Contributors: Summer 2015

DAVID ABRAMS has had short stories published by Esquire, Narrative, Electric Literature, CONSEQUENCE, Salamander, The Literarian, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, FiveChapters, The Missouri Review, and others. His work has also appeared in The New York Times and Salon. Fobbit, his debut novel about the Iraq War, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2012.

DANIELLE BERG is a tutor, bookseller, yoga teacher-in-training, and recent graduate of the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. non finito, excerpted here, is her thesis project and first book.

STAR BLACK’s poems have recently appeared in The Incredible Sestina Anthology, edited by Daniel Nestler, and Valley Voices: A Literary Review. She lives in New York City and on Long Island.

ROSE BURKE is a freelance writer and art enthusiast who often writes humorous essays inspired by awkward dating experiences and life’s cruel sense of humor. Not-so-shockingly, the most noteworthy moment of her childhood occurred at a Scholastic Book Fair where Jon Scieszka signed her very own copy of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and labeled her his “favorite stinker.” www.roseburke.com

WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE (1849–1916) was a student at the National Academy of Design. He attended the Royal Academy in Munich. In 1878 he began teaching at the Art Students League in New York City, a position he held until 1896 when he opened his own art school. Between 1891 and 1902 Chase directed a summer school in Shinnecock Hills, which became the most important outdoor art school in America. He was elected president of the Society of American Artists in 1885 and in 1890 he was elected as an Academician into the National Academy of Design.

Born and raised on her family farm in the north of Scotland, SHEENA COOK has a law degree from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA from Bennington. She is working on her first novel, A Month in the Country, set on a Greek island and in a Scottish village.

CHASE DEARINGER’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Forge, Eclectica, Short Story America, and Soundings Review, among others. His work has also been included in Ain’t Nobody Can Sing Like Me, an anthology of Oklahoma writers. He edits Arcadia, a literary quarterly, and is finishing a doctorate in Creative Writing at Texas Tech University.

DEVIN DeMARCO, a writer from upstate New York, graduated from Wells College with a BA in Creative Writing and Film and Media Studies. Currently, she’s attending the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University.

BYRON DOBELL paints and draws portraits (three of which are in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery), landscapes, and the figure. He had his 11th one-man show in September 2014 at the W.M. Brady Gallery in Manhattan. He has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

The 2014 Dartmouth Poet in Residence, REBECCA FOUST is the recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, the MacDowell Colony, and the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. Her fifth book, Paradise Drive, won the 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere.

GREGORY GOLASZEWSKI is from Lynbrook, New York. He lives on the North Fork of Long Island.

JOHN GOSSLEE is an American poet, editor of Fjords Review, an iconoclast.

BAYLIS GREENE is an associate editor at The East Hampton Star. He lives in Noyac with his wife and three children.

URSULA HEGI is a bi-cultural writer who has published 12 books. Her Burgdorf Cycle encompasses Stones from the River, Floating in My Mother’s Palm, The Vision of Emma Blau, and Children and Fire. Hegi’s work has been translated into many languages. Her awards include the Italian Grinzane Cavour, NEA, and PEN/Faulkner. She is on the MFA faculty at Stony Brook Southampton. She has served as a juror for the National Book Awards and the National Book
Critics Circle.

Watercolorist CLAUS HOIE (1911–2007) was a member of the prestigious National Academy. His work is collected by museums in America and abroad, including the Norfolk Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and the South Street Seaport Museum.

ABRIANA JETTÉ is the editor of the #1 best-selling anthology in Women’s Poetry, 50 Whispers: Poems by Extraordinary Women. Her poetry and nonfiction have been published in dozens of journals including Iron Horse Literary Review, River Teeth, The Moth, Poetry Quarterly, and many other places. She lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches for St. John’s University and for the City University of New York. abrianajette.com

TORI LANE KOVARIK is a poet, artist, and educator in northern Virginia. She has published two collections of poetry, Falling Season and The Beautiful Ruins.

WOODY LEWIS has worked as a rock musician, corporate banker, security guard, jazz composer, and software engineer—in that order. He holds a BA and an MBA from Columbia, and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. In 2010, he relocated from northern California back to New York, where he is currently at work on a novel and a collection of essays.

JULIO C. GONZÁLEZ MARTÍNEZ is the Interim Dean and an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. He is a poet, teacher, and developmental scientist. He lives in eastern Long Island with his wife MB and his twin boys, Cosmo and Çois.

MICHAEL MASLIN has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1977. His biography of Peter Arno will be published by Regan Arts in 2016.

MARTY McCONNELL lives in Chicago, Illinois, where she coaches individuals and groups toward building thriving, sustainable lives and organizations. An MFA graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, her work has recently appeared in Best American Poetry 2014, Southern Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, and Indiana Review. Her first full-length collection, wine for a shotgun, was published by EM Press.

L. E. MILLER’s short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Nimrod, Ascent, Cimarron Review, Salamander, Printer’s Devil Review, and elsewhere. Her story, “Kind,” was selected as a PEN/O. Henry Prize Story in 2009. L. E. Miller lives in Massachusetts with her family and is completing a collection of short stories called Other People’s Beds.

ALICIA MOUNTAIN received her MFA at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she now works as a case manager for people living with HIV. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Barrow Street, Witness, Spillway, LIT, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a Bentley-Buckman Poetry Fellowship. She is completing her first poetry collection.

VICTORIA ROBERTS is a cartoonist who has been under contract to The New Yorker since 1988. She has written two radio plays, The Life of Truman Capote (ABC Australia) and Divinity Fudge (WNYC). In 2012 she published her first illustrated novel, After the Fall. She has written and/or illustrated more than 20 books including Biographees, My Sunday, Australia Felix, Is Your Cat Gay, Is Your Dog Gay, and Cattitudes. Her work appears weekly in The New York Times science section Q&A.

JOHN ROSENBLATT is an MFA student at Stony Brook University. He writes and lives in New York City.

STRUAN SINCLAIR is a writer and editor based between Canada and the UK. His work, including Everything Breathed (Granta) and Automatic World (Doubleday), has been widely anthologized and has received critical acclaim and awards internationally.

RALPH SNEEDEN teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. The title poem of his first book, Evidence of the Journey, received the Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry magazine, and his recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Common, Ecotone, Harvard Review, and The Southeast Review.

JESSICA SOFFER is the author of the bestselling novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She teaches fiction and food writing and lives in Amagansett.

FREDERIC TUTEN was given the Award for Penmanship and Punctuality and the Certificate for Good Conduct at Junior High School PS 113, the Bronx, 1950. More recently, he was given his third Pushcart Prize (XL, 2016) for his story, “Winter, 1965.”

PAMELA WALTERS self-published a humor/cartoon book, The Out Of Work Coloring Book. Recently, she completed a memoir, Peanut Shells Stuck To My Veil, and is currently looking for an agent. She lives in Carmel, California, and is a dog walker for the rich and famous.

CHLOE WILSON writes poetry and fiction. Her first poetry collection, The Mermaid Problem, was Commended in the Anne Elder Award and Highly Commended in the Mary Gilmore Award. She won the 2014 Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry and the 2015 Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.

ROBERT WRIGLEY has published 10 books of poems, the most recent of which are Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems; and in the United Kingdom, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and many other literary journals. His poems have been reprinted three times in the Best American Poetry anthology, once in The Best of the Best American Poetry, and six times in the annual Pushcart Prize anthology, as well as in the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Poetry. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He served as the state of Idaho’s Writer-in-Residence from 1986-1988. He is a Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Idaho.

MELISSA BANK has published two collections of related short stories, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot, which have been translated into more than 30 languages. Bank was the winner of the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

SANDE BORITZ BERGER completed an MFA at Stony Brook Southampton where she won the Deborah Hecht Memorial prize in fiction. Her debut novel, The Sweetness, was published in September 2014 by She Writes Press and was a Foreward Reviews IndieFab finalist for Book of the Year.

GEORGE BOOTH has spent more than 45 years creating cartoons for The New Yorker. His books include About Dogs, The Essential George Booth, and Omnibooth. He is the recipient of the National Cartoonists Society’s Gag Cartoon Award and the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award.

LINDA CAPELLO is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology and worked in the NYC fashion industry for more than 20 years. She received the Miriam Russo Enders Award for Works on Paper from the National Association of Woman Artists (May 2009), for her red conté drawing So Inclined. She teaches extensively on the East End of Long Island.

BILLY COLLINS’s 10th collection of poetry is Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems. He also edited Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds (Columbia University Press, 2010). A two-term United States Poet Laureate (2001–2003), he is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

ANA DANIEL has completed her MFA at Stony Brook Southampton and is special projects editor for TSR. She worked for many years in management consulting, and at a major Wall Street firm. On completing doctoral studies at New York University, she taught modern European history at Southampton College for several years. She is the chairman of the Bay Street Theater board of trustees and is also an active member on the board of Pianofest in the Hamptons.

NORA DECTER is from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is working on her first novel and teaching undergraduate creative writing. She has a rock ’n’ roll past.

DANTE Di STEFANO’s poetry and essays have appeared recently, or are forthcoming, in The Writer’s Chronicle, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Shenandoah, Hunger Mountain, Brilliant Corners, Southern California Review, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize.

LIZA DONNELLY is a cartoonist and writer for The New Yorker, Medium.com, Forbes.com, and a variety of other publications. She is also a sought-after public speaker and author of 16 books. She lives in New York with her husband, New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin.

NAUSHEEN EUSUF is a doctoral student in English at Boston University. She holds an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Southwest Review, PN Review, Literary Imagination, World Literature Today, and other journals. Her chapbook, What Remains, was published by Longleaf Press.

EMILY SMITH GILBERT’s short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in CONSEQUENCE Online, The Greensboro Review, TSR: The Southampton Review, and The Waterhouse Review. Her story, “Thank God We’re Young, Otherwise This Would Be Terrifying,” won The Greensboro Review’s 2011 Robert Watson Literary Prize and was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s 2011 Short Fiction Open. She grew up in southwestern New Hampshire.

ELENA GOROKHOVA grew up in Leningrad, Russia, and at the age of 24 came to the United States with only a 20 kg suitcase to start a new life. She is the author of two memoirs published by Simon & Schuster, A Mountain of Crumbs (2009) and Russian Tattoo (2015). She has a Doctorate in Language Education and currently lives and teaches in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, on BBC Radio, and in a number of literary magazines.

DEBORAH MOONEY HARRIS earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently writing a novel.

TAYLOR LEA HICKS is a writer, editor, and playwright. Her work has been published in Gandy Dancer, Portland Review, and CIRCA Magazine.

BETSY HULICK writes poems, plays, and librettos, and translates poems (Pushkin, Akhmatova) and plays (Chekhov, Gogol). Her most recent publication is 30 Poems by Christian Morgenstern, which includes her illustrations. She lives and works in New York City. betsyhulick.com

JEAN HANFF KORELITZ is the author of the novels You Should Have Known, Admission, The White Rose, The Sabbathday River, and A Jury of Her Peers. She has also written a novel for children, Interference Powder, and a collection of poetry, The Properties of Breath. Born and raised in Manhattan and educated at Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge, she lives in New York City with her family.

LEN KRISAK’s most recent books are complete translations of Ovid’s erotic poems and Catullus’ Carmina. With work in the Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, PN, Sewanee, and Southwest Reviews, he is a Richard Wilbur and Robert Frost Prize winner and a four-time champion on Jeopardy!

JENNIFER LOBAUGH lives in Astoria, Queens. Her poems have recently appeared in The Knicknackery and Rust + Moth. Her chapbook, squall, won the Oklahoma Writers Federation, Inc. 2014 Best Book of Poetry award and is available from dancing girl press.

PATRICIA MARX is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former writer for Saturday Night Live. She is the author of 12 books, including the novels Starting From Happy and Him Her Him Again The End of Him, both of which were finalists for the Thurber Prize for Humor, and several collaborations with the cartoonist Roz Chast. Marx was the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon. She has taught screenwriting at Princeton.

PETER MATTHIESSEN (1927–2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, and wilderness writer. He helped found and edit the literary journal The Paris Review in 1953. During his life he wrote more than 15 books of nonfiction and fiction, including Wildlife in America (1959), The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (1961), and Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age (1962), among others. The Snow Leopard (1978) won both the National Book Award for nonfiction and the American Book Award.

CATHERINE MOORE’s publications include short stories and poems in Grey Sparrow, Tahoma Literary Review, and The Southeast Review. She’s the winner of the 2014 Gearhart poetry prize and her work was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler for inclusion in the Best Small Fictions 2015. Catherine’s chapbook Story is published by Finishing Line Press.

J. E. NISSLEY’s short fiction and prose poems have appeared in several journals. She is currently working on a novel.

FAIRFIELD PORTER (1907–1975) received his BFA from Harvard University in 1928. Porter continued his studies for the next two years at the Art Students League in New York. Though he favored the watercolor medium early and late in his career, throughout his life he made pencil and ink drawings and painted in oils. Porter was also a prolific poet and art critic until his death in 1975. Porter participated in numerous exhibitions, including the 1968 Venice Biennale, and major exhibitions held at the Whitney Museum and the Smithsonian Institution.

ROXANA ROBINSON is the author of nine books, five novels, three story collections, and the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Tin House, Slate, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is an NEA Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the President of the Authors Guild.

ROGER ROSENBLATT is the author of Making Toast, Kayak Morning, and most recently, The Book of Love. He is the winner of the 2015 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.

IRIS SMYLES has had stories and essays published by The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Observer, BOMB, Best American Travel Writing 2015, and other publications. She has written two books of fiction: Iris Has Free Time and the forthcoming Dating Tips for the Unemployed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). She lives in New York and Greece.

GRANT SNIDER is the creator of the online strip, Incidental Comics. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Best American Comics 2013, and the Kansas City Star. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, with his family.

ROSS TRUDEAU is a writer and digital video artist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

ALEJANDRO VARELA is originally from Queens, New York. He teaches policy and advocacy to public health graduate students in Brooklyn. His nonfiction writing has appeared in The New Republic.

THOMAS WHARTON’s paintings have won The Georgie Read Barton Award, The Katlin Seascape Award, the Windsor Newton Award, and the Richard C. Pionk Memorial Award for Painting. In addition, he has also been awarded honors in the RayMar Art Competition and juried member competitions by The Portrait Society of America. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and his work can be found in private collections throughout the United States.

MEG WOLITZER’s novels include The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. Her most recent book is Belzhar, a YA novel. Wolitzer’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize.