Performing Poetry by Brynn Martin
Brynn Martin is a Kansas native living in Knoxville while she pursues her MFA in poetry. For Grist, she is both Assistant Poetry Editor and Social Media Editor. She also acts as Social Media Coordinator for Stirring: A Literary Collection. She loves ee cummings and cats almost equally.
Doubting Narcissism by Katie Condon
Katie Condon has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Inprint. Her recent poems appear in or are forthcoming from The Adroit Journal, Indiana Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals, as well as the anthology Hallelujah for 50ft Women. Katie received her MFA from the University of Houston, and is currently a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee.
The Signifier Expresses Its Meaning Through the Writer: Superstition, Synchronicity and Writing Style by Michael Shou-Yung Shum
Michael Shou-Yung Shum is a PhD candidate in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Tennessee. His most recent work appears in Burrow Press Review, Spolia, and Your Impossible Voice.
The Art of the Aural Narrative: Podcasts to Inspire Your Writing by Rob McGinley Myers
Rob McGinley Myers is the host of his own podcast, Anxious Machine, which features stories about how humans are affected by the things that we’ve invented. He’s also a member of The Heard, a podcast collective that (full-disclosure) includes several of the podcasts mentioned above. But he’d be a fan of all of them no matter what.
The Business of Writing by Heather Dobbins
Heather Dobbins’s poems and poetry reviews have appeared in Beloit Poetry Review, CutBank, Raleigh Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology (Tennessee), The Rumpus, and TriQuarterly Review, among others. She has been awarded scholarships and fellowships to Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts’ workshop in Auvillar, France. Dobbins graduated from the College Scholars program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. After several years of earning graduate degrees in California and Vermont, she returned to her hometown of Memphis. Her debut, In the Low Houses, was published in 2014. For more information, visit heatherdobbins.com
All Roads Leading Home by Elwin Cotman
A native of Pittsburgh, PA, Elwin Cotman is a performance artist, educator, activist, and the author of two collections of fantasy short stories. He has toured across North America doing readings, and has performed at venues such as Bluestockings, Artomatic, Quimby’s, TerPoets, and the Interdisciplinary Writers Workshop. He currently lives in Oakland, CA, and is at work on his first novel.
Advice to Beginning Writers: Be Quick and Take Your Chances by Vanessa Blakeslee
Vanessa Blakeslee’s debut short story collection, Train Shots, is now available from Burrow Press. Her writing has appeared in The Southern Review, Green Mountains Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Globe and Mail, and Kenyon Review Online, among many others. She has also been awarded grants and residencies from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Banff Centre, Ledig House, the Ragdale Foundation, and in 2013 received the Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs.
Why Translate? by Darren Jackson
Darren Jackson’s poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Circumference, The Pinch, The Laurel Review, The Offending Adam, Bluestem, and other journals. He has translated Life in the Folds by Henri Michaux (Wakefield Press, forthcoming Fall 2014); “The White Globe,” an essay by Bertrand Westphal, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in The Planetary Turn: Art, Dialogue, and Geoaesthetics in the 21st Century; and A Free Air by Albane Gellé. He also collaborated with Marilyn Kallet and J. Bradford Anderson on the translation of Chantal Bizzini’s Disenchanted City (Black Widow Press, September 2014).
A Bio You Won’t Read: I Am From Nowhere and My Work Does Not Address a Sense of Place by Charlotte Pence
Charlotte Pence’s first full-length poetry collection, Spike, will be released by Black Lawrence Press in 2014. A professor of English and creative writing at Eastern Illinois University, she is also the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics (University Press of Mississippi, 2012).
On Messiness and Polish: Some Thoughts on Publishing and Why We’re Launching a Blog by Christian Anton Gerard
Christian Anton Gerard is editor-in-chief of Grist. His first book of poems, Wilmot Here, Collect For Stella, is forthcoming in spring 2014 from WordTech.