Forklift, Ohio

Justin Bigos is the author of the poetry chapbook Twenty Thousand Pigeons (iO Books, 2014). His poems and stories have appeared in magazines such as Ploughshares, H_NGM_N, New England Review, The Collagist, and McSweeney’s. He co-edits the literary magazine Waxwing and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.

Shevaun Brannigan is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, as well as The Jimenez-Porter Writers’ House at The University of Maryland. She has had poems appear in such journals as Best New Poets 2012, Lumina, Calyx, Court Green, and Free State Review. Since writing the poem “Shevaun Looks for a Man,” she has found one, and feels very lucky regarding the specific individual.

Nathan Breitling (1986–2014) was a native of the Chicagoland area. He received his BA in creative writing from Illinois Wesleyan University and his MFA at Columbia College Chicago. His poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, Cream City Review, and Phantom Limb.

Peter Burzynski a first-year PhD student in creative writing/poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MFA in poetry from The New School University, and an MA in Polish Literature from Columbia University. In between his studies, he has worked as a sous-chef in New York City and Milwaukee. His poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Kritya, Bar None Group, Zombie Logic Review, and Fuck Poems Anthology. He has poems forthcoming from BORT quarterly, the Great Lakes Review, Thrush Poetry Review, and Your Impossible Voice.

Nicole Callihan’s poems, stories and essays have appeared in North American Review, Cream City Review, Washington Square and Salt Hill. Her first collection of poems, SuperLoop was published by Sock Monkey Press in early 2014. Find her on the web at nicolecallihan.com.

Anders Carlson-Wee is a 2015 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the winner of Ninth Letter’s 2014 Poetry Award and New Delta Review’s 2014 Editors’ Choice Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, The Missouri Review, West Branch, Blackbird, The Journal, Linebreak, Best New Poets 2012 and 2014, and elsewhere. A recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Anders is currently an MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University.

MRB Chelko is the recipient of a 2013 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Manhattations. Her work has appeared in numerous chapbooks and journals; current and forthcoming publications include: The Ampersand Review, B O D Y, Poetry International, Revolver, Vinyl Poetry, and Washington Square Review. Chelko holds an MFA in poetry from The University of New Hampshire. She lives in Central Harlem.

Emily Chenoweth is a former fiction editor of Publishers Weekly. Her novel Hello Goodbye was published by Harper Collins in 2011. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Lauren Clark is a noted Beyoncé enthusiast. She currently serves as a Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan and works as a writer-in-residence with InsideOut Detroit. Her poems have appeared in PANK, Ninth Letter, and Cream City Review, among other journals.

Holly Coddington is a graduate of New York University’s MFA program where she curated the KGB Emerging Writers Series and was a Goldwater Fellow. Before that she was a backcountry ski guide in Jackson, Wyoming. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches in the Bronx. Her dog’s name is Charlie and he is very cute and charming.

Nina Corwin is the author of two books of poetry, The Uncertainty of Maps and Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, appears in the text/audio archive, From the Fishouse, as well as journals Drunken Boat, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review/nor, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review and Verse. Corwin is an Advisory Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and curator for the literary series at Chicago’s Woman Made Gallery. In daylight hours, she is a practicing psychotherapist known for her work on behalf of victims of violence.

Nick Courtright is the author of Let There Be Light, out now from Gold Wake Press, and Punchline, a 2012 National Poetry Series finalist. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, AGNI, Boston Review, and Kenyon Review Online, among numerous others, and a chapbook, Elegy for the Builder’s Wife, is available from Blue Hour Press. He lives with his wife, Michelle, and sons, William and Samuel, in Austin, Texas, where he teaches at Concordia University. Feel free to find him at nickcourtright.com.

Chris Creaturo invented a method of door-to-door pesto sales that made him one of the richest 12-year-olds in the world. “I contain multitudes,” he muses from atop Chris Manor, framed by the Charleston, South Carolina sky. “Dozens of tiny men, screaming.”

Leonard Crosby holds an MFA in fiction from the California College of the Arts. He’s been published in The Furious Gazelle, Samizdat Literary Journal, Star82 Review, and Eleven Eleven. He lives in Oakland and hosts the One Lone Pear Tree reading series in San Francisco.

Alex Crowley is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and a co-curator of Brooklyn’s MENTAL MARGINALIA Reading Series. He received the first annual Paul Violi Poetry Prize from The New School and his work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Phantom Limb, OmniVerse, BORT Quarterly, and DIAGRAM.

James D’Agostino is the author of Nude With Anything (New Issues) and Slur Oeuvre (New Michigan/ Diagram). He teaches at Truman State University, where he directs the BFA Program in Creative Writing.

Jay Deshpande’s poetry has recently appeared in Phantom Limb, Bodega, Narrative, Sixth Finch, Atlas Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, and elsewhere. In 2012 he was a winner in Narrative’s Fourth Annual Poetry Contest, and his poem “On the Meaning of Love” was named one of Narrative’s Poem of the Week top picks for 2013. He is a former poetry editor of AGNI. He lives in Brooklyn and works in magazine publishing. More at jaydeshpande.com.

Cassie Donish is a poet and geographer from the West Coast. She holds degrees from the University of Washington and the University of Oregon. She’s currently an editor of THERMOS and an Olin Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.

Lawrence Eby lives, writes, and edits in Southern California and is the author of two books, Flight of August (Trio House Press, 2014) which won the 2013 Louise Bogan Award, and Machinist in the Snow, forthcoming from ELJ Publications in 2015. His work has appeared in Passages North, Arroyo Literary Review, Superstition Review, as well as others. He is the founder of Orange Monkey Publishing, a poetry press, and a founding member of PoetrIE, a literary non-profit in the Inland Empire of Southern California.

Cody Ernst is a graduate student in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Redivider, Cream City Review, Salamander, and Witness among others.

Raymond Farr’s books include: Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), Rien Ici (Blue & Yellow Dog 2010), and Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012). His poems appear in Otoliths, Upstairs at Duroc, Cricket On Line, & Eratio. His latest book Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav is due out in late 2014 (more at blueyellowdog.weebly.com)

Henry Finch’s poetry appears in or is forthcoming from the Massachusetts Review, The Seattle Review, jubilat, The Denver Quarterly, Volt, Wag’s Revue, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Maine, where he teaches writing and music and edits Lit Passages.

Emily Kendal Frey lives in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of several chapbooks and chapbook collaborations, including Frances, Airport, Baguette, and The New Planet. The Grief Performance, her first full-length collection, won the Norma Farber First Book Award from The Poetry Society of America in 2012. Her second collection, Sorrow Arrow, is available from Octopus Books.

Tom Fugalli’s poetry has appeared in The Absinthe Literary Review, Disquieting Muses, Exquisite Corpse, Lake Affect, Opium Magazine, The Western Humanities Review, and other publications. He lives in the Bronx.

Ricky Garni is a writer and graphic designer living in North Carolina. His work is widely available on the web, and he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize on five occasions. His books include My Favorite Fifteen Presidents, Maybe Wavy, 2% Butterscotch and Shadow Box Chocolate Cake. His latest collection, Hey, is dedicated to the memory of Faye Hunter.

Jules Gibbs lives and works in Syracuse, New York. Her first book, Bliss Crisis, was published in 2012 by The Sheep Meadow Press.

Lizi Gilad is a first-generation American of Mexican and Israeli descent. She holds an MFA from UC Riverside’s low residency program. Her poems have been published in Amethyst Arsenic, burntdistrict, Literary Bohemian, Thrush, Thrush Press, Weave, and others. Her prose can be found at The Rumpus and The Volta blog.

Adam Halbur is author of the poetry collection “Poor Manners” (Ahadada 2009), for which he received a 2010 residency at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. His poetry appeared in the anthology Never Before (Four Way 2005), and his essays appeared in an anthology published by Cowfeather Press in 2014. A Wisconsin native, Halbur has lived on and off in Japan for the past 15 years while making his way here and there.

Bradley Harrison is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. His work can be found in New American Writing, Diagram, West Branch, Best New Poets 2012 and elsewhere. His chapbook Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012). He is currently a student in the doctoral program at the University of Missouri.

Sean Patrick Hill is the author of Hibernaculum (Slash Pine Press, 2013) and two full-length books of poems. He curates and publishes broadsides as Green Fuse Press in Louisville.

Julie Howd was born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the recent recipient of a fellowship to the Juniper Summer Writing Institute in Amherst. Currently, she lives in Texas where she is a James A. Michener fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work can be found in Broad! and Polaris magazines.

Laurel Hunt can usually be found playing the lyre beneath an olive tree on one of Greece’s 1,400 islands. You’ll have to figure out which one, but only 230 of them are inhabited, so maybe that helps a little. Good luck.

Jessie Janeshek’s first book of poems is Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). An Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing at Bethany College, she holds a PhD from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an MFA from Emerson College. She co-edited the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press, 2008).

Stefan Karlsson studied English and creative writing at UCLA, where he served as executive editor of the university’s literary journal, Westwind. He was awarded the Fred Weld Herman Memorial Prize from The Academy of American Poets and the Falling Leaves Creative Writing Prize, awarded by the UCLA Department of English. His work has recently appeared in Circle, an online poetry journal, and Westwind. His chapbook, No Nothing, was published in 2014 by the LUMA Foundation as part of the “Poetry will be made by all!” exhibition in Zurich. He is an MFA student in poetry at UC Irvine.

Devin Kelly is an MFA student at Sarah Lawrence College, where he serves as the nonfiction editor of LUMINA. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Armchair/Shotgun, RATTLE, Midwestern Gothic, Meat for Tea, apt, Big Truths, Kindred, Dunes Review, Steel Toe Review, Cleaver Magazine, Passages North, Lines & Stars, and District Lit. He teaches creative writing and English classes to 7th graders and high schoolers in Queens, and the occasional children’s poetry workshop at the New York Public Library in Harlem, where he currently lives. You can find him on Twitter @themoneyiowe.

Of I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press), John Ashbery describes Amy King’s poems as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” Safe was one of Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2011. King teaches creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College and works with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Check her latest blog entries at Boston Review (bostonreview.net), Poetry Magazine (poetryfoundation.org) and the Rumpus (therumpus.net/topics/amy-king).

Noelle Kocot is the author of six books of poetry, including Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006) and Soul in Space (Wave, 2013). She has also published Poet By Default (Wave Books, 2011), a limited-edition collection of translations of the poems of Tristan Corbière. Kocot has received numerous awards for her work, including from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Fund for Poetry, The Academy of American Poets, The Lannan Literary Foundation and The American Poetry Review. Her work is widely anthologized, including in Postmodern American Poems: A Norton Anthology and Best American Poetry 2001, 1012 and 2013. Born and raised in Brooklyn and now living in the wilds of New Jersey, she teaches writing in NYC.

Edgar Kunz is the Third Year Fellow in Poetry at Vanderbilt University. Last year, he won an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems can be found in The Journal, Indiana Review, Redivider, Bat City Review, Passages North, and other places.

Heidi Reszies Lewis is a poet and visual artist. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and works in the Digital + Design Bullpen at H_NGM_N.

Adam Love is from Salt Lake City, Utah. New work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Tongue Review, burntdistrict, Ampersand Review, Split Lip Magazine, Revolver, and others. He’s the author of the chapbook, Another Small Fire (Tired Hearts Press 2013). He directs the Literary Arts portion of the Utah Arts Festival and is always looking for new blood (come read yr stuffs!). In his free time, he can usually be found somewhere near a river or the Wasatch mountains.

Jenna Lynch lives in New York and teaches at The College of New Rochelle. She holds her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. Her poems have previously appeared in Stirring, Sundog Lit and Construction Magazine.

Laurie Maley is a graduate of the University of Nebraska MFA in Poetry. She is working on her first manuscript titled, “Bird Shit.” She does not have a favorite color, though she loves the sound of black and white like a piano.

Matt Mauch is the author of If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine, Prayer Book, and the chapbook The Brilliance of the Sparrow. He founded the annual Great Twin Cities Poetry Read, and co-hosts (with Paula Cisewski) the Maeve’s Sessions reading series. He edits Poetry City, USA, an annual collection of poetry and prose on poetry, and lives in Minneapolis, where he teaches in the AFA program at Normandale Community College.

Marc McKee is the author of What Apocalypse?, which won the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM 2008 Chapbook Contest, Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), and Bewilderness (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). His work has appeared in journals such as Barn Owl Review, Boston Review, Cimarron Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, LIT, and Pleiades, among others. He teaches at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray.

Britt Melewski was born in Hinsdale, Illinois and came out of his mother bleeding from his left temple. The botched Caesarean section left him bloodied and in need of many layers of delicate stitches. 67 total. In talking to a long-time physician friend—a friend who, since grade-school, has lamented the facts of Melewski’s unfortunate welcome into the world—he learned that this is a relatively normal occurrence with regard to C-sections, and that he should not feel too special. At present, Melewski applies daily a hefty smear of Bio-Oil Scar Treatment. He believes, truly, that this will make the scar fade, even though the chief bi-product of the oil—which smells like Avon’s Skin-So-Soft—is a range of taut white pimples. He ritualizes into a mirror in Brooklyn.

Matt Morton was a 2013 Finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a Finalist in Narrative’s 30 Below Contest. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Branch, Colorado Review, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, and 32 Poems, among others. Originally from Rockwall, Texas, he lives in Baltimore, where he is a lecturer in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Shannon Osaka was raised in San Jose, California and is pursuing her undergraduate degree at Princeton University. This is her first publication.

David Rivard’s new collection of poems, Standoff, will be out from Graywolf in early 2016. His five previous books include Otherwise Elsewhere and Sugartown, and he teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire.

Philip Schaefer’s collaborative chapbook Smoke Tones is forthcoming from Phantom Limb Press, and his poems are out or forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, RHINO, Interim, The National Poetry Review, Pacifica, The Boiler, Toad, Broadsided Press, Adroit, Ghost Town and elsewhere. He can usually be found tending bar at the local distillery in Missoula, where he recently received his MFA from the University of Montana.

Kelly Schirmann is the author of Activity Book (NAP) and the co-author of Nature Machine (Poor Claudia). She sings in the band Young Family, whose EP King Cobra is now available as a cassette from Spork Press, and runs Black Cake Records, a web-label for audio-chapbooks of contemporary poetry. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Lauren Shapiro is the author of the poetry collection Easy Math (Sarabande Books, 2013) and the chapbook Yo-Yo Logic (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2012). She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Carnegie Mellon University.

For more than thirty years, Paul Skenazy taught literature and writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His stories have been published in Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review, Red Wheelbarrow and other magazines. Other publications include La Mollie and the King of Tears, a revision of a posthumous novel by Arturo Islas; books and articles on James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and other noir writers; a collection of essays on San Francsico fiction; and a selection of interviews with Maxine Hong Kingston as well as hundreds of book reviews.

Frederick Speers lives with his husband in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works in digital marketing for a global telecommunications company. He is the recipient of the first annual Fitzpatrick Award from the Vermont Studio Center, which is given to poets who “focus on nature in all its many facets,” and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI (online), The Straddler, Salamander, and Likestarlings.

Amber Tamblyn is a Venice, California native. She has been a writer and actress since the age of 9. She has been nominated for an Emmy, Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Award for her work in television and film. She has two collections of poetry, Free Stallion (Simon & Schuster 2004) and Bang Ditto (Manic D. Press 2009). She co-founded the nonprofit, Write Now Poetry Society (writenowpoets.org) and has a poetry review column in Bust Magazine. Her forthcoming third book, Dark Sparkler, is an intimate look at the lives and deaths of child star actresses with accompanying art by such artists as David Lynch and Marilyn Manson (Harper Collins 2015). She lives in Brooklyn.

Maribeth Theroux writes poetry and makes an occasional web series called “Reading Poetry to the Cat,” in which she reads poems to her cat. In 2013 Maribeth played Kelly Kapowski in Bayside! The Musical. Depending on when you read this, she either lives in New Jersey or Los Angeles.

Carleen Tibbetts is the author of the e-chapbook “a starving music will come to eat the body” (FiveQuarterly, 2014). Her work has appeared in Coconut, H_NGM_N, Sink Review, Dusie, inter|rupture, Ilk, Jellyfish, The Pinch, Thrush, Swine, Big Lucks, The Laurel Review, and other journals.

Emily Toder is the author of the poetry collections Beachy Head and Science (from Coconut Books) and the chapbooks No Land (Brave Men), Brushes With (Tarpaulin Sky), and I Hear a Boat (Duets). She has translated various prose and poetry collections, among them The Life and Memoirs of Dr. Pi (Clockroot Books), Wendolin Kramer (Barcelona eBooks), and The Errant Astrologers (Ugly Duckling Presse). She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Peter Twal is both a writer and an electrical engineer. After completing his undergraduate degree, he found himself programming software aboard countless ships, despite being certain that just watching Titanic made him seasick as a kid. He only sometimes gets dizzy writing poetry these days. A recipient of the Samuel and Mary Anne Hazo Poetry Award, his poems have appeared in DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, Bat City Review, smoking glue gun, NAP, plain china, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame.

Leah Umansky is a teacher and writer in NYC. She is the author of the Mad Men inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream, and the full-length collection, Domestic Uncertainties. This poem was inspired by the writer D Foy’s talk, at a reading, on “Gutter Opera.” Read more at leahumansky.com.

Monica Wendel is the author of No Apocalypse (Georgetown Review Press, 2013) and the chapbooks Call it a Window (Midwest Writing Center, 2012) and Pioneer (Thrush Press, 2014). She is assistant professor of composition and creative writing at St. Thomas Aquinas College.

Zoë Ryder White writes poems and edits books for educators about the craft of teaching. Her poems have appeared in Threepenny Review, Subtropics, Crab Creek Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She is the author of a book for teachers about using poetry to teach reading, Playing with Poems: Word Study Lessons for Shared Reading, and she is a co-author of One to One: the Art of Conferring with Young Writers. You can find her at on Twitter @ZoeRyderWhite.

Jim Whiteside holds degrees from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Vanderbilt University. His poems and book reviews appear or are forthcoming in Barn Owl Review, diode poetry journal, the minnesota review, PANK Magazine, Phoebe, and storySouth, among others. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he now lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

David Winter wrote the poetry chapbook Safe House (Thrush Press, 2013). His poetry also appears in Atlanta Review, Union Station, Four Way Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, and other publications. He currently attends The Ohio State University’s MFA Program in creative writing and serves as a poetry editor for The Journal. He is also working on a literacy research/oral history project about the writing and lives of black poets in Columbus.