have recently been published or accepted by 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Tin House, and Ninth Letter. He lives in Denton, TX, with his wife, poet Chelsea Wagenaar, and a half-Labrador, half-Catahoula Leopard puppy that they recently adopted from the town shelter.

"A Field of Tiger Lilies in Kentucky" — Maurice Manning's most recent book is The Gone and The Going Away (2013). He teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.

"Poem in the Shape of a Grand Piano" — Kara van de Graaf serves as poetry editor for Cream City Review at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is a dissertator in English and creative writing. Most recently, she was a finalist for the 2012 Discovery/Boston Review Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the anthology Best New Poets 2010, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, The Journal, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. 

"Mysteries in a World that Thinks There Are None" — Gary L. McDowell is the author of Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral (Dream Horse Press, forthcoming); American Amen, winner of the 2009 Orphic Prize; and They Speak of Fruit. He’s also the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Bellingham Review, Indiana Review, New England Review, and Quarterly West. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Belmont University in Nashville, TN.

"An Armless He-Man Action Figure Adumbrates His Shed Decade" — Adam Tavel  received the 2010 Robert Frost Award, and his forthcoming collections are The Fawn Abyss (Salmon, 2014) and Red Flag Up (Kattywompus, 2013), a chapbook. His recent poems appear or will soon appear in West Branch, Indiana Review, Zone 3, Cream City Review, Bayou, Waccamaw, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. Tavel is an associate professor of English at Wor-Wic Community College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

"Clearing" — Magda Sokolowski and her husband live between Missoula, Montana, and the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado. She teaches for the University of Montana and for the Colorado Community College System.

"Terrapene carolina carolina" — Daniel Nathan Terry is the author of two books of poetry: Waxwings (Lethe Press 2012) and Capturing the Dead (NFSPS 2008), which won The Stevens Prize, and a chapbook, Days of Dark Miracles (Seven Kitchens Press 2011). His poems and short stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in numerous publications, including Cimarron Review, New South, Poet Lore, and Chautauqua. He serves on the advisory board of One Pause Poetry and teaches at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, where he lives with his husband, painter and printmaker Benjamin Billingsley.

"Dalliance" — D.A. Powell’s most recent collection is Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys. He lives in San Francisco.

"Fleeing Time" — Andrew Hudgins teaches at Ohio State University. His most recent book is American Rendering: New and Selected Poems. In June, he will publish two books: The Joker: A Memoir (Simon and Schuster) and A Clown at Midnight (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a new collection of poems.

"Rocket Night" —  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.

"Riffs on My Dad" — Robert McGuill is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Glimmertrain Stories finalist whose short fiction has appeared in more than forty literary journals, including Southwest Review, Bryant Literary Review, South Dakota Review, Santa Clara Review, and other national and international publications. He lives and writes in Colorado.

"Undertow" — Julian Zabalbeascoa is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Orleans. “Undertow” is the third in a collection of linked stories—the first two have recently been published in Post Road and Shenandoah.

"Say to Yourself" —  Jessica Falzoi was born in 1969 in Hamburg and raised in Lübeck. After stays in the United States and France, she moved to Berlin in the beginning of the nineties where she still lives with her three children. She is a teacher of creative writing at a secondary school, quite likely the only one in Germany.

“A Few Pesos” — Kelly Miller’s work has appeared in Flashquake, Nano Fiction, Quick Fiction, and Parting Gifts. Her essay “Some Getting Used To” was short-listed for the 2012 Bridgeport Prize.

“My Sister Mulan” — Natalie Parker-Lawrence earned her MFA in creative writing at the University of New Orleans. Selected monologues from her new play, I Bet They’re Asleep All Over America, were produced by You Heard It First Here in New York City, March 2013. A collection of nine true-story monologues about insomnia, the play won a spot in the first Women’s Theatre Festival of Memphis in 2012, and was the season opener for Our Own Voice Theatre Troupe at Theatreworks. The Just Passing By Theatre Company, in association with The Morris Theatre Guild, produced Bob War in 2011. Parker-Lawrence’s essays have been published in The Palimpsest Journal, Stone Highway Review, Alimentum, Orion Magazine, Prime Number Magazine, The Commercial Appeal, and The Pinch. She has a forthcoming essay in the anthology Uneasy Bones and has written the weekly spirituality column for Wildflower Magazine since December 2011.

“Colorless Life: An Essay in Grayscale” — Alysha Hoffa's work has been published in Atticus Review, Fiction Fix, Sliver of Stone, and The Broken Plate, among others. She studied creative writing at Ball State University, and currently resides in Indiana.