2018 Spring

Ronald Sloan's work is part of numerous private collections and has been included in hundreds of group and solo exhibits around the country during his fifty-plus years of painting.

“Crack” — Geoff Anderson curated Columbus, Ohio’s, first poetry shows for biracial writers (The Other Box), translation (Lingua Franca), and immigration (New World). He’s a Callaloo fellow and his chapbook, Humming Dirges, won Paper Nautilus’s Debut Series (2017). He has work on/forthcoming in Tinderbox, Juked, and Glass.

Britt Ashley is a queer femme from Texas who makes poems and biscuits. Her writing and artwork has appeared or is forthcoming from The Pinch, cream city review, Juked, Winter Tangerine, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is the former editor-in-chief of Indiana Reviewand she recently served as the managing editor at Bitch Media.

Christopher Citro is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy and the recipient of a 2018 Pushcart Prize for his poem “It’s Something People in Love Do”; his recent publications include poetry in The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Mid-American Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review and creative nonfiction in Boulevard, Passages North, and Colorado Review. Citro received his MFA from Indiana University and lives in Syracuse, New York.

Charlie Clark’s work has appeared in Pleiades, Smartish Pace, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals. He studied poetry at the University of Maryland and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Clark lives in Austin, Texas. 

Kat Finch is a poet living and working in Ann Arbor as a letterpress printer and as the education coordinator at a non-profit creative reuse center. She studied poetry at The University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ program where she received prizes in both fiction and poetry. Her work may be found in Diagram, The Literary Review, The Journal, and Black Warrior Review, among others. Birds with Teeth, her first chapbook, was published by alice blue press.

Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama who loves cats, crystals, and classic rock. Hendrix is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin and serves as the online content and web editor for Bat City Review. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and elsewhere.

L. A. Johnson is from California. She is the author of the chapbook Little Climates (Bull City Press, 2017). She received her MFA from Columbia University and is currently pursuing her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California, where she is a provost’s fellow. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, The Iowa Review, Narrative Magazine, The Southern Review, and other journals.

“Sunken Place Sestina” — Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in poetry from Florida International University, where she was a Knight Foundation Fellow. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, and her debut collection, Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press, 2017), won a silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her second collection, dark // thing, won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press, and is forthcoming in 2019. Jones lives and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama.

Lisa Maria Martin is a Cuban-American poet who earned her MFA at Cornell. Her work has appeared in Pleiades, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. Raised in Virginia, she currently lives in Boston and works as an editor and information architect. Martin tweets about poetry, politics, and Star Trek at @redsesame.

“White Earth” — Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions), forthcoming in September 2018; Copia (BOA Editions); and Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate programs in creative writing.

Alex Mouw’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Ruminate, poets.org, Briar Cliff Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Society of Arts and Letters, the Lilly Foundation, and Purdue University. Mouw served as a poetry editor for Sycamore Review and is currently a visiting assistant professor of English at Hope College.

“Fawn” — Susannah Nevison is the author of Lethal Theater (forthcoming from Ohio State University Press in 2019) and Teratology, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, The National Poetry Review, 32 Poems, Pleiades, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, and elsewhere. Nevison is currently at work on a collaborative collection of poetry with the writer Molly McCully Brown. Beginning fall 2018, she will join Sweet Briar College as a visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing.

Dustin Nightingale is the author of Ghost Woodpecker, a chapbook forthcoming from BatCat Press. His poetry has been or will be published in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, New Ohio Review, Cimarron Review, Portland Review, and decomP.Nightingale lives in Hartford, Connecticut.

Samuel Piccone is the author of Pupa, which was awarded editors’ choice in the 2017 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize with Anhinga Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including, The Southeast Review, Passages North, American Literary Review, and Zócalo Public Square. Piccone received an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University and serves on the poetry staff at Raleigh Review. Currently, he resides and teaches in Nevada.

Katie E. Pryor holds an MFA in poetry from Bennington College. Her work has appeared in The Rio Review and Prairie Schooner and is forthcoming in North American Review and Five Points (as the recipient of the James Dickey Prize for Poetry). She was recently recognized with a 2017 Fall Fellowship at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Pryor lives and teaches in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Jacob Sunderlin is a writer and musician who has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Narrative Magazine, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Third Coast, and elsewhere. His records Death Ranch and Hymnal are available on cassette and for download.

“In Praise of the Names of Things” — Chelsea Wagenaar is the author of Mercy Spurs the Bone, selected by Philip Levine as the winner of the 2013 Philip Levine Prize. She holds a PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of North Texas. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, The Normal School, and The Southern Review, and recent nonfiction appears in Grist. Wagenaar currently teaches as a postdoctoral Lilly Fellow at Valparaiso University and is at work on a second book of poems, The Spinning Place. She lives in Indiana with her husband, poet Mark Wagenaar; their daughter; and their son.

2017 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award winner Mark Wagenaar is the 2016 winner of Red Hen Press’ Benjamin Saltman Prize for Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining. His first two collections, The Body Distances (A Hundred Blackbirds Rising) and Voodoo Inverso, won UMass Press’s Juniper Prize and the University of Wisconsin Press’s Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, respectively. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Yorker,Tin House, 32 Poems, FIELD, The Southern Review, Image, and many others. Wagenaar teaches literature and creative writing at Valparaiso University, in Indiana.

Alex C. Zhang has been featured or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Rust + Moth, The Blueshift Journal, The Sierra Nevada Review, and other publications. He is currently an undergraduate student at Columbia University.

Thomas M. Atkinson is an author and playwright. He has won numerous awards for both fiction and drama, including five Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. His short fiction has appeared in The Sun, North American Review, Indiana Review, and Tampa Review. His novels include Strobe Life and the recently completed Tiki Man. Atkinson and his wife live in Ohio and have two sons.

Lance Dyzak is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Tennessee, where he is also working on his first novel. Dyzak’s work has previously appeared in New Limestone Review and Per Contra. 

2017 Mary C. Mohr Fiction Award winner Shubha Venugopal holds an MFA in fiction and a PhD in English. Her work has appeared or will appear in Nimrod International Journal Awards Issue, 2017; Fish Anthology 2017; WomenArts Quarterly Journal; The Masters Review; BANG!; The New Guard; Kartika Review; Potomac Review; Post Road Magazine; Storyglossia; Word Riot; and in other journals. Her stories appeared in the anthology A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection and in the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Short Fiction Prize anthology. Venugopal teaches at the California State University Northridge.

Matt Muilenburg teaches at the University of Dubuque. His creative nonfiction has been featured in Southern Humanities Review, Storm Cellar, Superstition Review, Barnstorm, Atticus Review, New Plains Review, and others. A graduate of the Wichita State MFA program, Muilenburg lives in Iowa near the Field of Dreams.

2017 Mary C. Mohr Nonfiction Award winner Adriana Páramo is is a Latina anthropologist, writer, and women’s rights advocate. She is the author of Looking for Esperanza and My Mother’s Funeral. Her essays have appeared in multiple literary magazines and noted in The Best American Essays of 2012, 2013 and 2014. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Fairfield University and is an alumna of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA), a community of writers of color. Páramo is currently living in Qatar where, oddly enough, she works as a yoga and Zumba instructor.

Michael Waters has written twelve books of poetry, including The Dean of Discipline; Celestial Joyride; Gospel Night; Darling Vulgarity, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems, finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in various journals, including The Yale Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Georgia Review, and Rolling Stone. 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.