Readers: 2018-20
2020 Season
(on hiatus due to Covid)
Tommye Blount
A Cave Canem alumnus, Tommye Blount is the author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books, 2020) and What Are We Not For (Bull City Press, 2016). A graduate from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, he has been the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from Kresge Arts in Detroit and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His work has been featured in Poetry, Magma, New England Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Ecotone, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. Born and raised in Detroit, Tommye now lives in Novi.
Daniel Suárez
Daniel Suárez is a first generation Cuban American born and raised in Chicago, IL. He holds an MA in English, and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. His poem can be found in the Columbia Poetry Review, RHINO, Eleven Eleven, 5x5, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Third Coast, [PANK] LATINX/Latinidad Folio, and other journals.
Jessica Berger
Jessica Berger is a Chicago-based fiction writer as well as a founding editor of Grimoire and Always Crashing Magazine. Her work has been featured in Ninth Letter, Suspira, Nat. Brut, Barrelhouse, The Spectacle, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.
Julia Story
Julia Story is the author of Spinster for Hire (The Word Works) and Post Moxie (Sarabande Books). Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in many publications including Diode, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Sixth Finch, and The New Yorker. She is from Indiana and now lives in Massachusetts.
Parneshia Jones
Parneshia Jones is the author of Vessel: Poems (Milkweed Editions), winner of the Midwest Book Award and featured as one of “12 Books to Savor” by O, The Oprah Magazine. Jones has been honored with the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Margaret Walker Short Story Award, and the Aquarius Press Legacy Award. Named one of the “25 Writers to Watch” by the Guild Complex and one of “Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago” by Newcity Magazine, her work has appeared in anthologies including, She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. Jones has been featured on PBS Newshour, the Academy of American Poets, and espnW.
Jeffrey Thomson
Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and the author of nine books including: Half/Life: New and Selected Poems from Alice James Books (October 2019), the memoir fragile, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and the edited collection From the Fishouse. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.
Katy Yocom
Katy Yocom’s debut novel, Three Ways to Disappear, won the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature and was named a Barnes & Noble Top Indie Favorite. The book’s publication received widespread coverage in the Indian press, including the front page of the Jaipur Times. A recipient of the Al Smith Fellowship for artistic excellence, Kentucky’s highest honor for an individual artist, she has written for Newsweek, Salon, LitHub, American Way (the American Airlines in-flight magazine), Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, holds an MFA from Spalding University, and serves as associate director of the low-residency graduate programs of Spalding’s School of Creative and Professional Writing.
Kristi Maxwell
Kristi Maxwell is the author of seven books of poems, including My My (Saturnalia Books, March 2020) and Bright and Hurtless (Ahsahta Press, 2018). Her individual poems have recently appeared in Bennington Review, jubilat,
RHINO, Black Warrior Review, and Boston Review. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville.
Cynthia Atkins
Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In The Event of Full Disclosure, and Still-Life With God. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including, Alaska Quarterly Review, Apogee, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, and Verse Daily. Atkins has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and the VCCA. Formerly, Atkins worked as the assistant director for the Poetry Society of America. Currently, she is an Interviews Editor at American Microreviews & Interviews, and also teaches Creative Writing at Blue Ridge Community College. Atkins lives with her family on the Maury River of Rockbridge County VA. More info at: @catkinspoet
Daniel WK Lee
Born in Kuching, Malaysia, Daniel W.K. Lee was/is a third-generation refugee going back to China via Vietnam and Malaysia before settling in the United States. Raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Daniel moved to New York City in 1996 where he earned a BA at NYU and an MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. Daniel relocated to Seattle, WA in March 2014 and after a little over five years in the Pacific Northwest, he and his whippet Camden moved to New Orleans in December 2019 soon after the publication of his debut collection of poetry Anatomy of Want.
Holly Amos
Holly Amos is a humor writer and poet in Chicago, as well as the associate editor of Poetry. Her first poetry collection is Continual Guidance of Air. Her poems and humor have appeared at The Academy of American Poets, jubilat, Prairie Schooner, McSweeney’s, and Tenderly, among other places.
Cheswayo Mphanza
Cheswayo Mphanza was born in Lusaka, Zambia and raised in Chicago, Illinois. His work has been featured in or is forthcoming from New England Review, New Orleans Review, American Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and RHINO. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Callaloo, Cave Canem, and Columbia University. A recipient of the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers, he earned his MFA in poetry from Rutgers-Newark.
Dolly Lemke
Dolly Lemke lives and works in Chicago. She is the author of four chapbooks, O Town Heights (DoubleCross Press, 2012), I’m so into you (plumberries press, 2013), Wyoming (dancing girl press, 2018), and DUET DUET #4 with Kelly Lorraine Andrews (pitymilk press, 2018). She founded and co-curated of The Dollhouse Reading Series from 2011-2016 and also co-founded the online poetry journal PINWHEEL where she served as Poetry Editor from 2012-2018. You can find her online at dollylemke.tumblr.com.
Tina Boyer Brown
Tina Boyer Brown is the Managing Director of the Arts Conservatories and Creative Writing Department Head at The Chicago High School for the Arts. She is a lead teacher at the Summer Poetry Teachers’ Institute sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. Her work has appeared in RHINO, POETRY Magazine, The Journal of Education, and Jet Fuel Review.
Billy Lombardo
billy lombardo is the founder and managing editor of Polyphony Lit,a student-run, international litmag for high school writers and editors. He’s the author of The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, The Man with Two Arms, and Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns. His novel, Morning Will Come will be launched in January 2021. billy is a 2011 Nelson Algren Fiction Award winner and is at work on the House of Fiction Deconstructed, a book on the craft of fiction for apprentice writers. billy can be reached through his writing and editing business, Writing Pros/e. He lives in the Albany Park neighborhood.
Patty Seyburn
Patty Seyburn has published five collections of poems: Threshold Delivery (Finishing Line Press, 2019), Perfecta (What Books Press, Glass Table Collective, 2014); Hilarity, (New Issues Press, 2009), Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). She earned a BS and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University, an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. She is a professor at California State University, Long Beach.
Nickole Brown
Nickole Brown received her MFA from Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at three different animal sanctuaries. A sequence called The Donkey Elegies will be published as a chapbook by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.
Mark Turcotte
Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) is the author of 4 poetry collections, including The Feathered Heart and Exploding Chippewas. His poetry and prose have appeared in national and international journals and magazines, and he is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and Wordcraft Circle among others. He teaches in the English Department at DePaul University.
Barbara Monier
Barbara Monier has been writing since the earliest days when she composed in crayon on paper with extremely wide lines. She studied writing at Yale University and the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, she received the Avery and Jule Hopwood Prize. It was the highest prize awarded that year, and the first in Michigan’s history for a piece written directly for the screen. She has three completed novels, YOU, IN YOUR GREEN SHIRT and A LITTLE BIRDIE TOLD ME (available on Amazon) as well as PUSHING THE RIVER (Amika Press, October 2018). She lives and works in Chicago.
Barbara Monier has been writing since the earliest days when she composed in crayon on paper with extremely wide lines. She studied writing at Yale University and the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, she received the Avery and Jule Hopwood Prize. It was the highest prize awarded that year, and the first in Michigan’s history for a piece written directly for the screen. She has three completed novels, YOU, IN YOUR GREEN SHIRT and A LITTLE BIRDIE TOLD ME (available on Amazon) as well as PUSHING THE RIVER (Amika Press, October 2018). She lives and works in Chicago.
Barbara Monier has been writing since the earliest days when she composed in crayon on paper with extremely wide lines. She studied writing at Yale University and the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, she received the Avery and Jule Hopwood Prize. It was the highest prize awarded that year, and the first in Michigan’s history for a piece written directly for the screen. She has three completed novels, YOU, IN YOUR GREEN SHIRT and A LITTLE BIRDIE TOLD ME (available on Amazon) as well as PUSHING THE RIVER (Amika Press, October 2018). She lives and works in Chicago.
Dipika Mukherjee
Dipika Mukherjee is the author of the novels Shambala Junction, which won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction, and Ode to Broken Things, which was longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize. Her short story collection is Rules of Desire (Fixi, 2015) and she has two poetry collections, The Third Glass of Wine (Writer’s Workshop, 2015), and The Palimpsest of Exile (Rubicon Press, 2009). Her work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and she frequently writes for World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review and Chicago Quarterly Review as well as a literary column for The Edge in Malaysia.
Thomas Burke
Thomas Burke received a BA from Union College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Eastbound into the Cosmos (MadHat Press, 2019) is his first novel. He has contributed work to Tin House, The Rumpus, Playboy, Hobart Pulp and St. Petersburg Review, among other places. He has taught at UMass Amherst, the Newberry Library, and Northwestern University, where he is currently assistant director of the Kaplan Humanities Institute.
Formerly Burke helped direct the Summer Literary Seminars in Russia and co-founded its sister program in Kenya. He lives in Evanston, IL with his wife and two children.
Molia Dumbleton
Molia Dumbleton’s debut collection of fiction was a finalist for the 2018 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Individual stories from that collection have been awarded the Sean O’Faolain International Story Prize, the Columbia Journal Winter Fiction Prize, and other honors, and can be read in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, Witness, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Bath and Bridport Prize Anthologies, and elsewhere. She writes, edits, and teaches for various universities and arts organizations around the city.
Rachel DeWoskin
Rachel DeWoskin is on the core fiction faculty and is an affiliated faculty member of Jewish Studies and East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of five novels, including the critically acclaimed Banshee; Someday We Will Fly; and Big Girl Small. Her essays, articles, and poems have appeared in a variety of outlets and anthologies, and her memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing, has been published in six countries and is being developed as a television series.
William Stobb
William Stobb is the author of six poetry collections including You Are Still Alive (2019, 42 Miles Press) and the National Poetry Series selection, Nervous Systems (2007, Penguin Books). His poems appear in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, and other journals and zines. His experimental audio appears on TextSound and The Volta, and is collected on his Soundcloud page. He works on the editorial staff of Conduit, and on the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse.
Jessica Jacobs
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books) and Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including Orion, New England Review, Guernica, and The Missouri Review. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and now serves as the Chapbook Editor of Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown.
2019 Season
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Nami Mun
Nami Mun is the author of Miles from Nowhere, which has received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Hopwood Award, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Miles from Nowhere went on to become a national bestseller. Some of Nami’s honors include fellowships and support from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and Northwestern University. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, The Iowa Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, among others. She’s currently an Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern.
Jennnifer Steele
Jennifer Steele is a native of Middletown, CT, and a current Chicagoan, and received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2008. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Revolving Door Arts alongside her service to the young people of Chicago through her work at Chicago Public Library. She is a 2015 fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and her work has appeared in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Callaloo, Columbia Poetry Review, and others. She is the author of the chapbook A House In Its Hunger (Central Square Press, 2018).
Aricka Foreman
Aricka Foreman is a poet, editor and educator from Detroit, MI. Author of Dream with a Glass Chamber and Salt Body Shimmer (forthcoming from YesYes Books), she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her poems, essays and features have appeared in The Offing, Buzzfeed, Vinyl, RHINO, The Blueshift Journal, Day One, shuf Poetry, James Franco Review, THRUSH, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin), among others.
Erika L. Sánchez
Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. A poet, essayist, and fiction writer, she is the author of a young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and instant New York Times Bestseller; and the poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. She is a 2019 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, and was a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow. She was recently appointed the Son Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair at DePaul University.
Tara Betts
Tara Betts is the author of Break the Habit and Arc & Hue and the chapbooks 7 x 7: kwansabas and THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali. She is part of the MFA faculty at Stonecoast-University of Southern Maine. Her poetry and prose has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
Kevin Coval
Kevin Coval is a poet & author of A People's History of Chicago, Everything Must Go: The Life & Death of an American Neighborhood & over ten other collections, anthologies & chapbooks. He is the founder & editor of The BreakBeat Poets series on Haymarket Books, Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, which won a MacArthur Award in 2016, & founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, the world's largest youth poetry festival, now in more than 19 cities around North America. He also is the recipient of the 2019 Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Advocacy Award, the 2018 Studs Terkel Award & the 2017 John Peter Altgeld Freedom of Speech Award. He co-hosts the podcast The Cornerstore on WGN Radio & can be found @kevincoval.
Fred Schmalz
Fred Schmalz is an artist and poet. His first collection, Action in the Orchards (Nightboat Books), responds to encounters with dance, music, and visual art. His writing has appeared in Poetry, Conduit, A Public Space, and elsewhere. He makes art with Susy Bielak in the collective Balas & Wax.
Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai's latest novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime -- four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. She is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Visit her at on Twitter @rebeccamakkai.
Ola Faleti
Ola Faleti is an essayist, poet, occasional fiction writer, and native Chicagoan. Her work has appeared in Hypertext Magazine, Rustbelt Chicago: An Anthology, Lunch Ticket, James Franco Review and elsewhere. Currently, Ola is working on a collection of poems about fictional best friends. In the daytime, she writes grants for a local creative writing nonprofit. She believes there's no such thing as too many flowers.
Laura Adamczyk
Laura Adamczyk is the author of the short story collection Hardly Children, published by FSG Originals in 2018. Her writing has appeared in such journals as McSweeney’s, Salt Hill, and Tin House, and in 2014, her story “Girls,” published in Guernica, won the Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program Award. She lives in Chicago.
Amish Trivedi
Amish Trivedi is the author of Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed, out from Shearsman this past January, and Sound/Chest, which came out in 2015. He has an MFA from Brown’s Program in Literary Arts and is at work on a PhD in Critical Theory and English at Illinois State University. He has poems in New American Writing, Kenyon Online, and Typo. He has reviewed books for Jacket2, Pleiades, and Sink. He has review music for The Rumpus. For the time being, he lives in Normal, IL.
Maya Marshall
Maya Marshall is a writer and an editor. She is co-founder of underbellymag.com the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Marshall has earned fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, and Cave Canem, and the Community of Writers. She serves as a senior editor for [PANK] and works as a manuscript editor for Haymarket Books. Her poems have appeared in RHINO, Potomac Review, Blackbird and elsewhere.
James Arthur
Canadian-American poet James Arthur is the author of The Suicide’s Son (Véhicule Press 2019) and Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012.) His poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and The London Review of Books. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Northern Ireland, and a Visiting Fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. Arthur lives in Baltimore, where he teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Douglas Kearney
Douglas Kearney has published six books, including Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and California Book Award silver medalist (Poetry). Kearney’s Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. (Photo by Bao Phi)
Micah Ruelle
Micah Ruelle is a queer poet from America’s heartland. She holds a CPTS from Oxford University’s Wycliffe Hall and an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State. Her forthcoming chapbook, Failure to Merge, is out this June from Finishing Line Press. She currently resides in the Kansas City area.
Connie Voisine
Connie Voisine is the author of The Bower (2019) and the recent chapbook of poems, And God Created Women. Her work has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and has won the Associated Writing Program’s Award in Poetry. She has poems published in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow to Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, she lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico and Chicago.
Hannah Gamble
Hannah Gamble is a poet, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and director. Her first book of poems Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast, won the National Poetry Series in 2011. In 2014, she received the Ruth Lilly/ Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. She is the writer and director of “Rad Program” (a short play about the midwest’s first community college to offer an associate’s degree in not getting raped) and is currently working on a web series called Choose Me: An Abortion Story.
Vu Tran
Vu Tran was born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma. His first novel, Dragonfish, was a NY Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and an NEA Fellowship, and his short fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, he is currently a criticism columnist for the Virginia Quarterly Review and an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago.
Jeremy T. Wilson
Jeremy T. Wilson is the author of the short story collection Adult Teeth. He is a former winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for short fiction, and his work has appeared in literary magazines such as The Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, Hobart, RHINO, Sonora Review, Third Coast and other publications. He holds an MFA from Northwestern University and teaches creative writing at The Chicago High School for the Arts. He lives in Evanston, Illinois with his wife and daughter.
Jan-Henry Gray
Jan-Henry Gray was born in the Philippines, grew up in California, worked as a chef in San Francisco, and lives in Chicago, where he co-hosts Meanwhile, a live lit and zine-making event. Jan is the recipient of awards from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Undocupoets Fellowship. His work has been published in Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, and other journals. He is the author of the chapbook Selected Emails of Jan-Henry Gray. His first book, Documents, won BOA Editions’ Poulin Poetry Prize and comes out through in April, 2019.
John McCarthy
John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize, and Ghost County (Midwestern Gothic Press, 2016), which was named a Best Poetry Book of 2016 by The Chicago Review of Books. He is the 2016 winner of The Pinch Literary Award in Poetry and his work has appeared in American Literary Review, Copper Nickel, Hayden's Ferry Review, Sycamore Review, TriQuarterly, Zone 3 and in anthologies such as Best New Poets 2015 and New Poetry from the Midwest 2017. He serves as an editor for Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program as well as RHINO magazine. John received his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and now lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Juan Martinez
Juan Martinez is the author of Best Worst American, a story collection published by Small Beer Press and the inaugural winner of the Neukom Institute Award for Debut Speculative Fiction. He lives in Chicago and is an assistant professor at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney's, Huizache, Ecotone, NPR's Selected Shorts, Mississippi Review and elsewhere. Visit and say hi at https://fulmerford.com
Logan February
Logan February is a Nigerian poet. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, Vinyl, Paperbag, Tinderbox, Raleigh Review, and more. He is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and his debut collection, Mannequin in the Nude (PANK Books, 2019) was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He is the author of two chapbooks, and the Associate Director of Winter Tangerine's Dovesong Labs.
Megan Volpert
Megan Volpert writes for PopMatters
and is the author of a bunch of books on communication and popular culture, including two Lambda Literary Award finalists. Her most recent book is Boss Broad (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). She has been teaching high school English in Atlanta for over a decade and was 2014 Teacher of the Year. She edited the American Library Association-honored anthology This assignment is so gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching, and co-edited Tom Petty and Philosophy.
Nik De Dominic
Nik De Dominic is an essayist and poet, the author of the forthcoming collection of poems Dear Wolf (Spork Press '19) and the chapbook, Your Daily Horoscope (New Michigan Press '15). Work has appeared in Guernica, Los Angeles Review, DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. He is the poetry editor of New Orleans Review and a founding editor of The Offending Adam. De Dominic teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where he is also the Co-Director of Public Humanities at the Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics, coordinating its prison education initiative.
Diana Khoi Nguyen
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018), was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest. In addition to winning the 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Contest, she is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver.
Toni Nealie
Toni Nealie is the author of the essay collection The Miles Between Me and the Literary Editor of Newcity. Her nonfiction and fiction have appeared in Guernica, Rust Belt: Chicago, The Guardian, The Rumpus, The Offing, Essay Daily, Chicago Quarterly Review, Hobart, Entropy, Hypertext
Review, Tell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing – Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago, a BA in English Literature and a diploma in Journalism. She worked in magazine journalism, politics and public relations in her native New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Singapore, and now edits, writes and teaches in Chicago.
Vincent Francone
Vincent Francone is the author of the memoir Like a Dog and the essay collection The Soft Lunacy. His work has appeared in Rain Taxi, Rhino, New City, The Oklahoma Review, and other web and print journals. He won 1st place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition. He hosts a podcast called Drinking and Talking and is at work on a story collection. Visit his website www.vincentfrancone.com to learn more and see pictures of his dog.
Krista Franklin
Krista Franklin is the recipient of the Propeller Fund and the Albert P. Weisman Award and has held residencies at A Studio in the Woods, Cave Canem, and the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life Initiative. Her poems and visual art have been published in Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, Vinyl , and BOMB Magazine. Willow Books published Study of Love & Black Body, her chapbook of poems, in 2012. Franklin’s work has exhibited nationally and was featured on 20th Century Fox’s Empire (Season Two). She is the co-curator of the Chicago citywide poetry and art initiative, EKPHEST: A Festival of Art + Word. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts – Book & Paper from Columbia College Chicago.
Sam Herschel Wein
Sam Herschel Wein lives in Chicago and specializes in aimless frolicking. His chapbook, Fruit Mansion (Split Lip Press, 2017) was the winner of the 2016 Turnbuckle Chapbook prize. He runs a new journal, Underblong, with his best friend, Chen Chen. See what he's up to at shmoowrites.com.
Marty McConnell
Marty McConnell's recently released second poetry collection, when they say you can’t go home again, what they mean is you were never there, won the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Her work has recently appeared in Best American Poetry, Vinyl, Southern Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, and Mid-American Review. She is co-founder and editor of underbelly, an online magazine focused on the art and magic of poetry revision. Her first full-length collection is “wine for a shotgun,” (EM Press,) and YesYes Book recently published her first non-fiction book, Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop.
Leila Chatti
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya (Bull City Press, 2018). She is the recipient of scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.
Anna Maria Hong
Anna Maria Hong’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition and was published in April 2018. Her novella, H & G, won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize and was published by Sidebrow Books in May 2018. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in early 2020. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published poetry, fiction, and essay in The Nation, The Iowa Review, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, and many other places. She joined the Literature faculty at Bennington College in July 2018.
Anders Carlson-Wee
Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of The Low Passions (Norton, 2019). His work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Ploughshares,The Nation, Kenyon Review, The Sun, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His chapbook, Dynamite, won the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is codirector of the award-winning poetry film Riding the Highline and winner of Ninth Letter’s Poetry Award, Blue Mesa Review’s Poetry Prize, New Delta Review’s Editors’ Choice Prize, and the 2017 Poetry International Prize. He holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and lives in Minneapolis.
Tyler Mills
Tyler Mills is the author of two books of poems, Hawk Parable (winner of the 2017 Akron Poetry Prize) and Tongue Lyre (winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and Poetry, and her essays have appeared in AGNI, Copper Nickel, and The Rumpus. The recipient of residencies from Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Vermont Studio Center, and scholarships/fellowships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee, the Chicago native is an assistant professor at New Mexico Highlands University, editor-in-chief of The Account, and a resident of Santa Fe, NM.
GennaRose
Nethercott
GennaRose Nethercott’s book The Lumberjack’s Dove (Ecco/HarperCollins) was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series for 2017. She is also the lyricist behind the narrative song collection Modern Ballads and is a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellow. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including The Massachusetts Review, The Offing, and PANK, has she been a writer-in-residence at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, Art Farm Nebraska, and The Vermont Studio Center, among others. A born Vermonter, she tours nationally and internationally composing poems-to-order for strangers on a 1952 Hermes Rocket typewriter.
Elizabeth Schmuhl
Elizabeth Schmuhl is a multidisciplinary artist whose work appears in The Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gramma, Paper Darts, PANK, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. Her book, Premonitions, is recently out from Wayne State University Press. Elizabeth has worked at various non-profits, including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and currently works as a Marketing Strategist and Campaign Manager for Shamel Pitts, and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Find her online here.
2018 Season
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C. Russell Price
C. Russell Price is a genderqueer poet originally from Virginia but now lives on Chicago’s north side. Previous publications include Assaracus, Court Green, Hound, MiPOesias, Weave, and elsewhere. Price works with The Offing (a channel of the LA Review of Books), Story Club Magazine, and TriQuarterly. They are a 2015 Lambda fellow in poetry and hold a BA from the University of Virginia and an MFA from Northwestern University, where they currently teach creative writing. Price’s chapbook Tonight, We Fuck The Trailer Park Out of Each Other was released by Sibling Rivalry Press in Summer 2016. ​
Anne K. Yoder
Anne K. Yoder fiction, nonfiction, and criticism have appeared in Fence, Bomb, Tin House, and BlackBook, among other publications. Her story “The Art of Forgetting,” originally published in Fence, was listed as a notable story in the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012. Anne is a staff writer for The Millions, and co-editrix of Projecttile, a journal of nontraditional writing with a feminist bent. She received an MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a Trustee Scholar and Writing Fellow. She currently lives in the tundra, better known as the city of Chicago.
Janice Tuck Lively
Janice Tuck Lively is a fiction writer and holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her fiction and creative non-fiction has appeared in the anthology The Thing About Love Is..., Hair Trigger, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Valley Voices: A Literary Review, among other publications. She lives in Chicago and teaches creative writing and literature at Elmhurst College. She is currently working on her first novel A Dress for Dorothy Dandridge.
Tina Jenkins Bell
Tina Jenkins Bell is an active member of Chicago’s writing community, having been a Ragdale resident twice and a CAAP’s grant recipient. As a cofounder of the West Side Writer’s Guild and FLOW (For Love of Writing), Bell has contributed to efforts to educate other writers on the business side of art. She’s also performed readings at various venues, including the Harold Washington Library, University of Chicago, American Bookseller Association’s Expo, Printer’s Row, Lollapalooza, Columbia College, The African Festival, and the Beverly Arts Center. Bell is currently completing final edits for Mud Pies, a novel and Cut the Baby in Half, a play. She lives with her family and unpredictable pup, Bella, on Chicago’s South Side.
Carlo Matos
Carlo Matos
Carlo Matos has published ten books, including The Quitters (Tortoise Books) and It's Best Not to Interrupt Her Experiments (Negative Capability Press). He also co-edited an anthology with Luis Gonçalves, Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora in the United States and Canada. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in such journals as Iowa Review, Boston Review, Rhino, among others. Carlo has received grants and fellowships from CantoMundo, the Illinois Arts Council, the Fundação Luso-Americana, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the La Romita School of Art in Italy. He currently lives in Chicago, is a professor at the City Colleges of Chicago, and is a former MMA fighter and kickboxer.
Amy Sayre Baptista
Amy Sayre Baptista’s writing has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2017, Ninth Letter, The Butter, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. Her flash fiction chapbook Primitivity is available from Black Lawrence Press, Sept 2018. She has received a SAFTA fellowship, a CantoMundo Poetry fellowship, and a scholarship to the Disquiet Literary Festival in Lisbon, Portugal. She performs with Kale Soup for the Soul, a Portuguese-American artist’s collective, and Poetry While You Wait. She is a cofounder of Plates&Poetry, a community arts program focused on food and writing. She earned an MFA in fiction at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and she teaches humanities at Western Governors University.
Emily Jungmin Yoon
Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize, selected by Maggie Smith. Her first full-length, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, is forthcoming from Ecco. Born in Busan, Republic of Korea, Yoon earned her BA in English and communication at the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA in creative writing at New York University. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker,
Poetry, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor for The Margins, and is pursuing a PhD in Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. In 2017, Yoon was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
Ben Clark
Ben Clark grew up in Nebraska and now lives in Chicago, where he works as an editor for Muzzle Magazine and Thoughtcrime Press. He has two collections of poetry: if you turn around I will turn around (2015) and Reasons to Leave the Slaughter (2011). Collaboration has become a major part of his writing practice, and he’s been lucky enough to work with GennaRose Nethercott, Whitney Seiler, Colin Winnette, Rebecca Elliott, and Kate Jury. He’s widely published in both online and print journals, included in several print anthologies, been featured online at Verse Daily, and nominated for a Best of the Net award. This October, he’ll be living with raccoons, sipping whiskey, and collaborating with Josh Gaines at Art Farm Nebraska, a multi-disciplinary artist and writer residency.
Sam Gennett
Sam Gennett recently received a B.A. in English at Lewis University, alongside a minor in Film Studies. While attending Lewis, Sam served as Managing Editor of Jet Fuel Review. Her poetry has been featured in Windows Fine Arts Magazine, and her chapbook Schadenfreude (with artwork by Lauren Levato Coyne) is available from dancing girl press, 2018.
Matthew DeMarco
Matthew DeMarco is a writer and editor living in Chicago. His work has appeared on Poets.org and in Columbia Poetry Review, Ghost City Review, Landfill, and elsewhere. Poems that he wrote with Faizan Syed have appeared in Dogbird and are forthcoming in They Said, an anthology of collaborative writing from Black Lawrence Press.
Jacob Saenz
Poet and editor Jacob Saenz was born in Chicago and raised in Cicero, Illinois. He earned a BA in creative writing from Columbia College in Chicago. Saenz has been an editor at Columbia Poetry Review and an associate editor at RHINO. He works as an acquisitions assistant at the Columbia College library and has read his poetry at a number of Chicago venues. A CantoMundo fellow, he has also been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. His poetry book Throwing the Crown was awarded the 2018 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and will be published in September 2018.
Tim Kinsella
Tim Kinsella is a musician, author, and film director. He has been a member of many bands, including Cap'n Jazz, Joan of Arc, Make Believe, American Football, Owls, Friend/Enemy,
Everyoned, and others. He is the writer-director of the feature film Orchard Vale, which opened at the Chicago Underground Film Festival on August 15, 2007. His first novel, entitled The Karaoke Singer's Guide to Self-Defense, was published by Featherproof Books in September 2011. His second book, Let Go and Go On and On (Curbside Splendor Publishing), takes its inspiration from the late actress Laurie Bird's brief film career in the '70s, and was published in April 2014.
David Welch
David Welch is the author of the forthcoming collection, Everyone Who Is Dead, and a chapbook, It Is Such a Good Thing to Be In Love with You. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Cincinnati Review, Greensboro Review, and Pleiades. The recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Lucille Medwick Memorial Award and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, he lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul University, where he is Assistant Director of Literary Programs and Outreach.
Sara Wainscott
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Sara Wainscott’s work appears in DIAGRAM, The Journal Petra, Powder Keg, BOAAT, Fairy Tale Review, The Collapsar, The Account, and elsewhere. She is a finalist for the 2017 National Poetry Series and appears on the New City “Lit 50 2017” list of people who promote literature in Chicago. She co-curates Wit Rabbit, an intergenre reading series. Her chapbook Queen of the Moon is available from Dancing Girl Press.
Sarah Meltzer
Sarah Meltzer’s first and only publication is a thank-you letter that appeared on the record jacket of a Raffi album, circa 1986. Some years later, she received her MFA in fiction from George Mason University. Now co-founder of the Wit Rabbit reading series, she writes narratives about breathing through small fires and large deaths, and has been known to leave on tables love letters to people she doesn’t know. She appears, with co-host Sara Wainscott, on the New City “Lit 50 2017” list of people who promote literature in Chicago.
Kenyatta Rogers
Kenyatta Rogers is a Cave Canem Fellow and has been twice awarded scholarships from the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. He has also been nominated twice for both Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, his work has been previously published in or is forthcoming from Jubilat, Vinyl, Bat City Review, The Volta and PANK, among others. He is an associate editor of RHINO Poetry and currently serves on the creative writing faculty at the Chicago High School for the Arts.
José Olivarez
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants, the co-author of the book of poems Home Court, and the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods. He is a graduate of Harvard University and the Marketing Manager at Young Chicago Authors. A recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Poets House, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, & the Conversation Literary Festival, his work has been published in the BreakBeat Poets, the Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, & Hyperallergic, among other places. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, will be released in September 2018 from Haymarket Books. He lives in Chicago.
Faizan Syed
Faizan Syed is a writer and psychiatrist in training based in Queens, NY. He was awarded the Folger Adams Jr. Prize and the Graduating Poet’s Award from the University of Illinois. Faizan’s work has appeared in Montage Literary Arts Journal and MACE. Poems he's written in collaboration with Matthew DeMarco have been published in Dogbird, and are forthcoming in They Said, an anthology from Black Lawrence Press.
Elizabeth O'Connell Thompson
Elizabeth O'Connell-Thompson is an Irish-American writer living in Chicago. She is the Literary Coordinator of the Chicago Publishers Resource Center, where she leads the Wasted Pages Writers’ Workshop. Her chapbook, Honorable Mention, was published by dancing girl press in 2017. Her work has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, RHINO, Entropy, and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017, and included in installations for Yoko Ono’s Arising and the Nevermore Free Poetry Festival. In 2018, she was a resident at The Moth Retreat for Artists and Writers. Get in touch at EOTwrites.com
Shanita Bigelow
Shanita Bigelow is a poet from North Carolina living in Chicago. Her work is published or forthcoming in Bombay Gin, New American Writing, Callaloo, African American Review, Anomaly (no. 16) and the Diverse Arts Project Journal among others. Her chapbook, Wherever Clarity is Necessary, is available through dancing girl press.
Valerie Wallace
Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen was chosen by Vievee Francis for the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry. In their starred review Publishers Weekly said that Wallace created “…a literary seance…serving as a scholar of and medium for the late iconic fashion designer Alexander McQueen….” Her work was chosen by Margaret Atwood for the Atty Award, and she has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award and others. She is Associate Director of Communications for the project Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life at the University of Chicago and teaches courses and workshops throughout the Chicago area.
Alison Rollins
Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, worked as the Librarian for Nerinx Hall and now works at SAIC. She is the second prizewinner of the 2016 James H. Nash Poetry contest and a finalist for the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Meridian, Missouri Review, The Offing, Poetry, The Poetry Review, River Styx, Solstice,TriQuarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Vinyl, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Her book Library of Small Catastrophes is due out Spring of 2019 from Copper Canyon Press.
Cecilia Pinto
Cecilia Pinto is a writer who has written and published poetry, short fiction and essays in a variety of journals and publications. She has worked as a teaching artist in the City of Chicago for close to twenty years. She is delighted to say that her chapbook, A Small Woman, is available from Dancing Girl Press.
Megan Stielstra
Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: The Wrong Way To Save Your Life, Once I Was Cool, and Everyone Remain Calm. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, Poets & Writers, Longreads, Tin House, Guernica, Catapult, Lit Hub, Buzzfeed Reader, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, Radio National Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Goodman Theatre, the Neo-Futurarium, and regularly with The Paper Machete live news magazine at The Green Mill. She is currently an artist in residence at Northwestern University.
Christine Pacyk
Christine Pacyk is a poet and educator living in the Chicago Suburbs. She holds an MFA in poetry from Northwestern University. In 2011 she earned 1st place in the Illinois Emerging Writers Competition, Gwendolyn Brooks poetry Award. Her work has been published in Jet Fuel Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crannóg Magazine, and Zone 3, among others.
Virginia Smith Rice
Virginia Smith Rice is the author of the poetry collection, When I Wake It Will Be Forever (Sundress Publications, 2014), and a chapbook, Whose House, Whose Playroom (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Her poems appear in The Antioch Review, Baltimore Review, Cincinnati Review, CutBank, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, and Southern Poetry Review, among other journals. Collaborative poems written with Christine Pacyk appear in Jet Fuel Review, and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018.) She is poetry editor at Kettle Blue Review and associate editor at Canopic Publishing.
Tarfia Faizullah
Tarfia Faizullah was born in 1980 in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Midland, Texas. She is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018), as well as a previous poetry collection, Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), winner of a VIDA Award, a GLCA New Writers’ Award, a Milton Kessler First Book Award, Drake University Emerging Writer Award, and other honors. In 2016, she was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change. Tarfia received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and teaches in the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry. She will be joining the SAIC faculty in Fall 2018.
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Julia Cohen
Julia Cohen is an Assistant Professor of English and Literature at Wright College in Chicago. She's the author of one collection of lyric essays, I Was Not Born (Noemi Press, 2014) and two books of poetry, Collateral Light (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014) and Triggermoon Triggermoon (BLP, 2011). She's currently working on a new collection of essays, Freak Lip.
Abby Hagler
Abby Hagler lives and works in Chicago. Her work appears in Alice Blue Review, Ghost Proposal, Fanzine and elsewhere. With Julia Cohen, she wrote the chapbook Trouble Department (dancing girl press)
Annah Browning
Annah Browning hails from the foothills of South Carolina and currently lives in Chicago, where she is an instructor in the UIC Honors College and the English department. She holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. from the Program for Writers at The University of Illinois-Chicago, and she is the author of a chapbook, The Marriage (Horse Less Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Southeast Review, Willow Springs, and other journals, and have received awards and recognition from Boulevard, Indiana Review, Blue Mesa Review, and Vermont Studio Center. She is poetry editor of Grimoire, a literary magazine of dark arts, and co-creator of Heloise & Wulf, an online interactive horror game.
Rachel Mennies
Rachel Mennies is the author of The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, winner of the 2014 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, and the chapbook No Silence in the Fields. Recent poems of hers have appeared in Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Drunken Boat, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Since 2016, Mennies serves as the series editor of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press. She currently teaches in the low-residency MFA at Chatham University and is a member of AGNI's editorial staff. She lives in Chicago.
Rebecca Morgan Frank
Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country (2017) and The Spokes of Venus (2016), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Little Murders Everywhere, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and editor of the literary magazine Memorious, and in Spring 2019 she will be the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University.
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Kyle Churney
Kyle Churney’s poetry has appeared in Salt Hill, The Journal, Memorious, and other publications, and his essays have been published in the Chicago Tribune. He is a recipient of a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council and a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. A native of rural Illinois, he lives in Chicago, where he teaches developmental writing at a community college and is working on his first poetry collection, Elsewhere.