FWR Staff

- Editor-in-Chief -

Anne Stameshkin recently moved from Brooklyn to Columbus, Ohio, where lots of things are named for James Thurber. Her fiction has been published in the Chattahoochee Review and Nimrod International Journal, 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 books she recommends include Pretty Monsters (Kelly Link), Delicate Edible Birds (Lauren Groff), and The Spare Room (Helen Garner).

- Associate Editor -

Jeremiah Chamberlin received his MFA in Creative Writing in 2004 from The University of Michigan, where he now teaches. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times Book Review, Poets & Writers, Glimmer Train, 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 2003 he was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and this summer he will attend the Sozopol Fiction Seminar in Sozopol, Bulgaria, as one of their 2009 Fellows. He lives in Ann Arbor where he is at work on his first novel. Three recent books he recommends: The Boatloads, poems by Dan Albergotti; The Art of Subtext, craft essays by Charles Baxter; and Tree of Smoke, a novel by Denis Johnson.

- Contributing 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, tentatively titled Everything I Never Told You, and a collection of short stories. She also teaches fiction at Grub Street, a non-profit writing center in Boston. Her stories have appeared in One Story, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, Apostrophecast, TriQuarterly, and Subtropics. 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.

- Contributing Editor -

Since her discovery of Alice and Jerry Brooks’ Through the Green Gate, Lee Thomas has been hooked on reading as well as the ideas and language that drive a good story. An English major at Yale, Thomas ventured into the workforce via a supremely logical avenue—insurance—and has tried life as a baker, house painter, exhibition curator, art gallery manager and the requisite waitress. She currently works as a producer for City Arts & Lectures. Her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Charlotte Observer, The Yale Undergraduate Review of Books and The San Francisco Chronicle. Lee Thomas also writes short stories concerned with the fantastical nature of the mundane. Four strong influences on her idea of a great book are To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, for its faith; the book of Hosea in the Bible, for its hope; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, for its love; and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, for everything. Lee lives in San Francisco with her husband.

- Site Designer -

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.

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.

Mary Stewart Atwell’s short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices and Epoch, and is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review. She is a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis and an assistant fiction editor at the Virginia Quarterly Review. She recommends 2666 by Roberto Bolano, The Groom to Have Been by Saher Alam, and Twilight by William Gay (not Stephenie Meyer).

Natalie Bakopoulos received her MFA in 2005 from the University of Michigan, where she now teaches. She is working on her first novel, set in Athens, Greece, during the military dictatorship of 1967–1974. Her short fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter and Tin House. Three books she read last summer and loved were Selected Poems: 1940-1979 by Odysseus Elytis, Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant, and Netherland by Joseph O’Neill.

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 is 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.

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. 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.

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.

Joshua Bodwell was born and raised in southern Maine where he continues to live. He works as a freelance journalist and fiction writer. With his partner, Tammy Ackerman, he is also a principal & co-creative of the design studio, North40Creative. Joshua is a regular contributor to Poets & Writers magazine, for whom he has profiled Richard Ford and written on the fiction of Andre Dubus, among many other stories. His work as a newspaper reporter 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 Spartina by John Casey as an old favorite, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy as a recent rave, the poetry collection The Ghosts of You and Me by Wesley McNair for fiction writers who need a lyrical fix, and Andre Dubus’s entire catalog (but especially Dancing After Hours and Voices from the Moon) for anyone with a beating heart.

Charlotte Boulay lives in Ann Arbor and teaches composition and creative writing at the University of Michigan, where she received her MFA in poetry. She is a former technical writer, a former labor organizer, and a sometime EMT. Currently, Charlotte is working on a poetry manuscript, parts of which have been published in Slate, the Boston Review, Cyphers, and the Michigan Quarterly Review, among other places. Charlotte recently read and loved Padma Viswanathan’s wonderful debut novel Toss of a Lemon and Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, which made her long for Finnish islands she has never seen. She also re-read Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero—a book that’s quickly becoming as important to her own writing as the rest of his catalog.

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 Long for This World, a novel. 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. His new novel will appear next year from Henry Holt.

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.

Erika Dreifus lives and writes in New York City. Her short stories have appeared in Lilith, Mississippi Review Online, Solander: The Magazine of the Historical Novel Society, TriQuarterly, and many others. Erika is also a prolific book reviewer and essayist whose work has been published in the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Kenyon Review Online, and the Missouri Review. She is a contributing editor for the Chattahoochee Review and for The Writer magazine, and she wrote the section on “Choosing a Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing” for the second edition of Tom Kealey’s Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2008). Last, but definitely not least, Erika is a newly practicing poet. For more about Erika’s writing, please visit her Web site. Erika is also the editor/publisher of The Practicing Writer, a free (and popular) monthly e-newsletter featuring advice, opportunities, and resources on the craft and business of writing for fictionists, poets, and writers of creative nonfiction. She keeps two blogs, Practicing Writing (updates on writing and publishing opportunities, happenings in the literary world, and more) and My Machberet (write-ups on Jewish news, especially of the literary sort, and commentary). Three books of fiction Erika loves to reread are Ludwig Lewisohn’s The Island Within, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Roman Gary’s La vie devant soi, which Gary wrote as “Emile Ajar” and which has been translated as “The Life Before Us (’Madame Rosa’).” You can read her thoughts on The Island Within here on JBooks.com.

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.

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 writer, actor, dancer, and choreographer. She’s a graduate of the English program at Ohio Wesleyan University, where she wrote screenplays, poorly, and the Radcliffe (now Columbia) Publishing Course, where she was disappointed to learn that books are, in fact, a business. Her 9-5 hours are spent fundraising for a university; previously, she raised money for cancer research, which makes her confession of having once smoked a cigarette with Kurt Vonnegut somewhat awkward. But it’s still her closest brush with literary genius, and for the record, she’s not a smoker. Books that have changed her life: Disgrace (Coetzee), Death in Venice (Mann), and Transformations (Sexton). She is at work on a collection of essays and blogs about fashion at Lauren’s Lookbook.

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.

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.

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.

Liana Imam is studying English and creative writing at the University of Michigan. She spent a semester in St Andrews, Scotland, and now finds it difficult to live in a town without cobblestones.

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.

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.

Kate Levin is a second-year fiction writer in the University of Michigan’s MFA program. She was a finalist in Narrative magazine’s 2009 Story Contest for writers under 30, and has published book reviews and journalism in The Nation. She thinks that a lot of great literature has come out of New Jersey. She also enjoys reading You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and Simple’s Uncle Sam by Langston Hughes.

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 reviews books for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She received her MFA degree in Fiction Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2005 and is completing a novel, working title Quaker Playboy Leaves Legacy of Confusion. Her poetry chapbook, from Finishing Line Press, is titled Bone China. In 2008 her essay “My Charlie Manson” won the First Person Essay award from Philadelphia Stories magazine. “Biology,” a short story, won the Editor’s Choice Award in issue #5 of Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression. Her story, “Astral Projection” is included in the Best of Philadelphia Stories 2007 anthology . She has published poems in Kennesaw Review, Café Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Phoebe: A Feminist Journal, among others. She teaches short story writing at Cheltenham Adult School and works with private students. She lives with her family in Philadelphia. [Photo Credit: Robin Hiteshew]

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.

Tyler McMahon is a professor of fiction writing at Hawaii Pacific University. He has won the Gary Wilson Short Fiction Award, been nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Threepenny Review, Sycamore Review, Passages North, Barrelhouse, the Hawai’i Review, the Surfer’s Journal and many others.

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.

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.

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.

Michael Rudin holds a BBA – uh yep, a Business degree…better than a tattoo on his lower back, he supposes – from the University of Michigan. Somewhere along the way, debits and credits lost their luster and he began ditching class in order to write The Whispering King, a novel that won him a Hopwood as an undergrad. Ever searching for ways to spend even more time on his butt looking at computer screens, Michael recently abandoned his career in the video-game industry to begin writing full-time. He laughs in the face of recessions, and is hard at work in Los Angeles on short fiction, a second novel and screenplays. He recommends three books: (1) Lolita (2) Catch-22 (3) The Road, two games: (1) Modern Warfare (2) Portal, and one comic: Y: The Last Man.

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, where she now teaches writing. Before moving to Ann Arbor, she taught in Beijing and Bogotá. She loves and recommends The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, Villette by Charlotte Brontë, and Nothing Right, Antonya Nelson’s 2009 story collection.

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.

Michael Shilling is a Lecturer at the University of Michigan, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing. Michael’s debut novel Rock Bottom was published in January 2009 by Back Bay Books, and his stories have appeared in The Sun, Fugue, and Other Voices. He has also written arts criticism for The Stranger, a Seattle weekly, and currently writes for MSN Music. A recovering rock musician, he played the drums in the Long Winters, as well as numerous other bands in Seattle. Michael writes fiction of varying lengths, but these days the length is novel (no pun intended). He is currently writing a novel set in Victorian England that, roughly and hopefully, is Jane Eyre meets The Wire.
You can read one of Michael’s short stories in Fugue. Three books that have impacted him as a writer are The White Album, by Joan Didion, The Dirt by Motley Crue, and The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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) and the MFA program at the University of Michigan. Her poems have been published in journals like Crazyhorse, Columbia, The Bellingham Review, Mid-American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Forklift Ohio, and are forthcoming in 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 writes and teaches in New York City, where she runs the Atlantic Writers’ Workshop. Her third novel, Grand Isle, was a finalist in the 2008 University of Michigan Novel Contest. Her second, 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’s now working on essays, fiction, and poetry. Recent favorite books are Alexander Hemon’s Nowhere Man, Alain de Botton’s Architecture of Happiness, and Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

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 2010. Stephanie also blogs at wordamour.wordpress.com. She is associate professor of writing at the University of Central Arkansas. Recommended reads include Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief, and Jesse Lee Kercheval’s The Museum of Happiness.

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.

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 spends his analog time in Colorado, where he teaches at the University of Colorado, and his digital time at www.stevenwingate.com. 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.