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Spring 2015


Artwork

Michael Aakhushas been professor of printmaking and painting at the ² since 1977, and currently serves as the dean for the College of Liberal Arts. He was born in Minnesota on the Canadian border and attended Bemidji State University where he earned a BA in art and art history. Aakhus received an MFA in printmaking, painting, and drawing from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and in 1976-77 he was the recipient of a grant to continue his creative work with the Roswell Artist in Residence Program where he spent a year painting and making prints in New Mexico.

Poetry

Curtis Baueris a poet and translator; his most recent collection of poetry is The Real Cause for Your Absence (C&R Press, 2013); his recent translations include Eros Is More, by Juan Antonio González Iglesias (Alice James Books, 2014); From Behind What Landscape, by Luis Muñoz (forthcoming from Vaso Roto Ediciones in 2015); and Baghdad and Other Poems, a bilingual chapbook of poems by Jorge Gimeno (forthcoming from Poets@Work Press in 2015). Bauer is the publisher and editor of Q Avenue Press Chapbooks and Broadsides, Spanish Translations editor for From the Fishouse, and he teaches at Texas Tech University.

Jenna Bazzell has an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. She won the 2010 AWP Intro Journal Award for her poem “Wet Field” and received publication in Hayden’s Ferry Review. She received Honorable Mention from the Academy of American Poets Prize for her poems “Into the Damp Woods” and “Drought.” Other publications are in Passages North, Cream City Review, Crab Orchard Review, Sou’wester, and Southern Indiana Review. She is the associate editor of Cimarron Review and publishes interviews of contemporary poets on PoemoftheWeek.org.

Adam Clayis the author of A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). A third book of poems is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review Online, Black Warrior Review, Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Clay co-edits TYPO Magazine and teaches at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Ansel Elkins is the author of Blue Yodel, which won the 2014 Yale Series ofYounger Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, TheBeliever, Oxford American, Parnassus, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, theNorth Carolina Arts Council, and the American Antiquarian Society, as wellas a “Discovery”/Boston Review award. In 2014 she was The Paris Review Writer-in-Residence at the Standard East Village. Born in Anniston, Alabama, she waseducated at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of North Carolina atGreensboro.

Stephen Frech has published three volumes of poetry: Toward Evening and theDay Far Spentwon the 1995 Wick Poetry Chapbook Contest; If Not For TheseWrinkles of Darkness won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize (2001); and TheDark Villages of Childhood won the 2008 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Prize.A fourth volume, A Palace of Strangers Is No City, a sustained narrative of prosepoetry/flash fiction, was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2011. His translationfrom the Dutch of Menno Wigman’s book of poems Zwart als kaviaar/Black asCaviar was published in 2012. He has been the recipient of the Elliston PoetryWriting Fellowship, the Milton Center Post-Graduate Writing Fellowship, andgrants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council. Frechis founder and editor of Oneiros Press, publisher of limited edition, letterpresspoetry broadsides, and associate professor of English at Millikin University.

Benjamin S. Grossberg earned an MFA and PhD in creative writing andliterature from the University of Houston. He is the author of the chapbook TheAuctioneer Bangs His Gavel(2006), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Series,and the full-length poetry collections Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath (2007);Sweet Core Orchard (2009), winner of a 2010 Lambda Literary Award; and SpaceTraveler (2014). He teaches English and creative writing at the University ofHartford. Grossberg is the assistant poetry editor of the Antioch Review.

Rebecca Gayle Howell is the author of Render/An Apocalypse (CSU, 2013),which was selected by Nick Flynn for the Cleveland State University First BookPrize. She is also the translator of Amal al-Jubouri’s Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation(Alice James Books, 2011). Among her awards aretwo fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and a Pushcart Prize. Native toKentucky, Howell is the poetry editor at Oxford American.

Josefine Klougart is one of Scandinavia’s most important writers. Her debutnovel Rise and Fall (Rosinante, 2010) contributed to her receiving the NordicCouncil Literature Prize in 2010. She has since published three other novels:The Halls (2011), One of Us is Sleeping (2012), and On Darkness (2013). Her workhas appeared in Salamander, World Literature Today, and Fjords. She is the editorof the Danish literary journal The Blue Gate.

Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection, The Book of Men, winner of The PatersonPrize, is available from W.W. Norton. Her fourth book of poems, Facts aboutthe Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the LenoreMarshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake(Carnegie Mellon ClassicContemporary); What We Carry (finalist for the National Book Critic’s CircleAward); and Smoke, as well as two fine small press editions, The Book of Womenand Dark Charms, both from Red Dragonfly Press. Co-author of The Poet’sCompanion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, Laux is the recipient of three Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The NationalEndowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Shara Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale. Her poems haveappeared in Plougshares, The Missouri Review, New England Review, ColoradoReview, The Kenyon Review, and Pleiades, among others. A former Stegner Fellowat Stanford, Lessley is the recipient of a 2015 Artist Fellowship in Poetry from theNational Endowment for the Arts.

Ada Limón is the author of three books of poetry, Lucky Wreck, This Big FakeWorld, and Sharks in the Rivers. She received her MFA in poetry from New YorkUniversity. Limón has received fellowships from the New York Foundation forthe Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and was one of the judgesfor the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry. She works as a freelance writer and splits her time between Lexington, Kentucky, and Sonoma, California (with agreat deal of New York in between). Her new book of poems, Bright Dead Things,is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in fall 2015.

Marc McKee is the author of What Apocalypse?, which won the New MichiganPress/DIAGRAM 2008 Chapbook Contest; Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011);and Bewilderness (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). His work has appeared in journalssuch as Barn Owl Review; Boston Review; Cimarron Review; Conduit; Crazyhorse; DIAGRAM; Forklift, Ohio; LIT; and Pleiades, among others. He teaches at theUniversity of Missouri at Columbia, where he lives with his wife, CamelliaCosgray.

Nick McRae is the author of Mountain Redemption (Black Lawrence Press, 2013)and The Name Museum (C&R Press, 2014) and editor of Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets(Sundress Publications, 2013). His work has appeared in CincinnatiReview, The Southern Review, Third Coast, and other journals. He is an associateeditor of 32 Poems. McRae received an MFA in writing from Ohio State University, and he is currently Robert B. Toulouse Doctoral Fellow in English atthe University of North Texas.

Fabio Morábito is a Mexican writer and poet. Born in Egypt to Italian parents,he spent his childhood in Milan. From the age of fifteen he has lived in MexicoCity where he has written—in Spanish—three books of poetry, Lotes baldíos(which won the 1995 Carlos Pellicer Prize), De lunes todo el año (which won theAguascalientes National Prize for Poetry in 1991), and Alguien de lava; a book ofprose, Caja de herramientas (1989); three collections of short stories, La lenta furia(1989), La vida ordenada (2000) and Grieta de fatiga (which won the ntoninArtaud Prize in 2006); and three books of essays, El viaje y la enfermedad (1984),Los pastores sin ovejas (1996), and El idioma materno (2014).

Jon Tribble’s first collection of poems, Natural State, will be published by GlassLyre Press in 2016. His poems have appeared in print journals and anthologies,including Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, South Dakota Review, and The Jazz Poetry Anthology, and online at The Account,Levure littéraire, Prime Number, and Story South. Tribble teaches at Southern IllinoisUniversity Carbondale, where he is the managing editor of Crab Orchard Reviewand the series editor of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry published by SIU Press

Mark Wagenaar is the winner of numerous poetry awards, including, in thepast two years, the New Letters Poetry Prize, The Pinch Poetry Award, the JamesWright Poetry Prize, the Poetry International Prize, and the Yellowwood PoetryAward. This past summer he served as the University of Mississippi’s 2014Summer Poet in Residence. His debut manuscript, Voodoo Inverso, was the 2012winner of the University of Wisconsin Press’ Felix Pollak Prize, and his secondmanuscript, The Body Distances, was first runner-up in Tupelo Press’ 2014 DorsetPrize. Recent acceptances or publications include The New Yorker, NarrativeMagazine, Field, the Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and the Laurel Review.He and his wife, poet Chelsea Wagenaar, are doctoral fellows at the Universityof North Texas in Denton.

Alexander Weinstein is the director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute ofCreative Writing, and his short stories have appeared or are forthcoming inCream City Review, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, PRISM International, QuarterAfter Eight, Sou’wester, Zone 3, and other journals.

Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois, native. He is the author of Thief inthe Interior (Alice James Books, 2016). A Cave Canem graduate and recipientof scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anti-, Callaloo, KenyonReview Online, Poetry, The Southern Review, West Branch, and others. Williams received his MFA in creative writing from Washington University in St. Louis.He is the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.

Interview

Contributing editor Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is a poet, professional editor, and educator living in Denver, CO. He is the author of a collection of poems, ; editor of ; series editor of ; founder of FineArtsEditing.com; and founder and managing editor of . Learn more at .

Fiction

Sam Grieve was born in Cape Town, and lived in Paris and London prior tosettling down in Connecticut with her husband and two sons. She graduated fromBrown University; received an MA in English from King’s College, London; andhas worked as a librarian, a bookseller and an antiquarian book-dealer. Her storiesand poems have recently appeared in 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, Cactus Heart,Forge, Grey Sparrow Journal, Qwerty, Sanskrit, and [PANK], amongst others.

Leyna Krow has previously appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter,Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, and other publications. She holds an MFAfrom Eastern Washington University.

David James Poissant’s stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic,The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The New York Times, One Story, Playboy,Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in the New Stories from the South and BestNew American Voices anthologies. His writing has been awarded the Matt ClarkPrize, the George Garrett Fiction Award, the RopeWalk Fiction Chapbook Prize,the GLCA New Writers Award, and the Alice White Reeves Memorial Awardfrom the National Society of Arts & Letters, as well as awards from The ChicagoTribune, The Atlantic Monthly and Playboy magazines. Poissant teaches in theMFA program at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with hiswife and daughters. His debut short story collection, The Heaven of Animals, waspublished by Simon & Schuster in 2014. He is currently at work on a novel,Class, Order, Family, also forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

Nonfiction

Kevin Callaway is a graduate of Belmont University and winner of the 2013Treadway Creative Writing Award. He lives in Milan, where he works as alinguistic assistant and educator. His essays have appeared in SLAB, Gravel, and Extract(s).

Lisa Nikolidakis’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, PassagesNorth, The Rumpus, [PANK], The Greensboro Review, Los Angeles Review, andelsewhere. She currently teaches creative writing in the Midwest.

Michael Waters has written eleven books of poetry, including CelestialJoyride (BOA Editions, 2016); Gospel Night (BOA, 2011); Darling Vulgarity, afinalist 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 Rolling Stone. Among his awards are fellowships from the National Endowment forthe 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 professorof English at Monmouth University and also teaches in the Drew UniversityMFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. Waters lives with his wife,poet Mihaela Moscaliuc, in Ocean, New Jersey.

Kathryn Wilder’s essays and stories have appeared in such places as RiverTeeth, Midway Journal, Fourth Genre, Southern Indiana Review, Bugle, Sierra,many Hawai`i magazines, and half a dozen anthologies. Wilder and her son Kenrun a small family ranch on the Colorado Plateau, on which they raise speciesgenerationally adapted to the desert environment of the Southwest, includingNavajo-Churro sheep and Corriente cattle. “Sundance,” from the in-progressmanuscript Woman Chasing Water, was the beginning.