Rod
Jess Williard’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The New Orleans Review, North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Oxford Poetry and other journals. He was a 2016 finalist for the Janet B. McCabe Prize in poetry from Ruminate Magazine and lives in Illinois.
Tear Down
Sandy Solomon teaches at Vanderbilt University where she is Writer in Residence and Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program. Her book, Pears, Lake, Sun, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, was also published in the U.K. by Peterloo Poets. Her poems have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, New Republic, Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry Review (UK), and the Times Literary Supplement.
Jana Harper is a visual artist who works both collaboratively and individually on themes related to quietude, connection, authenticity, and environment. She works in a variety of media including printmaking, drawing, installation, photography, and artists’ books. Her work has been shown in both solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and she has enjoyed artist residencies both in the United States and abroad. Jana teaches at Vanderbilt University.
The Names Are Not Revealed
Phoebe Reeves earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and now teaches English at the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont College in rural southern Ohio, where she advises East Fork: An Online Journal of the Arts. Her chapbook The Lobes and Petals of the Inanimate was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2009. Her poems have recently appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Drunken Boat, Phoebe, and Memorious.
Fever
Max McDonough is a Creative Writing Fellow at Vanderbilt University. His work appears in Gulf Coast, CutBank, The Adroit Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Point of origin after Li-Young Lee
Éireann Lorsung is making a very long prose object about archives and earthquakes. She is also residency director at Dickinson House (dickinsonhouse.be). You can find other of her poems in Music for Landing Planes By, Her book, and a third collection forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.
Alibi
Lisa Lewis’s books include The Unbeliever (Brittingham Prize, 1994), Silent Treatment (National Poetry Series, 1998), Vivisect, (New Issues Press, 2010), Burned House with Swimming Pool (American Poetry Journal Prize, Dream Horse Press, 2011), and The Body Double (Georgetown Review Press, 2016). Recent work appears in New England Review, Carolina Quarterly, Guernica, Four Way Review, American Literary Review, Florida Review, and elsewhere. She directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as poetry editor for the Cimarron Review.
Nanny Fairchild Offers Wisdom to her Nearly Grown Up Charge
Kathleen Jones is a poet, designer, and technical writer in Wilmington, NC. She has an MFA in poetry from UNC Wilmington. Her poems included in Grist are part of an in-progress book length project. Her work is forthcoming from Rust + Moth and can be found in Meridian, BOAAT, storySouth, LEVELER, and others.
Dear Birthplace
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is working on a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature & Literary Theory program where her research focuses on the rendering of trauma in contemporary American poetry related to the Holocaust. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Missouri Review, and Narrative Magazine, among others. She is the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars, winner of Split Lip Magazine’s 2014 Uppercut Chapbook Award. Julia is also Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine.
Where the Fired Body is Porous
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry chapbook Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She is the winner of the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. Tiana is currently an MFA candidate and teaching assistant at Vanderbilt University where she serves as Poetry Editor for Nashville Review. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Sewanee Review, Rattle, Best New Poets 2015, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Thrush Poetry Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. Tiana received the Tennessee Williams scholarship to The Sewanee Writers’ Conference. You can find her online at tianaclark.com.
Jesus in the Desert
Colin Cheney is the author of