Contributors: Winter/Spring 2018

Saptarishi Bandopadhyay’s work has appeared in Subtropics and Mississippi Review Online (archived at New World Writing). He lives in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

The work of Remy Barnes has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Saw Palm, whiskeypaper, and elsewhere. A product of the American South, he currently lives in Ithaca, New York, where he is pursuing his MFA in Fiction at Cornell.

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was an essayist, philosopher, and cultural critic. Of German Jewish heritage, he was associated with the Frankfurt School of social theory. While attempting to flee the Nazis in September of 1940, he committed suicide.

Sonya Bilocerkowycz’ essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Colorado Review, Partisan, Ninth Letter, and Crab Orchard Review. Before completing her MFA at Ohio State, Bilocerkowycz served as a Fulbright Fellow in Belarus, as well as an educational recruiter in the Republic of Georgia, and a visiting instructor at Ukrainian Catholic University in L’viv. She was a finalist for AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize in Creative Nonfiction and is the 2017–18 Milton Fellow in Creative Writing at Seattle Pacific University.

Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Adanna, Alyss, apt, Big Muddy, The Binnacle, Burningword, Canary, Catamaran, Common Ground Review, Crack the Spine, Dunes Review, Forge, The Healing Muse, McNeese, OxMag, Poetica, The Round, The Scream Online, These Fragile Lilacs, Third Wednesday, Tiger’s Eye, Tikkun, Whistling Shade, Willow Review, and TSR: The Southampton Review. She is an award recipient of San Francisco Poets Eleven 2016. Her poem “Still Arguing with Old Synagogue” was a finalist for the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award. She is a physician and practices Mind-Body medicine in San Francisco. Her website is abbycaplin.com.

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.

Paul Lustig Dunkel serves as Principal Flutist with the New York City Ballet. In addition he is a conductor, composer, and arranger who has taught at the New England Conservatory, Eastman School of Music, Vassar, and the University of Connecticut. He cofounded Music from Copland House with pianist Michael Boriskin. He was also one of the founders of the American Composers Orchestra, as well as the New Orchestra of Westchester, now known as the Westchester Philharmonic, the group that commissioned and recorded Melinda Wagner’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion.

Barbara Felton is a farmer and writer in Warwick, New York, who began writing creative nonfiction in 2014 following careers in psychology at NYU’s Department of Psychology and in mental health administration. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Psychiatric Services, skirt!, Dirt, Tupelo Quarterly, and Duende.

Cameron Gilhooley is a graduate student in Stony Brook Southampton’s Creative Writing department and earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence. On weekends Gilhooley can be found working security at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York.

Joel Greene is a painter and printmaker who lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Greene was born in Denver and raised in Las Vegas, New Mexico. He earned a BA, BFA, and MFA from the University of Iowa, and is now represented by the Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Santa Fe.

Adam Jonah is a self-taught artist. He encourages imaginative exploration through his “United Imagination” project, which has been named a top 10 finalist for the international Next Einstein competition. His work was exhibited at The First City Project, Ille Arts Gallery Holiday Show 2016, Eleven Under Thirty Group Show Spring 2017, Art Market + Design Summer 2017, and ARTWALK NY 2017, an event that benefited a coalition for the homeless. Jonah currently attends the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Daniel McDermott spent years as a music journalist and is currently a fiction candidate in the MFA program at Bennington College.

Yoram Naslavsky was born in Kibbutz Givat-Oz, Israel, and currently lives in Tel-Aviv. He is the author of In The Sight of This Sun, a collection of short stories published in Hebrew. His short stories have been published in various literary journals in English and Hebrew, including Fence, Mita’am, and Haaretz.

Sophia Rubenstein teaches fiction at Stony Brook University. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College.

Lore Segal has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, two PEN/O. Henry Awards, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A novelist and recognized author of children’s books, Segal has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and Harper’s, among other publications.

Grant Snider is the creator of the online strip Incidental Comics. The Shape of Ideas, a collection of his comics on the creative process, was published by Abrams in 2017. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, with his family.

Charlie Sterchi studies fiction at MFA@FLA, the writing program at the University of Florida. He lives in Gainesville.

David Storey is a British figurative painter. A native of West Cumbria near the Lake District, he has been widely exhibited in the United Kingdom and abroad. 

Recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim, Terese Svoboda is the author of six books of fiction, a memoir, an opera, five books of prize-winning poetry, and, most recently, a biography of poet Lola Ridge, entitled Anything That Burns You. Svoboda is also the recipient of the Bobst Prize, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an O. Henry Award, and she is a three-time winner of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Narrative, One Story, Poetry, Tin House, Slate, and The New York Times.

Dan Tague has an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of New Orleans. His photographs have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and his work appears in prominent collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Ogden Museum of Art, Speed Art Museum, the Frederick Weisman Collection, and Photo House Brussels. Tague lives and works in New Orleans.

Emma Wenninger graduated from Indiana University where she studied English and Spanish. When she received the 2014 Myrtle Armstrong Undergraduate Fiction Award from Indiana University, writer Jon Pineda characterized her work as “promising” and “outlandish.” Her work has been featured in BlazeVOX16 and Menacing Hedge. She lives in New York City.

Melanie Yazzie is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor of Navajo—Diné— heritage who works and teaches printmaking in the Department of Art and History at the University of Colorado. Concerned with the world environment, she strives to create work using non-toxic materials and methods.

Nancy Bannon is a writer, director, and actor. She is currently developing a feature based on Blood. Her script was a quarterfinalist for an Academy Nicholl Fellowship and is in the second round of consideration for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. nancybannon.com

Maura Lee Bee is a queer, Latinx writer based in New York City. Her first book, Peter & the Concrete Jungle, was released this year. Previous publications include Harpoon Review, Inigo Online, Newtown Review, and Public Pool.

Roy Bentley is the author of Boy in a Boat, Any One Man, The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana, and Starlight Taxi. A new book, Walking with Eve in the Loved City, has been selected as a finalist for the 2018 Miller Williams poetry prize and will be published in Spring 2018 from the University of Arkansas Press.

Ruth Bonapace is a former journalist, magazine editor, and sportswriter whose nonfiction has appeared in a variety of publications including The New York Times. Published in this issue is a chapter from her debut novel, The Bulgarian Training Manual. Born in Brooklyn, she currently resides in New Jersey and upstate New York. Her essay “The Day of the Mollusk” won second prize in the 2015 Dan’s Papers Literary Prize for Nonfiction contest.

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.

Christina Daub cofounded and co-edited The Plum Review, a national award-winning poetry journal. Recent poems appear in the anthologies Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. She is a recipient of a Young American Poet’s award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been translated into Russian, Italian, and German. She has taught in the English Department at George Washington University, in both the Maryland and Virginia Poets-in-the-Schools programs, and at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Cornelius Eady is the author of several books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Hardheaded Weather, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and The Gathering of My Name, which was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize. With poet Toi Derricotte, Eady is cofounder of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy, and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award.

Will Finlayson studied poetry and fiction at BYU in Provo, Utah. His work has appeared in Inscape and Thoreau’s Rooster.

Giles Goodland was born in Taunton, United Kingdom, was educated at the universities of Wales and California, and took a D. Phil at Oxford. He has published several books of poetry, including A Spy in the House of Years, Capital, and Dumb Messengers. He works in Oxford as a lexicographer and lives in West London. His most recent book, The Masses, was released by Shearsman in October of 2017.

Annette Handley Chandler has produced films for Paramount, Disney, PBS, ABC, and CBS. In 2002, she won an Emmy as Executive Producer of Ansel Adams: A Documentary. A former literary agent, Handley Chandler was also a programming executive for ABC Entertainment in Los Angeles, overseeing the production of more than 20 films in four years. A member of WGAWest, she has taught screenwriting at UCLA, Pepperdine University, NYU Tisch, and, at present, Stony Brook University. She is developing a documentary about the Shinnecock Nation of Southampton, New York, with director Anne Makepeace. She is also completing her first novel, The Oneness of Things.

Alfie Kungu is a young Bristol, United Kingdom, resident who earned a BFA with honors from the University of West England and was named a Bloomberg New Contemporaries artist in 2016. He has shown in a number of group shows in Britain. In the United States he is represented by Saatchi Art.

Douglas Lawson: Born in South Carolina, lived in Illinois, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Washington state. Spent time in every state except Hawaii. Currently living with his wife and a cat on a sailboat in Seattle. 

Russell Munson is devoted to making art in the sky, having created advertising and magazine photography focused on aviation throughout his career. He lives in New York City and the Hamptons.

Paola Peroni was born and raised in Rome. She currently lives in New York, where she works as a psychoanalyst in private practice. Her short stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Common, Fence, Mississippi Review, Post Road, and other publications. She has received a fellowship from the Yaddo Corporation, and was awarded a 2017 O. Henry Award.

Vincent Scarpa is a recent MFA graduate of the Michener Center for Writers. His work has appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, StoryQuarterly, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, and other journals. He is at work on a novel.

Julia Slavin is the author of The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg At the Maidstone Club and Other Stories and the novel Carnivore Diet. Her new collection is Stories for Squatters. She is the winner of the Rona Jaffe Award for Fiction, GQ’s Frederick Exley Fiction Competition, and a Pushcart Prize.

Matthew J. Spireng’s book, What Focus Is, was published by WordTech Communications. His book, Out of Body, won a Bluestem Poetry Award and was published by Emporia State University’s Bluestem Press. His chapbooks are: Clear Cut, Young Farmer, Encounters, and Inspiration Point, winner of the 2000 Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, as well as Just This. He is an eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His poems have appeared in magazines such as North American Review, Tar River Poetry, Oberon, Confrontation, and Rattle.

Elizabeth Stix’s stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, eleven eleven, The Tusk, and the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine. She was a finalist in the 2016 Glimmer Train Fiction Open as well as the Boulevard Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers. She was also a semi-finalist in the Disquiet fiction contest and the Sherwood Anderson contest. Her writing has won the Katherine Manoogian Scholarship Prize at San Francisco State and the Bay Guardian Fiction Prize. SF Weekly named her one of the “Best Bay Area Writers Without a Published Book.”

Derek Updegraff is the author of the fiction collection The Butcher’s Tale and Other Stories and the poetry/translation collection Paintings That Look Like Things. His short stories, poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Carolina Quarterly, The Minnesota Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Tikkun, CutBank, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. He holds an MFA from Cal State Long Beach and a PhD from the University of Missouri. He is currently an assistant professor at Riverside’s California Baptist University.

Daly Walker was an army surgeon in Vietnam. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Sewanee Review, The Louisville Review, The Sycamore Review, The Catamaran Literary Reader, and The Southampton Review. His collection, Surgeon Stories: Fiction by Daly Walker, was published by Fleur-de-Lis Press. His work has been short-listed for Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Award, and was a finalist in Best American Magazine Writing. He divides his time between Boca Grande, Florida, and Quechee, Vermont. Each summer he teaches a fiction writer’s workshop at Dartmouth.

Michelle Whittaker’s poems have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Narrative, Vinyl Poetry, and Long Island Quarterly. She has received a Cave Canem Fellowship for African American poetry, a Pushcart Special Mention, and was recently awarded a 2017 New York State Foundation of Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her book, Surge, was recently released by Great Weather for Media. She teaches in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University.