Author Bios

Devon Balwit’s most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found or are upcoming in Jet Fuel, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Apt, Psaltery & Lyre, and Saint Katherine's Review among others.

Thom Caraway is a poet, letterpress printer, editor, and publisher in Spokane, Washington. His most recent collection of poems is What the Sky Lacks, from Korrektiv Press. He’s been remodeling his kitchen since September and may never be done. It has become a metaphor, but he’s not sure for what.

Maryann Corbett is the author of four books of poetry. Her work has won the Richard Wilbur Book Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and has been published in venues like Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Rattle, River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Subtropics, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, The Writer's Almanac, and an assortment of anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2018.

Kristina Erny is a third culture person who is perpetually homesick for somewhere. Currently making a home in rural(ish) Kentucky with her family, she has lived and worked in South Korea, Sierra Leone, and in various locations in the USA. Her poetry has been published in Yemassee, Perspectives, Tupelo Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review. She is grateful.

Marci Rae Johnson is a freelance writer and editor. She is also the Poetry Editor for The Cresset and for WordFarm press. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Main Street Rag, The Collagist, Rhino, Quiddity, Hobart, Redivider, Redactions, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, and 32 Poems, among others. Her first collection of poetry won the Powder Horn Prize and was published by Sage Hill Press in 2013, and her second full length collection, Basic Disaster Supplies Kit, was released by Steel Toe Books in 2016. Her chapbook, A Dictionary of Theories, won the Friends of Poetry chapbook contest for Michigan authors in 2014 and was published by Celery City Chapbooks.

Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell University (MFA) and Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published eleven collections of poetry, a short story collection, and over 550 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies. In addition, she is co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press 2005), assistant editor of Presence, author of four children's books, and the recipient of numerous honors, including Pushcart Prize nominations in poetry and fiction. She gives readings and workshops around the country. Visit her website for information and reviews.

Linda Mills Woolsey is an emeritus professor of English at Houghton College in Western NY. Her poetry, essays, and short stories have appeared in a number of journals, including Anglican Theological Review, Appalachian Review, Christian Century, The Cresset, Lullwater Review, Mars Hill Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, and The Sow's Ear Poetry Review. She lives in the village of Rushford, NY and on the French Creek in Western Pennsylvania.

Natasha Oladokun is a poet and essayist. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Jackson Center for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Harvard Review Online, Pleiades, Kenyon Review Online, The Adroit Journal, Image, The RS 500, and elsewhere. She is Associate Poetry Editor at storySouth, and is the inaugural First Wave Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Daye Phillippo’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Literary Mama, Shenandoah, Natural Bridge, The Comstock Review, The Fourth River, Cider Press Review, Great Lakes Review, The Adirondack Review, Chariton Review, Windhover, and others.

Elizabeth Sackett’s work has appeared in Gandy Dancer, The Gravity of the Thing, I Want You to See This Before I Leave, and Wild Musette, among other publications. She spends her time asking questions and writing down poetic phrases before she forgets them.

Nelle Smith, a graduate of Ohio State University, lives and writes in Columbus.

Bill Stadick has published poetry and creative nonfiction in The Windhover, Barren Magazine, The Christian Century, First Things, The Ekphrastic Review, and The Cresset. His chapbook, Family Latin, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, and he will be one of the featured poets in the anthology, In a Strange Land, from Wipf and Stock.

Jen Stewart Fueston lives in Longmont, Colorado. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of journals, most recently Inklette, Whale Road Review, and the St. Katherine Review. Her poem, “Trying to Get My Body Back,” was just named a finalist for Ruminate magazine’s 2018 McCabe poetry prize, and her poem “To the Women Marching, From a Mother at Home,” appears in the recently released anthology America, We Call Your Name, from Sixteen Rivers Press. Her chapbook, Visitations, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2015. She has taught writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey, and Lithuania.

Daniel Tobin’s poems and translations have appeared in such journals as Stand, Ploughshares, Literary Imagination, Poetry Ireland Review, Salmagundi, The Dalhousie Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many others, as well as numerous anthologies. Awards include "Discovery/The Nation Award," the Robert Frost Fellowship, The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Julia Ward Howe Prize, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He has published eight books of poems including Belated Heavens (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award), as well as Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Awake in America. Edited books include The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame, 2007) and The Stone in the Air, a suite of versions from the poetry of Paul Celan.

Aaron Brown is the author of the poetry collection, Acacia Road, winner of the 2016 Gerald Cable Book Award (Silverfish Review Press). He has been published in World Literature Today, Tupelo Quarterly, Waxwing, Cimarron Review, and Transition, among others. Brown grew up in Chad and now lives in Kansas, where he is a professor of writing at Sterling College. He holds an MFA from the University of Maryland.

Todd Copeland’s poems have appeared in The Journal, High Plains Literary Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Adirondack Review, Sewanee Theological Review, The Antigonish Review, and Columbia Poetry Review, among other publications, and he was the recipient of descant’s Baskerville Publishers Poetry Award in 2018. He lives in Waco, Texas.

Kaylen Dwyer is a student in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a graduate assistant in the Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing and a metadata consultant for the Map of Early Modern London.

Chris Harold lives in a quiet suburb of Chicago. He mows the grass and rides a bicycle and writes in the margins of an otherwise ordinary life. An excerpt from his memoir, for which he’s seeking a publisher, appears online at Salon.

G.E. Kittredge has fiction forthcoming in The Windhover, and has published poetry and creative nonfiction, under a different name, in several literary and religious publications.

Susanna Mayer holds a Master of Arts in Religion from the Yale Divinity School and lives in Austin, TX, where she sits on the steering committee for the LOGOS Poetry Collective. Her work has previously appeared in Letters Journal.

Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk, winner of the 2015 Story Prize Spotlight Award. His most recent work appears in Iowa Review, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Best American Mystery Stories, and the New York Times Book Review. He lives, happily, in Indiana.

Kelcey Parker Ervick is the author of three award-winning books: The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová (Rose Metal Press 2016), a hybrid work of biography, memoir, and visual art; Liliane's Balcony: A Novella of Fallingwater (Rose Metal Press 2013); and the story collection, For Sale By Owner (Kore Press 2011). She teaches creative writing and comics at Indiana University South Bend.

Reference images for her comic include: the painting Red Berry Plant and Butterfly by Shibata Zeshin at The Met, classical sculpture of Psyche at the Louvre, cover image from Las Mariposas entre los Antiguos Mexicanos by Carlos Beutelspacher, and assorted photos of Vladimir Nabokov and his butterflies available widely online. Quotes are from Speak, Memory and Nabokov's poem “On Discovering a Butterfly.”

Richard Prins is a New Yorker who received his MFA degree in poetry from New York University. His work appears in publications like Gulf Coast, jubilat, Ploughshares, and Rattle, and has been listed as a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2014.

Nicholas Samaras is the author of Hands of the Saddlemaker, which won The Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His next book, American Psalm, World Psalm, came out in 2014 from Ashland Poetry Press. Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times, and many others.

Shannon St. Armand is a twenty-something mom of two toddler boys. She is working on a chapbook about the experience of miscarriage, while her husband does all of the cooking. Recently, she started blogging.

Jack Stewart was educated at the University of Alabama and Emory University. From 1992–95 he was a Brittain Fellow at The Georgia Institute of Technology. His work has appeared in Poetry, Image, The American Literary Review, Relief, The Southern Humanities Review, and other journals and anthologies, most recently in A Connecticut River Review. He lives in Coconut Creek, Florida.

Heather M. Surls uses her writing to explore cultures and the voiceless, stereotyped, and marginalized. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in places like River Teeth and Rock & Sling, and she recently won Ruminate’s short story contest. She is a regular contributor to EthnoTraveler Magazine and Culture Keeper, a growing art and style site. She lives in Amman, Jordan.

Jeremiah Webster’s work has appeared in North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, Windhover, Rock and Sling, Crab Creek Review, Dappled Things, and elsewhere. A second edition of After So Many Fires, his first poetry collection, was released by Wiseblood Books in September.

Ann Weikers is a New Hampshire writer who received a J.D. from Villanova University School of Law and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Mischa Willett teaches English and Writing at Seattle Pacific University and is the author of Phases (Cascade Books) and editor of Philip James Bailey’s Festus, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. His poems, essays, and translations appear widely. Find more of his work on his website.