2014 Spring

Brett Anderson received his MFA from the University of South Dakota. He has had solo exhibitions at college and community galleries in Oregon, Arizona, California, Nebraska, and South Dakota and participated in over sixty group exhibitions in the past five years. His work has been shown at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, The Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis, and The South Dakota Art Museum, among many venues throughout the United States.

"To a Sports Talk Caller Who’d Refuse to Cheer a Gay Athlete Because He 'Just Don’t Get It'" — Scott Beal’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, Muzzle, and the 2014Pushcart Prize anthology. His first full-length poetry collection, Wait 'Til You Have Real Problems, will be published by Dzanc Books in 2014. He teaches in the Sweetland Writing Center at the University of Michigan and serves as writer-in-residence at Ann Arbor Open School.

"Ghosts of Cellphone Number Past"— Josh Bell is the author of No Planets Strike and currently a Briggs Copeland Lecturer on English at Harvard University.

"Ruby Creek Road" —Russell Brakefield currently teaches writing at the University of Michigan, where he received his MFA in poetry in 2011. His poems have been published in journals including the New Orleans Review, the Indiana Review, The New York Quarterly, Poet Lore, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. He is the managing editor for CANARIUM Books.

"bop: deviled" —drea brown’s work has been published in a variety of literary magazines, anthologies, and online journals. She is a Cave Canem graduate who received her MFA from the University of Oregon. drea currently lives in Austin, TX, and is a student in the African and African Diaspora Studies Doctoral program at UT Austin.

"Call the Match" and "La Base" —Nandi Comer is currently the poetry editor of Indiana Review. She is pursuing a joint MFA/MA in Poetry and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She has received fellowships from Virginia Center for the Arts, Cave Canem, and Callaloo. She is the winner of Crab Orchard Review’s2014 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, and Third Coast.

"Once all the Hounds Had Been Called Home," "Last Psalm at Sea Level" & "On Nights When I am Your Husband" — Meg Day, recently selected for Best New Poets of 2013, is a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (winner of Barrow Street Press’ first book prize in poetry, forthcoming 2014); When All You Have Is a Hammer (winner of the 2012 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest); and We Can’t Read This (winner of the 2013 Gazing Grain Chapbook Contest). A 2012 AWP Intro Journals Award Winner, she has also received awards and fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Hedgebrook, Squaw Valley Writers, and the International Queer Arts Festival. Meg is currently a PhD fellow in Poetry & Disability Poetics at the University of Utah.

"Event" —Blas Falconer is the author of The Foundling Wheel (Four Way Books) and A Question of Gravity and Light(University of Arizona Press). The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, and a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, his poems have been featured by Poets and Writers, The Poetry Foundation, and Poetry Society of America. A coeditor of Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press) and The Other Latino: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University of Arizona Press), he teaches at the University of Southern California and in the low-residency MFA at Murray State University.

"The Mothers" and "How to be Reckless" —Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of Little Murders Everywhere, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and her poems have appeared such places as Ploughshares, Guernica, The Georgia Review, Crazyhorse, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for her new manuscript in progress. She teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi, and she is the founding editor of the online magazine Memorious.org.

"Bluberry Picking"—Hannah Gamble is working on her second book of poems. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from American Poetry Review; The Believer; POETRY; Black Warrior Review; Court Green; and a chapbook from Coldfront magazine, featuring new work from authors of readers' favorite poetry collections of 2012. She lives in Chicago, where she is developing an arts-based learning workshop at the Museum of Science and Industry for a team of innovators seeking to address the city's problem of urban nutrition.

"Love Poem Made in a Dry Riverbed" —Carrie Jerrell is the author of the poetry collection After the Revival (Waywiser Press). A graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and Texas Tech University, she is an assistant professor at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky, where she helps direct the low-residency MFA program.

"when it comes back"—Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. He received his MFA from the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in Poetry, Indiana Review, The New Republic, [PANK] Online, and in many other publications. He is a member of the poetry collective, Dark Noise. He is also a rapper.

"Consolation"—Nathan McClain holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Collagist, Weave, Quarterly West, The Journal, Toad, and Best New Poets 2010. A recipient of scholarships from Vermont Studio Center and The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, he currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

"Those Who Favor Fire" and "Each year gave us portals"—Mark Neely's first book, Beasts of the Hill (Oberlin College Press, 2012), won the FIELD Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Boulevard,Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor of English at Ball State University.

"Letters to the Body," "Pre-Op Portrait as a Stand of Willows," "Letter to my Pre-Op Self as Marionette," "If You Come to the Sea and You Must Cross," and "Letter to My Pre-Op Self as Etiological Myth" —Susannah Nevison’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Western Humanities Review, American Literary Review, Cider Press Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2013 Academy of American Poets Larry Levis Prize, and won the 2013 American Literary Review Poetry Prize. Her first book, Teratology, won the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2015. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Utah and lives in Salt Lake City.

"Tracking" —C.L. O’Dell’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, New England Review, Barrow Street, and Many Mountains Moving, among others. He is founder and editor of The Paris-American, a poetry e-zine and reading series at Poets House in New York City.

"The Rising Cost of Dying" —Emilia Phillips is the author of Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013) and three chapbooks including Bestiary of Gall (Sundress Publications, 2013) and Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, forthcoming in 2014). Her poetry appears in Agni, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, Poetry, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of the 2012 Poetry Prize from The Journal, 2nd Place in Narrative’s 2012 30 Below Contest, and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. She is the 2013–2014 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, the prose editor for 32 Poems, and a staff member at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Cecil Sayre has been published in Slipstream, Rattle, Main Street Rag, and Pearl. 

"Gerbils in Space" —Martha Silano has authored four poetry books, including The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception and Reckless Lovely (both from Saturnalia Books). She also co-edited, with Kelli Russell Agodon, of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press 2013), serves as poetry editor at Crab Creek Review, and teaches at Bellevue College. In 2013, Silano won North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize, as well as Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Poetry Award. Her work regularly appears in such journals as Paris Review, Orion,Ecotone, and American Poetry Review.

"Nightlight" —Leslie Kirk Campbell is the author of Journey Into Motherhood (Riverhead) and has published her personal essays in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, sfgate.com, and Literary Mama. Her short story "Thunder in Illinois" was a finalist for the Iowa Review and the Bellevue Literary Review, received an Honorable Mention at Carve Magazine, and won the 2013 The Briar Cliff Review Award. Leslie received an MA in English/Creative Writing (poetry) from San Francisco State University and an MFA (fiction) from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She teaches creative writing at Ripe Fruit School of Creative Writing, a program she founded in 1991.

"Nine Times I Failed My Second Wife" —Before returning to his home state of Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Shippensburg University, Neil Connelly directed the MFA program at McNeese State. His fifth book, THE POCKET GUIDE TO DIVORCE (A SELF HELP WORK OF FICTION) was the 2014 winner of the Molly Ivors Prize from Gorsky Press.

"Lessons in Lamentations" —Jennifer S. Davis is the author of two collections of short stories, Her Kind of Want, winner of the Iowa Award for Short Fiction, and Our Former Lives in Art, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. She has published in such journals as The Paris Review, One Story, The Georgia Review, Fiction, and The American Scholar. She lives in Baton Rouge with her husband and three young sons and teaches in the MFA program at LSU.

"The Big Picture" —Julie Marie Wade is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010; Bywater Books, 2014); Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010); Small Fires: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011); Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013); Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Books, 2013); andWhen I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014). A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives in Dania Beach. 

"The Lost Gardens of Tokyo" —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, including German, Swedish, and Hebrew. Yoshikawa’s second novel, Once Removed, also published by Bantam, came out in 2003. Writing awards include fellowships from the Bunting Institute of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the MacDowell Colony. Yoshikawa, who was born and raised in Princeton, NJ, spent two years of her childhood in Tokyo. She has also lived in England, France, Switzerland, and New Zealand. She attended Columbia University, received a masters in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama at Lincoln College, Oxford, and has a PhD in literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.