Issue 1.1 Contributors

Kate Bolton Bonnici’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern Humanities Review, NANO Fiction, BODY, The Examined Life Journal, Kudzu Review, VOX MOM, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2012 Morton Marr Poetry Prize (Southwest Review). Originally from rural Alabama, she graduated from Harvard University and New York University School of Law and is currently an MFA student in poetry at the University of California, Riverside. Kate lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Mark Jay Brewin, Jr. won the 2012 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry of the University of Utah Press for his first book manuscript, Scrap Iron. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Hollins Critic, Copper Nickel, Southern Humanities Review, Poet Lore, North American Review, Greensboro Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA program of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. You can find more of his work at https://markjaybrewinjr.com

Kevin Brown is a Professor at Lee University. He has published two books of poetry–A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press) and Exit Lines (Plain View Press, 2009)–and two chapbooks: Abecedarium (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and Holy Days: Poems (winner of Split Oak Press Chapbook Contest, 2011). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again (Wipf and Stock, 2012), and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels (Kennesaw State University Press, 2012). He received his MFA from Murray State University.

Dale Brumfield is reinventing himself after age fifty as a second year MFA Graduate student in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Creative Writing program. He is the author of two novels, two eBooks, a collection of memoirs, and his latest, Richmond Independent Press: A History of the Underground Zine Scene, is a history of Richmond’s alternative press, and was released in August, 2013 by History Press of Charleston, South Carolina. Dale lives in Doswell, Virginia, home of Kings Dominion and burial place of the Boston marathon bomber.

Susana H. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology. Her photos have appeared in San Pedro River Review and Blue Hour Magazine, among others. Author of several chapbooks, her Slapering Hol Press chapbook, The Scottish Café, was published in a dual-language version, Kawiarnia Szkocka, by Poland’s Opole University Press. She authored the books Salem In Séance (WordTech Editions), Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips (Anaphora Literary Press), and Earth and Below (Anaphora Literary Press). 4 Rms w Vu is forthcoming from Mayapple Press in 2014. Please visit her online at: https://www.nyit.edu/bio/shcase.

Gary J. Garrison is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University, where he divides his time between writing sentences, watching movies, and studying for trivia night.

Robyn Goodwin received her MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University, where she received the “Heritage Award,” the highest honor for fiction. In 1999, Sherman Alexie selected her short story “Watershed” to appear in Scribner’s “The Best of the Fiction Workshops.” Her works have appeared in various literary magazines and online publications. Currently, Robyn is working on her memoir, “Sweeping Beauty: Cleaning up Messes, Marriage and Me.” She lives in Manassas, VA with her husband and two wonderful sons.

Brenna Horrocks lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she is pursuing a degree in Advertising at the University of Alabama. A former intern for NANO Fiction, she works as a Barista at Five Java. This is her first publication.

Sam Martone lives in Tempe, Arizona, where he spends his evenings attempting to defeat the final boss of Dragon Quest V.

Alyce Miller is the award-winning author of three books of fiction and a forthcoming book of nonfiction. Her fiction has been awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Mary McCarthy Prize, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence, and the Lawrence Prize. More than 200 stories, poems, essays, and articles have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Michigan Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Glimmer Train, and Southern Review. She teaches in the English department at Indiana University, and leads a double life as a pro bono attorney with special interests in family law and animal rights law. Note: Out of deference, the names of two secondary characters were changed for this essay.

Matthew Zanoni Müller was born in Bochum, Germany and grew up in Eugene, Oregon and Upstate New York. He received his MFA from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and he teaches in the Community College system in Western Mass. “Lights” is from a forthcoming hybrid memoir he co-wrote with his father entitled Drops on the Water: Stories about Growing up from a Father and Son. The book will be published by Loyola University’s Apprentice House Press in early 2014. To learn more about his writing, please visit: www.matthewzanonimuller.com

This piece is part of a collection of short stories by Matthew and his father, Eric, to be published by Apprentice House in early 2014.

Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey & currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is the author of three collections: So You Know It’s Me, a series of Craigslist Missed Connections; Level End, lyric essays about video game boss battles; and the forthcoming Leave Luck to Heaven, an ode to 8-bit video games. He is at work on a book about professional wrestlers.

Chris Petruccelli is a graduate student at the University of Missouri. He earned his BA in geography at UT and claims eastern Tennessee as home. He likes to drink whisky, smoke cigarettes with older women and study forest dynamics. His poetry has appeared in Josephine Quarterly, Connotation Press and Gingerbread House Literary Magazine.

Ian Riggins is a graduate of Chatham University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. He serves as fiction editor for IDK Magazine, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Collision, Buffalo Almanack, Pithead Chapel, and #GOODLitSwerveAutumn: An Anthology of Independent Literature About Kanye West. He is currently working on a novel about the 1937 Dominican baseball season. He is from Virginia and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he teaches creative writing at Chatham. Contact information and links to publications can be found at www.ianriggins.com.

Timothy Shea holds degrees from Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has also studied at the National University of Ireland Galway, and at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. His work has appeared in Poetry London, Third Coast, Southern Humanities Review, and Poetry Ireland Review, amongst others. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Lucas Southworth has stories in recent issues of Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Web Conjunctions, West Branch, Willow Springs, and others. His collection of short stories, Everyone Here Has a Gun, was selected as the winner of AWP’s Grace Paley Prize last year, and was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2013. He is a professor of fiction and screenwriting at Loyola University Maryland. “Her Last Friday” is a small piece of a novel-in-progress.

Joy Weitzel is currently a teaching assistant at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan, where she is studying for a Masters of Arts in English. She has a mindset for helping students develop their own voice in the realm of academia, which she cultivated while working in NMU’s writing center as a graduate assistant. She received her Bachelors of Arts in English-Writing from Spring Arbor University in Spring Arbor, Michigan. When Joy is not writing, reading, studying, or grading papers, she can be found kayaking Lake Superior, skiing the backwoods of northern Michigan, or playing soccer with friends.

Holly M. Wendt teaches writing and literature at Casper College and is the director of the Equality State Book Festival. Her prose has previously appeared in or is forthcoming from Memorious, The Rumpus, The Classical, Hobart, and others. She serves as the assistant fiction editor for Drunken Boat. She thinks that the months without baseball are the saddest months.