Anthony M. Abboreno is currently pursuing a PhD in Literature and Fiction Writing at the University of Southern California. Previously, he earned an MA in the same subjects from the University of Southern Mississippi. He has work forthcoming in Reunion: The Dallas Review.
Neil Tangaroa Aitken is the author of The Lost Country of Sight which won the 2007 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in 2008. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, The Drunken Boat, Ninth Letter, Poetry Southeast, Sou'wester, and elsewhere. In collaboration with Chinese poet-translator Ming Di, he translated The Book of Cranes by Zang Di and later, Ming Di's own first selected poems, River Merchant's Wife. He is currently co-translating an anthology of contemporary Chinese poets and recently received the DJS Translation Prize for his translation work.
Diana Arterian was born and raised in Arizona. She holds an MFA in poetry from the California Institute of the Arts, where she was a Beutner Fellow. Ms. Arterian is the Managing Editor of Gold Line Press and the creator of Gold Line's imprint, Ricochet, both of which publish poetry and fiction chapbooks. She is also the curator of the annual Sumarr Reading Series and the creator of the La Misión Writer’s Retreat in Baja, Mexico. Her chapbook Death Centos is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse, and her poetry has appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, River Styx and Two Serious Ladies, among others.
A Canadian playwright, fiction writer and journalist, Leah's writing has appeared in publications such as PANK, Prism, Room, subTerrain, Hobart, on CBC Radio and in an anthology of Las Vegas fiction “Restless City.” In 2010, she traveled to Sierra Leone, where she conducted interviews and research for her first novel titled “The Following.” In the summer of 2010, she was awarded her first Canada Council grant for development of this manuscript.
A Chicago native, Josh Bernstein studied Near Eastern History at Brown University and went to Jordan on a Fulbright Scholarship, after which he lived in the Middle East for several years. His stories and essays are forthcoming in or have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Harpur Palate, Crab Orchard Review, Western American Literature, Anamesa, The Conradian, Packingtown Review, and other journals. The winner of the John Gunyon Prize and several awards in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, he’s also an avid runner and Bears fan. His website is writingwar.com.
Michelle Brittan has poems published or forthcoming in the journals The Los Angeles Review, Nimrod, Calyx, The Grove Review, and Crab Creek Review. She was also the title poet for Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25, an anthology edited by Naomi Shihab Nye (Greenwillow, 2010). Born in San Francisco of mixed white and Malaysian heritage, she recently graduated from the MFA program at California State University, Fresno. While there, she taught poetry and composition, interned with The Normal School, and co-edited San Joaquin Review. In 2010 she won the Academy of American Poets/Ernesto Trejo Poetry Prize judged by Philip Levine, and is currently at work on her first collection of poems.
Alfred Eugene Joseph Brown IV is a short story writer originated in the the April showers of Los Angeles County's hazy South Bay shores. He received a bachelor's fromPrinceton University where he studied English literature, creative writing, photography, and played rugby. He received a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from Columbia University, where he also served as the fiction editor of the Columbia Journal and was awarded a University Fellowship. Alfred is currently a PhD candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. His most recent story will soon be published in FENCE.
Elizabeth Cantwell's poems have recently appeared in such publications as PANK, The Los Angeles Review, La Petite Zine, Indiana Review, and Matter. She has acted as the managing editor of Gold Line Press, and currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband Chris and their small, lazy dog. A former high school teacher, she is now a Provost's Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she is earning her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. Her first book, Nights I Let The Tiger Get You, was a finalist for the Hudson Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press.
Nikki Darling's music criticism and essays appear regularly or have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Art Book Review, Tomorrow Magazine and Public Books. As well, she is a columnist at KCET, Artbound. Her essay "Appropriate For Destruction" was included in Best Music Writing 2010. She is finishing her first novel, Fade Into You, a memoir of mixed race identity in the San Gabriel Valley during the 90's.
Heather Dundas has been a playwright, producer, lyricist, teaching artist, writer of cooking shows, editor of medical textbooks, and other things. Her play, Cannibals (described as “a comic reverie” by The New York Times), was published by Smith and Kraus and has been produced around the country. Stories and essays have appeared recently in PoemMemoirStory, Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers, The Los Angeles Times, and The Loudest Voice Anthology.
Fox Henry Frazier graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Binghamton University and received her MFA from Columbia University. She is currently a Provost's Fellow at the University of Southern California. She is Poetry Editor at Gold Line Press, and her work has recently appeared in Spillway, Mantis, and The Paterson Literary Review. She loves travel, gin fizzes, and her dog Dalí Nimbus.
Todd Fredson’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, Interim, Poetry International, West Branch and other journals, as well as anthologies. He received his Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Arizona State University. He is pursuing his doctorate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. His collection, The Crucifix-Blocks (Tebot Bach, 2012), won the 2011 Patricia Bibby First Book Award.
Emily Fridlund’s fiction has appeared in Boston Review, New Orleans Review, Sou’wester, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Portland Review, Philadelphia Stories, and The Chariton Review, among others. She has published poetry and short shorts in Beloit Poetry Journal, Smokelong Quarterly, and Quick Fiction. Emily grew up in the Twin Cities and received her MFA in fiction from Washington University in Saint Louis. She is currently an Endowed Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she is pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. She lives with her husband outside Philadelphia.
The winner of the John Dryden Translation prize, Clarion alum Edward Gauvin has received fellowships from the NEA, the Fulbright program, the Centre National du Livre, and the American Literary Translators' Association. Residences have taken him to Banff, upstate New York, and southern France; he has also lived in Taiwan and Belgium. His volume of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s selected stories, A Life on Paper (Small Beer, 2010) won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award and was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. His translations have appeared in Tin House, Subtropics, Conjunctions, The Harvard Review, The Southern Review, AGNI Online, and PEN America. The contributing editor for Francophone comics at Words Without Borders, he translates comics for Top Shelf, Archaia, Lerner, and Self Made Hero. He writes a bimonthly column on the Francophone fantastic at Weird Fiction Review. His fiction has appeared in Epiphany, and is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review.
Stacy Gnall is from Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her undergraduate degree at Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA at the University of Alabama, and she is currently pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her book Heart First Into the Forest was recently published by Alice James Books.
A graduate of Vassar College, Alexis went onto work in the London publishing world after which she received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. She is now pursuing her PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing at The University of Southern California. Her area of interest is the early to mid twentieth century, specifically Jewish identity and assimilation during the interwar years. Twice, Alexis was awarded honorable mention in the Edward W. Moses Graduate Creative Writing Competition, and her short stories have appeared in journals such as LA City Zine and Amor Fati. She was awarded the General Education Graduate Assistant Award for teaching, and she now teaches in the Thematic Option Program. She is currently revising her second novel, The Empire of the Senses, and lives with her husband and daughter in Santa Monica.
Lisa Lee’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in North American Review, Sycamore Review, Gulf Coast, The Tusculum Review, Pebble Lake Review, and Reed Magazine. She has received fellowships and awards from the Inprint Foundation, Kundiman, and the Center for Fiction. Lisa holds an MFA from the University of Houston where she was a Nonfiction Editor of Gulf Coast. She received a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley in English and Music, and a J.D. at Santa Clara University in Public Interest Social Justice Law. Lisa enters USC’s PhD program in Literature & Creative Writing as a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow and is working on her first novel.
Robin Coste Lewis is a Provost’s Fellow in the Creative Writing and Literature PhD Program at USC. A Cave Canem Fellow, she received her MFA from New York University’s Creative Writing Program where she was a Goldwater Fellow in poetry. She also holds a Master's of Theological Studies degree from Harvard's Divinity School, in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature. She was a finalist for both the International War Poetry Prize and the National Rita Dove Prize, and a semi-finalist for the “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize. Additionally, her manuscript The Voyage of the Sable Venus was a semi-finalist for the Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The Massachusetts Review, Calalloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition, VIDA, Phantom Limb, The Best of Kore Press, Encyclopedia Project F-K, and Happy Hypocrite. She has been on the faculty at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Residencies and fellowships include the Caldera Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Can Serrat International Art Centre in Barcelona, and the Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya. Born in Compton, California, her family hails from New Orleans.
Lisa Locascio's fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Northwest Review, Faultline, Grist: The Journal for Writers, and many other journals. Grist named Lisa their 2012 Featured Emerging Fiction Writer, and she is the winner of the Daniel Alarcon-judged 2011 John Steinbeck Prize for Fiction. She has received honors and support for her writing from the National Association for the Advancement of the Arts, Western Michigan University, the Del Amo Foundation, and several other institutions. Lisa holds two degrees from New York University (BA in Individualized Study, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, 2007; MFA in Fiction Writing, College of Arts and Sciences, 2009). She has taught creative writing and literature at New York University, the University of Southern California, and through various tutoring and mentorship organizations in California, New York City, and Chicago. She is a PhD candidate in the department of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California and fiction editor of Ricochet Editions, an imprint of Gold Line Press.
Douglas Manuel received his MFA from Butler University where he was the Managing Editor of Booth, a Journal. He also helped initiate and develop Butler's Writing in the Schools Program, a community outreach group that goes to urban schools to teach poetry and creative writing during after-school hours. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, Thoughtsmith, Punchnels, and Bruised Peach Press.
Ryan McIlvain was born in Utah and raised in Massachusetts. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he has published fiction and nonfiction in the Paris Review, and other journals, and has received honorable mentions in the Best American
Short Stories and the Best American Nonrequired Reading. His first novel, Elders, is forthcoming from Hogarth in early 2013.
Originally from Colorado, Chris holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from USC, as well as an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Writing from the California Institute of the Arts. His research focuses on the literature, music and politics of globalization, with an emphasis on Third World urbanization, transnational border zones, and Native American and Chicano history/culture. Chris' interests also include issues of masculinity, race and ethnicity in modern America as well as electronic music culture worldwide.
Jessica Piazza is the author of two poetry collections: Interrobang (Red Hen Press, 2013) and the chapbook This is not a sky (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she is currently a PhD candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She began her poetry career as an undergraduate intern at The Favorite Poem Project in Boston, and continued on to co-found the Speakeasy Poetry Series in New York City, Bat City Review at the University of Texas at Austin and Gold Line Press at USC. She is a contributing editor at The Offending Adam and has blogged for The Best American Poetry and Barrelhouse. Among other places, her poems have appeared in The National Poetry Review, Agni, Indiana Review, 32 Poems, The Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, Rattle, Forklift Ohio, and the anthologies 150 Contemporary Sonnets (U. of Evansville Press) and Hot Sonnets (Entasis Press). You can find out more about her and read her work at www.jessicapiazza.com.
Scott Reding is a writer of poetry.
Joshua Rivkin's poems and essays have appeared in AGNI Online, Blackbird, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review Online, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Verse Daily and Best New Poets. and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and awards from the Inprint-Brown Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Poetry Society of America, as well as a travel fellowship to the Krakow Writer’s Seminar, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University.
Chris Santiago is a Provost’s Ph.D. Fellow at the University of Southern California and lives in Pasadena. His poems and book reviews have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from FIELD, Pleiades, Canteen, The Asian American Literary Review, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.
Pamela Schaff is a writer of fiction.
Corinna McClanahan Schroeder is currently a Ph.D. student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California where she holds a Wallis Annenberg Endowed Fellowship. She earned her M.F.A. at the University of Mississippi, where she was the recipient of a John and Renée Grisham Fellowship, and her B.F.A. at the University of Evansville. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, Tampa Review, Poet Lore, and Blackbird. She is the recipient of a 2010 AWP Intro Journals Award in poetry and was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship in 2011.
Suraj Shankar is a fiction writer.
A Pushcart-nominated writer, Ryan Shoemaker is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the The MacGuffin, Weber: The Contemporary West, Santa Monica Review, and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, where he won the 2008 Best in Fiction Award, as well as two New Voices awards. Ryan lives in Burbank, California with his wife, Jennifer, and two children, Kieran and Haven.
Brandon Som holds degrees from Arizona State University and the University of Pittsburgh and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing and Literature program at the University of Southern California. Recent work has been published in Best New Poets 2007, McSweeney's Poets Picking Poets, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.His book Babel's Moon was recently published by Tupelo Press.
elise suklje martin is a bibliophile-gypsy-sagittarius-iconoclast-poet from los angeles & ljubljana . . .
Catherine Theis is the author of The Fraud of Good Sleep (Salt Modern Poets, 2011). Her poems have appeared in various journals, including Fence, Gulf Coast, LIT, and Volt. She is a recipient of an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. Her chapbook, The June Cuckold, is published by Convulsive Editions. She lives in Santa Monica.
Sarah Vap grew up in Missoula, Montana. She attended Brown University, received her MFA from Arizona State University, and is completing her PhD at the University of Southern California. She has two collections forthcoming in the fall of 2012: End of the Sentimental Journey (Noemi Books) and Arco Iris (Saturnalia).
A native of Los Angeles, where she co-curates the 3rd Area Poetry Series, Marci Vogel has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the AWP Intro Journals Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Colorado Review, ZYZZYVA, and Seneca Review. Her collection Valiant was recently published by Finishing Line Press.
Tim Wirkus's short fiction has appeared in Subtropics, Gargoyle, Cream City Review, Sou’wester and Ruminate Magazine. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, recognized on the list of Other Distinguished Stories in Best American Mystery Stories 2011, and selected as a finalist in Narrative’s 30 Below contest. He lives in Irvine with his wife, Jessie.
