2019 Spring

Ervin A. Johnson graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a bachelor’s in rhetoric. He completed his MFA in photography at Savannah College of Art and Design. Johnson utilizes photo-based mixed media to re-imagine his cultural and racial identity via photography and video. In 2016 he was awarded the Critical Mass Solo Exhibition Award. Johnson has exhibited all across the United States, most notably with Blue Sky Gallery in Portland and Arnika Dawkins Gallery in Atlanta and also Detroit’s Wright Museum.

Emily Cinquemani is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she currently teaches. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Meridian, Nashville Review, Indiana Review, and Cherry Tree.

"Upon Meeting My Father for the First Time, My Mother Thinks—" — Bailey Cohen is the author of Self-Portraits as Yurico (forthcoming, Glass Poetry Press). An undergraduate student at New York University, he serves as the associate editor for Frontier Poetry and runs Alegrarse, an online journal of poetry and interviews with poets. Cohen’s work appears in publications such as [PANK], Raleigh Review, Boulevard, Longleaf Review, The Boiler Journal, and elsewhere. He can be found across most social media platforms @BaileyC213.

Dorsey Craft holds an MFA from McNeese State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD student in poetry at Florida State and the assistant poetry editor of The Southeast Review.

Didi Jackson’s collection of poems, Moon Jar, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press (2020). Her poems have appeared most recently in The New Yorker, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. Currently, Jackson teaches creative writing at the University of Vermont.

"Motel, Oregon" — Sophie Klahr is the author of Meet Me Here At Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016) and the chapbook _____ Versus Recovery. Her poetry appears in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, AGNI and other publications.

Stephen Lackaye’s first collection of poems, Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape, won the Unicorn Press First Book Prize and was published in 2016. It was subsequently a finalist for an Eric Hoffer Award and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Lackaye lives in Beaverton, Oregon, with his wife and two daughters. 

Moira Logan, an emeritus professor of dance, has spent the last several years shifting her creative focus from dance to poetry. A native of Philadelphia, she lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with her husband, a visual artist, and her son, a musician.

Karyna McGlynn is a writer and collagist living in Memphis. Her newest poetry collection Hothouse (Sarabande Books) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her other books include The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, and Scorpionica. Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Best American Poetry blog, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. McGlynn is an assistant professor of
creative writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis and teaches with Tennessee Young Writers Workshop. She’s currently completing a new poetry collection called 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse. Find her on Instagram/Twitter @karynamcglynn.

Michael Mlekoday is the author of one collection of poems, The Dead Eat Everything, and is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Davis. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Washington Square Review, and other venues.

"Something Quiet" — Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System, winner of the National Poetry Series, chosen by Monica Youn, forthcoming from Ecco press. She is also the author of June in Eden, winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal prize. She has been awarded the “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, a Wallace Stegner fellowship in creative writing from Stanford University, and scholarships from the Tin House and Bread Loaf writing workshops. Moffett’s poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Believer, FIELD, Narrative, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, and other magazines, as well as in the anthology Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets.

Carolyn Oliver’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in FIELD, Indiana Review, The Shallow Ends, The Greensboro Review, Booth, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry. Oliver lives in Massachusetts with her family.

"Casida of the Branches" — 2018 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award winner, C. C. Reid, is the recipient of two Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and winner of the Larry Neal Writers’ Award for poetry. Her work has appeared in/is forthcoming from Poet Lore, Mid-American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Five Points.

Felicity Sheehy’s poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The Yale Review, The Adroit Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Shenandoah, Narrative, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. A finalist in Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, she has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a scholarship to the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop, and the 2019 Jane Martin Poetry Prize for UK residents under thirty. Originally from New York’s Hudson Valley, she is a PhD student at Cambridge University.

"For the Doctor's Records" — Clint Smith is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Art for Justice Fund, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the National Science Foundation. He is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and a recipient of the 2017 Jerome J. Shestack Prize from The American Poetry Review. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and numerous other publications. Smith is the author of Counting Descent (2016), which won the 2017 Literary Award for best poetry book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He was born and raised in New Orleans.

Robert Thomas’s latest book, Bridge, is a work of fiction published by BOA Editions. His first book, Door to Door, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize and published by Fordham University Press, and his second book, Dragging the Lake, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won a Pushcart Prize.

Jermaine Thompson was born in Louisville, Mississippi. He learned language from big-armed women who salted their greens with gossip and from shade-sitting men who cussed and prayed with equal fervor. Thompson has an MFA in poetry and currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

William H. Wandless is a professor of English at Central Michigan University specializing in British literature of the eighteenth century. He writes primarily on scholarly subjects, but his verse has appeared in a number of poetry journals, most recently in The Cincinnati Review and Rattle.

2018 Mary C. Mohr Fiction Award winner, Elise Burke, holds an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University. She is the recipient of two Kratz Center Writing Fellowships, the Reese Writing Award, the Dillard Arts Fellowship, James Purdy Award for Short Fiction, and her fiction has recognized by storySouth’s Million Writers Award. Her story collection Sorry for Crashing Your Party and Possibly Killing Your Horse was a finalist for the YesYes Books 2018 Pamet River Prize. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Joyland, and The RS 500, among others. Burke is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Susquehanna University as well as fiction editor at Flock literary journal.

Tim Potter is a retired dairy farmer from the Berkshire Hills of Connecticut. Now that his cows are no longer calling the shots, he’s found the time to write again. He studied at the University of Montana in the days of William Kittredge, James Lee Burke, and Richard Hugo. In the early seventies, while driving a yellow cab in NYC, he was part of an Anatole Broyard writing group at The New School. Potter now lives in Skaneateles, New York, with his wife, Linda.

Robyn Ritchie is an MFA graduate of Emerson College. She is currently at work on a novel, Red All Over, which is set in the same small town as that in “Revival Meetings” (her story in SIR). She tweets at @RobynBRitchie.

2018 Mary C. Mohr Nonfiction Award co-winner, Chelsea Catherine, is also a winner of the 2016 Raymond Carver Contest, a Sterling Watson fellow, and an Ann McKee grant recipient. Her novella Blindsided won the Clay Reynolds novella competition and was published in 2018. Her novel Summer of the Cicadas won the Quill Prose Award and will be published in 2020. Catherine lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, where she enjoys running along the beach and hanging out with other people’s dogs.

2018 Mary C. Mohr Nonfiction Award co-winner, Sean W. Murphy, is a 2018 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow as well as an authorized teacher of Zen meditation. His One Bird, One Stone: 108 Contemporary Zen Stories, won the 2014 International Book Award in the Eastern Religions category. He is the award-winning author of three novels with Bantam Dell Books, receiving the Hemingway Award for a First Novel for The Hope Valley Hubcap King, the 2009 National Press Women’s Communication Award for best novel for The Time of New Weather, and the 2017 William Faulkner Wisdom Award for novel-in-progress for his current project, Wilson’s Way.

Michael Waters has published twelve books of poetry, most recently The Dean of Discipline(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) and Celestial Joyride (BOA Editions, 2016). Darling Vulgarity was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, and Rolling Stone. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, he has been the recipient of five Pushcart Prizes, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, and New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and residency fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, St. James Cavalier Centre (Malta), Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), and Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland). Waters teaches at Monmouth University and for the Drew University MFA Program. He lives in Ocean, New Jersey.

Ryan Schaufler received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts in Acting. He has performed throughout the country working as a professional actor for over twenty years. He has worked for one of Los Angeles’s premier classical theatre companies A Noise Within, as well as the Stella Adler Theatre, and was a member of The Other Side Theatre in Portland, Oregon. He has worked as a director, poet, and playwright having work produced at the Los Angeles Greenway Court Theatre and directing shows in Wisconsin. His plays and poetry have been published in Rise Up Review and Clockhouse. For ten years Schaufler has been collaborating with Above the Clouds, a faith-based program, bringing the arts to disadvantaged children free of charge. Currently, he works as a special education teacher, adjunct theatre instructor, as well as a working artist. He has the joy of artistically collaborating with his beautiful wife, Lori Woodall (head of the Concordia Theatre Program), on various theatrical projects. He is also blessed with two beautiful children.