Craft Articles

The Wild Feminine: Five poems by Ada Limón by Dion O’Reilly
Dion O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and a variety of other literary journals and anthologies, including an upcoming Lambda Literary Anthology. Her work has been nominated for Pushcarts, the Intro Journals Project, and was sent to the judges for the Folio Literary Journal Poetry Contest and her first manuscript, Ghost Dog, was a finalist for the Catamaran Book Prize.

Current: An Interview with Rebecca Morgan Frank About Her 2017 Collection Sometimes We’re All Living in A Foreign Country by Allison Pitinii Davis
Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017) and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. She holds an MFA from Ohio State University and fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She’s a PhD student at The University of Tennessee.

The Shattered Novel: Rules of Fragmented Fiction by Samantha Edmonds
Samantha Edmonds’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Day One, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, Indiana Review, Monkeybicycle, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her nonfiction has been published in Bustle, Elite Daily, Ravishly, and more. She currently lives in Knoxville, where she’s an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee. Visit her online at www.samanthaedmonds.com.

Wings and Scythes: An Interview with Kristin Robertson About Craft and Her Debut Poetry Collection, Surgical Wing by Hank Backer
Hank Backer teaches English at the University of Tennessee. He recently graduated from Georgia State University’s creative writing program, where he worked as an assistant editor for Five Points and a poetry editor for New South. He’s been previously published in Red Paint Hill, Loose Change, Sixty Six: A Journal of Sonnet Studies, and The Rectangle.

Death, Art, and Writing by Ryan Masters
Ryan Masters is an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction student at Washington University in St. Louis. His recent essay, “Unless a Kernal of Wheat Falls,” was published in Image and appears in the Notables section of this year’s Best American Essays series.

A Whale is a Whale is a Home is a Lamp: An Interview with Dana Diehl About Craft and Her Debut Story Collection, Our Dreams Might Align by Michelle Ross
Michelle Ross is the author of THERE’S SO MUCH THEY HAVEN’T TOLD YOU, winner of the 2016 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award (Moon City Press 2017). Her writing has appeared in The Common, Cream City Review, Hobart, Moon City Review, and other venues. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she works as a science writer and serves as fiction editor for Atticus Review. More about her writing can be found at michellenross.com.
GRIST CRAFT ARTICLES

What Is Poetry For? | by James McKee
James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His debut poetry collection, The Stargazers, was published in the spring of 2020, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, New World Writing, The Ocotillo Review, Illuminations, CutBank, The Raintown Review, Flyway, Saranac Review, THINK, The Midwest Quarterly, Xavier Review, and elsewhere. He spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.

“That they are there”: On George Oppen and the Role of Poetry | by Jonathan Farmer
Jonathan Farmer is the author of That Peculiar Affirmative: On the Social Life of Poems and the poetry editor and editor in chief of At Length. He teaches middle and high school English, and he lives in Durham, NC.

Poets of Dos Lenguas | by Alejandro Lemus-Gomez
Alejandro Lemus-Gomez is a Davies-Jackson Scholar of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge. He was a finalist for the 2020 C.D. Wright Emerging Poet’s Prize and a 2019 Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets fellow. His poetry and academic work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Journal, the Afro-Hispanic Review, storySouth, The Indiana Review Online, and other journals.

Preparing to Write: Outlines in Fiction Writing | by James McNulty
James McNulty holds an MFA in Fiction from VCFA; he’s been managing fiction editor of Driftwood Press for nearly a decade.
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