Volume Five Contributors
Contributors
Sabine Bradley is a Rochester, NY native and a current undergrad at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. As a poet, Sabine focuses heavily on the intersectional and transnational layers unique to black, urban, and non-Christian women. She has competed in the 2015 Brave New Voices Youth National Slam, as well as the 2016 Rustbelt and Mid-Atlantic Regional Slams. A Pink Door Literary Fellow, Sabine believes in the importance of safe space, the magic of the spoken word, and the inherent radicalism of jazz and sci-fi novels.
Kaitly Burd is from Louisville, Kentucky, and now lives in Madrid. Her work has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Atticus Review, Sonder Review, and elsewhere. She has also worked on the editorial staff of Paper Darts Magazine and as an associate for The Kenyon Review. This summer, she will spend time as a resident at the Chulitna Lodge in Alaska, at work on a novel.
Richard Chin is a longtime newspaperman from St. Paul who has covered everything from the Pillsbury Bake-Off to bombings in Baghdad. He was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He's also the author of several plays including Starved, a play based on the true story of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and True, a 10-minute play about sex robots. In 2018, he will be producing the Snowblower Ballet, an outdoor dance performance involving man, machine and flying snow.
Katharine Haake is the author of five works of fiction, including the science fiction eco-fable, The Time of Quarantine; the hybrid California prose lyric, That Water, Those Rocks; and three collections of stories. Her writing has long appeared in such magazines as One Story, The Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, december, and Witness, and has been recognized as distinguished by Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays, among others. A collaborative text/image work she did with artist Lisa Bloomfield is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Art. A recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles, Haake teaches at California State University, Northridge.
Samina Hadi-Tabassum was born in Hyderabad, India and lived there until she was five while her father worked in Tehran. After fleeing the revolution, her father immigrated to Chicago as an engineer and brought her mother, older brother, younger sister and Samina to the United States. Most of her poetry deals with the struggles of growing up poor, not knowing English, and making sense of this newfound country. Samina graduated from Northwestern University with a Comparative Literature degree and a minor in Biology and completed a PhD in cultural and linguistic anthropology and education at Columbia University. Currently, Samina is a professor at Northern Illinois University where she teaches courses in language/linguistics.
Holly Karapetkova's poetry, prose, and translations from the Bulgarian have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Drunken Boat, and many other places. Her second book, Towline, won the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Cloudbank Books.
Helene Barker Kiser lives in Washington, DC, with her family, both human and canine. She has published poetry in journals such as Poet Lore, Borderlands, Sycamore Review, Indiana Review, Hawaii Review, Poem, and others. Her first book Topography was published by Linear Arts. Currently at work on her second poetry collection, tentatively titled Mother Hunger, she earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College.
Kerri Kochanski is a playwright and author of the highly-rated pop culture/humor book & blog, 1,001 People That Suck. Her plays have been produced throughout the United States and Canada—and her work is published by Meriwether, Smith & Kraus, Dramatic Publishing, Cengage Learning, ICWP, Kickie Publishing and Applause Books. She is a resident playwright with Emerging Artists Theatre, an award-winning off-Broadway theatre company. Her work has been supported by The Puffin Foundation and the NJ Council for the Humanities. She received an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. She lives in Greater Philadelphia.
Aimee Liu is the bestselling author of the novels Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her short fiction has been nominated for and received special mention in the Pushcart Prize competition. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and many other periodicals and anthologies.
Carol McMahon is a teacher and poet who has been published in various journals (Lake Affect Magazine, HazMat, Blue Collar Review, IthacaLit, Prodigal) and has a chapbook, On Any Given Day, published by FootHills Press. McMahon received an MFA in Poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop in Washington State, and when not teaching, reading or writing can be found out trail-running or on the water, rowing.
Margaret Medina’s play, A Force to Be Reckoned with, debuted at Casa0101 in Boyle Heights. She is the author of Mexican Mothers and Freeways published by Brooklyn and Boyle magazine. She’s taught dramatic writing at Cypress College, the Chicano Studies department at California State University, Northridge. Her critically acclaimed one-woman show Margarita on the Rocks ran at The Creative Center and was performed at the HBO Workspace, No Ho Theatre Arts Festival, and many colleges, winning best solo-show from playreviews.com. Margaret toured with her show The ABC‘s of Life: Acceptance, Bullies and Castanets at colleges across the nation. Margaret is a native of Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont.
Sabina Murray is the author of six works of fiction, including the recent novel Valiant Gentlemen and the short story collection The Caprices, which won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
David Myers’ work has been developed at Berkeley Rep, South Coast Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Vic, The Royal Court and more. He’s written and sold two screenplays and two original television pilots. Originally from Houston, David has a BA from Brown and an MFA from UCSD. He teaches at UCSD and lives in LA with his wife and two boys.
W.P. Osborn’s collection, Seven Tales and Seven Stories, won the 2013 Unboxed Books Fiction Prize, selected by Francine Prose. He has short fiction in journals such as Mississippi Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Cream City Review, Gargoyle, and Gettysburg Review, and poetry in Hotel Amerika, Main Street Rag, and Pinyon Review. He retired from teaching at Grand Valley State University in 2016. His website is wposborn.com.
Simon Perchik’s poetry has appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker and elsewhere.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of, most recently, Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press, 2016).
Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Boston. He is a sociologist, and author of a collection of poetry and flash fiction, Pink X-Ray (Big Table Publishing, 2015). He is also the author of three chapbooks of poetry and flash fiction, Democracy of Secrets, Coyotes Circle the Party Store, and Dancing School Nerves. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Brad’s poetry and fiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The American Journal of Poetry, Folio, decomP, Lunch Ticket, The Baltimore Review, Posit, Boston Literary Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, and other publications. Brad’s website is http://bradrosepoetry.blogspot.com/. Audio recordings can be heard at: https://soundcloud.com/bradrose1.
Mary K. Ryan is a doctoral student in Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought at Virginia Tech. Mary's creative writing has been published in the Lehigh Valley Vanguard Journal, Nomadic Sojourns Journal, and the Draw Write Here collective. Mary's academic writing is published in the Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict and Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory as well as book chapters in the edited collection Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature (Salem Press) and the forthcoming Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves (Palgrave Macmillan) and The Representation of Poverty in Popular Culture (McFarland).
Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb’s work has appeared in many publications, including Depth Insights Journal, Watershed Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Terrain.org, SLAB: A Literary Magazine, Caesura, the anthology Talking Back and Looking Forward: An Educational Revolution in Poetry and Prose (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group), and others, with work forthcoming in Weber—The Contemporary West and The American Journal of Nursing. In addition to past Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, her work received Honorable Mentions in 2016 from both Port Yonder Press and Erbacce Press. She has been an educator and a researcher, and is co-founder of Native West Press.
Ira Sukrungruang is the author of the memoirs Southside Buddhist and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy, the short story collection The Melting Season, and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the recipient of the 2015 American Book Award, New York Foundation for theArts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Emerging Writer Fellowship. His work has appeared in Post Road, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com), and teaches in the MFA program at University of South Florida.
Daryl Sznyter received her MFA in poetry from The New School. Previous and forthcoming publications include Best American Poetry blog, Bluestem Magazine, Eunoia Review, The Fem, Freshwater Literary Journal and others. She currently resides in Dunmore, Pennsylvania.
Clifford Thompson received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction in 2013 for Love for Sale and Other Essays, published by Autumn House Press, which has also published his memoir, Twin of Blackness (2015). His essays on books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Oxford American, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Black Issues Book Review and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel Signifying Nothing. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Queens College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the MFA program at Bennington College. His book J.D. & Me, both memoir and reflection on the work of Joan Didion, is forthcoming from Other Press. He lives in Brooklyn.
Tony Tracy is the author of two poetry collections: The Christening and Without Notice. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, North American Review, Poetry East, Painted Bride's Quarterly, Rattle and various other magazines and journals over the past 20 years.
Diana Wagman is the author of six novels, most recently Extraordinary October. Her second novel, Spontaneous, won the 2001 USA Pen West Award for Fiction. Her fourth novel, The Care & Feeding of Exotic Pets, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection. Her short stories and essays have appeared in various journals and as part of the n + 1 anthology MFA vs. NYC. She is an occasional contributor to the LA Times. She teaches fiction for Writing Workshops LA.
James Whorton Jr. is a former Mississippian who now teaches at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. He is the author of three novels, most recently Angela Sloan.
Kaitly Burd is from Louisville, Kentucky, and now lives in Madrid. Her work has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Atticus Review, Sonder Review, and elsewhere. She has also worked on the editorial staff of Paper Darts Magazine and as an associate for The Kenyon Review. This summer, she will spend time as a resident at the Chulitna Lodge in Alaska, at work on a novel.
Richard Chin is a longtime newspaperman from St. Paul who has covered everything from the Pillsbury Bake-Off to bombings in Baghdad. He was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He's also the author of several plays including Starved, a play based on the true story of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and True, a 10-minute play about sex robots. In 2018, he will be producing the Snowblower Ballet, an outdoor dance performance involving man, machine and flying snow.
Katharine Haake is the author of five works of fiction, including the science fiction eco-fable, The Time of Quarantine; the hybrid California prose lyric, That Water, Those Rocks; and three collections of stories. Her writing has long appeared in such magazines as One Story, The Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, december, and Witness, and has been recognized as distinguished by Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays, among others. A collaborative text/image work she did with artist Lisa Bloomfield is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Art. A recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles, Haake teaches at California State University, Northridge.
Samina Hadi-Tabassum was born in Hyderabad, India and lived there until she was five while her father worked in Tehran. After fleeing the revolution, her father immigrated to Chicago as an engineer and brought her mother, older brother, younger sister and Samina to the United States. Most of her poetry deals with the struggles of growing up poor, not knowing English, and making sense of this newfound country. Samina graduated from Northwestern University with a Comparative Literature degree and a minor in Biology and completed a PhD in cultural and linguistic anthropology and education at Columbia University. Currently, Samina is a professor at Northern Illinois University where she teaches courses in language/linguistics.
Holly Karapetkova's poetry, prose, and translations from the Bulgarian have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Drunken Boat, and many other places. Her second book, Towline, won the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Cloudbank Books.
Helene Barker Kiser lives in Washington, DC, with her family, both human and canine. She has published poetry in journals such as Poet Lore, Borderlands, Sycamore Review, Indiana Review, Hawaii Review, Poem, and others. Her first book Topography was published by Linear Arts. Currently at work on her second poetry collection, tentatively titled Mother Hunger, she earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College.
Kerri Kochanski is a playwright and author of the highly-rated pop culture/humor book & blog, 1,001 People That Suck. Her plays have been produced throughout the United States and Canada—and her work is published by Meriwether, Smith & Kraus, Dramatic Publishing, Cengage Learning, ICWP, Kickie Publishing and Applause Books. She is a resident playwright with Emerging Artists Theatre, an award-winning off-Broadway theatre company. Her work has been supported by The Puffin Foundation and the NJ Council for the Humanities. She received an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. She lives in Greater Philadelphia.
Aimee Liu is the bestselling author of the novels Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her short fiction has been nominated for and received special mention in the Pushcart Prize competition. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and many other periodicals and anthologies.
Carol McMahon is a teacher and poet who has been published in various journals (Lake Affect Magazine, HazMat, Blue Collar Review, IthacaLit, Prodigal) and has a chapbook, On Any Given Day, published by FootHills Press. McMahon received an MFA in Poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop in Washington State, and when not teaching, reading or writing can be found out trail-running or on the water, rowing.
Margaret Medina’s play, A Force to Be Reckoned with, debuted at Casa0101 in Boyle Heights. She is the author of Mexican Mothers and Freeways published by Brooklyn and Boyle magazine. She’s taught dramatic writing at Cypress College, the Chicano Studies department at California State University, Northridge. Her critically acclaimed one-woman show Margarita on the Rocks ran at The Creative Center and was performed at the HBO Workspace, No Ho Theatre Arts Festival, and many colleges, winning best solo-show from playreviews.com. Margaret toured with her show The ABC‘s of Life: Acceptance, Bullies and Castanets at colleges across the nation. Margaret is a native of Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont.
Sabina Murray is the author of six works of fiction, including the recent novel Valiant Gentlemen and the short story collection The Caprices, which won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
David Myers’ work has been developed at Berkeley Rep, South Coast Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Vic, The Royal Court and more. He’s written and sold two screenplays and two original television pilots. Originally from Houston, David has a BA from Brown and an MFA from UCSD. He teaches at UCSD and lives in LA with his wife and two boys.
W.P. Osborn’s collection, Seven Tales and Seven Stories, won the 2013 Unboxed Books Fiction Prize, selected by Francine Prose. He has short fiction in journals such as Mississippi Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Cream City Review, Gargoyle, and Gettysburg Review, and poetry in Hotel Amerika, Main Street Rag, and Pinyon Review. He retired from teaching at Grand Valley State University in 2016. His website is wposborn.com.
Simon Perchik’s poetry has appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker and elsewhere.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of, most recently, Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press, 2016).
Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Boston. He is a sociologist, and author of a collection of poetry and flash fiction, Pink X-Ray (Big Table Publishing, 2015). He is also the author of three chapbooks of poetry and flash fiction, Democracy of Secrets, Coyotes Circle the Party Store, and Dancing School Nerves. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Brad’s poetry and fiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The American Journal of Poetry, Folio, decomP, Lunch Ticket, The Baltimore Review, Posit, Boston Literary Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, and other publications. Brad’s website is http://bradrosepoetry.blogspot.com/. Audio recordings can be heard at: https://soundcloud.com/bradrose1.
Mary K. Ryan is a doctoral student in Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought at Virginia Tech. Mary's creative writing has been published in the Lehigh Valley Vanguard Journal, Nomadic Sojourns Journal, and the Draw Write Here collective. Mary's academic writing is published in the Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict and Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory as well as book chapters in the edited collection Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature (Salem Press) and the forthcoming Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves (Palgrave Macmillan) and The Representation of Poverty in Popular Culture (McFarland).
Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb’s work has appeared in many publications, including Depth Insights Journal, Watershed Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Terrain.org, SLAB: A Literary Magazine, Caesura, the anthology Talking Back and Looking Forward: An Educational Revolution in Poetry and Prose (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group), and others, with work forthcoming in Weber—The Contemporary West and The American Journal of Nursing. In addition to past Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, her work received Honorable Mentions in 2016 from both Port Yonder Press and Erbacce Press. She has been an educator and a researcher, and is co-founder of Native West Press.
Ira Sukrungruang is the author of the memoirs Southside Buddhist and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy, the short story collection The Melting Season, and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the recipient of the 2015 American Book Award, New York Foundation for theArts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Emerging Writer Fellowship. His work has appeared in Post Road, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com), and teaches in the MFA program at University of South Florida.
Daryl Sznyter received her MFA in poetry from The New School. Previous and forthcoming publications include Best American Poetry blog, Bluestem Magazine, Eunoia Review, The Fem, Freshwater Literary Journal and others. She currently resides in Dunmore, Pennsylvania.
Clifford Thompson received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction in 2013 for Love for Sale and Other Essays, published by Autumn House Press, which has also published his memoir, Twin of Blackness (2015). His essays on books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Oxford American, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Black Issues Book Review and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel Signifying Nothing. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Queens College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the MFA program at Bennington College. His book J.D. & Me, both memoir and reflection on the work of Joan Didion, is forthcoming from Other Press. He lives in Brooklyn.
Tony Tracy is the author of two poetry collections: The Christening and Without Notice. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, North American Review, Poetry East, Painted Bride's Quarterly, Rattle and various other magazines and journals over the past 20 years.
Diana Wagman is the author of six novels, most recently Extraordinary October. Her second novel, Spontaneous, won the 2001 USA Pen West Award for Fiction. Her fourth novel, The Care & Feeding of Exotic Pets, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection. Her short stories and essays have appeared in various journals and as part of the n + 1 anthology MFA vs. NYC. She is an occasional contributor to the LA Times. She teaches fiction for Writing Workshops LA.
James Whorton Jr. is a former Mississippian who now teaches at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. He is the author of three novels, most recently Angela Sloan.