Notes on Contributors

Abdul Ali is the author of Trouble Sleeping, a 2014 winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize selected by Fanny Howe. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gathering of Tribes, Plume, Poet Lore, and the recent anthology Resisting Arrest. Ali has been honored with two Literature fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He currently teaches high school English at a private school in Baltimore. 

Rennie Ament studied poetry at Hunter College, where she has taught creative writing.  Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Sixth Finch, Prelude, and elsewhere.   She lives in Astoria, Queens and works at Poets House in Manhattan.  

Rae Armantrout is professor emerita of writing at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of thirteen previous books of poetry, most recently Partly.

Paul Asta was born in South Korea. He is a bookbinder and writer from the Chicago suburbs. He is a poetry editor for Hobart, and currently resides in Cork, Ireland, studying creative writing at University College Cork on a Fulbright Scholarship. He is a founding member of Frontier Slumber, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Indiana University, Bloomington where he earned his MFA in Poetry.

Monica Berlin’s first book, No Shape Bends the River So Long, a collaborative collection of poems with Beth Marzoni, was published in 2015 (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press). Her solo work has appeared in many journals, most recently The Cincinnati Review, Cimarron Review, Crazyhorse, Passages North, Kudzu House Quarterly, Bennington Review, december, Salt Hill, Water~Stone Review and The Kenyon Review. Berlin serves as Associate Director of the Program in Creative Writing and Chair of the English Department at Knox College in Galesburg, IL, where she is an associate professor.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry chapbook Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She is the winner of the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. Tiana is currently an MFA candidate and teaching assistant at Vanderbilt University where she serves as Poetry Editor for Nashville Review. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Rattle, Best New Poets 2015, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Thrush Poetry Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. Tiana received the Tennessee Williams scholarship to The Sewanee Writers’ Conference. You can find her online at tianaclark.com.

Grant Clauser is the author of the books Necessary Myths (2013) and The Trouble with Rivers (2012). Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Cortland Review,  Painted Bride Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review and others. By day he writes about electronics, and sometimes he fishes. He blogs occasionally at www.unIambic.com.  Twitter: @uniambic

Brian Clifton co-edits Bear Review. His work can be found in: Pleiades, Guernica, Barrow Street, Bennington Review, Prairie Schooner, and other such magazines.

S. Brook Corfman is a poet who writes plays, living in a turret in Pittsburgh. A Lambda Literary Fellow who has also been published as Sam Corfman, work has appeared or will appear soon in Phantom, Prelude, Ghost Proposal, Washington Square Review, and OmniVerse, among other places.

Adam Day is the author of A Model of City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and is the recipient of a PSA Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Emerging Writers Award. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. He directs The Baltic Writing Residency in Sweden, Scotland, and Blackacre Nature Preserve. These poems form part of a triptych of poems that function as mock centos, working as a parody of explicit, problematic sexual writing by novelists such as Roth, Franzen, Mailer, Updike and others.

Jessica Farquhar holds an MFA in Poetry from Purdue, where she was the assistant director of Creative Writing. You can find her poems in recent or forthcoming issues of Diagram, Fogged Clarity, and Interrupture

Jennifer Franklin is the author of Looming (2015), winner of the 14th Annual Editor’s Prize from Elixir Press. She received an AB from Brown University and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Harvey Baker Fellow. She was nominated for the 2016 Rona Jaffe Award. Her poetry has appeared widely in literary magazines and journals including Blackbird, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Nation, New England Review, [PANK], “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, and Southwest Review. She teaches poetry workshops at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, where she serves as Program Director. She lives in New York City.

Matthew Gellman’s poems are featured or forthcoming in Thrush, The Adroit Journal, Muzzle, Word Riot, Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize and a scholarship from the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University.

Michael Homolka is the author of Antiquity, winner the 2015 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books. His poems have appeared in publications such as The New YorkerPloughsharesThe Threepenny ReviewAntioch ReviewAlaska Quarterly ReviewAgni, and Poetry Daily. A graduate of Bennington College’s MFA program, he currently teaches high school students in New York City. 

Hanae Jonas is a Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in jubilat, The Volta, Columbia Journal, H_NGM_N, and Twelfth House.

Abe Koogler writes plays and fiction. His plays have been produced or are upcoming at Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, and the Goodman Theatre, and are published by Dramatists Play Service and Bloomsbury. He earned an MFA from the Michener Center at UT-Austin, and is a native of Washington State.

Dan Kraines is a poet whose work has most recently appeared in the anthology The Traveler’s Vade Mecum. He teaches at the University of Rochester, where he is a PhD student and Slattery Fellow. Like many other writers, he cherished corresponding with Franz Wright.

Kara Krewer grew up on an orchard in rural Georgia. She holds an MFA in poetry from Purdue University, where she also taught creative writing and film studies. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Prodigal, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2016-2018 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

Yael Massen is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Indiana University and former Nonfiction Editor and Associate Poetry Editor of Indiana Review. Her poems can be found within the pages and URLs of DIAGRAM, Hobart, Mid-American Review, Lilith, Southern Indiana Review, Ninth Letter Online, and Day One. She is a recipient of the 2016 Vera Meyer Strube Academy of American Poets Award, the 2016 Kraft-Kinsey Award from the Kinsey Institute, and was a 2015 TENT Fellow in Creative Writing at the Yiddish Book Center. She volunteers as an On-Scene Advocate and a Legal Advocate at Middle Way House, a domestic violence shelter in Bloomington, Indiana, where she lives, works, and walks.

Sarah Munroe is a creative writing MFA candidate in poetry at West Virginia University, where she is also the editorial assistant for the West Virginia University Press and the poetry editor for Cheat River Review. She has a deep and abiding love for dinosaurs. When not in Morgantown, she can be found in Philadelphia with her husband and their two dogs.

Miguel Murphy is the author of Detainee and A Book Called Rats, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. He lives in Southern California where he teaches as Santa Monica College. 

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of the lyric essay collection, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, which won the Non/Fiction Prize from OSU Press. Her poetry collections are The End of Pink (BOA, 2016) and Rag & Bone (Elixir, 2011). Recent work appears in 32 Poems, Crazyhorse, Field, Ninth Letter, Poetry International,  and Willow Springs. She is an associate professor of Creative Writing at University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as the director of Pleiades Press.

Ines Pujos holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU and lives in NYC. She is the cofounder of Print Oriented Bastards, an online literary journal. Her poems will be appearing Salt Hill Press and has been previously published in Cosmonauts Ave, Powder Keg, The Adroit Journal, Day One, Bone Bouquet, Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, Phantom, Hayden’s Ferry, Puerto del Sol, and Verse Daily, among others.

John Repp‘s poems have appeared in several past issues of The Journal. His most recent collection is Fat Jersey Blues, winner of the 2013 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press.

C. F. Sibley is the Assistant Editor at Parnassus: Poetry in Review. She received a scholarship to Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in 2012 and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from DIAGRAM, Sugar House, FIELD, Muzzle Magazine, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015.  

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008) and most recently Vanitas, Rough (Persea, December 2012).  A new collection of her poems, Orexia, will appear from Persea in 2017.  She is the editor of Acquainted with the Night:  Insomnia Poems (Columbia University Press, 1999) and All that Mighty Heart:  London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008), and a collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse:  Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, appeared from Drunken Boat Media in March 2013.  She is the editor of a new anthology, Monticello in Mind:  Fifty Contemporary Poets on Jefferson, due out from the University of Virginia Press in February 2016.  Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, a 2016 Pushcart Prize Anthology award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared or forthcoming in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize Anthology series and have recently appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, IMAGE, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth is a poet, educator, collaborative artist, and licensed builder. Her poetry has appeared recently in Alaska Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Colorado Review, jubilat, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West and elsewhere. A chapbook, Forking The Swift, was published in 2010. She has received grants from the Sewanee Writers Conference, The Vermont Studio Center, Warren Wilson College where she received her MFA in poetry, and The Bear River Writers Conference.  In 2016 she was the Writers@Work Poetry Fellow selected by Tarfia Faizzulah and won the The Connecticut River Review Poetry Prize. She lives in Traverse City, Michigan and teaches at The Leelanau School and at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

Nomi Stone is the author of the poetry collection STRANGER’S NOTEBOOK (TriQuarterly, 2008), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton University, and an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Warren Wilson College. Poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2016, Diode, Poetry Northwest, Guernica, and elsewhere, and her new manuscript KILL CLASS was just named runner-up for the May Sarton Poetry prize.

Jason Tandon is the author of three collections of poetry including, Quality of Life (Black Lawrence Press, 2013) and Give over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt (Black Lawrence Press, 2009), winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, Esquire, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry East, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.

Leah Umansky is the author of the dystopian themed chapbook, Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016)¸ the Mad-Men inspired, Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014) and the full-length collection Domestic Uncertainties (Blazevox, 2012). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Poetry, Boston Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, The Golden Shovel Anthology, and elsewhere. You can find her at www.leahumansky.com.

Dr. Ernest Williamson III has published creative work in over 600 journals. Williamson has published poetry in over 200 journals, including The Oklahoma Review, The Roanoke Review, Pamplemousse, formerly known as The Gihon River Review, The Copperfield Review, The Penwood Review, and Wilderness House Literary Review. Some of his visual artwork has appeared in journals such as Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The William & Mary Review, New England Review, The Tulane Review and The Wisconsin Review. Williamson is an Assistant Professor of English at Allen University. Learn more here: www.ernestwilliamsoniii.com