2016 Fall

Joan Dewig Kempf deJong is assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and associate professor of art at the University of Southern Indiana. For nearly twenty-five years, she has taught college-level courses in graphic design, digital photo imaging, illustration, web design, interactive media, and 3D computer graphics. Her creative work has been shown in numerous invitational and competitive exhibitions and is included in private and corporate collections. Her current work consists of mixed media and computer-generated 3D graphics.

William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming 2017), winner of the National Poetry Series, and Oxyana, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, forthcoming in 2017. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Brewer was born and raised in West Virginia.

Kathy Fagan is the author of five books of poems: Sycamore, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in March, 2017; The Raft, a National Poetry Series Award Winner; MOVING & ST RAGE, winner of the 1998 Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry; The Charm (2002); and LIP(2009). Her work appears recently in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, and Blackbird. Fagan directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Ohio State where she serves as Series Editor for The OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Poetry Prize.

Maggie Graber is a poet originally from the Midwest. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Luminarts Cultural Foundation and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Jet Fuel Review, the Harpoon Review, GlitterMOB, the Button Poetry blog, Duende, and elsewhere. A former radio DJ and farmhand, she currently lives and teaches at the Cahaba Environmental Center on the Cahaba River in Alabama.

Rebecca Hazelton is the author of Fair Copy and Vow. Her poems have appeared inPoetry, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry 2013 and 2015.

Cynthia Hogue has nine collections of poetry, most recently Revenance, listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets, and the forthcoming In June the Labyrinth (Red Hen Press, 2017). Her work has appeared recently in Kestrel, Best American Poetry, Hotel Amerika, Prairie Schooner, and Field, among others. She holds the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.

Katharine Johnsen earned her MFA in creative writing as the Bernice Kert Fellow at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and is the recipient of a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Five Points, Ninth Letter, American Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Annie Kim’s first collection, Into the Cyclorama, won the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Mudlark, Asian American Literary Review, and DMQ Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA program for writers and the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Hambidge Center, Kim works at the University of Virginia School of Law as the assistant dean for public service.

Kien Lam lives in Los Angeles, where he works as an esports writer. He received his MFA in poetry from Indiana University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Rattle, and Hobart, among others. His favorite reptile is a Gatorade. Follow him on Twitter @meanmisterkien.

Michael Marberry’s poetry has appeared in The New Republic, Sycamore Review, Indiana Review, West Branch, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. His work has received a Pushcart Prize and has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Currently, Marberry lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he serves as coordinator of the Poets-in-Print Reading Series. He is originally from rural Tennessee.

Leah Nielsen’s collection No Magic was published by Word Press in 2005. Side Effects May Include, a chapbook, appeared as its own volume from The Chapbook in 2014. Nielsen lives and teaches in Westfield, Massachusetts.

Annette Oxindine’s poems appear in Gulf Coast, Shenandoah, Crab Creek Review, Willow Springs, New Orleans Review, Hollins Critic, Winter Tangerine Review, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere. Originally from Maryland, she teaches literature at Wright State University, in Ohio.

Siobhan Phillips’s poems have appeared in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Ladowich, Yale Review, and other journals; her essays and reviews have appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, Massachusetts Review, The Toast and other journals. Phillips teaches at Dickinson College.

Catherine Pierce’s third book, The Tornado Is the World, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in December; her other books are The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia, 2012) and Famous Last Words (Saturnalia, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, and elsewhere. She co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

Drew Pomeroy’s poetry has been published by The Louisville Review. He holds an MFA from Spalding University, where he is currently leading an online alumni workshop in poetry. Born and raised in Selma, Alabama, Pomeroy now lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky, dividing his time between the Copper & Kings brandy distillery and the Kentucky Opera.

Daniel Eduardo Ruiz was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, but currently lives in Valparaíso, Chile, on a Fulbright Scholarship. His poems can or will be found in The Journal, Harpur Palate, Minnesota Review, and elsewhere.

Britton Shurley’s poetry has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Wacamaw. He has also received Emerging Artist Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council in both 2011 and 2017. Shurley is currently an associate professor of English at West Kentucky Community & Technical College where he edits the journal Exit 7 with his wife, poet Amelia Martens.

Brian Simoneau is the author of River Bound (C&R Press, 2014). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, RHINO, and other journals, and his awards include a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and an emerging writer fellowship from The Writer’s Center. He lives in Connecticut with his family.

Kathryn Smith’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Bellingham Review, Redivider, Ruminate, and elsewhere. A mini-chapbook, Tracing the New Stars, was published in Rock & Sling. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Eastern Washington University and lives in Spokane, Washington.

Barbara Ungar’s most recent book, Immortal Medusa, was chosen as one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2015, and won the Adirondack Center for Writing Poetry Award. Prior books include Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Prize, an Independent Publishers Silver Medal, and a Hoffer award. A professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, Ungar teaches writing and literature.

Jennifer Whalen’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Fugue, New South, Grist, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She was the 2015-2016 L.D. & LaVerne Harrell Clark House writer-in-residence at Texas State University. Residing in San Marcos, Texas, Whalen currently teaches college writing.

Katie Willingham teaches writing at the University of Michigan where she earned her MFA. Her debut collection of poems, Unlikely Designs, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in 2017. Willingham has poems in such journals as The Kenyon Review, Cimarron Review, Whiskey Island, Phantom, and others.

Before becoming a novelist, Anne Hillerman, daughter of Tony Hillerman, worked as a nonfiction author and journalist. In 2013 she revived her father’s classic Navajo mystery series with Spider Woman’s Daughter. Her second mystery, Rock with Wings, was released in 2015, and quickly became a New York Times bestseller. The third book in the new series, Song of the Lion, will debut in April 2017.

Neil Connelly teaches writing at Shippensburg University and lives in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, with his wife and their two sons.  He is the author of five novels.  His story in this issue, "Holding Your Peace," will be included in the collection In the Wake of Our Vows, due out from Fomite Press in 2017.   

Matthew Socia’s stories have appeared in Tin House, CutBank, and Epiphany. He has received a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and an emerging writer fellowship from the Writers’ Room of Boston. He has an MFA from Emerson College. Originally from northern Michigan, Socia now lives in Connecticut.

Justin Bigos's stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly, The Best American Short Stories 2015, Ninth Letter, The Seattle Review, Memorious, and The Collagist, and a new story is forthcoming in Indiana Review. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Twenty Thousand Pigeons and co-editor of the literary journal Waxwing. He lives with his wife and daughter in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.

Cate Hennessey’s essays and book reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Gettysburg Review, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, PANK, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. A Pushcart Prize recipient, she has been noted in The Best American Essays and is a recent finalist for the Arts & Letters prize in creative nonfiction. Hennessey teaches at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of eight collections of poetry and prose, most recently Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016) and When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014). Her first lyric essay collection, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010; Bywater Books, 2014), won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, and her newest collection of poems, SIX (Red Hen Press, 2016), was selected by C.D. Wright as the winner of the AROHO/ To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for The Rumpus and Lambda Literary Review. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives on Hollywood Beach.