2015 Fall

Richard Hunt is an internationally known sculptor whose career has spanned four decades. His abstract works of welded steel and bronze are based on natural forms and have been exhibited in some of the most prestigious museum collections in the United States and abroad, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna, Austria. More than thirty of Hunt’s public sculptures are located in and around greater Chicago, where he was born and raised.

Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, performer, photographer, writer and thinker who is almost always in-between two places. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Paris-American, The Margins, The Offing, Word Riot, and many others.  In 2011 she created Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first Spoken Word Poetry group, REFLEKS, while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-genocidal countries. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook After was just published by on YesYes Books. Asghar currently serves as a member of the teaching artist core for Young Chicago Authors.

Ruth Awad is a poet, tattoo artist, and copy editor with an MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, CALYX, Diode, Rattle, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review and the following anthologies: The Hundred Years’ War: Modern War Poems, New Poetry from the Midwest 2014, and Poets on Growth. She won the 2013 and 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest. Awad is currently writing a collection of poems about her father’s experiences during the Lebanese Civil War and his eventual emigration. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her two Pomeranians.

J. Scott Brownlee is a former Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at NYU, where he taught poetry to undergraduates and fifth graders through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. His poems appear in The Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, RATTLE, Beloit Poetry Journal, Linebreak, Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, BOXCAR Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Devil's Lake, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of three prize-winning chapbooks: Highway or Belief, which won the 2013 Button Poetry Prize; Ascension, which won the 2014 Robert Phillips Poetry Prize; and On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County, which won the 2015 Tree Light Books Prize. His first full-length collection, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and selected by C. Dale Young as the winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize. Brownlee writes about the people and landscape of rural Texas and is a founding member of The Localists, a literary collective that emphasizes place-based writing of personal witness, cultural memory, and the aesthetically marginalized working class. He currently lives in Philadelphia.

Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and teaching artist. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellow. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Journal, PANK, The Rumpus, and others. She is a VONA alumna, Project VOICE teaching artist, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. 

Aaron Coleman is the Third Year Fellow in Poetry in Washington University St. Louis’ MFA Program and Programs Assistant at Pulitzer Arts Foundation. A Fulbright Scholar from Metro-Detroit, Aaron has lived and worked with youth in locations including Kalamazoo, Chicago, Spain, and South Africa. Winner of the Tupelo Quarterly TQ5 Poetry Contest and a semifinalist for the 92Y/Discovery Poetry Contest, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Greensboro Review, Meridian, Pinwheel, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. 

Gillian Cummings is the author of My Dim Aviary, chosen as the winner of the 2015 Hudson Prize from Back Lawrence Press and forthcoming in November 2016. She has also written three chapbooks, Ophelia (dancing girl press, forthcoming, 2016), Petals as an Offering in Darkness (Finishing Line Press, 2014), and Spirits of the Humid Cloud (dancing girl press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, cream city review, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Linebreak The Paris-American, and in other journals.

Kyle Dargan is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Honest Engine and Logorrhea Dementia. His debut, The Listening, won the 2003 Cave Canem Prize, and his second, Bouquet of Hungers, was awarded the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in poetry. Dargan’s poems and nonfiction have appeared in publications such as Callaloo, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, The Newark Star-Ledger, Ploughshares, and Shenandoah. While a Yusef Komunyakaa fellow at Indiana University, he served as poetry editor for Indiana Review. He is the founding editor of Post No Ills magazine.

Rebecca Foust’s fifth book, Paradise Drive, won the 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry and was reviewed in The Georgia Review, Hudson Review, Huffington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Review of Books, and elsewhere. The recipient of recent fellowships from the Frost Place, MacDowell Colony, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and West Chester Poetry Conference, Foust works as poetry editor for Women’s Voices for Change.

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon, 2012), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and The Spokes of Venus (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared such places as Ploughshares, Harvard Review, 32 Poems, and the New England Review. She is the editor of the online magazine Memorious and an assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers.

Audrey Gradzewicz was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, and received her BA from Dartmouth College. She is currently a third-year poet in the MFA program at Purdue University.

Julie Henson was the winner of Redivider’s Beacon Street 2015 poetry prize for her poem “Fell the Trees.” She was a finalist for Washington Square Review’s 2015 Poetry Prize, for Iowa Review’s 2014 poetry contest, and a semi-finalist for Boston Review’s 2014 “Discovery” contest. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Subtropics, Quarterly West, CutBank, cream city review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Rattle, and others. Her essays have appeared in New Ohio Review and Word Riot.

Cate Lycurgus’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Third Coast, Gulf Coast Online, and elsewhere. A 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship Finalist, she has also received scholarships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. Lycurgus currently lives south of San Francisco, California, where she teaches professional writing to aspiring accountants.  

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Press, 2014). He is a Kundiman fellow and a recipient of the Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant from The Loft Literary Center. His work has also appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Journal, PANK, The Paris-American, Devil’s Lake, Vinyl, Indiana Review, and other journals. Nguyen lives in Minneapolis.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of two poetry collections, Rag & Bone, which won the Elixir Press Antivenom Prize, and The End of Pink, which is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2016. Nuernberger is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as the director of Pleiades Press. 

Jill Osier’s work can be found in The Georgia Review, Pleiades, West Branch, and ZYZZYVA.

Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College, Alan Michael Parker is the author of eight collections of poetry and three novels. His awards
include three Pushcart Prizes, the 2013 and 2014 Randall Jarrell Prizes in Poetry, and the North Carolina Book Award. Parker also teaches in the University of
Tampa’s low-residency MFA program.

Jocelyn Sears is a California native currently living in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow with the MFA program at the University of Virginia. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in journals that include PANK, CutBank, Bellingham Review, DIAGRAM, and The Collagist.

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, winner of the 2012 The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellow at Stanford University, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2014, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is currently the 2015-2016 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.

Tobias Wray is a poetry editor for cream city review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Bellingham Review, North American Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry and Translation from the University of Arkansas and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Conor McPherson was born in Dublin in 1971. His plays include Rum & Vodka (Fly by Night Theatre Company, Dublin); The Good Thief (Dublin Theatre Festival; Stewart Parker Award); This Lime Tree Bower (Fly by Night Theatre Company, Dublin/Bush Theatre; Meyer-Whitworth Award); St. Nicholas (Bush Theatre/Primary Stages, New York); The Weir (Royal Court/Duke of York’s/Walter Kerr Theater, New York; Laurence Olivier, Evening Standard, Critics’ Circle, George Devine Awards); Dublin Carol (Royal Court/Atlantic Theater, New York); Port Authority (Ambassadors Theatre/Gate Theatre, Dublin/Atlantic Theater, New York); Shining City (Royal Court/Gate Theatre, Dublin/Manhattan Theater Club, New York; Tony Award nomination for Best Play); The Seafarer (National Theatre/Abbey Theatre, Dublin/Booth Theater, New York; Laurence Olivier, Evening Standard, Tony Award nominations for Best Play); The Veil (National Theatre); and The Night Alive (Donmar Warehouse/Atlantic Theatre). Theatre adaptations include Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds (Gate Theatre, Dublin/Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis) and August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death(Donmar at Trafalgar Studios).

Gerald C. Wood is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus from Carson-Newman University. During his years as a college teacher, he wrote primarily on theater and film, emphasizing the work of Horton Foote (USA) and Conor McPherson (Ireland), both playwrights and filmmakers. Most recently he has written about the history of baseball, including a biography of Smoky Joe Wood, legendary pitcher and outfielder from the Deadball Era, winner of the 2014 Dr. Harold and Dorothy Seymour Medal from the Society for American Baseball Research, which honors the year’s best book of baseball history or biography.

Allegra Hyde's stories and essays have appeared in The Missouri Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. Her work was recently included in The Pushcart Prize XL: The Best of the Small Presses, and named "Notable" in Best American Essays 2015. She is currently living in Bulgaria.

Claire O'Connor’s stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, Fiction Circus, and Gravel. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Idaho, and for the past six years she taught English and Special Education in New York City public schools. She is currently traveling and preparing to volunteer with an organization that promotes sustainable development in Borneo.

Sarah Mollie Silberman holds an MFA from George Mason University and lives in Virginia. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, CutBank, Devil's Lake, Juked, and Nashville Review. 

Jon Volkmer is the director of creative writing at Ursinus College. His books include a travel memoir, Eating Europe, and a collection of poems about grain elevators.  His nonfiction has appeared in Literal Latte, Parnassus,  Platte Valley Review,  Divide, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Michael Waters has written eleven books of poetry, including Celestial Joyride (BOA Editions, 2016); Gospel Night (BOA, 2011); Darling Vulgarity, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (BOA, 2006); and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems, finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize (BOA, 2001). His poems have appeared in various journals, including The Yale Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Georgia Review, and RollingStone. Among his awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation and fellowship residencies at Yaddo,MacDowell, The Tyrone Guthrie Center (Ireland), Le Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), and The St. James Centre for Creativity (Malta). He is professor of English at Monmouth University and also teaches in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. Waters lives with his wife, poet Mihaela Moscaliuc, in Ocean, New Jersey.

2015 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Nonfiction Award Winner, Melora Wolff, grew up in New York City and now lives near Saratoga Springs. Her essays have appeared in many publications, including Brick, The Normal School, and The New York Times and have been anthologized in The New Brick Reader and, most recently, in Every Father's Daughter: Twenty-four Women Writers Remember Their Fathers. Shorter prose works have been selected for Best New Writing 2016 and Best American Fantasy. Wolff currently teaches at Skidmore College.