Jesus in the Desert
Colin Cheney is the author of
What Did I Do To Deserve This
Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a CantoMundo Fellow. She was a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan, and a Horace Goldsmith Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013), a contributor to The Conversant, and an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her poems appear in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, among others. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review blog. Find her at 7TrainLove.org.
The Radio is Full
Lindsey D. Alexander lives in East Tennessee, where she produces Story of My Life, a podcast that asks interesting guests over 70 how they came to be who they are and where they are. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Waxwing, and Arts & Letters, among other magazines. For more, visit www.ldalexander.com.
Athletic Director Greenshield Evaluates the New Hire
Bryan Owens has been a teacher of English for 9 years in the Houston public school system. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Houston. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications including New Ohio Review, San Pedro River Review, Poetry Quarterly, Boston Poetry Magazine, Inscape, Primitive, The Centrifugal Eye & elsewhere.
Manifest Destiny
Charles O’Hay is the author of two collections—Far from Luck and Smoking in Elevators—both from Lucky Bat Books. His poems have appeared in over 125 literary journals, including The New York Quarterly, Cortland Review, Gargoyle, and West Branch.
Frida Kahlo Takes a Muse in Detroit after her smallest self-portrait
Alyssa Jewell studies poetry at Western Michigan University where she served as assistant editor for New Issues Poetry and Prose and is currently an assistant poetry editor for Third Coast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, Fifth Wednesday, The Columbia Review, and Cactus Heart. She lives and teaches in Grand Rapids.
Portrait
Chaun Ballard was raised in both Missouri and California. For six years now, he and his wife have been teaching in the Middle East and West Africa. He is currently a graduate student in the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program. His poems have recently been published in or accepted by The Caribbean Writer, Orbis: Quarterly International Literary Journal, the Best New African Poets 2015 anthology, and other literary magazines.
Nicole Oquendo and Mike Shier On Collaboration and Folie à Deux
Nicole Oquendo is a writer, educator, and editor interested in multimodal compositions and translations of nonfiction and poetry. She is a member of the Sundress Publications Board of Directors, an Assistant Editor for Flaming Giblet Press, the Managing Editor of The Florida Review, and the Nonfiction Editor of the annual Best of the Net Anthology. She is the author of the chapbooks some prophets (2015, Finishing Line Press) and self is wolf (2015, dancing girl press), and the hybrid memoir Telomeres (2015, Zoetic Press).
Mike Shier holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University and is currently in Illinois State University’s PhD program for the same. Other poems from Folie à Deux, a collaborative poetry chapbook manuscript written with Nicole Oquendo, have appeared in Menacing Hedge.
Haibun on the 650 lb. Grand Piano Standing Upright in Biscayne Bay
Brianna Noll is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and she is Poetry Editor of The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in 32 Poems, The Kenyon Review Online, The Missouri Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere.
Love Poem with False Labyrinth
Joseph Mulholland is from Albuquerque, New Mexico. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, Bayou, Beecher’s, Whisky Island, The Carolina Quarterly, and Notre Dame Review. He currently lives in San Juan and is a graduate student at the University of Puerto Rico.