Contributors

Fred Arroyo is the author of Western Avenue and Other Fictions, shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and the novel The Region of Lost Names. A recipient of an Individual Artist Program Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission, Fred’s fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in various literary journals and anthologies including The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World and Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing. He is currently completing a book of essays in which he lyrically meditates on work, reading and writing, migration, and place—those sources of creativity arising from living and working in the Midwest, growing up bilingual on the East Coast, and being caught between urban and rural worlds. You can read a recent essay by Fred here.

Claire Aviles earned a BA in English from Boston College and currently works as a Marketing Events Coordinator in the Boston area. She is also a freelance writer and editor for Naturally Curly. Claire’s poetry has been published by Dead Beats, *82 Review, and The Voices Project, among others.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California.  He has work in Thrice Fiction, The Cortland Review, Treehouse, and Storm Cellar.  He won the 2011 SuRaa short fiction award.

Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee living in Jersey City, NJ. He is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania and its premier performance poetry collective, The Excelano Project. He is also a founder of BLACK PANTONE, an inclusive digital cataloging of black identity. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Rattle, Eleven Eleven, Folio, The Normal School, Chiron Review, Word Riot, Storyscape Journal, Kweli Journal, HEArt Online, and CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action, among other publications.

Michael Collins‘ poems have appeared in more than 40 journals and magazines, including Grist Journal, Kenning Journal, Pank, SOFTBLOW, and Smartish Pace. His first chapbook, How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water, won the Exact Change Press Chapbook contest in 2014. A full-length collection, Psalmandala, was published later that year.

Lori DeSanti is an MFA Candidate for Poetry at Southern Connecticut State University.  Her other works have recently been published in Extract(s) Literary Journal, Mojave River Review, Paddlefish, Mouse Tales, East Coast Literary Review, Adanna Literary Journal, Words Dance, Wicked Banshee Press and the Writer’s Digest “Poem Your Heart Out” Anthology.  She is the recent winner of the 2014 William Kloefkorn Award, a 2014 Best of the Net Nominee and a 2013 Pushcart Prize Nominee.  She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Noctua Review.

Heather Durham is a restoration ecologist and naturalist currently pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction through the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. Her nonfiction has won awards in the Oregon Quarterly’s Northwest Perspectives contest and The Nature of Words Rising Star competition, and has been published in Pilgrimage Magazine.

Kelly Jean Egan lives in San Francisco and is currently pursuing her MFA in Poetry at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga. She also studies Spanish and teaches poetry in translation to elementary school students. She likes to visit small towns.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. Her laptop screen got cracked during a year in Cape Town, South Africa, but it never stopped her from writing. Her publications list lives here.

Carlos F. Espinoza writes, lives, teaches, and plays cumbias along the US/Mexico Border. His work has appeared in various journals, most recently in Chrysalis, BorderSenses, The Rio Grande Rift and Pilgrimage. He contributed to the editing of Andres Montoya’s posthumous collection of poetry, and the Forword chapbook. He holds a bilingual MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and teaches literature and composition at El Paso Community College. As the Artistic Director for a literary non-profit, Carlos facilitates writing workshops in the west Texas region.

Kate Gorton is a writer of short and long fiction. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University and runs It’s Just Brunch, a blog and web series for writers, with fellow graduates. Her critical work has been published by Mason’s Road Online Literary Journal, and she is a credited proofreader of You. An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person and Essaying the Essay. She lives in Rhode Island.

Christopher Eugene Grillo is an education professional and recent graduate of Southern Connecticut State University’s MFA program. He has published both fiction and poetry in various national magazines including Extracts, Up the River, Drunk Monkeys, Noctua Review, Young Raven’s Literary Review, Lunch Ticket Press, Referential, The Elm City Review, Indian Short Fiction, Aethlon, and more. Christopher is Noctua Review‘s Connecticut State University’s Poetry Prize runner up, a 2014 Best of the Net nominee, and a 2014 Byline nominee. He moonlights as a high school football coach at his alma mater, North Haven.

Chad Hanson serves as Chairman of the Department of Sociology & Social Work at Casper College. His creative nonfiction titles include Swimming with Trout (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) and Trout Streams of the Heart (Truman State University Press, 2013). His collection of poems, Patches of Light, won the Meadowhawk Prize (Red Dragonfly Press, 2014). For more information, visit here.

Lindsey Harding is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia. In May 2011, she graduated from Sewanee University’s School of Letters with her M.F.A. in creative writing. Her fiction has appeared in Soundings Review, Prick of the Spindle, The Boiler, Xenith, and other publications. She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband and three small children. You can find her online here.

Wren Holland graduated from the University of South Carolina in 2012 where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a concentration in writing. She’s at work on her first novel in Columbia, SC. This is her first publication. Peruse her musings on Twitter.

Anna Lea Jancewicz lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she homeschools her children and haunts the public libraries. She is an associate editor at Night Train, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming at The Citron Review, Hobart, matchbook, Prime Number, WhiskeyPaper, and many other venues. Yes, you CAN say Jancewicz: Yahnt-SEV-ich. More here.

Jill Khoury earned her Masters of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University. She teaches writing and literature in high school, university, and enrichment environments. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Bone Bouquet, RHINO, Inter|rupture, and Stone Highway Review. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net award. Her chapbook Borrowed Bodies was released from Pudding House Press. You can find her here.

Residing with her two daughters and husband in the St. Louis Metro East area, Katrina Knebel is a high school English teacher and a writer. Katrina has earned an MA in English from SIUE, and she is planning to pursue her MFA or doctorate in Creative Writing. She can be found online here.

Angelica LaMarca is a student at Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the ARts, a high school that specializes in the creative arts as well as academics. There, she is part of the creative writing community. you can find one of her poems published in the 2014 edition of Accolades.

D. E. Lee‘s fiction appears in Alligator Juniper, Prick of the Spindle, Broad River Review, Mixed Fruit, Emerald Coast Review, and others. Awards include Pushcart Prize nominee in 2013, Honorable Mention in the December 2013 Glimmer Train Fiction Open, and finalist for the 2014 Nelson Algren Award. Additional info at uH.

Jon Mcgill is a Midwestern boy who lives alone in a tiny house by a river. He works in a hospital caring for sick people, like he used to be. More of his stories can be found on the internet if you Google hard enough. Sometimes he tells stories about his life at his website, which is kinda sorta an on-going memoir, and sometimes he twitters nonsense here.

Bob Meszaros taught English at Hamden High School in Hamden, Connecticut, for thirty-two years. He retired from high school teaching in June of 1999. During the 70s and 80s his poems appeared in a number of literary journals, such as En Passant and Voices International. In the year 2000 he began teaching part time at Quinnipiac University, and he began once again to submit his work for publication.

Olivia Olson is a Teen Librarian who makes young people write creatively even when they don’t want to. Her poems can be found in Bird’s Thumb and ExFic and are forthcoming in Bitterzoet.

Beate Singriddaughter lives and writes in Silver City, New Mexico, Land of Enchantment. Her work has received three Pushcart Prize nominations. Currently she is working on a novel called Tango. She has also established the Glass Woman Prize to honor passionate women’s voices. Visit her website here.

Sigrid Tornquist is a freelance writer and editor working toward her MFA at Hamline University, St. Paul, Minn. Her CNF narrative work has been featured as a part of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice, Women PeaceMakers program.

Jenn Treado is a budding creative nonfiction writer, model, and painter who strives to blend genres and mediums. She keeps very strict, minimalist form while battling the issues of coming of age, including abuse, tension, and sex. In 2014, she completed post-baccalaureate studies in Creative Writing at Northwestern University. Living in Chicago with her cat, Meeka, Jenn daydreams of graduate school in a warmer climate while playing with web content at her 9-5. Current projects and work can be found here.

Joanna M. Weston. Married; has two cats, multiple spiders, a herd of deer, and two derelict henhouses. Her middle-reader, Those Blue Shoes, published by Clarity House Press, her poetry, A Summer Father, published by Frontenac House of Calgary, and her other eBooks can be found at her blog, here.

Yuan Changming, an 8-time Pushcart nominee, is the most widely published poetry author who speaks Mandarin but writes English. Tutoring and co-editing Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan in Vancouver, Changming has poetry appearing in 929 literary publications across 30 countries, including Best Canadian Poetry (2009,12,14), BestNewPoemsOnline, Criterion and Threepenny Review.