Volume One Contributors
Contributors
Dale Cottingham has published poems and poetry reviews in many journals and reviews across the country including Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Lung Full!, Main Street Rag, The Asheville Poetry Review, Borderlands and many others. Dale lives in Edmond, Oklahoma.
David Dannenfelser has had numerous workshops, readings and productions of his one-acts and full-length plays and has recently completed a book of short plays for use in the study of acting, Plays for Actors, which, along with his plays, When Words Fail…, The Medicine Show and The On Being Series have all been published as a part of the new Indie Theatre Collection, available on IndieTheaterNow.com. David is a member of The Dramatists Guild. For more information go to: DavidDannenfelser.com.
Cristina García is the author of six novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel and King of Cuba. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox, were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010. Her young adult novel, Dreams of Significant Girls, was published in 2011. García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University and an NEA grant, among others. García was a visiting professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin as well as the University of Miami. Currently, she is University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos.
Vivienne Glance’s full-length and short plays have been produced in London, Edinburgh, Seattle, Sydney and Perth. Her latest production, The Cat in the Box, played to full houses at the Blue Room Theatre, Perth. Shaking the Tree was showcased at the International Playwriting Festival in London in 2012, the same year she was awarded a WA Playwrights Development Initiative Award. Vivienne has undertaken several writing residencies in Australia and in London. She is also an actor and theatre director and has published two collections of poetry. See: VivienneGlance.com.
Kim Hannah lives in New York City. She received her MFA from New York University and currently works as a collections assistant at a fine arts library.
Cara Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed novel So Much Pretty. She is a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA program in Creative Writing. Hoffman has been a visiting writer at St. John’s University, Goddard, Columbia University and Oxford University. Her second novel, Be Safe I Love You, will be published by Simon and Schuster in April, 2014.
Mary Johnson is the author of An Unquenchable Thirst: A Memoir, which tells the story of her twenty years as a nun with Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Johnson is a 2002 graduate of Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing program and is Creative Director of Retreats for A Room of Her Own Foundation. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, O the Oprah Magazine, Salon.com, The Daily Beast, Bloomberg View and National Public Radio. She has been interviewed by Chris Matthews, Rosie O’Donnell and CNN’s Erin Burnett. Johnson blogs for The Huffington Post.
Mark L. Keats earned his MFA from the University of Maryland. He was twice an honorable mention for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Citron Review, Emerge Literary Journal and others. He currently teaches writing and literature at Montgomery and Howard Community Colleges.
Dave Kim’s fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Witness, Santa Monica Review, New Ohio Review, The Pinch and other journals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Amy King is the author of, most recently, I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press), and of Slaves to Do These Things, I’m the Man Who Loves You, Antidotes for an Alibi (all from BlazeVOX Books) and The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award). She currently is preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett, co-edits Esque Magazine and the PEN Poetry Series with Ana Bozicevic, and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
Joan Larkin’s six poetry collections include My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2007) and Legs Tipped with Small Claws (Argos Books chapbook, 2012). Blue Hanuman is forthcoming in Spring 2014 from Hanging Loose. Larkin is currently the Conkling Writer in Residence at Smith College.
Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder, both published by Graywolf Press. Recent work appears in Five Points, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, The Seattle Review, The Pinch, and in the anthologies Truth in Nonfiction and Naming the World. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Winter Fellow. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Sarah Lawrence College and Antioch University in Los Angeles. He currently teaches at NYU and in the low residency MFA program at Fairfield University. A novel and a collection of short prose pieces are forthcoming. He lives in New York City.
Rod McFadden began writing plays in 2009. In addition to successful productions at small theatres around the country, Rod’s plays have been well-received by Bay Area audiences of Broadway West, The Playwrights Center of SF, Wily West Productions, The Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Fringe of Marin, the Masquers, and PlayGround SF. He has received awards in national playwriting competitions for his plays, Love Birds, Counting on Love and Getting the Message, and was chosen for the People’s Choice award at the 2012 inspiraTO Festival in Toronto. Rod serves on the Board of Directors for the Playwrights Center of SF and teaches in the masters program at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
Chiori Miyagawa is a NYC-based playwright. Her plays have been produced off-Broadway, at renowned performance houses in NYC, and regionally. A collection of seven of her plays, Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays, is published by Seagull Books; and another collection of five plays, America Dreaming and Other Plays, is published by NoPassport Press. “A Different Kind of Love” is an excerpt from a full-length play, I Came to Look for You on Tuesday, which premiered at La MaMa in September 2013. This Lingering Life, which was awarded a 2012 MAP Fund, will premiere at Theatre of Yugen in San Francisco in 2014. She is an alumnus Radcliffe Advanced Studies Fellow at Harvard University and an alumnus resident playwright of New Dramatists and currently teaches undergraduate playwriting at Bard College.
Julie Parent is the editor of Clockhouse. After many years as an actor of classic, contemporary and improvisational theater, she began to write plays and got her MFA at Goddard College. Her short play, Beauty, was a semi-finalist in the Queer Shorts Festival at Stage Q in Madison, WI. She’s taught writing workshops in Vermont and New York City and is at work on a new play concerning the American settlement movement.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker and elsewhere. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at SimonPerchik.com.
Nate Pritts is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sweet Nothing, which Publishers Weekly describes as “both baroque and irreverent, banal and romantic, his poems [. . .] arrive at a place of vulnerability and sincerity.” Poetry Magazine called his third book, The Wonderfull Yeare, “rich, vivid, intimate, and somewhat troubled” while The Rumpus called Big Bright Sun, his fourth book, “a textual record of mistakes made and insights gleaned [in] a voice that knows its part in self-destruction.” His poetry and prose have been widely published, both online and in print, at places like Southern Review, Forklift, Ohio, Court Green, Gulf Coast, Boston Review and Rain Taxi, where he frequently contributes reviews. The founder and principal editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal and small press. He lives in Syracuse, New York.
Shimul Rahim is a writer and editor who grew up in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and now makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing on ethnic food has been published on Examiner.com and she maintains a blog on food, travel and literature at Saved By the Bay. She has been awarded multiple residencies at Hedgebrook, a residency program for women writers, and is currently at work on her first novel.
Angelica Romans is currently a student at West Chester University, pursing an English degree. She has been published in various magazines including The Laconic and Daedalus. She has won “Best of” for her poem “Boundaries” in The Laconic. Angelica hopes to continue writing poetry about cats.
Victoria Elizabeth Ruwi survived cancer and began writing poetry. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. Her most recent publications have been in Illness and Grace, Colere, Hospital Drive and Bliss.
Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels The Pink Institution, The Meat and Spirit Plan and the forthcoming Slab, all published by Coffee House Press. She is also the author of Tiger Goes to the Dogs, a limited edition letterpress project published by Nor By Press. She is the Director of Creative Writing in the University of Denver’s PhD program and also teaches in the Naropa Summer Writing Program. She is very proud to have received her MFA from Goddard College.
Prageeta Sharma was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1972, shortly after her parents emigrated from India in 1969. She attended Simon’s Rock College of Bard for her undergraduate studies and received an MFA in poetry from Brown University in 1995 and an MA in media studies from The New School in 2002. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007); The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004), winner of the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize; Bliss to Fill (Subpress Collective, 2000); and The Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013).
Susan Straight has published eight novels and one middle-grade reader. Highwire Moon was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001; A Million Nightingales, the first novel in a trilogy that includes Take One Candle and Light a Room and last year’s publication of Between Heaven and Here, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2006. Her short stories have appeared in Zoetrope, The Ontario Review, The Oxford American, The Sun, Black Clock and other magazines. “The Golden Gopher,” from Los Angelas Noir, won the Edgar Award in 2007; “El Ojo de Agua,” from Zoetrope, won an O. Henry Award in 2007. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Family Circle, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, Harpers, The Nation and other magazines. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on Highwire Moon, and a Lannan Prize was an immense help when working on Take One Candle and Light a Room. Her website is SusanStraight.com.
Patricia Youngblood is the 2011 winner of the Worcester County Poetry Association’s Frank O’Hara prize and has been published in the Worcester Review and elsewhere. She is a founding member of 4×4, a poets and visual artists collaborative with annual exhibitions since 2010. The now retired content editor of Bose.com and Furniture.com, she is also a former reporter/editor and interior designer. “I find a natural relationship between the impact and word economy of poetry, journalism and online content,” she says. “And my journalism and design background have a lot to do with what I observe and how I work with it.”
David Dannenfelser has had numerous workshops, readings and productions of his one-acts and full-length plays and has recently completed a book of short plays for use in the study of acting, Plays for Actors, which, along with his plays, When Words Fail…, The Medicine Show and The On Being Series have all been published as a part of the new Indie Theatre Collection, available on IndieTheaterNow.com. David is a member of The Dramatists Guild. For more information go to: DavidDannenfelser.com.
Cristina García is the author of six novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel and King of Cuba. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox, were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010. Her young adult novel, Dreams of Significant Girls, was published in 2011. García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University and an NEA grant, among others. García was a visiting professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin as well as the University of Miami. Currently, she is University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos.
Vivienne Glance’s full-length and short plays have been produced in London, Edinburgh, Seattle, Sydney and Perth. Her latest production, The Cat in the Box, played to full houses at the Blue Room Theatre, Perth. Shaking the Tree was showcased at the International Playwriting Festival in London in 2012, the same year she was awarded a WA Playwrights Development Initiative Award. Vivienne has undertaken several writing residencies in Australia and in London. She is also an actor and theatre director and has published two collections of poetry. See: VivienneGlance.com.
Kim Hannah lives in New York City. She received her MFA from New York University and currently works as a collections assistant at a fine arts library.
Cara Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed novel So Much Pretty. She is a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA program in Creative Writing. Hoffman has been a visiting writer at St. John’s University, Goddard, Columbia University and Oxford University. Her second novel, Be Safe I Love You, will be published by Simon and Schuster in April, 2014.
Mary Johnson is the author of An Unquenchable Thirst: A Memoir, which tells the story of her twenty years as a nun with Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Johnson is a 2002 graduate of Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing program and is Creative Director of Retreats for A Room of Her Own Foundation. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, O the Oprah Magazine, Salon.com, The Daily Beast, Bloomberg View and National Public Radio. She has been interviewed by Chris Matthews, Rosie O’Donnell and CNN’s Erin Burnett. Johnson blogs for The Huffington Post.
Mark L. Keats earned his MFA from the University of Maryland. He was twice an honorable mention for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Citron Review, Emerge Literary Journal and others. He currently teaches writing and literature at Montgomery and Howard Community Colleges.
Dave Kim’s fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Witness, Santa Monica Review, New Ohio Review, The Pinch and other journals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Amy King is the author of, most recently, I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press), and of Slaves to Do These Things, I’m the Man Who Loves You, Antidotes for an Alibi (all from BlazeVOX Books) and The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award). She currently is preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett, co-edits Esque Magazine and the PEN Poetry Series with Ana Bozicevic, and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
Joan Larkin’s six poetry collections include My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2007) and Legs Tipped with Small Claws (Argos Books chapbook, 2012). Blue Hanuman is forthcoming in Spring 2014 from Hanging Loose. Larkin is currently the Conkling Writer in Residence at Smith College.
Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder, both published by Graywolf Press. Recent work appears in Five Points, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, The Seattle Review, The Pinch, and in the anthologies Truth in Nonfiction and Naming the World. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Winter Fellow. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Sarah Lawrence College and Antioch University in Los Angeles. He currently teaches at NYU and in the low residency MFA program at Fairfield University. A novel and a collection of short prose pieces are forthcoming. He lives in New York City.
Rod McFadden began writing plays in 2009. In addition to successful productions at small theatres around the country, Rod’s plays have been well-received by Bay Area audiences of Broadway West, The Playwrights Center of SF, Wily West Productions, The Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Fringe of Marin, the Masquers, and PlayGround SF. He has received awards in national playwriting competitions for his plays, Love Birds, Counting on Love and Getting the Message, and was chosen for the People’s Choice award at the 2012 inspiraTO Festival in Toronto. Rod serves on the Board of Directors for the Playwrights Center of SF and teaches in the masters program at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
Chiori Miyagawa is a NYC-based playwright. Her plays have been produced off-Broadway, at renowned performance houses in NYC, and regionally. A collection of seven of her plays, Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays, is published by Seagull Books; and another collection of five plays, America Dreaming and Other Plays, is published by NoPassport Press. “A Different Kind of Love” is an excerpt from a full-length play, I Came to Look for You on Tuesday, which premiered at La MaMa in September 2013. This Lingering Life, which was awarded a 2012 MAP Fund, will premiere at Theatre of Yugen in San Francisco in 2014. She is an alumnus Radcliffe Advanced Studies Fellow at Harvard University and an alumnus resident playwright of New Dramatists and currently teaches undergraduate playwriting at Bard College.
Julie Parent is the editor of Clockhouse. After many years as an actor of classic, contemporary and improvisational theater, she began to write plays and got her MFA at Goddard College. Her short play, Beauty, was a semi-finalist in the Queer Shorts Festival at Stage Q in Madison, WI. She’s taught writing workshops in Vermont and New York City and is at work on a new play concerning the American settlement movement.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker and elsewhere. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at SimonPerchik.com.
Nate Pritts is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sweet Nothing, which Publishers Weekly describes as “both baroque and irreverent, banal and romantic, his poems [. . .] arrive at a place of vulnerability and sincerity.” Poetry Magazine called his third book, The Wonderfull Yeare, “rich, vivid, intimate, and somewhat troubled” while The Rumpus called Big Bright Sun, his fourth book, “a textual record of mistakes made and insights gleaned [in] a voice that knows its part in self-destruction.” His poetry and prose have been widely published, both online and in print, at places like Southern Review, Forklift, Ohio, Court Green, Gulf Coast, Boston Review and Rain Taxi, where he frequently contributes reviews. The founder and principal editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal and small press. He lives in Syracuse, New York.
Shimul Rahim is a writer and editor who grew up in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and now makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing on ethnic food has been published on Examiner.com and she maintains a blog on food, travel and literature at Saved By the Bay. She has been awarded multiple residencies at Hedgebrook, a residency program for women writers, and is currently at work on her first novel.
Angelica Romans is currently a student at West Chester University, pursing an English degree. She has been published in various magazines including The Laconic and Daedalus. She has won “Best of” for her poem “Boundaries” in The Laconic. Angelica hopes to continue writing poetry about cats.
Victoria Elizabeth Ruwi survived cancer and began writing poetry. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. Her most recent publications have been in Illness and Grace, Colere, Hospital Drive and Bliss.
Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels The Pink Institution, The Meat and Spirit Plan and the forthcoming Slab, all published by Coffee House Press. She is also the author of Tiger Goes to the Dogs, a limited edition letterpress project published by Nor By Press. She is the Director of Creative Writing in the University of Denver’s PhD program and also teaches in the Naropa Summer Writing Program. She is very proud to have received her MFA from Goddard College.
Prageeta Sharma was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1972, shortly after her parents emigrated from India in 1969. She attended Simon’s Rock College of Bard for her undergraduate studies and received an MFA in poetry from Brown University in 1995 and an MA in media studies from The New School in 2002. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007); The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004), winner of the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize; Bliss to Fill (Subpress Collective, 2000); and The Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013).
Susan Straight has published eight novels and one middle-grade reader. Highwire Moon was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001; A Million Nightingales, the first novel in a trilogy that includes Take One Candle and Light a Room and last year’s publication of Between Heaven and Here, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2006. Her short stories have appeared in Zoetrope, The Ontario Review, The Oxford American, The Sun, Black Clock and other magazines. “The Golden Gopher,” from Los Angelas Noir, won the Edgar Award in 2007; “El Ojo de Agua,” from Zoetrope, won an O. Henry Award in 2007. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Family Circle, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, Harpers, The Nation and other magazines. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on Highwire Moon, and a Lannan Prize was an immense help when working on Take One Candle and Light a Room. Her website is SusanStraight.com.
Patricia Youngblood is the 2011 winner of the Worcester County Poetry Association’s Frank O’Hara prize and has been published in the Worcester Review and elsewhere. She is a founding member of 4×4, a poets and visual artists collaborative with annual exhibitions since 2010. The now retired content editor of Bose.com and Furniture.com, she is also a former reporter/editor and interior designer. “I find a natural relationship between the impact and word economy of poetry, journalism and online content,” she says. “And my journalism and design background have a lot to do with what I observe and how I work with it.”