Summer/Fall 2017 Contributors

Julia Alvarez has written novels (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World), collections of poems (Homecoming, The Other Side/El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself), nonfiction (Something to Declare, Once Upon A Quinceañera, A Wedding in Haiti), and numerous books for young readers (including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, Finding Miracles, Return to Sender, and Where Do They Go?). A recipient of a 2013 National Medal of Arts, Alvarez is one of the founders of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. She lives in Vermont.

Miranda Beeson’s poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, Bateau, Barrow Street, The Malahat Review, and an anthology (with a very long title) edited by Russ Kick. She has been the recipient of several New York State Council on the Arts Grants for teaching a generation of young poets. Her recent chapbook is Ode To the Unexpected from Shrinking Violet Press.

Billy Collins’s latest collection of poetry is The Rain in Portugal (Random House, 2016). He was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Jacob Cooley is a landscape painter born in Sydney, Australia. He received a BFA from the University of Georgia and Antioch College, and an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives and works in North Carolina.

Natalie De Paz is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter of Cuban descent who was born and raised in south Florida. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Crab Fat Magazine, Tule Review, and City Works Journal.

Eve Ensler is the Tony Award winning playwright, activist, performer and author of the theatrical phenomenon and Obie Award winning, The Vagina Monologues, which has been published in 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries. She is the author of many plays and books including her memoir In the Body of the World which she adapted into a play that she performed and debuted at the American Repertory Theater. In January 2018, she will be premiering it in New York at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Ms. Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the almost 20-year-old global activist movement to end violence against women and girls which has raised over 100 million dollars for grassroots groups. V-Day led Ms. Ensler to also found One Billion Rising, the biggest global mass action campaign to end violence against women in human history in over 200 countries. 

Siri Hustvedt has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University and is the internationally acclaimed author of five novels, including The Blazing World, and What I Loved, as well as a growing body of nonfiction such as A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. In 2012, she was the recipient of the Gabarron International Award for Thought and Humanities. She lives in Brooklyn.

Nancy Keating’s work has been, or is about to be, published in several anthologies including Grabbing the Apple and Toward Forgiveness, as well as numerous literary magazines and webzines including New Letters, Tar River Poetry, Iconoclast, Chaffin Journal, and Long Island Quarterly. She is the author of a volume of poems, Always Looking Back, and two chapbooks. A graduate of Bucknell and the University of Minnesota, she is currently pursuing an MFA. She lives in Babylon, New York.

Jaime Manrique was born in Colombia. He’s a bilingual novelist, poet, essayist, and translator. His work has been translated into 10 languages. He’s currently a Distinguished Lecturer in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages at City College of New York.

Beverly Tan Murray is a Chinese-American author who was born in Singapore and immigrated to California at age 16. She now resides in Miami with her husband and a terrier-mutt, Larry David. Murray is a two-time VONA/Voices alumna, and has been published in The James Franco Review, AWAY Magazine, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, and Lime Hawk. She writes short stories about life in liminal spaces, and has yet to find the perfect carne asada taco.

When she was young, SARA MAJKA’s family moved along the New England shoreline with the Coast Guard, living in Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, northern Maine, and even for a time in a lighthouse. She went on to get graduate degrees in writing from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Bennington College and was a fiction fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Her stories have appeared in A Public Space, PEN America, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Guernica. She now lives in Providence with her young son. Cities I’ve Never Lived In is her first book.

J. E. Nissley is a recent graduate of Stony Brook Southampton’s MFA program, where she fell in love with Young Adult literature. Her short fiction and poems have been published in several literary journals, and she now teaches remedial writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Strings Attached is her debut novel.

Christine Pacson is an alumna of the MFA in Creative Writing and Literature Program at Stony Brook University at Southampton. She is the winner of the 2010 Deborah Hecht Memorial Prize in Fiction. Her work has appeared in Carrier Pigeon. She is currently working on her first novel.

Carl Phillips’s new book of poems, Wild Is the Wind, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2018. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Antonio Romani is an essayist and translator whose writings and co-translations have appeared in A Public Space, AGNI, The Common, Tin House, and other literary journals. His essay on Elena Ferrante was a Notable in Best American Essays 2016. His co-translation (with Martha Cooley) of Antonio Tabucchi’s Time Ages in a Hurry, appeared in 2015. He currently leads a “What’s Italian?” reading group at The Center for Fiction in New York.

Zinnia Smith is a writer and painter living in Hampton Bays, New York. She graduated from St. Lawrence University with a BA in Fine Arts and English in 2015. Her work has been previously published in Yankee Magazine and online in Story Magazine. She is currently a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing.

Donald Sultan, a painter, printmaker, and sculptor, lives in New York City and Sag Harbor. His work is part of the permanent collections of many prestigious institutions, including The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MoMA, and the Tate Modern in London, as well as the Parrish Museum in Watermill, Long Island.

Suzy Vitello’s fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Plazm, Tarpaulin Sky, and other journals. She has been a prize winner in the Atlantic Monthly Student Fiction Contest, and is a recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts grant. Vitello holds an MFA from Antioch Los Angeles, and teaches writing workshops through LitReactor and other programs. Her published novels include The Moment Before and The Empress Chronicles, both through Diversion Books. Her essay, “Delivering,” is excerpted from a memoir in progress. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Hilma Wolitzer’s most recent novel is An Available Man. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, New Letters, and Prairie Schooner. She’s taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and in the writing programs at Columbia University, NYU, and the University of Iowa.

Shelley Wong is the author of Rare Birds (Diode Editions). Her poems have recently appeared in Crazyhorse, Fairy Tale Review, Sixth Finch, Southern Humanities Review, Vinyl, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and a Pushcart Prize recipient, and lives in Oakland, California.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of Land of Love and Drowning, which won The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize in 2014, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. Her writing has won the 2011 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction, a Boston Review prize in fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, and American Short Fiction, among others. Originally from the Virgin Islands, Yanique is a professor in the MFA program at the New School in New York City.

Adam Armstrong was raised within the confines of a Christmas tree farm in upstate New York and now lives in Brooklyn. In addition to completing his MFA from Stony Brook Southampton, he will be teaching screenwriting at Stony Brook University. His work has appeared in Hobart and Weirdo Torpedo.

Sarah Cadorette’s work has previously appeared in publications such as Meridian, GoWorld Travel, and Cultural Survival Quarterly. She has a degree in Travel Writing and Social Advocacy, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her dream is to do embedded journalism at Paisley Park, but in the meantime, she’ll stick to playing “Purple Rain” on repeat.

Michael Collier’s seventh book of poetry, My Bishop and Other Poems, will be published by University of Chicago Press in 2018. He is the director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and teaches at the University of Maryland.

After growing up in Ohio, Matt Collins went on to university in St. Louis, Missouri, where he earned his BFA. He started out in advertising, first in St. Louis, and then in Manhattan. He finally moved to Connecticut and started illustrating. He lives there with his wife and son, and produces award-winning images for newspapers, magazines, and children’s books.

Olabajo Dada was the Microjourneys Editor of Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine, where excerpts from his novel-in-progress, Cinema Road, were serialized. Born and raised in Nigeria, he has lived in the United States since 2009, and has an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. He currently teaches English at the Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina, and enjoys a bit of carpentry when he’s not writing.

Anthony Dipietro is a Providence, Rhode Island, native who worked for 12 years as a nonprofit executive focusing on community violence, abuse, and income inequality. In 2016, he moved to Hampton Bays, New York, and joined Stony Brook University as a candidate for a creative writing MFA. A graduate of Brown University with honors in creative writing, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Assaracus, Talking River, The American Journal of Poetry, The Woman Inc, and here/there.

Janet Frame (1924–2004) was a short fiction writer, poet, novelist, and memoirist from New Zealand’s South Island. Her awards include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize from her native New Zealand, as well as the Queen’s appointment to Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1983 for her contributions to literature.

Kaylie Jones is a novelist, creative nonfiction writer, and editor. She’s published several books, including her memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me, and the novels The Anger Meridian, Celeste Ascending, Speak Now, and A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, which was adapted as a Merchant Ivory Film. Currently, she chairs the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, which awards $10,000 annually to an unpublished first novel. She also manages her imprint, Kaylie Jones Books, under the aegis of Akashic Books. In the last three years she has published seven titles, including award winners and two national best-sellers. She holds an MFA in Creative writing from Columbia.

Matthew Klam is the author of Sam the Cat, a short story collection. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, a Whiting Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts grant. His writing has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The O’Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction.

Angela Merkel was elected the chancellor of Germany in 2005. Merkel holds a doctorate in physics. She is currently serving her third term as chancellor.

Clio Newton is an American figurative artist living and working in Zurich, Switzerland, where she is completing an MFA at the Zücher Hochschule der Künste. She received her BA from New York’s Cooper Union. She also studied classical painting and drawing at the Florence Academy of Fine Art in Italy.

JACK MAYER is a Vermont writer and pediatrician. For 10 years he was a country doctor on the Canadian border bartering medical care for eggs, firewood, and knitted afghans. Dr. Mayer established Rainbow Pediatrics in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1991, where he continues to practice primary care pediatrics. He was a participant at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2003 and 2005 (fiction) and 2008 (poetry). His first nonfiction book is Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project. His new novel, Before the Court of Heaven, is about Weimar Germany and the rise of the Third Reich.

Jaime Osnato is a New York City-based freelance writer and holds a Master of Social Work from NYU.

Linda Pastan’s 14th book of poems, Insomnia, was published in October of 2015 and won the Towson State Literature Prize. She is a former Poet Laureate of Maryland and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2003, she won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

Melanie Pierce is a creative writing instructor at Stony Brook University. Her fiction has previously appeared in Newtown Literary. After acquiring passport stamps from 12 countries in six years, she now lives on the East End of Long Island.

Roger Rosenblatt is the author of 19 books, published in 14 languages, five of which have been New York Times Notable Books. His New York Times bestsellers are Kayak Morning, Unless It Moves the Human Heart, and Making Toast, a memoir of his family. Thomas Murphy is his latest novel. Among his honors are two George Polk awards, the Peabody, the Emmy, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and the President’s Medal of the Chautauqua Institution for his body of work.

Born in Miami, Florida, Marlene Siering spent her childhood summers in Germany. A former journalist, she is working on her first novel.

Grant Snider is the creator of the online strip, Incidental Comics. The Shape of Ideas, a collection of his comics on the creative process, has just been published by Abrams. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, with his family.

Bob Tabor is an advertising creative director and photographer who is best known for his equestrian portraits, as well as sea and landscapes of the East End of Long Island.

EMILY SULLIVAN is a writer and educator from Connecticut. She earned her BA in English from the University of Connecticut and her MA from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her work has appeared in The Toast, The Frisky, The Hartford Courant, and others. She is currently working on her first novel and during breaks she tweets @paperbacklady.

Will Wilson is a Navajo artist who depicts contemporary Native American subjects using 19th-century photographic processes. He was the recipient of the prestigious Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art in 2007, the Native Arts and Culture Foundation Artistic Innovation Award in 2010, and the Rollin and Mary Ella King Fellowship in 2013.

Meg Wolitzer is a novelist whose books include The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. A member of the creative writing faculty at Stony Brook Southampton, she lives in New York City.

Barbara Wright is the author of the novels Crow, Easy Money, and Plain Language, which won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. “Anny in Love” is an excerpt from a novel in progress.

Péter Zilahy, the author of four books, is one of Hungary’s most exciting and diverse writers. His genre-defying novel, The Last Window-Giraffe, has been translated into 22 languages. It has won multiple awards, among them The Book of the Year Prize in Ukraine, and is often cited as one of the inspirations for the Orange Revolution. He has written for numerous international media outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Financial Times. He has lectured at Princeton, NYU, the New School, the University of Pennsylvania and the Library of Congress, among others. Zilahy, who has performed in a Moth Mainstage Show at Symphony Space, recently joined Anthony Bourdain for an episode of CNN’s Parts Unknown.