2017 Fall

Alisa (AL) Holen is an associate professor of ceramics at the University of Southern Indiana. She exhibits both regionally and nationally, and dedicates time each fall to oversee and facilitate Empty Bowls, Evansville which uses clay to annually raise $8000-10,000 for the undernourished in Southern Indiana.

Norman D. Holen was a professor of art for forty years, thirty-eight of which were at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He creates sculpture, drawings, and pottery and has been in numerous exhibitions, including one-person exhibitions in the Little Gallery and Kresge Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. His group exhibitions include shows at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Port of History Museum in Philadelphia.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, writer, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of poetry collection The Crown Ain’t Worth Much and the essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, VINYL, PEN American, and various other journals, and his essays and music criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The FADER, and Pitchfork. Abdurraqib is currently a columnist at MTV News.

Eloisa Amezcua is an Arizona native. Her debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. She is the author of three chapbooks and has poems and translations forthcoming in Poetry, Diode, Vinyl, and more. Amezcua is the founder and editor of The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry.

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American poet whose debut poetry collection Set to Music a Wildfire won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from SIR Press. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the 2012 and 2013 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in New Republic, The Missouri Review, CALYX, Nashville Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.

Michael Bazzett is the author of You Must Remember This, which received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, and The Interrogation. He is also the translator of The Popul Vuh, the first English verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and Best New Poets. A longtime faculty member at The Blake School, Bazzett is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. He lives in Minneapolis.

Annah Browning lives in Chicago, where she recently completed her PhD in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Verse Daily, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Southeast Review, Willow Springs, and other journals, and have received awards and recognition from Boulevard, Indiana Review, Blue Mesa Review, and Vermont Studio Center. She is poetry editor of Grimoire, an online literary magazine of dark arts.

Karissa Morton Carter is originally from Iowa, and currently lives in Texas. Her recent work can be found in Cream City Review, Indiana Review, Guernica, The Paris-American, Sonora Review, Devil’s Lake, and Crab Orchard Review, among other places. She enjoys spending time with her husband, wrangling her cat, and following Stevie Nicks around the country.

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is winner of the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for his book River Hymns. Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly finalist and Cave Canem fellow and longtime member of the editorial staff at Raleigh Review. He received his MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner and Nashville Review and is forthcoming in Ploughshares. He recently won the Amy Clampitt Residency for 2018 and The Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of four collections of poetry, Names Above Houses; Furious Lullaby; Requiem for the Orchard, winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martìn Espada; and Post Subject: A Fable. He co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry, and serves on the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Board of Trustees. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, and Tin House, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Brionne Janae is a California native and teaching artist living in Brooklyn, New York. She is a recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award, a Hedgebrook alum, and proud Cave Canem fellow. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Waxwing, The American Poetry Review, and Rattle, among others. Brionne’s first full-length collection of poetry, After Jubilee, was selected for publication by Dorianne Laux and published by Boaat Press.

Donika Kelly is the author of BESTIARY, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, long listed for the 2016 National Book Award, and a finalist for a 2017 Lambda Literary Award, and the chapbook AVIARIUM. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she received her MFA in writing from the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Kelly is an assistant professor at St. Bonaventure University, where she teaches creative writing.

Rebecca Lindenberg is the author of Love, an Index and The Logan Notebooks, winner of the 2015 Utah Book Award. She’s been awarded an Amy Lowell fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant, a Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Fellowship, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and residency grants from the MacDowell Arts Colony and the Sewanee Writers Conference. Her poetry, lyric essays, and criticism appear in The Believer, Poetry, McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Lindenberg is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Cincinnati.

Philip Metres is the author of a number of books, including, most recently, Pictures at an Exhibition and Sand Opera. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and has garnered the Lannan Literary Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, six Ohio Arts Council grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. Metres teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

David Moolten’s most recent book, Primitive Mood, won the T. S. Eliot Award from Truman State University Press. He lives and writes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

Lauren Moseley is the author of the debut poetry collection Big Windows, forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in February 2018. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Best New Poets and Women Write Resistance and in such magazines as Copper Nickel, Narrative, FIELD, and Pleiades. She has been a fellow at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a recipient of an artist’s grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Moseley lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Amy O’Reilly’s poetry has appeared in Sugar House Review, Cimarron Review, and Little Patuxent Review. She is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at Creighton University. O’Reilly lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with her husband and son.

John Poch’s poems have recently appeared in The Nation, Poetry, Yale Review, and other journals.

Sheila Sanderson is a rural Kentucky native who now lives in the high desert mountains of Arizona and teaches at Prescott College. She also serves as editor for Alligator Juniper. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, North American Review, and Southern Poetry Review, as well as in anthologies Language Lessons and One for the Money: The Sentence as a Poetic Form. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Keeping Even. Forthcoming prose publications include Arts & Letters and The Southeast Review.

Michael Shewmaker is the recent winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and author of Penumbra. His poems recently appear in Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, Poetry Daily, Parnassus, Oxford American, Narrative, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Shewmaker is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University.

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir and six poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She was awarded an American Book Award for her memoir Bring Down the Little Birds and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for her collection Goodbye, Flicker. She also co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing. She now serves on the planning committee for CantoMundo and as the publisher of Noemi Press. Her next collection of poems, Cruel Futures, will be a volume in the City Lights Spotlight Series in 2018. Be Recorder will be published by Graywolf Press in 2019. Smith is professor of English at Virginia Tech and, with Steph Burt, poetry editor of The Nation.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley borderlands to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PBS Newshour, Poor Claudia, Apogee, Waxwing, The Wanderer, Sporklet, DIAGRAM, The Feminist Wire, The Poetry Foundation Harriet Blog, and elsewhere. She has served as an editor for the Bettering American Poetry project and is a CantoMundo fellow. Her book, Beast Meridian, is available from Noemi Press. Villarreal is currently pursuing a PhD in poetry and digital media arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Caki Wilkinson is the author of the poetry collections Circles Where the Head Should Be, which won the Vassar Miller Prize, and The Wynona Stone Poems, which won the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Brad Eddy lives in Pittsburgh and has an MFA from The University of Montana. His stories have appeared in Subtropics, The Normal School, descant, The Saint Ann’s Review, and elsewhere.

Lee Martin is the author of five novels, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Bright Forever; three memoirs; and a story collection. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Georgia Review, Glimmer Train, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Martin teaches in the MFA program at The Ohio State University.

Giovanna Varela grew up in the South Orlando-North Kissimmee area of Central Florida. She is a student in two MFA programs: creative writing at The New School and film production at Emerson College. Her flash fiction has been published in Folio, Literary Juice, Rock & Sling, and the Owen Wister Review, and is forthcoming in Moon City Review.

Steve Fellner is the author of two books of poetry, The Weary World Rejoices and Blind Date with Cavafy, winner of the Thom Gunn Gay Male Poetry Award, and All Screwed Up, a memoir. His nonfiction has appeared in The Sun and North American Review, among other journals.

Stephen Baily has published short fiction in some forty journals. Of his ten plays, four have been performed in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Orlando. He’s also the author of three novels, including Markus Klyner, MD, FBI, which is available as a Kindle e-book.

Mark A. Fisher is a poet and playwright living in Tehachapi, California. His poetry has appeared in Dragon Poet Review, Altadena Poetry Review, Penumbra, Elegant Rage: A Poetic Tribute to Woody Guthrie, and many other places. Fisher is the author of two chapbooks: drifter and hour of lead, which won the 2017 San Gabriel Valley Poetry Chapbook contest. His plays have appeared on California stages in Pine Mountain Club, Tehachapi, Bakersfield, and Hayward.