Craft Articles
Dorothea Lasky, I Wouldn’t Be a Poet Without You: How Black Life Influenced My Poetics by Katie Condon
Katie Condon is a Poetry Editor at Grist. If you would like to see first hand how her poetry has been influenced by Dorothea Lasky, head to www.katiecondonpoetry.com. To get your own copy of Black Life, visit wwww.wavepoetry.com
What Meditation Did For Me During My MFA by Nancy Zigler
Nancy Zigler is a recent MFA graduate from the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently an Education Specialist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and a past fiction editor of Callaloo and Hot Metal Bridge magazine. She enjoys writing doomed love stories and about her love-hate relationship with Texas. Nancy likes teaching, painting, Pluto, and trekking across desolate cities in search of good pizza. She blogs here.
Say What?: Writing in Regional Accents by Alex Bledsoe
Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (the home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (the birthplace of Tina Turner). He’s been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He now lives in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls, writes before six in the morning and tries to teach his three kids to act like they’ve been to town before. Bledsoe is also the author of the Eddie LaCrosse novels and the Memphis Vampires series.
Ticks by Stephanie Anderson
Stephanie Anderson is a writer living in Boca Raton, Florida. She holds an MFA from Florida Atlantic University, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Chronicle Review, Sweet, Devil’s Lake, Farm and Ranch Living, and others. Her essay “Greyhound” was the 2015 winner of the Payton James Freeman Essay Prize sponsored by The Rumpus, Drake University, and the Freeman family. Stephanie is proud to have grown up in South Dakota, and she recently completed a book on sustainable agriculture.
On Teaching Young Writers: Getting Better, Not Being Good by Jason Linden
Jason Linden teaches English and creative writing in Louisville, KY where he lives with his two children. His debut novel, When the Sparrow Sings, is kicking around out there still. You can find him on Twitter @jasonlinden or visit his website jasonlinden.com.
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.
GRIST CRAFT ARTICLES
The Dark Pages: Updating Patterns of Rape in Fiction by Zoe Marzo
Zoe Marzo is a writer in Los Angeles. She has a B.A. from Antioch University Los Angeles and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She’s a doctoral student in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Popshot Quarterly, Tahoma Literary Review, and other publications.
Chiasmus by Matthew Wimberley
Matthew Wimberley grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Daniel Boone’s Window (LSU, 2020), selected by Dave Smith for the Southern Messenger Poetry series, and All the Great Territories (SIU, 2020), winner of the 2018 Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book award, winner of the Weatherford Award. Winner of the 2015 William Matthews Prize from the Asheville Poetry Review, his work was selected by Mary Szybist for the 2016 Best New Poets Anthology and his writing has appeared most recently in the Poem-a-Day series from the Academy of American Poets. Wimberley received his MFA from NYU where he worked with children at St. Mary’s Hospital as a Starworks Fellow. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, NC.
Cultivating Empathy through Mimetic Forms by Brenna Womer
Brenna Womer is an experimental prose writer, poet, and professor. She is the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and two chapbooks, Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018) and cost of living (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her work has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Shenandoah and a contributing editor for Story Magazine.
Being Nobody, or How I Was Radicalized by Emily Dickinson | by M. Jamie Zuckerman
M Jaime Zuckerman is the author of two chapbooks, most recently Letters to Melville (Ghost Proposal, 2018) as well as poems in BOAAT, Diode, Fairy Tale Review, Hunger Mountain, Palette, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. She serves as the associate editor for Sixth Finch and a senior reader for Ploughshares. She grew up in the woods but now lives and teaches in Boston, MA.
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