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SIR 2020 Spring


Artwork

is an artist, graphic designer, and educator. Her professionalpractice includes visual art as well as user experience, book, and new media design.She has worked as a creative director, visual artist, user experience lead, andassistant professor of practice at North Carolina State University. Her work hasbeen published by Communication Arts, PRINT Magazine, MasterClass, and theAIGA. Vuchnich’s latest work-in-progress, which includes several images featuredin this issue, is a multi-media installation that leverages digitized versions ofHenry David Thoreau’s pressed plant specimens to consider scientific data aboutclimate change and create a visceral connection to the natural world’s beauty ata time of environmental crisis.

Poetry

"Book of Mild Regrets"— latest poetry collection is Partial Genius(Black Lawrence Press,2019). Poems have recently appeared in Court Green, POETRY, Tupelo Quarterly,and Waxwing, among others. She is a professor of English at the University ofAkron, and edits the Akron Series in Poetry. Biddinger has received awards orfellowships from the Cleveland Arts Prize, Ohio Arts Council, and NEA.

& the white girl tells me i need to marry a Latino man so that my kids can be the world— Em Dial is a queer, triracial poet and educator born and raised in the Bay Area.She is an alum of the Stanford Spoken Word Collective and slam team, as wellas the Youth Speaks Artist Corps. They have received the Hoefer Prize forExcellence in Undergraduate Writing from Stanford University and Best PoetAward at the 2017 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational.

is the author or editor of eighteen books includingNot All Saints, winner of the 2019 Bitter Oleander Library of Poetry Prize. TheSecond O of Sorrowreceived both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the HousatonicBook Award from Western Connecticut State University. He works as a caregiver and med tech for various disabled populations in Erie, Pennsylvania.

is an American poet, essayist and digital curator from Detroit,Michigan. Author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber and Salt BodyShimmer, she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the MillayColony for the Arts. Her work has appeared in RHINO, Buzzfeed, James FrancoReview, THRUSH, and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry,among others. She serves on the Board of Directors for The Offing, and spends hertime in Chicago, Illinois, experimenting with photography and video narratives.

John Gallaher’s current collection, Brand New Spacesuit, is published by BOA Editions, and poems appear in POETRY, New England Review, Crazyhorse,West Branch, and elsewhere.

Immigrant Elegy for Ávila is a rabbi and poet, raised by her Venezuelan Jewish family in Boston and Caracas, and now living in Philadelphia. Her work explores queerness, diaspora, ancestry, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. She is the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her poem “A poem with two memories of Venezuela” won the 2020 Minola Review Poetry Contest, judged by Doyali Islam. She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist in the Cutthroat Journal Joy Harjo Poetry Contest. Her poetry has been published in various journals, including most recently Frontier, Foglifter, Ninth Letter, Interim, Tinderbox, and Canthius.

is the author of the chapbook I Ask My Sister’s Ghost(DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets 2018, Indiana Review, Third Coast, and other journals. He is a winnerof Iron Horse Literary Review’s2019 Trifecta Poetry prize, the Milton Kessler MemorialPrize from Harpur Palate, and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize. Gucciardi workswith refugee and immigrant youth in Oakland, California.

Clemonce Heard received his BFA in graphic communications from NorthwesternState University and his MFA in creative writing from Oklahoma State University.Heard is the 2019-2020 WICW Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow.

Shannon Hozinec lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work can be found inThe Hunger, Thrush, Deluge, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.

all the girls standing in the line for the bathroom was born and raised in Detroit and is the author of thepoetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020). A graduate of Universityof Michigan’s MFA in poetry, his work has found homes with Indiana Review,The Rumpus, Waxwing, and Iowa Review, among others.

Joseph Johnson teaches in New Meadows, Idaho. He received his MFA fromthe University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and his work has recently appearedor is forthcoming in Big Big Wednesday; Chicago Review; Forklift, Ohio; Pleiades;Storm Cellar; Washington Square Review; Yalobusha Review; and elsewhere.

Zoe Mays is a writer from Kansas whose poetry has appeared in Hobart, LittlePatuxent Review, Zone 3, and elsewhere.

Masculine Sonnet is a writer from Delhi, India. She studied literatures in Englishfrom Delhi University and completed her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, NewYork. Her work has been published in Arkansas International, bitch media, BOAAT,Glass Poetry, Hyperallergic, Hyphen, The Margins, The Shallow Ends, and elsewhere.Sen was the 2017-18 Readings/Workshops fellow at Poets & Writers and currentlylives and teaches in Las Vegas, where she’s completing her PhD in poetry.

salat during deportation proceedings”— is a Filipino-Jordanian immigrant living in Washington state.He is the author of Here I Am O My God, selected by Fady Joudah for a PoetrySociety of America Chapbook Fellowship, and Salat, selected by Cornelius Eadyas winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award. Their poemshave been published or are forthcoming in POETRY, Sugar House Review, TheJournal, Poetry NW, The Southeast Review, ZYZZVA, Asian American LiteraryReview, and elsewhere. Tahat has earned fellowships from Hugo House, Jack StrawWriting Program, and the Poetry Foundation, as well as a work-study scholarshipfrom Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. They serve as a poetry editor for Moss andHomology Lit and cohost The Poet Salon podcast. He got his start as a Seattle PoetrySlam Finalist, a collegiate grand slam champion, and Seattle Youth Speaks GrandSlam Champion, representing Seattle at HBO’s Brave New Voices.

hearsay”— is a poet and writing instructor from the East Coast. She earnedher BA from Howard University and her MFA from Cornell University, whereshe also taught. Her work has been recognized by the likes of the Hurston/WrightFoundation, Sonora Review, and Indiana Review and also appears or is forthcomingin The Offing, Slice, Poetry Daily, Ruminate, Witness, The Southampton Review, andelsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Fiction

Lara Palmqvist is the recipient of a 2019 Elizabeth George Foundationgrant and a 2019 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.She was a 2017–2018 Fiction Fellow in the Loft Literary Center Mentor Series.Her writing appears or is forthcoming inThe Washington Post, Ploughshares online,The Southampton Review, and Witness, among other publications. Her work hasalso been honored with awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Kimmel HardingNelson Center for the Arts, Ox-Bow School of Art, Marble House Project,the Saari Residence in Finland, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, and theU.S. Fulbright Commission, through which she taught creative writing in Ukraine.Originally from New Mexico, she currently lives in Minnesota.

is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as“remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist and short-listedfor the First Novel Award from the Center For Fiction. He is also the author of amemoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and four collections of poetry, including WhenWe Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award, and, most recently, Thieve.His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The SouthernReview, Orion, and The Sun. He lives with his family in western Oregon, where hedirects the creative writing program at Linfield College.

Interview

is the author of the poetry collections Immigrant Modeland Father Dirt, translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star and Carmelia Leonte’sThe Hiss of the Viper, and editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of GeraldStern. She is the recipient of two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and LeChateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), an Individual Artist Fellowship from the NewJersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania.

Deborah Woodard is the author of Plato’s Bad Horse; Borrowed Tales; and NoFinis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911. She has published several chapbooks, includingHunter Mnemonics, which was illustrated by artist Heide Hinrichs, and translated thepoetry of Amelia Rosselli from Italian in The Dragonfly, A Selection of Poems: 1953-
1981; Hospital Series; and Obtuse Diary. Currently, she is translating Rosselli’s longestcollection, Documento. Woodard teaches at Hugo House, a literary center in Seattle.

Nonfiction

Jen Kasten is a writer in the Midwest. Her work also has appeared in Waccamaw.

Courtney Kersten is the author of Daughter in Retrograde: A Memoir. Her essayscan be seen or are forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, The Normal School, RiverTeeth, Hotel Amerika, DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She wonthe Bellingham Review’s 2018 Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction; was a FulbrightFellow to Riga, Latvia; and is a PhD candidate in literature at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz. Kersten is currently at work on a biography about the latesuperstar astrologer Linda Goodman.

is the author of two story collections—Future Missionariesof Americaand Gateway to Paradise—as well as two collections of essays—inscriptions for headstonesand Permanent Exhibit. He served with David Shieldsas co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. His work has appeared in venues such as The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Tin House, VirginiaQuarterly Review, Epoch, Ecotone, New England Review, DIAGRAM, ColoradoReview, The Normal School, Willow Springs, The Antioch Review, Gulf Coast,The Collagist, Carolina Quarterly, Oxford American, The Sun, The Pushcart Prize,and Best American Essays. Vollmer teaches creative writing and literature in theEnglish Department at Virginia Tech, where he is an associate professor.