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.
GRIST CRAFT ARTICLES
If We’re Here Now: Movements Toward the Lyric Essay | by Anna Leahy
Anna Leahy is the author of the nonfiction book Tumor and the poetry collections Aperture and Constituents of Matter. Her work has appeared at Aeon, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and her essays have won top awards from the Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood. She directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chapman University, where she edits the international Tab Journal. See more at www.amleahy.com.
Zoshchenko’s Unstable We: The Tension of Collective Plurals in Soviet Fiction by Alina Stefanescu
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, Poetry Editor for Random Sample Review, Poetry Reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Co-Director of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter. She was nominated for 5 Pushcart Prizes by various journals in 2019. A finalist for the 2019 Kurt Brown AWP Prize, Alina won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize. She still can’t believe (or deserve) any of this. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.
The Issue of Race in Writing by Cynthia Robinson Young
Cynthia Robinson Young, an adjunct professor of Special Education at Covenant College, is also a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. Her work has appeared in journals including The Amistad, Rigorous, The Ekphrastic Review, and Freedom Fiction. She was the Poetry Editor for the 2020 issue of Catalpa: a magazine of Southern perspectives, and named Finalist for her poetry chapbook, Migration, in the 2019 Georgia Author of the Year Awards in her category.
Heartwood by Kimberly Hoff
Kimberly Hoff is an environmental educator and a nature essayist who currently lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. She has been published in Northern Woodlands Magazine and in Explore! (Mass Audubon’s member magazine).
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We read for our ProForma Contest every spring from March 15 – April 30 and for general submissions from May 15 – August 15. Our print issue is published annually with accompanying online content.