MASTHEAD
- Editor-in-Chief -
Jeremiah Chamberlin received his MFA in Creative Writing in 2004 from The University of Michigan, where he now teaches. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Poets & Writers, Glimmer Train, Flyway, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. He has also published interviews in online exclusives for Granta and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His short fiction is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and has been twice nominated for Best New American Voices. Most recently, his short story “What We Can” won 1st prize in Glimmer Train’s Family Matters Competition, and his essay “Workshop Is Not for You” appeared in their online Bulletin. In addition to teaching and writing, he is a regular contributor to Poets & Writers magazine, which features his interview series “Inside Indie Bookstores” in each issue. In 2003 he was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and in 2009 he received a fellowship to attend the Sozopol Fiction Seminar in Sozopol, Bulgaria. He is also the recipient of residencies from The Interlochen Arts Academy and the Glen Arbor Arts Association. He lives in Ann Arbor, where he serves as the Associate Director of the English Department Writing Program. Three recent books he recommends: Percival’s Planet by Michael Byers; What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us by Laura van den Berg; The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova.
- Founding/Features Editor -
Anne Stameshkin lives in Brooklyn. Her fiction has been published in the Chattahoochee Review and Nimrod, and her book reviews have appeared in Enfuse magazine. Anne holds an MFA (fiction) from the University of Michigan. She pays the bills as a freelance editor, writer, and writing teacher, most recently at Connecticut College. While in-house at McGraw-Hill, Anne edited a number of literature and composition texts and two craft books—Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola and The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation by Nicholas Delbanco, among other projects. She is currently at work on a novel. Some recently published collections she recommends include If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black, The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter, and Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle.
- Managing Editor -
Lee Thomas has called ten cities home in her life and still relishes getting to know a new place. She recently moved from San Francisco to New York, and is enjoying the reappearance of seasons. In her tenure at City Arts & Lectures in San Francisco she met authors on all stages of their book tours — from the idyllic beginning to the dusty end of the trail. Lee Thomas has reviewed books for the New York Times, the Charlotte Observer, the Yale Undergraduate Review of Books and the San Francisco Chronicle. She recently wrote a piece on collectors, and the passion that drives them, for Where GuestBook. Whatever John Banville writes, whatever alias he chooses, she reads, and will gladly discuss The Sea with anyone. The stories of John Cheever, Wells Tower, Shirley Hazzard, David Foster Wallace, Joshua Furst, and Bruno Schulz have had a profound influence on how she views swimming pools, carpentry, Italy, windowpanes, Boy Scout Camp, and life. In addition to her freelance work, Lee Thomas writes short fiction.
- Blog Editor -
Celeste Ng grew up in Shaker Heights, OH, and has an MFA from the University of Michigan. Nowadays she lives in Cambridge, MA, where you’ll often find her at Darwin’s working on her current projects: her first novel and a collection of short stories. She also teaches fiction at Grub Street, a non-profit writing center in Boston, and blogs for the Huffington Post. Her stories and essays have appeared in various literary journals, including One Story, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, Apostrophecast, TriQuarterly, Subtropics, and the Kenyon Review Online, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. If you haven’t yet read them, Celeste highly recommends The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy; The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner; and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
- Associate Editor -
Charlotte Boulay is a poet who adores fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan, and recently moved to beautiful central New Jersey. Her poems have appeared in Slate, Field, and the Boston Review, the Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse and other journals. She teaches at The College of New Jersey. She recommends reading anything by Kelly Link, and, not just for poets, Dan Chiasson’s latest collection Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon. She is also eagerly awaiting the sequels to many novels, among them Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.
- Assistant Editor -
Jackie Reitzes has published fiction in Iron Horse Literary Review and non-fiction in ESPN: The Magazine and The Minneapolis Star Tribune. A native ATLien, she received a BA in English from The University of Michigan and still dreams of returning to Wolverine country one day. After working at HarperCollins Publishers for two years, she migrated to Ithaca, NY for an MFA in Fiction from Cornell University. She currently lives in New York City. Desert-Island picks include Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard, Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman, and Self Help by Lorrie Moore.
- Director of Marketing and Development -
Michael Rudin enjoyed his time in corporate America, working as a Brand Manager at the video game publisher Activision prior to leaving to pursue writing full time. He remains in Santa Monica, where he juggles paying the bills as a consultant and working on his own literary endeavors: short fiction, the impending novella “Lockbox Souls,” and a follow-up to his Hopwood Award winning novel. His essays and reviews have appeared here at Fiction Writers Review, as well as The Rumpus. He recommends three books: Lolita, Catch-22, and The Road; two games: Modern Warfare and Portal; and one comic: Y: The Last Man.
- Contributing Editor -
Natalie Bakopoulos received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, where she now teaches. Her short fiction has appeared in such places as Ninth Letter and Tin House, and her story “Fresco, Byzantine” was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2010. Her first novel, The Green Shore, which takes place in Athens and Paris between 1967 and 1973, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2012. This winter, she will be a fellow at the Camargo Foundation, and this summer she will teach a workshop for the Aegean Arts Circle in Andros, Greece.
- Contributing Editor -
Joshua Bodwell is the executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. He also works as a freelance journalist and is a contributing editor of Art New England magazine. He and his partner, Tammy Ackerman, are the co-founders of the arts nonprofit Engine, as well as the co-creatives of the design studio, North40Creative. Joshua is a regular contributor to Poets & Writers magazine, for whom he has profiled authors such as John Casey and Richard Ford, and written on the fiction of Andre Dubus, among many other stories. His work as a newspaper reporter has garnered awards from the Maine and New England press associations. A recipient of the Maine Community Foundation’s Martin Dibner Fellowship for fiction, Joshua’s short stories have appeared in the Threepenny Review, Ambit (England), Northern New England Review, and Tears in the Fence (England). Joshua recommends two of the best books to come out of Maine in 2010: Father of the Rain by Lily King, and the poetry collection Lovers of the Lost by Wesley McNair; the best book of 2010 by a part-time Maine resident, Walks with Men by Ann Beattie; and for a bit of nonfiction from just down the road in Massachusetts, he recommends Andre Dubus III’s new memoir, Townie.
- Contributing Editor -
J.T. Bushnell is working on a collection of stories and a novel. His stories and essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, the Mississippi Review, the South Carolina Review, the Greensboro Review, the Tusculum Review, Natural Bridge, Reed Magazine, Fogged Clarity, Bluestem, and Brevity. He earned his MFA from University of Oregon and now teaches writing and literature at Oregon State University. His recommendations are The Assistant by Bernard Malamud, The Barracks Thief by Tobias Wolff, and, if you’re a writer, Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor.
- Contributing Editor -
Roohi Choudhry is a writer, researcher and lifelong nomad who calls Brooklyn home. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan , where she is currently a Zell Fellow in Creative Writing. Her short stories have appeared in the journal Callaloo and the anthologies Desilicious and 21 Under 40. Her non-fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Hyphen Magazine, Bitch Magazine, The Encyclopedia Project, and on Bookslut.com. She was awarded writing residencies at Moveen, Hedgebrook and the Mesa Refuge, and is currently working a novel set in Durban, South Africa. Favorite recent reads include Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.
- Contributing Editor -
Erika Dreifus lives and writes in New York City, where she is a communications director at The City University of New York (CUNY). One of her favorite job responsibilities is maintenance of the Creative Writing at CUNY website. Erika’s first book of fiction, a short story collection titled Quiet Americans, was recently published (January 2011) by Last Light Studio Books. Her book’s publication finally motivated Erika to launch a new website that attempts to organize her varied literary activities and interests, which, in addition to working on her own prose, poetry, and book reviews include maintaining two blogs, a newsletter, and a Twitter feed through which she shares writerly news and resources. Three books of fiction Erika was quick to place on her “favorites” shelf when she joined Goodreads are Ludwig Lewisohn’s The Island Within, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Romain Gary’s La vie devant soi, which Gary published as “Emile Ajar” and which has been translated as “Momo” and The Life Before Us (”Madame Rosa”).
- Contributing Editor -
Carolyn Gan is an event producer who has curated and produced events with authors and cultural figures for the New York Public Library, the Rubin Museum of Art, San Francisco’s City Arts & Lectures, and Canteen Magazine, among other organizations. She participated in the Reader’s Committee for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. She studied creative writing at the University of California, San Diego, with Quincy Troupe, Fanny Howe, and Eileen Myles, and her poetry and short fiction have appeared in various publications. Carolyn admires the quirky stories of Amy Hempel, Wells Tower, and Lorrie Moore, and the novels of Yannick Murphy, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Joan Didion. She lives in Los Angeles.
- Contributing Editor -
Travis Holland is the author of The Archivist’s Story (Dial Press), a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. In 2007, The Archivist’s Story was listed among the best books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly and the Financial Times, and was a Guardian Readers’ Pick. Travis is the winner of the 2008 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and has been nominated for the 2009 Impac Dublin prize. His stories have previously appeared in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Five Points, and The Quarterly. If pinned down, he would probably list among his favorite novels: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, and The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald. A list that might, on another day, depending on the weather, include three entirely different novels. He lives in Ann Arbor.
- Contributing Editor -
Steven Wingate’s short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. His stories, reviews, and hybrid-genre work have appeared in such venues as Gulf Coast, The Pinch, the Mississippi Review, the Colorado Review, and Brand (UK). He also writes Quotes and Notes–an ongoing series of craft essays–for Fiction Writers Review. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD. Three books he has enjoyed recently are Zachary Mason’s Lost Books of the Odyssey, Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street, and Amos Tutuola’s My Life in a Bush of Ghosts. Visit his author website at www.stevenwingate.com.
- Editorial Intern -
Benjamin Verdi is a 2011 graduate of the University of Michigan, a former writer for the Michigan Daily and AnnArbor.com, and a 2010 Hopwood Award winner for undergraduate nonfiction. He was also the co-captain and treasurer of the University of Michigan Club Baseball team, pitching and winning the 2011 Great Lakes Conference Championship game to send the Wolverines to their first National Club Baseball World Series. He recommends The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and Underworld by Don DeLillo to nearly everyone he meets.
- Editorial Intern -
Nicole Aber grew up in the New York City suburb of Purchase, New York, and has been studying English and Mandarin Chinese at the University of Michigan for the past three years. During Nicole’s undergraduate years thus far, most of her time has been spent writing and editing news articles for the Michigan Daily, for which she is the 2011 managing news editor. Some of Nicole’s favorite reads include Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.
- UROP Intern -
Josie Keenan is a 2nd year student at the University of Michigan, a copyeditor at the Michigan Daily, and a year-round fan of Christmas. She is an English concentrator, but she often prefers to concentrate on extracurricular readings. Her favorites include The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Letters from the Center of the Earth by Mark Twain, and A Shorter Ego by James Agate.
- UROP Intern -
Drake Misek plans to graduate from the University of Michigan in 2013 with a double major in English and Informatics. Ann Arbor is the tenth town he has called home, and he hopes to add many more—cities, preferably—to that list. He writes short fiction and poetry, as well as scripts for comics and video games that he lacks the drawing and programming skills to create. The last novel he read was Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and he recommends everything by Alan Moore. Finally, he recommends the best example so far of video games’ unique potential for interactive stories: Heavy Rain.
- UROP Intern -
Emily VanDusen is a first year student at the University of Michigan and a copy editor at the Michigan Daily. She is unsure about many things in her life, including her major, but distracts herself from this uncertainty by reading, writing, and playing cello. The literary distractions she recommends most are William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Ken Haruf’s Plainsong.
- Site Designer and Administrator-
Marissa Perry lives in New York City, where she works as a web designer at American Express Publishing. A graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Glimmer Train. She is currently working on a novel.
Contributors
Peggy Adler was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and received a B.S. from Northwestern University. Naturally, with a degree in Social Policy, she spent her twenties doing production, literary, and casting work in New York theatre. After receiving an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, where she received an Avery Hopwood Award for Short Fiction, she remained in Ann Arbor to teach writing. She recently took a year off to research her novel, first by living in a tent in the Negev, without electricity under the desert sky, and later by studying water science at Ben Gurion University in Sde Boker. She is now back at the University of Michigan, where she recently received a Ben Prize for Excellence in Teaching Writing. Lately, Peggy is entrenched in nonfiction about the desert in the Middle East, including Daniel Hillel’s The Rivers of Eden, and Janet Wallach’s wonderful biography of Gertrude Bell, The Desert Queen. Less idiosyncratically, she just finished, and recommends, What Is the What by Dave Eggers, and has also recently re-read The History of Love, by Nichole Krauss, which continues to move and teach her. Additionally, she spends a lot of time lately with the Old Testament. She recommends it.
Debra Allbery’s collection, Walking Distance, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh, and her latest volume, Fimbul-Winter (Four Way, 2010) was awarded the National Book Prize in Poetry from the Boston writers’ organization, Grub Street. New poems are forthcoming in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Kenyon Review. She lives near Asheville, NC, and is the Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Britta Ameel lives in San Francisco, where she watches the fog, writes poems sometimes about the fog, and wishes for a dog. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, and her poems have appeared in jubilat, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and New Orleans Review, among others.
Forrest Anderson teaches creative writing and composition at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina. He has a PhD from Florida State University, where he worked for two years as an archivist and assistant for Robert Olen Butler. His fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative, The Southeast Review, Blackbird, The Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. He’s recently started writing about books for The Salisbury Post in a blog called Read Salisbury. Some of his favorite books are A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, Deliverance by James Dickey, and The Professor’s House by Willa Cather — he used to want to grow up to be Tom Outland, but as he gets older he fears he’s becoming Godfrey St. Peter. Oh, and since it is basketball season: Will Blythe’s To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry.
Mary Stewart Atwell’s short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices, Epoch, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and is forthcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2010. She teaches fiction writing at Missouri State University. She recommends 2666 by Roberto Bolano, The Groom to Have Been by Saher Alam, and Twilight by William Gay (not Stephenie Meyer).
Neelanjana Banerjee is a writer and editor whose poetry and fiction have appeared in the Asian Pacific American Journal, Nimrod, A Room of One’s Own, Desilit, and the anthology Desilicious. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University in 2007 and was a Hedgebrook Fellow in 2008. She has worked in mainstream, ethnic and independent media for the past ten years. Since 2003, she has helped young people tell their own stories at YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia. This fall, she will start as a teaching artist with the San Francisco WritersCorps. She previously was the Books and Literature editor for the Asian American magazine Hyphen and a co-editor of the forthcoming Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010). She recommends Minal Hajratwala’s Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents, Peter Orner’s The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and thinks everybody should read and re-read and re-read and re-read Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Anne Clinard Barnhill’s first novel, At the Mercy of the Queen, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press. Her previous books include At Home in the Land of Oz: Autism, My Sister and Me (memoir, Jessica Kingsley Publisher, 2007) and What You Long For (short story collection, Main Street Rag, 2009). Ms. Barnhill holds an M.F.A. from UNC-Wilmington. Her stories have won awards and she is the recipient of several grants. Ms. Barnhill loves to read, play bridge, dance, play piano, and bake cookies with her grandchildren.
Brian Bartels lives in New York. His latest publication is “Master Class With Sam Shepard” in the Missouri Review. Beyond essays, he writes fiction, teleplays, screenplays, poetry and stage plays. He is currently working on a young adult book with his sister, who rocks. He has written four original scripts for television and two Mad Men spec scripts. Forthcoming plays are I’ll Believe In Anything, Smoothie, Gemini Battlecry, Trouble, Whale, Beef With Papa, Small Many Memory, Project 14 and Vs. 2009. You look great in blue. Visit his author website at www.brianbartels.com
Laura Barthule is a freelance editor and writer working in the foothills of Colorado. Her days are spent improving the quality of first-year writing textbooks for a wide range of publishers, and her nights are spent painfully drafting her first novel. Laura is the former Books Editor of Enfuse Magazine, an online arts and culture publication based in Denver. Books are hugely important to her, and her list of favorites is in constant flux. Authors she’ll always read include Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, Paul Auster, Philip Roth, Kelly Link, and now, Martin Millar.
Nick Bascom was born in Kansas but grew up in Cincinnati. After a brief stint as a science writer, he entered the MFA program at Penn State University where he has been hard at work completing a collection of stories, The Lion with No Tongue and Other Tales, as well as a semi-autobiographical novel titled Take Me Back, Cincinnati. He looks to many authors for inspiration, but Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, George Saunders’s In Persuasion Nation, and Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree are the works he returns to most frequently to reinvigorate a tired pen.
Tom Bennitt lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his girlfriend and his cat, Waylon. He is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at the University of Mississippi, where he holds a Grisham Fellowship. His short fiction has been published in River Walk Journal, Bewildering Stories, Twisted Tongue, and Burnt Bridge. Born and raised in western Pennsylvania, he graduated from Bowdoin College. In the past he worked in the pack house of a mushroom farm and the warehouse of a furniture store, where he operated a forklift. It’s always a tough call, but his three favorite books would have to be Joe by Larry Brown, Snow Angels by Stewart O’Nan, and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find.
Alyse Bensel is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at Penn State. Her poetry has appeared in The Meadowland Review, and she is a contributor for Newpages. Her book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Los Angeles Review, CALYX, Coldfront, and Rain Taxi, among others. When not engaged in her teaching and studies, she teaches at non-profit art organizations and works for a share program at a local CSA.
Nico Berry lives in San Francisco. He spends a good percentage of his days making up stories and remixing nursery rhymes with his daughter. He has been working as a freelance graphic designer and visual artist since he left his position as Art Director of Thrasher skateboard magazine eight years ago. He’s published interviews with a wide range of wordsmiths—from lyricists like Snoop Dogg and De La Soul, to graffiti writers in Thailand. He’s currently working on writing and illustrating a series of children’s books. Three books he recommends for people of all sizes are Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak, The Acme Novelty Library by Chris Ware, and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Visit his website at www.nicoberry.com.
In the 1960s, Charles W. Brice was in a soul band in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and still has his Ludwig Oyster Pearl drum set with Zildjion symbols. He was a Ph.D. psychotherapist for thirty years and now is a recovering psychoanalyst who writes full time in Pittsburgh, Pa. His wife, Judy, is a psychiatrist and poet, and their son, Ari, is a ceramic artist. Since he’s been writing plays lately, he’s been reading lots of them. He Loved Neil Labute’s Reasons to be Pretty, and thought that Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman was the closest any contemporary playwright has come to Shakespeare. He also just finished a terrific literary thriller, The Odds, by Kathleen George, an education on how to get the reader to suspend disbelief.
Michael Byers is the author of The Coast of Good Intentions, a book of stories, and two novels, Long for This World and Percival’s Planet. His first book was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other citations. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan.
Jonathan Callahan’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in Unsaid, Pank, The Collagist, Kill Author, Fringe, Underwater New York, Washington Square Review, and The Lifted Brow. His essay on Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, and David Foster Wallace was published in The Collagist’s July 2010 issue. Jonathan lives with his wife in Fukuoka, Japan. He is currently seeking publication for his first fiction collection, The Consummation of Dirk. Email him at jonathancalla@gmail.com.
Liam Callanan is the author of the novels The Cloud Atlas and All Saints, and chairs the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. For more, visit liamcallanan.com. Three books he recommends are The Privileges, Jonathan Dee; Commuters, Emily Gray Tedrowe; and Sonata Mullatica, Rita Dove.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell, a writer and psychotherapist, lives with her husband near Washington, D.C. Her short fiction has appeared in journals including the Massachusetts Review and Iron Horse. Campbell holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is at work on a novel about Japanese prisoners of war.
Aaron J. Cance was born and raised in Wisconsin. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire and an M.A. in British and American Literature from the University of Utah. He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, Katherine, and daughter, Viola Wren, where he teaches Composition and Advanced Composition as an adjunct and works full time at The King’s English Bookshop. Still searching for a publisher for his first novel, Walking the Dark Waters, he’s currently working on a second. Two poems from his latest chapbook, The Grassland Triptych, recently appeared in Southern Minnesota State University’s Bare Root Review. Among his favorite works are The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
Leslie Clements recently graduated from Old Dominion University with a Master of Fine Arts in fiction. She currently works as an environmental educator at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia while she finishes a new batch of short stories. When she moves back to England in the fall, she’ll make sure to have books by Neil Gaiman to pass around.
Charles Conley is the 2011-2012 Second-Year Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. He has also received fellowships from Teachers & Writers Collaborative and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars. His stories have appeared in Southern Review, Harvard Review, North American Review, and Gargoyle, and he received his MFA from the University of Minnesota. Recent novels he can confidently recommend for your reading pleasure are The House on Salt Hay Road by Carin Clevidence, The End by Salvatore Scibona, and The Cosmopolitans by Nadia Kalman.
T.L. Crum was born and raised on a dairy farm in Southern California, less than a mile from a maximum security prison. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern California Review, Short Story America, and Fringe Magazine, among others. Despite her loathing for the heat, she’s chosen to pursue her MFA in fiction at California State University, Fresno, where she works as an assistant editor for The Normal School, and co-edits the San Joaquin Review. Currently revising her first novel, she is anxious to get started on her second. Some of the books she’s recently turned to for inspiration include: Andre Dubus’s In the Bedroom, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. When weather permits, she and her husband can be found chasing their indefatigable three year-old around the park.
Cathy Day has been teaching undergraduate and graduate fiction workshops for almost 20 years, most recently at Ball State University. She’s the author of The Circus in Winter (2004) which was a finalist for the Story Prize, and Comeback Season (2008). Her work has appeared most recently in Ninth Letter, Freight Stories, North American Review, and Sports Illustrated.com. Her essay, “The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia’s Novel Crisis” appeared recently in The Millions. She writes about novel writing (and teaching novel writing) at her blog, The Big Thing. Three books she recommends to FWR’s readers are David Huddle’s The Writing Habit, Carolyn See’s Making a Literary Life, and Brenda Ueland’s If You Want To Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit.
T. M. De Vos received an MFA in 2004 from New York University and a Hopwood Award in 1999 from the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in Washington Square, Small Spiral Notebook, Yuan Yang: A Journal of Hong Kong and International Writing, Pebble Lake Review, Global City Review, Dark Sky Magazine, Alimentum: The Literature of Food, the Pedestal Magazine, the Saint Ann’s Review, Ars Medica, the Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette, HOBART, the Douglas Post, Bosphorus Art Project Quarterly, Sakura Review, and Dossier Journal. She has taught at the University of Michigan and New York University. Her favorite books of all time are Immortality by Milan Kundera and Cosmicomics and t zero by Italo Calvino. Some more recently published books she recommends include Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, and Love and Obstacles, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić, and New European Poets, edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer.
Margaret Lazarus Dean is the author of The Time It Takes to Fall (Simon & Schuster, 2007). She teaches writing at the University of Tennessee and lives in Knoxville. She wishes she had been the one to write Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, and Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson, but sadly, others got to them first.
Denise Delgado is a Miami-based writer, curator, and artist. Her fiction has been broadcast on NPR station WLRN and has appeared in Inch, Dossier, the Cent Journal Series, the Selected Collective: Poetry, Prose and Projects from the Miami Poetry Collective, Jai-Alai Magazine, the monograph for Frances Trombly: Paintings, and Tigertail, A South Florida Annual: Florida Flash. Her arts practice includes teaching, residencies, and community projects with arts organizations, libraries, schools, community centers, prisons, and museums throughout South Florida. She received an MA in Media Studies from The New School and an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. Denise teaches writing at Miami-Dade College, works as curatorial consultant for the Miami-Dade Public Library System’s Vasari Project Archive, and is Writer-in-Residence for Girls’ Club Collection, an exhibition space and private foundation dedicated to contemporary art by women. She is currently working on A Wig in the Duplex, a collection of short stories set in Florida. Three books she recommends to people she loves are The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, Daybook by Anne Truitt, and The Time of the Doves by Mercé Rodoreda.
Alison Espach received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches fiction and creative non-fiction. She is the Fiction Editor of Arch. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, the Del Sol Review, and Sentence. She is many coffees away from finishing her first novel. She highly recommends the three short-story collections Do the Windows Open? by Julie Hecht, Where Europe Begins by Yoko Tawada, and In A Bear’s Eye by Yannick Murphy.
Lydia Fitzpatrick is an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan. She’s been published in Opium magazine, was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s May 2009 Short Story Award for New Writers, and the 3rd-place winner of Glimmer Train’s September 2009 Fiction Open. If she could enlist Doc Brown and take the DeLorean back in time to write three books, they would be: The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico, and East of Eden by John Steinbeck.
Tori Fullard is an avid reader, a prolific blogger, and a somewhat less-than-prolific novel-in-progress writer. At A Blog of One’s Own, she writes a daily mix of book, theater, and film reviews; political commentary; and personal musings. Tori loves theater and tries to see it all—Broadway and off Broadway, musicals and straight plays. She is a survivor of book publishing but now toils in a university’s marketing and communications department. As an internet dating survivor, she knows the perils of naming favorite books and authors. She confesses to making snap judgments about men who listed The DaVinci Code as a favorite book. Submitting to your judgment, she recommends authors Michael Chabon, Kent Haruf, and Sarah Waters. Tori also has a not-so-secret love for academic dysfunction novels like Straight Man, Wonder Boys, The Secret History, and Special Topics in Calamity Physics. But the book she has re-read more times than any other is the lesser-known A Season of Migration to the North; she first encountered it in a class called, wonderfully, “Love, Hate, and Sexual Desire under Colonialism.” Things so good they must be books in disguise include The Wire, the final episode of Six Feet Under, Robin Sparkles, the genius combination of chocolate and peanut butter, and lip balm.
Beth Garland has an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC and is a former Technical Writer, but her heart belongs to fiction. She has written articles on military marriage for Examiner.com and in September 2010, attended the War, Literature, and the Arts conference at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs where she read an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, What Separates Us. She currently stays very busy living in Surf City, NC with her husband, two daughters, and son. Three of her favorite books are For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
Gwen Glazer recently moved to Ithaca, NY, to pursue a master’s degree in library and information science and start a job that involves two of her favorite things: writing and librarians. She has one unpublished manuscript called “Down Home” and one novel-in-progress called “that new one about summer camp.” Gwen wrote a books column for a local newspaper for seven years, and her journalism-related work has appeared in Washingtonian magazine, National Journal, MSNBC.com and several other publications.
Three books she recommends to other writers are Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. She also feels compelled to reflect upon subconscious lessons about character development—but not proper hyphenation or apostrophe usage—gleaned from Ann M. Martin’s Baby-sitters Club books. (Did she just admit that? Oh yes she did.) Gwen enjoys patting other people’s dogs, mucking about in her new garden and writing about herself in third person.
Lee Goldberg teaches Literature and Composition at LaGuardia Community College. He has an MFA from New School University and hosts a monthly reading series called The Guerrilla Lit Fiction Series. Check it out. Right now he is finishing his first novel, Eating the Sun. He is a Native New Yorker and dreams of writing a book that reviews all the best pizza in the five boroughs. Some of his favorite books are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby like everyone probably says, along with Demian by Hermann Hesse, The Razor’s Edge by W. Sommerset Maugham, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, and anything by Hemingway or John Irving.
Lauren Hall is a Philadelphia-based freelance writer. She is a columnist at Bookish and a contributor to Fiction Writers Review and Metropolis Philadelphia. Her prose poetry is forthcoming in NANO Fiction. A graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, she is currently at work on a collection of prose poetry. Please visit her at laurenhallwriting.com.
Sharon Harrigan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slice, Pearl, Mid-American Quarterly, the Rumpus, the Nervous Breakdown, Rain Taxi, Apercu Quarterly, and Hip Mama. She has a B.A. in English from Columbia University and is an MFA candidate in fiction at Pacific University.
Christine Hartzler reads boatloads of fiction but writes poems and essays. The essays are mostly about video games and have appeared in Ninth Letter and the Cream City Review. Christine’s poetry has appeared in Mudlark, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Touchstone, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Christine received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. These days Christine is working on a collection of poems called PLUTO, and more essays. She writes and edits ESL books for Oxford University Press, and she is learning a lot about nuclear fusion as the communications director at a startup in Seattle. Christine has a blog at www.snowandsigil.blogspot.com; it’s mostly photos. Here are three books of essays she likes: An Elemental Thing, by Eliot Weinberger; The Future of Ice, by Gretel Ehrlich; and The Principles of Uncertainty, by Maira Kalman (in paintings and words). As Christine is really a poet she suggests that you read Bucolics by Maurice Manning and The Return Message by Tessa Rumsey.
Jesse Hassenger grew up in Saratoga, NY, and currently lives in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in, on, and around PopMatters, Dirt, PulpLit, Pindelyboz, the L Magazine, and Filmcritic.com. He enjoys many things, including pie.
Tim Hedges holds degrees from Cornell University, Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan, where he is currently a Lecturer. His fiction has appeared in Sycamore Review, Harpur Palate, The Summerset Review, Soundings East, and Cicada. A native of Ohio, he taught high school English near Boston just long enough to see the Celtics win a world championship, the Red Sox win two, and the Patriots win three. He does not like any of those teams. He now lives near Detroit with his wife and son. Three books that may or may not have made him cry are Love of Seven Dolls by Paul Gallico, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.
Sara Henkin grew up in Arlington, Virginia and now lives in London. Her writing has appeared on artnet.com and PANK, as well as in Shofar, the Charles River Review, and the Wall Street Journal Europe (via breakingviews). Some of her recent recommendations include How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer, Miss Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg, and Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis.
Michael Hinken has taught English in the Russian Far East, covered municipal news in central Illinois, and now teaches composition and creative writing at the University of Michigan, where he received an MFA in Creative Writing in 2004. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown during 2007-08. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in River City, the Tampa Review, West Branch and Third Coast, and his essays have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly and the Peoria Journal Star. He is working on a short story collection and, lately, finds himself returning to the following stories over and over to see how it’s done: “The Kiss” by Anton Chekhov, “Smorgasboard” by Tobias Wolff and “Glut Your Soul on My Accursed Ugliness” by Jim Shepard.
V. Jo Hsu received her BA in English and Visual and Dramatic Arts from Rice University. She is currently working towards her MFA at Penn State. She has forthcoming reviews in Pleaides and Green Mountains Review. Her short story, “Flashpoint,” will appeared in the debut issue of TINGE Magazine (April 2011). If forced to choose only three books, she would recommend Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender. She often wishes she could dream through the beautiful, kaleidoscopic lens of Bender’s work.
Liana Imam holds a degree in English with a Subconcentration in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Her short fiction has been published in Flyway and also anthologized in The Harvard Bookstore’s short-short story collection Microchondria. She works for The Collagist, where she serves as a blog editor.
Cyan James earned her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she taught composition and creative writing classes. She’s now departing Michigan for the University of Washington in Seattle, where she’s earning a Ph.D in public health genetics. In addition to three Hopwood awards, her writing has also earned her several other prizes and residences, including the opportunity to attend Breadloaf as a dancing waiter. She sometimes publishes poems, essays, book reviews, and short stories in places like Blackbird Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Arkansas Review, and the Barcelona Review; right now the main thing she’s writing is a novel about a commune where people go to get sick. Books she recommends are Under the Volcano, As I Lay Dying, and The Moviegoer.
Dana Kletter received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received Hopwood awards for short fiction and novel and taught all manner of writing. She will be a Stegner Fellow at Stanford beginning September 2010. Dana spent 17 years as a professional musician, composing, recording, touring and performing throughout the U.S. and U.K. Her writing can be found in Michigan Quarterly Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Phoenix, and The Independent. She is currently working on everything she hasn’t finished yet. In times of trouble she turns to William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows, the poems of Anna Akhmatova, and Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales.
Kate Kostelnik is working on a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she serves as an editorial assistant for Prairie Schooner and teaches composition and creative writing. She did her undergraduate work at Colgate University and earned her MFA from the University of Montana in 2005. Her short stories, which earned her a 2007 New Jersey State Arts Council Fellowship, have appeared in 42 Opus, Invisible Insurrection, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Superstition Review. Most recently, her pedagogy scholarship appeared in the journal Creative Writing Teaching: Theory and Practice. Some books she recommends are Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill, What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies by Katharine Haake, and Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates.
Valerie Laken is the author of the story collection, Separate Kingdoms and the novel, Dream House, which won the Ann Powers award and was among Kirkus Review’s Best Books of 2009. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, two Hopwood Awards, a Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, and an honorable mention in the Best American Short Stories. She is currently in love with the city of Milwaukee and teaches in the graduate program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Some authors she envies are Gary Lutz, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Lydia Davis, and Nicholson Baker.
Danielle LaVaque-Manty earned a PhD in political science at the University of Michigan and an MFA in creative writing at Ohio State. Lucky for her, she doesn’t care about football. Her short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train and Northwest Review, and her flash fiction in Bateau, Vestal Review, and Fast Forward: The Mix Tape. For several years, she worked at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, where she co-edited Transforming Science and Engineering: Advancing Academic Women (University of Michigan Press, 2007). Currently, ahe teaches at the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing.
Danielle Lazarin’s fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review and Boston Review. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Oberlin College and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, where her stories and essays won Avery and Jule Hopwood Awards in 2007. She gets the good shivers when she thinks about Stuart Dybek’s I Sailed With Magellan, Julie Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater, and anything by Junot Diaz. She recently moved back to her native New York, where she is raising her first daughter.
Anna Leahy is an Associate Professor at Chapman University, where she teaches in the MFA and BFA programs and directs Tabula Poetica, which includes an annual poetry reading series. Her book Constituents of Matter won the Wick Poetry Prize, and she has published two poetry chapbooks. Leahy has contributed articles to New Writing, Can It Really Be Taught, The Writing Workshop Model, and other publications. Anna Leahy also co-writes Lofty Ambitions, a blog about aviation, science, and writing as a couple. Books she receommends include The Art of Time in Memoir, as well as the ever-growing The Art of _____ series by Graywolf. Keeping in mind that novelist Walter Mosley took a poetry class every semester in grad school to remain attentive to the language, she also recommends these three books of poetry to fiction writers: Allison Joseph’s My Father’s Kites, Allison Benis White’s Self-Portrait in Crayon, and Nancy Kuhl’s The Wife of the Left Hand.
Kate Levin received an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she currently teaches. Her writing has appeared in The Nation and the New York Times Book Review, and she was a finalist in Narrative magazine’s 2009 Story Contest for writers under 30. Three books she keeps close by are Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell.
Felicity Librie was born and raised in England, and has lived in four countries and eleven cities. She received an MA from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and worked in publishing in New York and London. She’s been writing fiction for seven years, in between moves. She’s currently working towards an MA in English, focusing on Creative Writing, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She contributes occasional essays to her local NPR station, had an interview published in The Writer magazine, and recently had a flash fiction piece accepted for printing on the sleeves that go on the cups at UWM’s coffee shops. Three books that she’d love to get people reading are Angel, by Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that Elizabeth Taylor), Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian, and I Capture the Castle by Dodi Smith.
Jonathan Liebson’s work has most recently appeared in Fifth Wednesday Journal, American Book Review, and InterAct Theatre’s Writing Aloud series, in Philadelphia, as well as in the anthology Naming the World: and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer (Random House). He grew up in suburban Chicago and earned his B.A. from Wesleyan University in French literature and international politics, his M.A. in Modern literature from the University of Kent (Canterbury, UK), and his MFA in fiction from NYU. He currently teaches writing and literature at Eugene Lang College of The New School and at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. He invites you to visit www.Jonathanliebson.com to see more of his writing and to view his photographs from New York to New Mexico. The three short story collections he cannot live without are Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades,” Annie Proulx’s “Heart Songs,” and Ethan Canin’s “Emperor of the Air.”
Kelly Luce’s collection of Japan-set stories received the San Francisco Foundation’s 2008 Jackson Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Bakeless Prize. Her work has been recognized by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale Foundation, and Jentel Arts, and has recently appeared in The Southern Review, American Short Fiction, and Kenyon Review. During Spring 2010, she was the Writer in Residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando. She keeps a hula hoop in her car.
Ever since a ghost of a chance wrote his disappearing act, John Madera had only seen glory from the cheap seats, but after mistaken identity theft, he’d finally found himself. You may find him in Featherproof Press, elimae, Everyday Genius, ArtVoice, Underground Voices, Little White Poetry Journal #7, and hitherandthithering waters, and reviewing for Bookslut, The Collagist, The Diagram, The Quarterly Conversation, 3:AM Magazine, New Pages, Open Letters Monthly, The Rumpus, Tarpaulin Sky, and Word Riot. His fiction is forthcoming in Opium Magazine and Corduroy Mountain. An essay will appear in The Prairie Journal: A Magazine of Canadian Literature. He is editing a collection of essays on the craft of writing for Publishing Genius Press (2010). He edits the forum Big Other and journal The Chapbook Review. He is an Assistant Fiction Editor for Identity Theory. He sings and plays guitar for Mother Flux. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. As for his all-time favorite novels (although she would call many of them “elegies”), John recommends anything by Virginia Woolf, especially The Waves. For new discoveries, he has to mention Joanna Ruocco’s wistful, baroque The Mothering Coven and Lily Hoang’s book of nested boxes, Changing.
Helen W. Mallon grew up in a Philadelphia Quaker family and was a “lifer” at Germantown Friends School. She has a degree in painting from Tyler School of Art and an MFA in fiction writing from Vermont College. Her stories and essays have won awards from Philadelphia Stories Magazine and Relief: A Christian Literary Expression. She regularly contributes book reviews to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her short story “Did You Put the Cat to Bed?” is now available for download from www.bookstogonow.com. She is at work on a novel titled Quaker Playboy Leaves Legacy of Confusion. The website for her freelance editing and creative writing is www.helenwmallon.com.
Christina McCarroll holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where she won two Hopwood Awards and a Helen Zell Post-MFA Fellowship. She earned her M.A. and B.A. in English from Stanford University and has worked as a writer and editor at The Christian Science Monitor in Boston. Her book reviews and nonfiction essays have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Stanford magazine, and elsewhere, and her fiction has been nominated for the Best New American Voices series. She has taught at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and the University of Michigan.
Kathryn McGowan is a Brooklyn-based food journalist and fiction lover with a penchant for trolling historical cookbooks in search of forgotten recipes and techniques from the the past, when slow food was the only food. As well as writing the Novel Dishes column here at FWR, her writing can be found at The Thrifty Gourmet and her own blog, Comestibles. She has studied food writing with Alan Richman at the International Culinary Center in New York, and is a member of the Culinary Historians of New York. For great food reading she recommends Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian (and all of the books which follow it in the series); The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman — everything you ever wanted to know about what it’s like to be a chef; the 12th Century Irish wonder tale, Aisling MacConglinne (The Vision of MacConglinne) in which MacConglinne tries to cure the king of his gluttony; and finally, her favorite since she was 3 years old, Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss.
Emily McLaughlin received her MFA in fiction in 2010 from the University of Michigan, where she won the Meijer Postgraduate Fellowship; Hopwood Awards for short fiction, novel, drama, and nonfiction; the Farrar Prize in Playwriting; and the Chamberlain Award in Creative Writing.
Tyler McMahon is author of the novel How the Mistakes Were Made, coming from St. Martin’s Press in 2011. He lives in Honolulu and teaches at Hawaii Pacific University. More info at: http://www.tylermcmahon.net/
Jennifer Metsker teaches writing at the University of Michigan. She has graduate degrees in both poetry and painting. Her poetry has appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast magazine, and many others. Her poem “Poltergeist,” published in The Southern Review, was also selected for Verse Daily.
Shawn Andrew Mitchell is currently pursuing his MFA in fiction at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale where he teaches composition and creative writing, works as an Assistant Editor at Crab Orchard Review, and heads the Writers on the Road program. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Torpedo, NANO Fiction, and Crafty Magazine, and his short story “It’s Not the Heat So Much As the Jelly” was anthologized in Torpedo Greatest Hits, available from Hunter Publishers in Australia. He recommends anything by Richard Brautigan, especially Revenge of the Lawn and Trout Fishing in America, as well as Steven Millhauser’s Dangerous Laughter, Jim Shepard’s Like You’d Understand, Anyway, and the Oulipo Compendium. He can be found online at shawnandrewmitchell.com/.
Composer and pianist Eric Moe has received numerous grants and awards for his work, including the Lakond Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His sit-trag/one-woman opera Tri-Stan was hailed by the New York Times in 2005 as “a blockbuster” and “a tour de force,” a work of “inspired weight” that “subversively inscribe[s] classical music into pop culture.” His recorded works include Kicking and Screaming, Up & At ‘Em, Siren Songs, On the Tip of My Tongue, and the forthcoming Strange Exclaiming Music. The fine arts journal The Sienese Shredder includes an all-Moe CD as part of its third issue. Moe has premiered and performed works by composers from Anthony Davis to Stefan Wolpe, and he recently recorded The Waltz Project Revisited – New Waltzes for Piano, performing works by two generations of American composers. A founding member of the San Francisco-based EARPLAY ensemble, he currently co-directs the Music on the Edge new music concert series in Pittsburgh. Moe studied composition at Princeton University (A.B.) and at the University of California at Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.). He is currently Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh.
Christopher Mohar was the recipient of the 2009-10 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin. He co-teaches a weekly poetry workshop in a men’s correctional institution, and has previously worked as a metallurgical researcher, a literacy tutor, a computer programmer, a busboy, and a legal assistant’s assistant. Chris is a fiction editor for Devil’s Lake, and his recent writing appears in The Southwest Review, Word Riot, decomP, Ink Node, and on his blog at TurboBoosting the Panopticon. He is currently at work on a novel about meat. Three books he recommends: Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson, The Seas by Samantha Hunt, and The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead.
Stephen Morison, Jr.’s articles for Poets & Writers Magazine have profiled the lives of writers in Afghanistan, Myanmar, North Korea and other countries. His short stories and poems regularly appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and Canada. Based in Madaba, Jordan, with his wife and daughter, he is the Director of Arabic Year at King’s Academy, a one-year language and immersion program for American high school students.
Andrea J. Nolan has authored two books of non-fiction, Sea Kayaking Virginia and Sea Kayaking Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, both published by Countryman Press. Her Potomac Review essay, “Edges,” was selected as a 2008 Notable Essay by The Best American Essays series and she has stories forthcoming in Flyway, Dogwood, and Alligator Juniper. She has worked as an environmental educator, house painter, naturalist, bookkeeper, English instructor, and owned a Chesapeake Bay sea kayaking guide service. She holds an MFA from Old Dominion University and three recently read (though not all recently published) books she recommends are The River Why by David James Duncan, Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann and Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung.
Gregory Parker lives in Grass Lake, Michigan, with his family in the house they (mostly) built themselves. He works for a cultural nonprofit in Lansing where he coordinates a statewide reading program. He has a secret penchant for spy novels and won the fourth-grade young author competition with “Phony Agent 811,” the first in a planned series that was abandoned after the second title failed to win the fifth-grade prize. He has an M.A. in American History from Columbia University in New York. Recently, he read The Three Musketeers, reread A Tale of Two Cities, and learned to appreciate Emily Brontë. This is one of the few photos he has in which he doesn’t look like a serial killer.
Scott F. Parker has a Master’s in writing from Portland State University. He is working on a memoir about running, chapters of which have appeared in Epiphany, WritersDojo, and The Ink-Filled Page. He has written chapters for several popular philosophy books, and he is a regular contributor to Rain Taxi Review of Books. In addition to the work of David Foster Wallace, he recommends, from three distinct categories, The Great Gatsby (classics), 501 Minutes to Christ by Poe Ballantine (personal essays), and Ricochet River by Robin Cody (great Oregon books).
Richard Parks is an occupational journalist and critic who commits occasional creative acts of poetry, music, and illustration. For evidence, find for his fiction in ABJECTIVE and elimae, his illustrations in The Believer, FANZINE, and TheRumpus.net, and his music in the coldest, darkest corners of the Internet. Parks has previously reviewed poetry books (in Pleiades and Mid-American Review) and baseball books (in Elysian Fields Quarterly and Spitball). He’s also written about submarines (in the Oxford American), music (in No Depression and Paste), and stolen flowers (in the East Bay Express). He has authored enough daily news articles—including ones for the Oakland Tribune and the San Jose Mercury-News—to choke several large horses, and has served as editor at two small-town newspapers. He is an associate producer for The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández, a feature-length documentary film recently nominated for an Emmy. He has written for a clothing company blog, contributed music to chewing gum commercials, and cut grass to support his writing efforts. If all goes to plan, in two years’ time he will be a Master of Journalism. Wish him luck.
Sophie Powell is the author of The Mushroom Man, which received glowing reviews, including from the New York Times Book Review, and which was translated into several languages. She has also written short stories, reviews and articles for publications such as Town And Country Travel, Time Out New York, Words Without Borders and The Rumpus. She teaches creative writing at Boston College and Grub Street and is currently working on a novel, a screenplay, and a non-fiction work on myths and fairytales. Three books she recommends are: The Stories of Breece D J Pancake by Breece D J Pancake, Listening Below The Noise: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence by Anne D LeClaire, and A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff.
Hanna Pylväinen grew up in the metro Detroit area with her four sisters and three brothers. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the University of Michigan, where she is now a Zell Postgraduate Fellow. Frequent rereads of hers include Song of Solomon, Anna Karenina, and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.
Laura Roberts is the founder and editor-in-chief of Black Heart Magazine, a sex news and views site that is also the home of the dirtiest minds in literature. With a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from Concordia University in Montreal, she is fascinated with all things CanLit and seeks to share her take on the Canadian perspective as a literary foreign correspondent. She is currently working on her first novel, which is currently titled Blowjobs for the Soul, and keeps a personal blog on her website. Three books she thinks everyone should read for a healthy juxtaposition of the sacred and profane are Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
Preeta Samarasan graduated from the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Michigan in 2006. Her first novel, Evening Is The Whole Day, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. It was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and was featured in Poets & Writers magazine’s roundup of the year’s best debuts. Her short fiction and nonfiction has been published or is forthcoming in Hyphen magazine, the Michigan Quarterly Review, EGO magazine, A Public Space, and the anthology Urban Odysseys: KL Stories. Three books about which she thinks every day are: Bleak House, by Charles Dickens; Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie; Waterland, by Graham Swift. She lives in a small village in central France with Rob the husband and Bella the dog.
Phil Sandick is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worked for three years at the Kelly Writers House, a non-profit arts organization in Philadelphia, and is originally from Fresh Meadows, New York.
Sara Schaff received her BA from Brown University and her MFA from the University of Michigan. Her stories have appeared in Inkwell and Carve Magazine, and she was awarded a residency from the Ragdale Foundation to begin work on a novel. She loves and recommends The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, Villette by Charlotte Brontë, and Heir to the Glimmering World, by Cynthia Ozick.
Greg Schutz is a 2009-10 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where he’s also taught English and served as a Zell Postgraduate Fellow in Creative Writing. His first published story recently won the Juked Fiction Prize. Some of his very favorite contemporary short-story writers include Charles D’Ambrosio, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Dan Chaon.
Brian Selfon has interviewed authors and written book reviews for the Detroit Jewish News. His short stories have appeared in Clerestory, Issues, and Foxy.
Michael Shilling’s first novel, Rock Bottom, was published in 2009 by Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, and in 2011 will be staged as a musical by the Landless Theater Company in Washington DC. His stories have appeared in The Sun, Fugue, and Other Voices, and he has written criticism for The Stranger. He lives in Seattle, where he is a Lecturer at Seattle University. In his free time, he writes a bunch of stuff, and plays the drums in a soul band.
Brian Short received his MFA from the University of Michigan, where he received a Hopwood Award and a Zell Post-Graduate Fellowship. His work has appeared in Monday Night and Fourteen Hills. He lives in Ann Arbor, MI.
Curtis Smith is the author the novels Sound and Noise and Truth or Something Like It (both from Casperian Books), and the story collections Bad Monkey and The Species Crown (both from Press 53). In December 2010, Sunnyoutside will release his essay collection Witness.
Jessica Belle Smith lives in Chicago, IL, after graduating from the Univeristy of Michigan with an MFA in Poetry in 2000. When not cajoling co-eds into studying abroad through her work as a marketing writer, Jessica dabbles in pottery and poetry. Her latest writing project, however, finds her up to her eyelashes in fiction. Most recent books read include Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri and, I kid you not, The Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, the unrivaled Scottish bodice-ripper.
Jennifer Solheim is a PhD candidate in French at University of Michigan. She will defend her dissertation, entitled Sounding the Text: Listening to Gender in Mediterranean Culture in French, in May 2011. She is also a literary translator and fiction writer. She is seeking a publisher for her translation of French writer Yolaine Simha’s prose-poem novel, I Saw You on the Street (Je vous ai vue dans la rue) (1998), and is working on a novel entitled Five Stops on Line 2, which takes place in the northern arrondissements of contemporary Paris. Additionally, she used to play bass and sing, and with her bands released two CDs: Lolita Haze’s Playing the Body (Tour de Vis Records) and The Smoothies’ Pickle (Southern Records). She lives in Oak Park, Illinois, with her fiancé, Brian.
Elizabeth Ames Staudt earned her MFA from the University of Michigan. She lives in Seattle and is at work on her first novel. This photograph adequately represents her feelings about the process.
Dana Staves received her Master of Fine Art in fiction from Old Dominion University. While attending ODU, Dana was awarded an internship at the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she had the oportunity to work closely with writers and artists. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is learning to tap dance and is working on her first collection of short stories. Officially free from required reading for her MFA thesis, Dana has expanded her horizons and recently read and enjoyed A Brief History of Time by Shaindel Beers, Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer by Chely Wright, and Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens by Liz Goldwyn.
Ben Stroud recently completed an MFA (Creative Writing) and PhD (English Lit) at the University of Michigan and will spend the next year teaching in the Department of American Studies at the University of Mainz. He’s been a resident at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and his stories have appeared in One Story, Subtropics, Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Pindeldyboz, and another is forthcoming in Gigantic. He has also written about books for the website The Rumpus. Three books he’d recommend are W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, John Banville’s Dr. Copernicus, and just about anything by William Trevor.
Nine years as a Cosmo editor, four as a Marie Claire fashion expert, and one as full-time blogger gave Giota Tachtara more than 1600 friends on Facebook, lots of free makeup, and the false belief that she can survive anything, even Michigan winters. That’s how she found herself in Ann Arbor in the fall of 2010. Born in Greece, studying Political Science in Athens and Journalism in Los Angeles, she left the glossy world of staff writing, got a green card and followed her husband to the exotic Mitten, where he’s begun a PhD in comparative literature and she’s continuing her collection of short stories. As a Greek journalist based in the USA she finds herself doing a lot of explaining: no, Greeks don’t break their plates after every meal and no, not all Americans surf year round. Living between two languages, two time-zones, two cultures, and two cookbooks (one full of pumpkin recipes and the other full of olive oil stains) she decided to make things even more complicated with intensive Japanese lessons. Giota was last seen in a coffee shop somewhere in Ann Arbor, procrastinating on Twitter with a half-finished story waiting patiently on her desktop.
Cam Terwilliger lives in Boston, where he’s at work on a historical novel, a collection of stories, and the occasional poem. When he’s not writing, Cam teaches at Grub Street and Emerson College, where he earned his MFA. Supported by The Massachusetts Cultural Council, The American Antiquarian Society, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and The Academy of American Poets, his work has appeared in a variety of magazines and literary journals, including West Branch, The Mid-American Review, and The Literary Review. Cam’s a big fan of J.M. Coetzee and Hawthorne, as well as Arthur Schnitzler’s fin-de-siècle novella of jealousy, phantasmagoria, and masquerades, “Dream Story.”
Casey Tolfree is a working journalist living in Westchester County, New York. She will receive her MFA in Fiction from Adelphi University in May 2011. She is currently working on her first novel, Watch the Sky. Her favorite novel is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and she recommends Atonement by Ian McEwan, Self-Help by Lorrie Moore, and Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo.
JT Torres is for the most part a Florida-based writer who hates Florida, despite Florida appearing in most of his fiction. He wonders if it’s true that a writer—through his writing—transcends reality—in this case, being in Florida—but Florida has even wormed its way into this small-talk bio. He is an MFA candidate at Georgia College & State University (at least one state removed from Florida) and plans to continue north, state by state, until he can no longer smell the disorientating odor of sunscreened tourists. He has written for The Orlando Sentinel and The Florida Review and has had his fiction published by The Rambler. Recently read novels that have changed the way he thinks about fiction are Ruins by Achy Obejas (dark subject matter can be explicitly comic), The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid (telling can be showing), and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (slang, pop culture allusions can be very literary).
Katie Umans is a poet. What is she doing here? Indulging her love and envy of fiction and maybe getting you to try a little poetry. (Please? You might like it.) These days, she lives in New Hampshire. She is one poet of Two Poet Truffles, a chocolate and poetry enterprise that publishes The Concher. In addition to holding an office job, she teaches genius kids through Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth. Katie steals her own time for writing now, but she has in the past been happily swaddled in the support of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (where she was a post-graduate fellow), the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and the New Hampshire State Council for the Arts. Her first book is forthcoming in 2012 from Dzanc/Black Lawrence Press; she received the 2010 St. Lawrence Book Award for her manuscript, “Flock Book.” Katie’s poems have been published in journals like Crazyhorse, Columbia, The Bellingham Review, Mid-American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Forklift Ohio, and the Indiana Review. Three books that are hugely important and influential to her are Nabokov’s Lolita, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Plath’s Ariel — a list which makes Katie sound like a really dark and disturbed person, but she absorbs these into a generally cheerful and stable personality.
Laura Valeri is the author of the collection The Kinds of Things Saints Do, winner of the Iowa/John Simmons Award in 2002 and the Binghamton University John Gardner Award in 2003. She was a Sewanee Walter E Dakins Fellow in Fiction in 2008 and earned her two MFA’s from Florida International University and from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work appears in Glimmer Train, Gulf Stream, Big Bridge, Waccamaw, Inkwell/Literary Potpourri and a collection of essays by Italian Americans published by Creative Nonfiction and Otherpress, titled Our Roots Are Deep With Passion. She is at work on a novel, a screenplay, and a collection of linked short stories. Her most recent recommended reads are The House on Fortune Street (Margot Livesey), Begin Anywhere (Frank Giampietro), and All Souls (Christine Schutt).
Sarah Van Arsdale teaches creative writing at New York University. Her third novel, Grand Isle, will be published in spring, 2012, by SUNY Press; it was a finalist in the 2008 University of Michigan Novel Contest. Her second novel, Blue, won the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel and was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2003, and her first novel, Toward Amnesia, was published by Riverhead Books in 1996. She also makes short animated films from her watercolors, and works as a manuscript consultant sarahvanarsdale.com. One of her all time favorite writers is Iris Murdoch, but currently she’s reading a lot of poetry as April is National Poetry Month; a favorite poet is Elizabeth Bishop, from whom the line “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” is taken.
Stephanie Vanderslice’s essays have been included in books and journals such as Creative Writing Studies, New Writing, Profession, Teaching Creative Writing and The Creative Writing Handbook. Her prose has also appeared in Mothers in All But Name, Knowing Pains: Women on Love, Sex and Work in their 40’s and many others. With Kelly Ritter, she edited Can It Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore in the Teaching of Creative Writing (Heinemann, 2007), and wrote Teaching Creative Writing to Undergraduates: A Resource and Guide, forthcoming from Fountainhead Press in 2011. Stephanie also blogs at wordamour.wordpress.com. She holds a BA from Connecticut College, an MFA from George Mason University and a Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and is associate professor of writing at the University of Central Arkansas. Recommended reads include Nicole Krauss’s Great House, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, and Jesse Lee Kercheval’s The Museum of Happiness.
Daniel Wallace found a copy of Mrs. Dalloway in a public library in Taiwan and has yet to completely recover, although he also wouldn’t mind being able to write essays like William H. Gass. He was born in London, for a period wearing a suit, after which he began travelling, visiting an indecent number of countries, with most of his time spent in China, Syria, Taiwan, and New Jersey. He earned his MFA at Rutgers-Camden, where he now teaches creative writing. He was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s August 2010 new writer’s short story competition, and his fiction and travel writing have been published in magazines in the US and Asia. He blogs about literature and culture at www.onpinestreet.com. He is neither Daniel Wallace, the author of Big Fish, nor Daniel Wallace, M.D., whose patients routinely email him for news about their test results. He is considering a name change.
Angela Watrous is currently earning her MFA in prose at the University of Michigan. She’s from the San Francisco Bay Area, where she attended Mills College. Before moving to the Midwest Coast, she spent a decade working as a freelance writer and developmental book editor. The author of five nonfiction books, she’s currently working on a story collection, a memoir, and a novel, not always in that order. The story collections she keeps returning to as a writer and a human are Amy Bloom’s Come to Me, Julie Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater, and Jon Raymond’s Livability.
Zachary Watterson’s writing appears in River Styx, Sendero, Salt River Review, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Washington MFA program, he has received a fellowship from the Jentel Foundation and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He recommends Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce, Jennine Capó Crucet’s How to Leave Hialeah, and Albert Murray’s The Hero and the Blues.
Mary Westbrook lives in Norfolk, VA, where she is a third-year student in Old Dominion University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. She is the student director of ODU’s Writers in Community program. Janet Peery is her thesis adviser. Recently she read (and liked) Easter Parade by Richard Yates, Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist and The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake.
Brad Wetherell received his MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, where he is currently a Lecturer for the writing program. His fiction has appeared in The Berkeley Fiction Review and Eclectica. A native of Connecticut, he holds a BA from the University of Connecticut and is a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course. He has worked for HarperCollins Publishers and Slice Magazine.
J. Caleb Winters teaches Humanities at West Virginia University. His short stories are forthcoming or have been published in Camera Obscura Journal of Literature and Photography and The Humanist.
Melissa Scholes Young was born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain’s beloved hometown, and she teaches writing at American University in Washington, D.C. She is a recovering high school English teacher and spent a few years teaching in Brazil. She recently earned an MFA in fiction at Southern Illinois University where she served as an assistant editor for Crab Orchard Review. Her fiction and poetry has been published in Tampa Review, Word Riot, Cold Mountain Review, New Madrid, Yalobusha Review, and other literary journals, and she’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Her favorite short story collections are Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, and Deborah Willis’s Vanishing. You can read more about her at her website.
