Issue 2.3 Contributors

Elizabeth Acevedo was born and raised in New York City. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and received her MFA from the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been published or has work forthcoming in Poet Lore, The Notre Dame Review, and Callaloo. She has attended the Callaloo Writers Workshop, is a CantoMundo Fellow and a first-year Cave Canem Fellow. Acevedo is a founding member of The Drawbridge Collective. She lives and works in Washington, DC.

Liz Ahl is the author of Talking About the Weather (2012, Seven Kitchens Press), Luck (2010, Pecan Grove Press), and A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, which won the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook prize. Her poems have appeared recently in Pea River Journal, Little Patuxent Review, and Tidal Basin Review. She lives in New Hampshire. More work is available at https://lizahl.wordpress.com/

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times; The Millions; Brain, Child; The Georgia Review; Shenandoah; The Rumpus; Brevity; Fourth Genre and elsewhere. A fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, she was named a 2013 Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow to attend a residency at The Millay Colony for the Arts. Currently she is a nonfiction reader for r.kv.r.y quarterly and Reviews Editor at PANK. You can read more of her work at www.randonbillingsnoble.com.

Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York. He is an alumnus of the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing program and is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at Oregon State University. He has previously published stories in Stymie Magazine, The Broad River Review, The New Sound, Siren Zine, CaKe: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and Cahaba River Literary Journal. You can learn more about him at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.

Amy Collini’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Baltimore Review, Slice, Soundings Review, Pithead Chapel, Literary Mama and elsewhere. She lives in central Ohio with her husband and two young sons, where she is at work on a novel.

Michael Colonnese lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He is the author of a detective novel, Sex and Death, I Suppose, published by Oak Tree Press, and a poetry collection, Temporary Agency, which won the Ledge Poetry Prize and was published by the Ledge Press. His poetry collection Double Feature won the 2014 Dell Poetry Award, with publication by Big Table Press scheduled for Spring 2015. His short stories, poems, and creative-nonfiction have appeared in many magazines and literary journals. He currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Methodist University and serves as managing editor of Longleaf Press.

Gabrielle Freeman’s poetry has been published in many journals including Beecher’s Magazine, Chagrin River Review, Gabby, Melancholy Hyperbole, Minetta Review, and Shenandoah. She has been nominated twice for the Best of the Net, and she was a finalist in 2014. She earned her MFA in poetry through Converse College. Gabrielle lives with her family in North Carolina where she blogs about poetry at www.whythewritingworks.com, and about writing and all things random at www.ladyrandom.com.

Jessica Greenbaum’s second book, The Two Yvonnes, was a Library Journal’s Best Book in Poetry in 2012. As a social worker, she has been facilitating poetry reading-and-writing group for older adults, and will be initiating one for 9/11 first responders through the WTC Health Program. She is the poetry editor of upstreet, and received an NEA literature grant for 2015.

Benjamin Gucciardi’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Orion, Talking River, Terrain.org, The California Journal of Poetics, Poecology and others. He is a winner of the 2013 Dorothy Rosenberg Memorial Prize. In addition to writing, Benjamin works with refugee and immigrant youth in Oakland , CA through Soccer Without Borders, an organization he founded in 2006.

Patrick Kindig is a PhD candidate in Indiana University’s Department of English. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the minnesota review, Fugue, Bloom, Court Green, and elsewhere.

Sheila R. Lamb is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Queens University of Charlotte. Her writing has appeared in Monkeybicyle, JMWW, among others, and has earned Pushcart and storySouth Million Writers Award nominations. She’s also the author of Once a Goddess and Fiery Arrow, the first two novels in a historical fiction series. Feel free to visit her website at http://sheilarlamb.com.

Rebecca Macijeski received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2011 and is studying toward a PhD in Poetry at University of Nebraska—Lincoln where she serves as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for Hunger Mountain and Prairie Schooner. She also is an assistant to Ted Kooser’s newspaper project, American Life in Poetry. She is a recipient of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poet Lore, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Salon, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Whiskey Island, Lullwater Review, Fickle Muses, Phantom Drift, Border Crossing, Fourteen Hills, and others.

Charlotte Mandel’s ninth book of poetry, Through a Garden Gate, with color photographs by Vincent Covello, is published by David Robert Books. Previous titles include two poem-novellas of feminist biblical re-vision—The Life of Mary and The Marriages of Jacob. Her awards include winner of the 2012 New Jersey Poets Prize and two fellowships in poetry from New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She edited the Eileen W. Barnes Award Anthology, Saturday’s Women. An independent scholar, she has published a series of essays on the role of cinema in the life and work of poet H.D. Visit her at: charlottemandel.com

Kelly Nelson is the author of the chapbook Rivers I Don’t Live By (Concrete Wolf, 2014). The poems included in this issue come from a lyric biography of her uncle who was a minor outlaw in Minnesota in the 1950s. She received a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts in support of this book-length project. She teaches Interdisciplinary Studies at Arizona State University.

Joe Oestreich is the author of Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll. His second book, Lines of Scrimmage: A Story of Football, Race, and Redemption (co-written with Scott Pleasant), is forthcoming in September 2015 from the University Press of Mississippi. His work has appeared in Esquire, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, The Normal School, and elsewhere. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC, where he directs the M.A. in Writing Program.

Born in Subic Bay, Philippines, Mg Roberts teaches writing in the San Francisco Bay area. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Kelsey Street Press member, and involved with the radical printing collective Material Print Machine. She is author of not so,sea (Durga Press) and latest work appears in the anthologies Nests and Strangers On Asian American Women Poets (Kelsey Street Press) and Kuwento: Lost Things (Carayan). Her poems have appeared in the Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies, Bombay Gin, Web Conjunctions, Everyday Genius, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on producing an anthology on the urgency of experimental writing written for and by writers of color.

Gina Williams lives and creates in the Pacific Northwest. Her writing and visual art have been featured most recently by Carve, The Sun, Fugue, Palooka, Boiler Journal, tNYPress, Whidbey Art Gallery, Black Box Gallery, and Great Weather for Media, among others. Learn more about her work at http://www.ginamariewilliams.com

Jared Yates Sexton is a born-and-bred Hoosier living and working as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University. He is the author of three story collections and a novel. His work has been nominated for a handful of Pushcarts, The Million Writer’s Award, was a finalist for The New American Fiction Prize, and has been featured in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Fictions and Best of the Net. His website can be found at jysexton.com.