Forklift, Ohio

Annik Adey-Babinski is a Canadian living in Miami. Her poems have appeared in the Best New Poets series, Sink Review, Hobart, Prelude, and the Eight Miami Poets anthology (Jai Alai Books). Her first book, Okay Cool No Smoking Love Pony, is forthcoming from The Word Works in 2017.

Heather Altfeld’s first book, The Disappearing Theatre, won the Poets at Work Book Prize selected by Stephen Dunn. Her poems appear in Narrative Magazine, Pleiades, ZYZZYVA, Poetry Northwest, and others. She won the 2015 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry with Nimrod International Magazine of Poetry and Prose. She lives in Northern California and is a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.

Eloisa Amezcua is an Arizona native. Her poetry and translations are published or forthcoming from BOAAT, The Journal, Prelude, and others. Her chapbook On Not Screaming is forthcoming from Horse Less Press. @ eloisaamezcua.com

Scott Beal is the author of Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems (Dzanc Books, 2014). His chapbook The Octopus won the 2015 Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Contest and will be published in 2016. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Cincinnati Review, Linebreak, FRiGG, and other journals. He lives, teaches, and co-hosts the monthly Skazat! reading series in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Justin Bigos is the author of the poetry chapbook Twenty Thousand Pigeons (iO, 2014). His writing has appeared most recently in North Dakota Quarterly, Indiana Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Seattle Review, and The Best American Short Stories 2015. He co-edits Waxwing and lives with his wife, Erin, and daughter, Thalia, in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Conor Bracken’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears or is forthcoming in Handsome, the minnesota review, Ninth Letter, Puerto del Sol, and THRUSH Poetry Journal. Originally from Virginia, he lives in Texas, where he received his MFA from the University of Houston and was a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.

Lauren Brazeal teaches writing in the Dallas/Forth Worth metroplex but in the past has been a homeless gutter punk, a resident of the Amazon jungle, a maid, and a surfer chick. She’s the author of two chapbooks, Zoo for Well-Groomed Eaters (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), and Exuviae (Horse Less Press 2016). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Smartish Pace, Verse Daily, Barrelhouse Online, and Painted Bride Quarterly. @ laurenbrazeal.com

Nate Brown’s fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Five Chapters, Carolina Quarterly and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore.

Collin Callahan was born in Illinois and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. His work has appeared in Hobart and is forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly. In his free time, he likes making sandwiches for his friends and family.

Anders Carlson-Wee is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow and the author of Dynamite, winner of the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, Narrative, AGNI, The Missouri Review, Best New Poets, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading series. With his brother Kai, he is co-author of two chapbooks: Mercy Songs and Two-Headed Boy, winner of the 2015 David Blair Memorial Chapbook Prize. The recipient of Ninth Letter’s Poetry Award and New Delta Review’s Editors’ Choice Prize, he is currently a 2016 McKnight Foundation Creative Writing Fellow.

Alex Chambers has taught bread-baking, literature, and creative writing on the campuses of universities, prisons, and high schools. His writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Paper Darts, and The Rumpus. For the time being, he’s a PhD candidate in American Studies at Indiana University.

John Colburn is the author of Invisible Daughter (firthFORTH Books, 2013) and Psychedelic Norway (Coffee House Press, 2013) as well as three chapbooks of poetry. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Ryan Collins is the author of A New American Field Guide & Song Book (H_NGM_N Books). His poems have appeared many places, including Another Chicago Magazine; Asymptote; Diagram; Handsome; Ninth Letter; and PEN Poetry Series. He hosts the SPECTRA Poetry Reading Series in Rock Island, Illinois.

Bess Cooley’s poems have appeared in Toad, Spry, and other journals. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University, where she was managing editor of Sycamore Review.

William Virgil Davis’s most recent book of poetry is Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New (2015). He has published five other books of poetry, including Landscape and Journey, which won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Poetry, and One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His poems have appeared in major periodicals here and abroad, including Agenda, The Atlantic Monthly, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, The Nation, The New Criterion, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, The Southern Review, and TriQuarterly.

Frank Fucile has lived in the suburbs of Maryland, the mountains of New Hampshire, the inner city of Philadelphia, and now the swamps of Virginia. His work was recently published in Kenyon Review and Mobius. He is poetry editor at the William and Mary Review.

Mike Good holds an MFA from Hollins University. He is from Pittsburgh, where he helped to found the After Happy Hour Review and Hour After Happy Hour Writing Workshop. His poems have appeared in Nerve Cowboy, Artemis, The NewYinzer, Poetry Fix, and Jersey Devil Press. He was a runner up for the Gertrude Claytor Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Deb Gravina has always lived in small towns. In these towns, she is often writing and caffeinating. When she isn’t doing either of those activities, she serves as big sister to three siblings, Poetry Editor for Sonora Review and instructor of English at the University of Arizona, where she recently earned her MFA.

Sophie Grimes holds an MFA in Poetry from Boston University, a BA in Creative Writing from Oberlin College and has spent an extensive amount of time living and traveling in China as an Oberlin Shansi Fellow and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review, AGNIonline, and The Literary Review. Her chapbook, City Structures, was published by Damask Press in 2013. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn and writes poetry reviews for Publishers Weekly.

Mikko Harvey lives in Columbus, Ohio. His poems appear or are forthcoming in places such as Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Sixth Finch, and Best New Poets 2013. He is a poetry editor for The Journal.

Emma Heldman lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. You can also find her work in Prelude Magazine, Queen Mob’s Tea House. Her chapbook was recently a finalist for Damask Press.

Troy Jollimore’s most recent collection of poetry, Syllabus of Errors, was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best poetry books of 2015. His previous poetry books are At Lake Scugog (2011) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for 2006. He is also the author of two philosophical works, Love’s Vision and On Loyalty, and has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Caleb Kaiser is a writer from Kentucky. He is a staff member of Able Projects and the Adroit Journal. His work can be found in Banango Street, Muzzle, PANK, and Diagram. He is Claudia Cortese’s son.

Matt Kolb lives in rural Michigan. He is the winner of the 2014 Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Poetry Prize. His work has been published in Exposition Review; The Michigan Poet; The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society; Missed Connections; and in The Offbeat from Michigan State University Press.

Robert Krut is the author of two books of poetry: This is the Ocean, winner of the 2012 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Award from Bona Fide Books, and The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). He teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and lives in Los Angeles.

Ashleigh Lambert is the author of the chapbooks Ambivalent Amphibians (Dancing Girl Press) and The Debt or the Crisis (DoubleCross Press). Her poems and reviews can also be found in Bone Bouquet, Coldfront, DIAGRAM, Five Quarterly, H_NGM_N, and other fine places. A native of the Midwest, she currently lives in New York City.

Danika Stegeman LeMay lives in Minneapolis and works at Wilson Library on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. She has an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Alice Blue Review, and CutBank Literary Journal.

Jeffrey Little is the author of The Hotel Sterno, The Book of Arcana, (Spout Press, both), as well as Five & Dime (Rank Stranger Press). He is a 2001 Delaware Division of the Arts Poetry Fellow in the Established Professional category. For the past three decades or so he has been publishing work in journals such as Columbia Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, Eye-Rhyme, Kiosk, Mudlark, Painted Bride Quarterly, Shattered Wig, & Swerve. He now has kids, doesn’t sleep, and everywhere is walking into walls.

Tony Mancus is the author of a handful of chapbooks. He co-founded Flying Guillotine Press with Sommer Browning in 2008, and co-curates the In Your Ear reading series with Meg Ronan in Washington DC. He and his wife Shannon live with three yappy cats in Arlington, Virginia.

Laura McCullough’s book, From Particle to Wave, was selected by Billy Collins as the winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and it will be published in early 2017 by University of Arkansas Press. Her other books of poems are Jersey Mercy, Rigger Death & Hoist Another, Panic, Speech Acts, and What Men Want. She is the editor of two anthologies, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race (University of Georgia Press) and The Room and the World: Essays on Stephen Dunn (Syracuse University Press). She is the founding editor of Mead: the Magazine of Literature and Libations. @ lauramccullough.org

June Melby’s memoir, My Family and Other Hazards (Henry Holt, 2014), was a New York Times Bestseller and won a Midwest Connections award. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Fugue, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Versal, Utne Reader, Water~Stone, LAWEEKLY, and Kaffee.Satz.Lesen v.2, out of Hamburg, Germany. As a spoken word artist, she has been featured in sold-out shows across the U.S. and Europe. She received an MFA from the University of Iowa, and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Arts (VCCA). Currently, she lives in a cabin in the woods of Iowa with her husband and a 20-pound cat named Ferdinand Magellan.

Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren earned her MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from Columbia University. Her work has been honored with a Hopwood Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Page Davidson Clayton Award for Emerging Poets, a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil, and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Narrative, The Common, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. A Cleveland native, she is now based out of Montreal.

Sara Mumolo is the author Mortar (Omnidawn, 2013) and the chapbook March (Cannibal Books, 2011). She is the program manager for the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of CA. She has received residencies to Vermont Studio Center and Caldera Center for the Arts. Sara is currently serving as a curatorial resident at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, CA.

Lisa Nance grew up in middle North Carolina & now resides in Asheville. Some of her works are signed “Gus Grissom”. She is a painter, bookseller & waitress.

Kelly Nelson is the author of the chapbooks Rivers I Don’t Live By (Concrete Wolf, 2014) and Who Was I to Say I Was Alive (Minerva Rising, 2015). Her cross-language erasures have also appeared in Jet Fuel Review, Quarter After Eight and Best Experimental Writing (BAX). She teaches Interdisciplinary Studies at Arizona State University and hasn’t owned a car since 1999.

Paul Nemser’s book Taurus won the New American Poetry Prize (New American Press, 2013), and his chapbook Tales of the Tetragrammaton was published by Mayapple Press in 2014. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the London Revie, Plume and Spillway. He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, Massachusetts mostly, and Harborside, Maine, sometimes.

Emily O’Neill is a writer, artist, and proud Jersey girl. Her debut collection, Pelican, is the inaugural winner of YesYes Books’ Pamet River Prize. She is the author of three chapbooks: Celeris (Fog Machine, 2016), You Can’t Pick Your Genre (Jellyfish Highway, 2016), and Make a Fist & Tongue the Knuckles (Nostrovia! Poetry, 2016). She teaches writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education and edits poetry for Wyvern Lit.

Peg Alford Pursell is the author of the forthcoming book of flash/hybrid prose, SHOW HER A FLOWER, A BIRD, A SHADOW (ELJ Publications). Her work has been published in VOLT, the Journal of Compressed Arts, and RHINO, and shortlisted for the Flannery O’Connor Award. She produces Why There Are Words, the Bay Area reading series she founded six years ago, and is founding editor of WTAW Press, an independent book publisher. @ pegalfordpursell.com

Grant Quackenbush is from San Diego. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in Muzzle, Rattle, Vending Machine Press, Orange Coast Review, The Missing Slate, and elsewhere. He is currently earning his MFA in poetry at UC Irvine.

Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List (Hogarth/Crown, 2012), an Editors Choice in The New York Times Book Review. Her short stories have appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best of the West, and have been noted in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. She teaches in the English Department at the College of the Holy Cross and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Stephanie Rogers grew up in Middletown, Ohio and now lives in New York City. She received her MFA in poetry from UNC Greensboro. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Southern Review, Pleiades, New Ohio Review, and upstreet. Her first collection of poems, Plucking the Stinger, was published by Saturnalia Books in October.

James Shea is the author of two poetry collections, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye, which was selected for the Fence Modern Poets Series and included in the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets series. His poems have appeared in The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets. A former Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong, he has taught at Nebraska Wesleyan University, the University of Chicago’s Committee on Creative Writing, Columbia College Chicago’s MFA Program in Poetry, and DePaul University. He was poet-in-residence in the Chicago public schools, where he received The Poetry Center of Chicago’s Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Arthur Solway’s poetry and essays have appeared in distinguished literary and cultural publications since 1978, most recently in the Antioch Review, BOMB, Salmagundi, and TriQuarterly. As the former founding director of James Cohan Gallery Shanghai, the first contemporary art gallery from New York to establish itself in mainland China (2007-2015), he presently divides his time between private consulting and art advisory services, and critical writing for regional art publications in Asia and abroad. He has recently completed a collection of poems entitled Shadow Nation and lives in Shanghai with his wife, daughter, sister-in-law, two turtles, and a bilingual cat.

Analicia Sotelo holds an MFA from the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Antioch Review, Meridian, The Collagist, The Indiana Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. Tracy K. Smith selected “I’m Trying to Write a Poem About a Virgin and It’s Awful” for Best New Poets 2015. Analicia is the recipient of a fellowship from the Ithaca Image-Text Symposium and is the 2016 Disquiet International Literary Prize winner in Poetry. She currently lives in Houston.

Originally from Denver, Peyton Prater Stark currently lives in Tucson, where she studies poetry and book art at the University of Arizona. She is equal parts writer and teacher. Previous work includes teaching 7^th and 8^th grade Language Arts and developing writing workshops for 826 Seattle. Her work appears in Eleven Eleven and Colorado Review.

Paul Suntup’s poetry has appeared in numerous publications including Rattle, Spillway, Artlife, Cider Press Review, ISM, and the anthology 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day edited by Billy Collins. His first full-length book of poetry, Sunset at the Temple of Olives, was published in 2011 by Write Bloody Publishing. He was born in South Africa and currently resides in Southern California.

Born and brought up in Pomona, California, Michael Torres spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in BOAAT, Huizache, Miramar, Okey-Panky, and Paper Darts. He is a CantoMundo fellow. Currently, he lives in Mankato, Minnesota where he teaches creative writing. In his free time teaches poetry to homeless youth at the Reach Drop-in Center.

Derek JG Williams puts words into rows both long and short. He’s a graduate of the MFA program at UMass Boston, where he taught creative writing. He’s a 2016 Blacksmith House Emerging Writer. His poems are published or forthcoming in Salamander, Plume, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, H_NGM_N, and New Ohio Review.

Ian Randall Wilson’s fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of journals including the North American Review, Spork and Puerto del Sol. His chapbook, The Wilson Poems, was published by Hollyridge Press. He is on the fiction faculty at the UCLA Extension. He lives in Los Angeles where he is an executive at Sony Pictures.

Scott Wordsman holds an MFA from William Paterson University. His poems appear or will appear in THRUSH, BlazeVOX, Main Street Rag, Black Heart Magazine, Slipstream, and others. He lives in Jersey City, reads for Map Literary, and teaches composition.