Generated by All in One SEO v4.9.6.2, this is an llms.txt file, used by LLMs to index the site. # Grist A Journal of The Literary Arts ## Sitemaps - [XML Sitemap](https://gristjournal.com/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website. ## Posts - [Soulmate As a Verb by Kelsey L. Smoot  ](https://gristjournal.com/2026/04/soulmate-as-a-verb-by-kelsey-l-smoot/) - Reviewed by Bess Cooley | Mar 28, 2026 Dopamine Books, February 2026 Paperback, 120 pages, $16.95 I had the pleasure of hearing Kelsey L. Smoot read his work in a bookstore in the Atlanta area last spring. The room was small, quiet but crowded—in that way poetry readings are meant to be. Smoot had his audience, and - [Could be the last time](https://gristjournal.com/2026/04/could-be-the-last-time/) - Robin LaMer Rahija is the author of Inside Out Egg (Variant Lit 2024). She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky, where she is an administrative assistant in the Department of English. Her poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, FENCE, Spoon River Review, and elsewhere. Robin LaMer Rahija is the author of Inside Out Egg (Variant Lit 2024). She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky, where she is an administrative assistant in the Department of English. Her poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, FENCE, Spoon River Review, and elsewhere. - [INOPERABLE](https://gristjournal.com/2026/04/inoperable/) - Anna Antongiorgi(she/her) is a poet, choreographer, and dancer. She earned her BA in English and Theatre, Dance, and Media at Harvard, followed by an MFA in Poetry at the New School. Her poetry chapbook refinding the rules of gravity(Finishing Line Press, July 2021), was featured in Dance Magazine and included in Flight Path Dance Project’s curriculum. Her original choreopoem, SUNDAY, was presented at the TADA! Theater in October 2022. Individual poems of hers have been featured in The Inquisitive Eater and Big Windows Review. She lives in Brooklyn, works as a freelance choreographer, and dances with the Brooklyn Ballet. You can find her on instagram, @annaantongiorgi. - [When He Was Alive](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/when-he-was-alive/) - Julie A. Cox received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota, where she was an Edelstein-Keller poetry fellow. A finalist for the Loft Mentorship Series and Writers@Work competition, she has poems published or forthcoming in Cream City Review, Failbetter, Juke Joint Magazine, Salamander, and elsewhere. - [Within is a moss of nonlinear relation](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/within-is-a-moss-of-nonlinear-relation/) - Ashleigh A. Allen is a graduate of The New School’s MFA program, and she has been teaching, first in New York City and then in Toronto, since 2010. Currently, she is a researcher, instructor, and Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum & Pedagogy at OISE/ University of Toronto. Her poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in The Malahat Review, PRISM international, the minnesota review, Fourteen Hills, Invisible City, So To Speak Journal, Contemporary Verse 2 and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2024 Writers Trust of Canada Bronwen Wallace Award for poetry and was longlisted for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. - [DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/department-of-the-air-force/) - Brenna Womer (she/they) is a queer, childfree, Latine prose writer and poet. She is the author of Unbrained (FlowerSong Press, 2023), Honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and two chapbooks. Her writing across genres has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, teaching in the MFA program at California State University, Fresno. - [Legion](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/legion/) - Katherine Indermaur is the author of 'I|I' (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and the 2023 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and two chapbooks. She serves as an editor for Sugar House Review. Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, Frontier Poetry, the Journal, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. - [As the Sun Goes Down](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/as-the-sun-goes-down/) - Javier Sandoval grew up in the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico and studied under Forrest Gander and John Wideman at Brown University. He now teaches at the University of Alabama where he also served as Poetry Editor of Black Warrior Review. His work has appeared in Narrative, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Massachusetts Review, and Southeast Review among others, and he's been a finalist for awards from Iowa Review, Pinch, and Ninth Letter, and the recipient of Frontier Poetry's Global Poetry Prize and swamp pink's Indigenous Writers Award. His chapbook, Blue Moon Looming, was recently reviewed by National Book Award nominee José Olivarez as 'poetry for the unruly, and yes, the brilliant among us.' But mostly, he loves to smoke on the stoop with his lady. - [The Flatlander](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/the-flatlander/) - Courtney Pasko is a writer and public library worker. Originally from rural Pennsylvania, she currently resides in Baltimore with her husband and their cat, Poe. Her work has previously appeared in HAD, hex literary, and The Dodge. Read more or get in touch at courtneypasko.com. - [Tall Cowboy](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/tall-cowboy/) - Scott Brennan, a writer and photographer, divides his time between Miami, Florida, and Vermont. Recent work has appeared in The Hopkins Review, River Styx, Columbia Journal, Harvard Review, and Smithsonian. The recipient of the Scotti Merrill Award, his most recent book, Raft Made of Seagull Feathers, appeared with Main Street Rag Press. - [Make it Dirty](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/make-it-dirty/) - Christopher Gonzalez is the author of the story collection I’m Not Hungry but I Could Eat (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2021). He is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and lives in Brooklyn. He can be found most places online, @livesinpages. - [Directions for After Care: Biopsy by Kami Westhoff](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/directions-for-after-care-biopsy-by-kami-westhoff/) - Kami Westhoff is the author of the story collection The Criteria, and four poetry chapbooks, including Sacral, recent winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Prize. She teaches Creative Writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. - [The Vocabulary of Violence by Alison Colwell](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/the-vocabulary-of-violence-by-alison-colwell/) - Alison Colwell is a writer, mother, domestic violence survivor and community organizer. Her work has been published in several literary journals including: The Humber Literary Review, The Ocotillo Review, Roi Faineant Literary Press, Hippocampus Magazine, and Grist. She lives on Galiano Island, Canada. Connect with her at: alisoncolwell.com. - [The Drive Home](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/the-drive-home/) - Sonya Lara is a biracial Mexican American writer. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech. She was accepted for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop with Leila Chatti, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, the Hambidge Creative Residency Program, the Peter Bullough Foundation Residency, the Blue Mountain Center Residency, the Good Hart Artist Residency, and the Shenandoah National Park Artist-in-Residence Residency. She is the recipient of the Studios Fellowship through The Studios at MASS MoCA. Additionally, she was a finalist for the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship and the Outpost Residency Fellowship, and was shortlisted for The Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award and runner-up in Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her work appeared or is forthcoming in Frontier, The Pinch, X-R-A-Y Lit, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, AGNI, The Los Angeles Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she is the Poetry Editor for Minerva Rising and an Editor-at-Large for Cleaver Magazine. Previously, she was the Managing Editor for The New River, the Managing Editor of the minnesota review, and an Associate Fiction Editor for The Madison Review. Additionally, she has served as a juror for contests and residencies, such as the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Peter Bullough Foundation Residency, and the Blue Mountain Center Residency. For more information, visit www.sonyalara.com. - [Phobia, as Pantoum](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/phobia-as-pantoum/) - Meg Eden Kuyatt teaches creative writing at colleges and writing centers. She is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World” and children’s novels including a 2024 ALA Schneider Family Book Award Honor “Good Different,” and the forthcoming “The Girl in the Wall” (Scholastic, 2025). Find her online at megedenbooks.com. - [Namesake](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/namesake/) - A biracial Asian artist and writer, Addie Tsai (any/all) teaches Creative Writing at William & Mary. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. Addie is the author of Dear Twin and Unwieldy Creatures, which was a Shirley Jackson finalist for Best Novel. She is the features & reviews editor, as well as fiction co-editor, for Anomaly, and the founding editor in chief for just femme & dandy. - [Slam Dancing at the Dead Milkmen Show in the Nyabinghi Dance Hall, 199two](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/slam-dancing-at-the-dead-milkmen-show-in-the-nyabinghi-dance-hall-199two/) - Claudine Moreau is a physics and astronomy professor at Elon University which is in the middle of North Carolina. Her first full length book of poems, "Demise of Pangaea," was published by Main Street Rag in April 2024. She has had work published in PANK, Tar River Poetry, Pinch, The Bitter Oleander, and the 34th Parallel among other places. - [Nightly News](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/nightly-news/) - Patrick Wilcox is the author of Acta from Cathexis Northwest Press and a Pushcart Prize nominee. He studied English and Creative writing at the University of Central Missouri where he also was an Assistant Editor for Pleiades and Editor-in-Chief of Arcade. He is a three-time recipient of the David Baker Award for Poetry, the 2020 honorable mention of Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Poetry, and grand-prize winner of The MacGuffin’s Poet Hunt 26. His work has appeared in Southeast Review, Quarter After Eight, West Trade Review, and Copper Nickel, among others. He currently teaches English Language Arts at William Chrisman High School. - [Bacardi Lips](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/bacardi-lips/) - Alejandro Lucero’s chapbook, Sapello Son, was named the Editors’ Selection for the 2022 Frost Place Competition (Bull City Press, 2024). His latest work appears and is forthcoming in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, The Florida Review, Passages North, RHINO, and The Southern Review. He lives in Baltimore, where he teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and is a managing editor for The Hopkins Review. - [Elizabeth Bishop at the West Side YMCA](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/elizabeth-bishop-at-the-west-side-ymca/) - A.M. Goodhart received their MFA at Western Michigan University. They have published poems in Atlanta Review, Passages North, and Lake Effect. Their collection Neither Kind of Body was a semi-finalist for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize at BOA Editions and the Pamet River Prize at Yes Yes Books. They live in Madison, Wisconsin with Molly Grue (the dog) and Garrett Merz (the human). - [TITLE: Elimination Diet / A Buen Tiempo by Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/title-elimination-diet-a-buen-tiempo-by-yamilette-vizcaino-rivera/) - Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera is a queer Afro-Dominican writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has been longlisted for the First Pages Prize and supported by Sundress Academy for the Arts, Velvet Park, Vermont Studio Center, and others. She’s a Hunter College MFA alum, a mom to her cat Sofrito, and is (perpetually) nearly finished with her memoir. - [A Laicized Priest](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/a-laicized-priest/) - Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023) His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, Brink, Dialogist, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California. - [The night I learn that quantum mechanics says that in trying to observe something you alter it](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/the-night-i-learn-that-quantum-mechanics-says-that-in-trying-to-observe-something-you-alter-it/) - Bleah Patterson (she/her) is a southern, queer writer born and raised in Texas. A current MFA candidate and writing professor. She is a Pushcart nominee, has been a SAFTA and BAC resident, and her various genres of work are featured or forthcoming in Barely South, Write or Die, Phoebe Literature, The Texas Review, Milk Press, Beaver Magazine, Across the Margins, Electric Literature, Queerlings, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. - [The Poet & the City](https://gristjournal.com/2026/03/the-poet-the-city/) - Steven Cordova Steven Cordova’s full-length collection of poetry, Long Distance, was published by Bilingual Review Press in 2010. His poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Journal, New Orleans Review, Notre Dame Review, Los Angeles Review and Pleaides. From San Antonio, TX, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. - [Tennessee Homesick Blues by Kathryn M. Barber](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/tennessee-homesick-blues-by-kate-barber/) - Kathryn M. Barber grew up in the mountains along the Tennessee/Virginia state line. She holds degrees from Mississippi State University, University of North Carolina Wilmington, and Carson-Newman University. Currently, she is the Editorial Director for Press Pause Press and lives on the shores of North Carolina. Her work has appeared in The Masters Review,The Pinch, Blue Earth Review, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. - [Florence by Bess Cooley](https://gristjournal.com/2025/10/florence-by-bess-cooley/) - What Remains: Memory and Erasure in Bess Cooley’s Florence Reviewed by Dr. Kelsey L. SmootSundress Publications, October 15th, 2024Paperback, 78 pages, $16 Everything in Bess Cooley’s Florence is borrowed: the narrator’s pulse, thumping reliably thanks to blood donated by strangers; the love for a wife now gone, rejiggered and gifted to Florence (an inanimate gathering - [Prunus Alleghaniensis](https://gristjournal.com/2025/06/prunus-alleghaniensis/) - Brung up in West-by-God Virginia, Christina Craigo earned BFA and MFA degrees in painting and fine arts in Philadelphia and New York City. After a few decades of teaching, making, and exhibiting art (including a year in India supported by the Fulbright Foundation), she earned an MBA degree and took a more active role in managing a family business. She settled in Boulder, Colorado, and her creative inclinations shifted to writing fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Exposition Review, Hobart, Eclectica, Post Road, and Pembroke Magazine. She is seeking representation for her first novel and developing a second. For more information, please visit christinacraigo.com. - [Parable of Sparrow and Crocodile](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/parable-of-sparrow-and-crocodile/) - Originally from the DC area, Matthew Moniz has poems appearing in or forthcoming from The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Crab Orchard Review, Meridian, Tupelo Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, and minnesota review. His work has been awarded Poetry by the Sea’s Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Crown Contest prize and the SCMLA Poetry Prize. - ["I Write for My Beloveds": An Interview with Javeria Hasnain](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/i-write-for-my-beloveds-an-interview-with-javeria-hasnain/) - Javeria Hasnain is a poet, translator, and educator from Karachi, and the author of SIN (Chestnut Review, 2024). Her poetry and prose have appeared widely, including in Pleiades, Poet Lore, Foglifter, beestung, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Poetry from The New School, and has received fellowships and scholarships from Fulbright, Teachers & Writers, and Sewanee Writers Conference, among others. Shlagha Borah (she/her) is from Assam, India. Her work appears in Poetry Northwest, Cincinnati Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and is an Assistant Editor at The Offing. She's a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist. Her work has been supported by Brooklyn Poets, The Hambidge Center, The Peter Bullough Foundation, VCCA, among others. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India. Her work is available at www.shlaghaborah.com. - [Trees Speak by Li Sian Goh](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/trees-speak-by-li-sian-goh/) - Li Sian Goh is a writer and researcher. Born and raised in Singapore, she now lives in New York, where she is at work on a short story collection and a novel. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Joyland Magazine, swamp pink, and No Tokens, and The Offing. For 2024, she is a Kweli Emerging Writer Fellow and a Periplus Fellow. - [On the Ass by Liza Flum](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/on-the-ass-by-liza-flum/) - Liza Flum is the author of Hover, forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2025. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2020, AGNI, Narrative, Meridian, Washington Square Review, Lambda Literary, and Zócalo Public Square. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming individual artist grant, and her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Saltonstall Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Summer Words, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She holds an MFA in poetry from Cornell and PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. She currently teaches creative writing at Rochester Institute of Technology. - [20 Ways to Start a Poem by Rebecca Danelly](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/20-ways-to-start-a-poem-by-rebecca-danelly/) - Rebecca Danelly holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University and is currently co-editor of poetry at “table//Feast Mag.” Her poems have been published in the anthology, Chaos, Dive, Reunion by Mutabilis Press, Defunkt Magazine, and in numerous other journals and anthologies. She is a mother and grandmother, a United States Air Force veteran, and teaches college writing in Houston on former Akokisa, Atakapa, Karankawa, and Sana land where she resides with her partner, Jeremy, and Daisy, the oversized chihuahua. - [Maytag by Chris Wiberg](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/maytag-by-chris-wiberg/) - Chris Wiberg is a Chicago-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in journals including Fiction, Crab Orchard Review, Broad River Review, Folio, and Ninth Letter. He has taught creative writing at the University of Illinois and the Writer's Studio at the University of Chicago Graham School. Professionally, he is a developmental editor in the medical field. - [Same by Blake Goodwin](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/same-by-blake-goodwin/) - Blake Goodwin is a fiction writer. He lives in Los Angeles, California. - ["Gum" and "Anything to Mess it Up" by Allison Field Bell](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/gum-and-anything-to-mess-it-up-by-allison-field-bell/) - Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she holds an MFA from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, Without Woman or Body, forthcoming 2025 from Finishing Line Press and the creative nonfiction chapbook, Edge of the Sea, forthcoming 2025 from Cutbank. Allison's prose appears or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com. - [Ghazal Across a Series of Construction Lines Marked A' Through G' by Shou Jie Eng](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/ghazal-across-a-series-of-construction-lines-marked-a-through-g-by-shou-jie-eng/) - Shou Jie Eng is an architectural designer and writer. Originally from Singapore, he runs Left Field Projects, a design and research practice located in Hartford, CT. His writing has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Cathexis Northwest, Softblow, Speculative Nonfiction, and the anthology New Singapore Poetries. He teaches drawing and representation at the Rhode Island School of Design. - ["Forsythia" and "Act of Some Minor God" by Kate Welsh](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/forsythia-and-act-of-some-minor-god-by-kate-welsh/) - Born and raised along the Mississippi River, Kate Welsh now lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BA from Barnard College and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where she was the Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow in 2021. In addition to Grist, her work can be found in or is forthcoming from Variant Lit, Epiphany, SWWIM Every Day, and West Trade Review, among others. She is the co-founder/co-editor of The Swannanoa Review. www.kate-welsh.com - [Dear Honeybees, the Wind Unhinges by Dawn Terpstra](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/dear-honeybees-the-wind-unhinges-by-dawn-terpstra/) - Dawn Terpstra is a poet, writer and beekeeper from Iowa. Her journal publications include Cities of the Plains: An Anthology of Iowa Poets and Artists, Pratik: Magazine of Contemporary Literature, Midwest Quarterly, Halfway Down the Stairs, Verse Daily, 2River, Ekphrastic Review and SWWIM. She is the author of a chapbook Songs from the Summer Kitchen. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop. She is the Poetry Editor of River Heron Review. Learn more at dawnterpstra.com. - [Snakes All the Way Down by Lou Terlikowski](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/snakes-all-the-way-down-by-lou-terlikowski/) - Lou Terlikowski is an Appalachian poet who cannot stop thinking about family, inheritance, and the beauty of her home. She loves the mountains and is grateful for the time she spent earning an MFA at the University of Alabama and the University of Oregon. Her work can be found in Blue Earth Review, Screen Door Review, Psychopomp, and in small piles throughout her house. - [Wedded, at Last, to the Idea of Weeds by Rosanne Singer](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/wedded-at-last-to-the-idea-of-weeds-by-rosanne-singer/) - Rosanne Singer been a teaching artist in the Maryland schools and part of small arts teams working with wounded warriors and their families at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and with pediatric patients at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC. Currently she is getting her MFA at the University of Baltimore. Recent work has appeared online in The Baltimore Fishbowl and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine and is forthcoming in Allium and 1-70 Review. Social media handles are Twitter: @poetsinger and Instagram: @rosannesinger5. - [This Map of the Profane by Erin Elkins Radcliffe](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/this-map-of-the-profane-by-erin-elkins-radcliffe/) - Erin Elkins Radcliffe is a third-generation oldest child and the author of "Station of Rain" (dancing girl press) and "Bottomland" (Sundress Publications). Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit, Tupelo Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Indiana, she now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with her family. - [self portrait as saint dymphna](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/self-portrait-as-saint-dymphna/) - MJ Lu (she/they) is a Southeast Asian American poet who hails from North Carolina. Her work was previously published in MudRoom, Bulb Culture Collective, and Von Aegir Literary. - [How to Love the Natural Sciences](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/how-to-love-the-natural-sciences/) - Based in West Texas, Jennifer Loyd is a poet, translator, and a former editor for Copper Nickel, West Branch, and Sycamore Review. For her poetry exploring the archives of Rachel Carson, she has received a Stadler Fellowship, as well as research grants from Purdue University, where she earned an MFA. Her poems and prose, which explore the intersection between private voice and public narratives, appear in Best New Poets, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, Swamp Pink, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. - [One Winter in Vermont](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/one-winter-in-vermont/) - Emily Light is a poet, educator, and mother living in northern New Jersey. Her poetry can be found in such journals as Inch, Salt Hill, Cherry Tree, Cumberland River Review, and RHINO, among others. - [MY GRANDMOTHER AFTER KOREA](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/my-grandmother-after-korea/) - Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai'i and the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books 2025) and Animal Logic (Bull City Press 2025). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Arah edits at Surging Tide Magazine and is pursuing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Cincinnati. Catch her at arahko.com. - [We Open on a Field](https://gristjournal.com/2025/04/we-open-on-a-field/) - Michaela Brown is a Midwest transplant currently teaching English in Vigo, Spain. She is the first place recipient of the 2020 Marjorie Stover Short Story Prize and has previously been published in Unstamatic Magazine, Gone Lawn, The Daily Drunk, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @mikienbrown. - [#7 Serpentine](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/7-serpentine/) - Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in Iowa where she likes to rock climb. She is the author of four full length poetry collections and twelve chapbooks. Her chapbook Teeth Have a Hardness Scale of 5 is forthcoming from Sputnik and Fizzle. Recent work can be seen at or is forthcoming from The Pinch, Cleaver, Yalobusha Review, Zone 3, and Grist. She also hosts an indie reading series sponsored by Iowa City Poetry called Today You Are Perfect. Find her online at jennifermacbainstephens.com. - [Nanny](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/nanny/) - Sumita Mukherji's work has appeared in Witness, Failbetter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College and her work has been supported by a Bread Loaf scholarship. She is working on a novel. Find out more at sumitamukherji.com. - [When I Grow Up I Want to Be the Culmination of Things I Took for Granted](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/when-i-grow-up-i-want-to-be-the-culmination-of-things-i-took-for-granted/) - Hiba Tahir is a YA author and 2022 graduate of the University of Arkansas MFA, where she received the Carolyn Walton Cole Endowment Fund, the J. Chester and Freda S. Johnson Graduate Fellowship, and the James T. Whitehead Award. She is a 2020 recipient of an Artists 360 Grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance and a 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council. - [Ghosts Are Only Real If You Say Their Name](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/ghosts-are-only-real-if-you-say-their-name/) - Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn is a Senior Features Editor at The Rumpus. Her debut essay collection, A Fish Growing Lungs (2020), was a finalist for the Believer Awards in nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Kenyon Writers' Workshop, and she teaches creative writing at Warren Wilson College. - [White Boys in Florida](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/white-boys-in-florida/) - Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn is a Senior Features Editor at The Rumpus. Her debut essay collection, A Fish Growing Lungs (2020), was a finalist for the Believer Awards in nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Kenyon Writers' Workshop, and she teaches creative writing at Warren Wilson College. - [Aaron's Trash](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/aarons-trash/) - Nitya Gupta (she/her) is a fiction writer from Chicago. She's currently an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was a 2023 Tin House Scholar and a finalist for the 2022 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review. - [Most Non-Compete Clauses are Legally Unenforceable](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/most-non-compete-clauses-are-legally-unenforceable/) - Robert Walikis is a writer, playwright, poet, and songwriter. His short stories "Terrafir" and "Peak Child" were semifinalists for the North American Review's 2023 and 2022 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prizes. His very short story "Funerary Rumors" was second runner-up for PRISM International's 2022 Grouse Grind Lit Prize for V Short Forms. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Post Road, PRISM International, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. Rob lives in Maine with his wife-partner-writer Diana Mullins. He makes maps and tells stories. Read more at www.robertwalikis.com. - [Origin Story](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/origin-story-2/) - Danielle Cadena Deulen is the author of four books. Her most recent poetry collection is Desire Museum (BOA Editions, 2023). Her previous books include Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us,which won the Barrow Street Book Contest; The Riots, which won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award; and - [We Could Fix You](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/we-could-fix-you/) - Alan Sincic teaches at Valencia College. His fiction has appeared in the New Ohio Review, Greensboro Review, Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere/ His short stories have won contests sponsored by the Texas Observer, Driftwood Press, Prism Review, Westchester, American Writer's Review, Broad River Review, and Pulp Literature. The opening chapter of his novel, The Slapjack, won the 2021 First Pages Prize. - [Take Good Care](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/take-good-care/) - Melanie Pierce holds an MFA in fiction from Stony Brook University, where she was a BookEnds fellow. Her stories and interviews have appeared in CRAFT, Electric Literature, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute and serves as the reviews editor for The New Territory magazine. "Take Good Care" is her debut creative non-fiction publication. - [If I Erase My Body](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/if-i-erase-my-body/) - Jennifer Whalen (she/her) is a poet & educator from the Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati, Ohio area. She is the author of the poetry collection Eveningful (2024), which was selected by Rick Barot as the winner of the 2022 Lightscatter Press Prize. Her poems can be found in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, New South, Glass: A Journal for Poetry, The Boiler, & elsewhere. She previously served as writer-in-residence at Texas State University’s Clark House and currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Springfield. - [Labor Day, 1961, Last Poolside Event](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/labor-day-1961-last-poolside-event/) - Among John Tabb DuVal's awards for verse translation are a major NEA and two awards from the Avcademy of American Poets. His Song of Roland was a finalist for the PEN Translation Award in 2013. Fabliaux, Fair and Foul (translations of Medieval French comic verse tales) has been reissued twice and a reissue of From Adam to Adam: Seven Old French Plays is forthcoming. - [my ruins](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/my-ruins/) - Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic's Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic's Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Jerry has held residencies at MadCowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and is a Helix Fellow with Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc, IG: @apophatic_attic. - [essay on distance](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/essay-on-distance/) - Juliana Chang is a Taiwanese American poet. Her debute poetry chapbook, INHERITANCE, was the winner of the 2020 Vella Prize and published with Paper Nautilus Press in 2021. Juliana's work appears or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Chestnut Review, diode poetry journal, and other journals. She is a student at Harvard Law School, where she is a Presidential Public Service Fellow and an editor of the ,em.Harvard Law Review. - [Bliss as a Metaphor for the Catenary Curve](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/bliss-as-a-metaphor-for-the-catenary-curve/) - Michael T. Lawson studied poetry and biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earning a PhD in the latter and fostering a love of the former. His work has been published in Tar River Poetry, Ninth Letter, Nimrod International Journal, and Four Way Review, among others. He currently resides in Boston, MA, where he works as a data analyst. - [The Judas Tree](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/the-judas-tree/) - Erica Wright is the author of seven books, including the poetry collection All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned (Black Lawrence Press) and the essay collection Snake (Bloomsbury). She was the poetry editor of Guernica for more than a decade. - [The Ferry](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/the-ferry/) - John Poch's most recent books are God's Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and the Christian Imagination (St. Augustine's Press 2022) and Notes on the Poet (Measure Press 2023). - [Not Everyone Gets To Go To Tennessee](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/not-everyone-gets-to-go-to-tennessee/) - Andrew Furman is a professor of English at Florida Atlantic University and teaches in its MFA program in Creative Writing. Recent stories and essays have appeared in such publications as Prairie Schooner, Santa Monica Review, Terrain.org, and Willow Springs. His books include the novels Jewfish (Little Curlew Press, 2020) and Goldens are Here (Green Writers Press, 2018), and the memoir, Bitten: My Unexpected Love Affair with Florida (University Press of Florida, 2014), which was named a finalist for the ASLE Environmental Book Award. You can find him at andrewfurmanwriter.com. - [Good With Animals](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/good-with-animals/) - Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn is a Senior Features Editor at The Rumpus. Her debut essay collection, A Fish Growing Lungs (2020), was a finalist for the Believer Awards in nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Kenyon Writers' Workshop, and she teaches creative writing at Warren Wilson College. - [Circle of Instruction](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/circle-of-instruction/) - Circle of Instruction Gage Saylor There are two types of people in this world: Jeopardy people and Wheel people. The Roberts are Jeopardy people. It’s 7:27 p.m. on a Wednesday. Dalton, the Roberts’ only son, is home for Thanksgiving break. A trio of La-Z-Boy recliners sit carefully angled around the entertainment center. It bends from - [Tell Them You Love Them in Person](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/tell-them-you-love-them-in-person/) - Tell Them You Love Them in Person Zachary Kocanda The day before Valentine’s Day, the sign above the expressway read: Texting is tacky. Tell them you love them in person. The Illinois Department of Transportation was more romantic than me. I liked to hide behind my phone and send messages on dating apps, bad flirting, - [Dream of a Unified Field](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/dream-of-a-unified-field/) - Josh Emmons has published two novels with Scribner and a short story collection with Dzanc Books, plus fiction in ZYZZYVA, Ecotone, Chicago Quarterly Review, Santa Monica Review, West Branch, The American Scholar, Joyland, The New York Times and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles. - [Angels](https://gristjournal.com/2024/05/angels/) - Susannah Sheffer's poetry collections are This Kind of Knowing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2013), Break and Enter (Kelsay Books, 2021), and a new book forthcoming from Cornerstone Press's Portage Poetry Series in early 2025. Her nonfiction books include Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys (Vanderbilt University Press, 2013). She lives in Western Massachusetts. - [Poetic Endings: Nailing Down the Threshold by Dia Calhoun and Deborah Bacharach](https://gristjournal.com/2024/01/poetic-endings-nailing-down-the-threshold-by-dia-calhoun-and-debby-bacharach/) - Deborah Bacharach (left photo) is the author of two full length poetry collections Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her poems, book reviews and essays have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters, Poet Lore and The Writer’s Chronicle among many others, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is currently a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review and a mentor with PEN America. She lives in Seattle. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com. Dia Calhoun (right photo) is the author of seven young adult novels, including two verse novels, After the River the Sun and Eva of the Farm (Atheneum, 2013, 2012). She has won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award; published poems and essays in The Nashville Review, The Writer’s Chronicle; EcoTheo Review; MORIA Literary Magazine; And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow: An International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine, and others. She co-founded readergirlz, recipient of The National Book Foundation Innovations in Reading Prize and taught creative writing at Seattle University and Stony Brook University. More at diacalhoun.com. - [Risking the Hug: An Examination of Sentimentality and Sincerity in Lars and the Real Girl by Daniel Abiva Hunt](https://gristjournal.com/2024/01/risking-the-hug-an-examination-of-sentimentality-and-sincerity-in-lars-and-the-real-girl-by-daniel-abiva-hunt/) - Daniel Abiva Hunt holds an MFA from the University of Houston. His stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, The Masters Review, CRAFT, Maine Review, Portland Review, and elsewhere. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches and studies fiction. - [The Manananggal as Mythmaking by Melanie Manuel](https://gristjournal.com/2023/12/the-manananggal-as-mythmaking-by-melanie-manuel/) - Melanie H. Manuel is a Filipina American poet. She obtained her BA from UC Davis in English and Asian American Studies and is currently attending SDSU for her MFA in poetry. She is a recipient of the Prebys Creative Writing Scholarship, the Master’s Research Fellowship, and most recently, the Sarah B. Marsh-Rebelo Scholarship. She is the Production Editor for PIOnline and teaches in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies department. Her work has been published by Third Iris Zine and North American Review, and she has forthcoming work with minnesota review, Porkbelly Press, and Zone 3. - [god mornings, tiger nights by Nuha Fariha](https://gristjournal.com/2023/12/god-mornings-tiger-nights-by-nuha-fariha/) - Reviewed by Shlagha Borah | December 7, 2023Game Over Books, 2023Paperback, $18 Girlhood, nationhood, and an identity smeared across borders – Nuha Fariha’s collection of poems, god mornings, tiger nights, asks us to interrogate how much of a woman is her country, how much of her home is her body. She asks, over and over - [All Hat, No Cattle by Mariah Rigg](https://gristjournal.com/2023/08/all-hat-no-cattle-by-mariah-rigg/) - Reviewed by Sarah Harshbarger | August 8, 2023Bull City Press, 2023Paperback, $4.99 Mariah Rigg’s chapbook All Hat, No Cattle is a masterclass in “Compressions,” the title of its fifth micro-essay. The collection moves easily through time and space, using vivid images and keen observations as modes of transport. The title comes from the narrator’s partner, - [Maybe This Is What I Deserve by Tucker Leighty-Phillips](https://gristjournal.com/2023/07/maybe-this-is-what-i-deserve-by-tucker-leighty-phillips/) - Reviewed by Shlagha Borah | July 21, 2023 Split/Lip Press, 2023 Paperback, $12 Tucker Leighty-Phillips’ flash fiction chapbook, Maybe This Is What I Deserve, is like blue cheese: it demands your undivided attention. It isn’t for quick, on-the-go consumption but a collection to be relished, slowly, with utmost care. The collection starts with two epigraphs, - [The First of June](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/the-first-of-june/) - Carolyn Zaikowski is the author of the hybrid novel In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Everyday Feminism, DIAGRAM, West Branch, Dusie, Huffington Post, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and currently works in Western Massachusetts as an English professor and death doula. Find her online at www.carolynzaikowski.com. - [Alive in Ohio](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/alive-in-ohio-wheeler/) - Abby Wheeler lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was a 2021 finalist for the Great Midwest Writing Contest, and has work published or forthcoming in SWWIM, The Free State Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, In the Roots, is available from Finishing Line Press. - [Ode to History](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/ode-to-history/) - Campbell McGrath is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems, and XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in scores of literary journals and anthologies, as well as the New Yorker, Atlantic Magazine, Harper's and the New York Times. McGrath's writing has been recognized with some of the most prestigious awards in American letters, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award." He lives with his wife in Miami Beach, and teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University. - [& I Cringe Every Time I Hear the Word 'Womb'](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/i-cringe-every-time-i-hear-the-word-womb/) - Megan Neville (she/her) is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets (Poets.org), Cherry Tree, West Branch, Pleiades, Wildness, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection The Fallow will be published by Trio House Press in 2022. She is an editorial assistant for Split Lip Magazine, and you can find her on Twitter @MegNev. - [Heroic Head of Pierre de Wissant, One of the Burghers of Calais (1886) by Auguste Rodin](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/heroic-head-of-pierre-de-wissant-one-of-the-burghers-of-calais-1886-by-auguste-rodin/) - Megan Neville (she/her) is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets (Poets.org), Cherry Tree, West Branch, Pleiades, Wildness, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection The Fallow will be published by Trio House Press in 2022. She is an editorial assistant for Split Lip Magazine, and you can find her on Twitter @MegNev. - [After All, I Promised to Read St. Augustine](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/after-all-i-promised-to-read-st-augustine/) - Megan Neville (she/her) is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets (Poets.org), Cherry Tree, West Branch, Pleiades, Wildness, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection The Fallow will be published by Trio House Press in 2022. She is an editorial assistant for Split Lip Magazine, and you can find her on Twitter @MegNev. - [Our Lady of the Fallow](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/our-lady-of-the-fallow/) - Megan Neville (she/her) is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets (Poets.org), Cherry Tree, West Branch, Pleiades, Wildness, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection The Fallow will be published by Trio House Press in 2022. She is an editorial assistant for Split Lip Magazine, and you can find her on Twitter @MegNev. - [Confessional to Famous Iranian Pop Singer Dariush II](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/confessional-to-famous-iranian-pop-singer-dariush-ii/) - Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work has appeared in Indiana Review, Barrow Street, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Florida Review, Brevity, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). Atefat-Peckham lives in Huntington, West Virginia and studies Creative Writing at Harvard College. - [Niceville](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/niceville/) - Collin Callahan was born in Illinois. His first collection of poetry, Thunderbird Inn, won the 2022 Minds on Fire Open Prize. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, SLICE, Cream City Review, Hobart, Carve Magazine, Witness, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Collin holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas—where he was awarded the 2017 Walton Family Fellowship in Poetry—and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He is the recipient of the 2021 Bat City Review Editors' Prize in poetry. - [beach house](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/beach-house/) - Rachel B. Glaser is the author of the novel Paulina & Fran, the short story collection Pee On Water, and the poetry books MOODS and HAIRDO. Glaser studied painting at RISD and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Umass-Amherst. In 2017, she was on Granta's list of Best of Young American Novelists. Her fiction has been anthologized in New American Stories. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and teaches at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. - [Learning to eat: an essay in twelve dishes and one dinner party](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/learning-to-eat-an-essay-in-twelve-dishes-and-one-dinner-party/) - Éireann Lorsung makes pictures, texts, rooms, and clothes, and spends joyful time thinking in the company of others. Milkweed Editions published Music for Landing Planes By, Her book, and The Century; you can find out more at ohbara.com. - [Elegy Written in a City Fish Market](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/elegy-written-in-a-city-fish-market/) - Dan Huppman is a writer based in Philadelphia. His work can be found in the Journal and TINGE Magazine. He plays drums in the bands Puriden and Petrol. He is happy to be here, thanks. - [Off](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/off/) - Jordan Hill is an adjunct professor at Florida International University where he teaches creative writing and rhetoric. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Islandia Journal, Whale Road Review, and The MacGuffin. - [Homebody](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/homebody/) - Jessica Dealing's work has been published in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at Florida International University. - [The Thief](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/the-thief/) - Joseph Rakowski is a fiction writer. His short stories have been published by The Carolina Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, The Normal School, New Ohio Review, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. - [Luisa Anselmi as Saul at Damascus](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/luisa-anselmi-as-saul-at-damascus/) - Danielle Rose is the author of two short books: at first & then and The History of Mountains. Her work can be found at Palette, Hobart & Pithead Chapel. - [Truth and Violence Carved My Baby Out of Stone](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/truth-and-violence-carved-my-baby-out-of-stone/) - Jordan Escobar is a writer in Jamaica Plain, MA. He is a 2022 Djanikian Scholar in Poetry. Recent work can be found in Zone 3, Willow Springs, Colorado Review and elsewhere. He currently divides his time teaching at Emerson College and Babson College, and working as a professional beekeeper. - [Origin Story](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/origin-story/) - Paul Christiansen received his BA at St. Olaf College and his MFA at Florida International University. He is the author of Beneath Saigon’s Chò Nâu (Phương Nam Publishing House), a bilingual collection of essays and the co-editor of A Rainy Night in the City (Hanoi Publishing House), a bilingual anthology of short stories. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Best New Poets, Pleiades, Quarter After Eight, Threepenny Review, Zone Three and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow, he currently resides in Saigon and works as content director for Saigoneer. - [How Did It Get This Bad?](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/how-did-it-get-this-bad/) - Paul Christiansen received his BA at St. Olaf College and his MFA at Florida International University. He is the author of Beneath Saigon’s Chò Nâu (Phương Nam Publishing House), a bilingual collection of essays and the co-editor of A Rainy Night in the City (Hanoi Publishing House), a bilingual anthology of short stories. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Best New Poets, Pleiades, Quarter After Eight, Threepenny Review, Zone Three and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow, he currently resides in Saigon and works as content director for Saigoneer. - [New Year of the Mind](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/new-year-of-the-mind/) - Jonathan Dubow has recent work in the Crab Creek Review, Coal Hill Review, Ethel Zine, Jewish Currents and elsewhere. He lives in Schenectady, NY and teaches in the department of Writing and Critical Inquiry at the University at Albany-SUNY. - [Of all the things I am guilty of,](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/of-all-the-things-i-am-guilty-of/) - Jesse Millner’s poems and prose have appeared most recently in the Blue Mountain Review and Book of Matches. His work was included in The Best American Poetry 2013 and Best Small Fictions 2020. His latest poetry book, Memory’s Blue Sedan, was released in March 2020 by Hysterical Books of Tallahassee, Florida. Jesse teaches writing courses at Florida Gulf Coast University and lives in Estero, Florida, with his dog, Lucy. - [Just Beyond the Tree Line](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/just-beyond-the-tree-line/) - Jesse Millner’s poems and prose have appeared most recently in the Blue Mountain Review and Book of Matches. His work was included in The Best American Poetry 2013 and Best Small Fictions 2020. His latest poetry book, Memory’s Blue Sedan, was released in March 2020 by Hysterical Books of Tallahassee, Florida. Jesse teaches writing courses at Florida Gulf Coast University and lives in Estero, Florida, with his dog, Lucy. - [Mud](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/mud/) - Bryan Head is a poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Georgia Review, the New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he teaches 11th Grade English. - [Basement](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/basement/) - Ellene Glenn Moore is an American writer living in Zürich. She is the author of How Blood Works (Kent State University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Ellene’s poetry, lyric non-fiction, and critical work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Brevity, West Branch, and elsewhere. Find her at elleneglennmoore.com. - [Aubade Between Homes](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/aubade-between-homes/) - Ellene Glenn Moore is an American writer living in Zürich. She is the author of How Blood Works (Kent State University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Ellene’s poetry, lyric non-fiction, and critical work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Brevity, West Branch, and elsewhere. Find her at elleneglennmoore.com. - [Eternal City](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/eternal-city/) - Aiden Heung(He/They) is a Chinese poet born in a Tibetan Autonomous Town, currently living in Shanghai. He holds an MA from Tongji University. His words appeared or are forthcoming in The Australian Poetry Journal, The Missouri Review, New York Quarterly, Poet Lore, Parentheses, The Columbia Journal, among other places. Read more about him at www.aidenheung.com. He can be found at twitter @aidenheung - [At First There Was Nothing](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/at-first-there-was-nothing/) - Joe Woodward lives and works in Claremont, California. He is the author of ALIVE INSIDE THE WRECK: A Biography of Nathanael West (O/R Books, New York) and a four-time finalist and two-time winner of a Los Angeles Press Club Award. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in Brick, Carve, The Chariton Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Passages North and elsewhere. He received his MFA from Brooklyn College and is online at www.joewoodward.net. - [Tilting](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/tilting/) - Joe Woodward lives and works in Claremont, California. He is the author of ALIVE INSIDE THE WRECK: A Biography of Nathanael West (O/R Books, New York) and a four-time finalist and two-time winner of a Los Angeles Press Club Award. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in Brick, Carve, The Chariton Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Passages North and elsewhere. He received his MFA from Brooklyn College and is online at www.joewoodward.net. - [$14,000 Watch](https://gristjournal.com/2023/04/14000-watch/) - Campbell McGrath is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems, and XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in scores of literary journals and anthologies, as well as the New Yorker, Atlantic Magazine, Harper's and the New York Times. McGrath's writing has been recognized with some of the most prestigious awards in American letters, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award." He lives with his wife in Miami Beach, and teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University. - [Delightfully Weird by Tommy Dean](https://gristjournal.com/2023/02/delightfully-weird-by-tommy-dean/) - Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021), and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He lives in Indiana where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and numerous litmags. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter. - [Wristwatches and Miniature Clocks by Daniel Abiva Hunt](https://gristjournal.com/2023/02/wristwatches-and-miniature-clocks-by-daniel-abiva-hunt/) - Daniel Abiva Hunt is a writer from South Jersey. His stories and essays appear or are forthcoming in The Masters Review, CRAFT, The Maine Review, Portland Review, and elsewhere. He previously served as assistant fiction editor for Gulf Coast, and he is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches and studies fiction. - [On Reality, Fiction and Neurodiversity by Victoria Costello](https://gristjournal.com/2023/02/on-reality-fiction-and-neurodiversity-by-victoria-costello/) - Victoria Costello is a writer and teacher of memoir and auto-fiction based in Ashland, Oregon. Her debut novel, Orchid Child, forthcoming from Between the Lines Publishing in June, 2023, is based on the three-generation family story she first told in her memoir, A Lethal Inheritance (Prometheus Books/2012). As a science journalist, she's written feature articles for Scientific American MIND, Psychology Today, Brain World, and Huffington Post. She earned an Emmy Award as a writer/producer of documentary films, including This Island Earth and Wolf Nation, shown on PBS, Discovery, and The Disney Channel. Themes of ancestry, neurodiversity, and mysticism reoccur in her latest writings and workshops. Visit her website, victoriacostelloauthor.com for contact info and to read more of her work. - [Big Break: A Multiple-Choice Test](https://gristjournal.com/2023/01/big-break-a-multiple-choice-test/) - Sandra Beasley is the author of Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, and A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays. She is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Made to Explode, which won the Housatonic Book Award, and she edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Photo credit: Andrew Lightman - ["Where in the body do I begin": Grass and Hunger in Layli Long Soldier's Whereas by James Ciano](https://gristjournal.com/2023/02/where-in-the-body-do-i-begin-grass-and-hunger-in-layli-long-soldiers-whereas-by-james-ciano/) - James Ciano holds an MFA from New York University, and has received support from the Vermont Studio Center and The Community of Writers. His poems have recently appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Quarterly West, and Nashville Review. Originally from New York, he lives in Los Angeles, California where he is currently a Provost Fellow at the University of Southern California, pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. - [This Is Not a Day at the Fair: On Poetry and PTSD by Jennifer Metsker](https://gristjournal.com/2023/01/this-is-not-a-day-at-the-fair-on-poetry-and-ptsd-by-jennifer-metsker/) - Jennifer Metsker’s poetry collection Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise was published by New Issues Press. Her poetry has appeared in Beloit, Rhino, Birdfeast, Gulf Coast, The Cream City Review and other journals. Her audio poetry has been featured on the BBC Radio’s Short Cuts. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is the Writing Coordinator at the Stamps School of Art and Design. - [of being neighbors by Daniel Biegelson](https://gristjournal.com/2022/09/of-being-neighbors-by-daniel-biegelson/) - Reviewed by Alison Hramiak | September 16, 2022Ricochet Editions, 2021Small Press Distribution, $15 At first glance of being neighbors looks like a book that concentrates on what its title suggests –neighborliness. A fleeting glimpse at the contents might have you thinking that it is structured almost like a report with subheadings. Do not be fooled - [Scale Model of a Country at Dawn by John Sibley Williams](https://gristjournal.com/2022/09/scale-model-of-a-country-at-dawn-by-john-sibley-williams/) - Reviewed by Alison Hramiak | September 2, 2022Cider Press Review, 2022Paperback, 85 pp. $18.95 A Scale Model of a Country at Dawn by John Sibley Williams looks at the world through a different lens – a lens that feels like it came from another world. It comprises a grounded series of poems reflecting on love - [The Tillable Land by Melva Sue Priddy](https://gristjournal.com/2022/07/the-tillable-land-by-melva-sue-priddy/) - Reviewed by Andrew Lee Butler | July 16, 2022Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2022Paperback, 91 pp. $17.00 There is a line in The Tillable Land—a simple, straightforward line—that resonates to me as a working thesis for Melva Sue Priddy’s fine collection of poetry. In “Ode to the Dish Sink,” the speaker recalls how the thankless task of - [Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos](https://gristjournal.com/2022/06/body-work-the-radical-power-of-personal-narrative-by-melissa-febos/) - Reviewed by Sara Biggs Chaney | June 21, 2022 Catapult Press, 2022 Paperback, 171 pages, $16.95 Melissa Febos begins Body Work with an insistence: personal writing is not trivial, craftless, or selfish. On the contrary, it might be the only writing really worth our time. By the end of the book’s first essay, “In Praise of Navel - [Deadheading and Other Stories by Beth Gilstrap](https://gristjournal.com/2022/06/deadheading-and-other-stories-by-beth-gilstrap/) - Reviewed by Mariah Rigg | June 14, 2022Red Hen Press, 2021Paperback, 232 pages, $22.95 Beth Gilstrap’s Deadheading and Other Stories is a love letter to the Carolinas, a collection that takes the much-documented recession and remakes it through the eyes of the Southern working class. As someone who did not grow up in North America, - [How To Fix Everything](https://gristjournal.com/2022/06/how-to-fix-everything/) - J Lazar is a writer and co-founder of the Field Academiy, a school that seeks to make learning and life indistinguishable. She is currently working on a family memoir exploring whiteness and erasure through stories of alchemy and migration. Jen is grateful for the best mammals she knows: her partner, Daniel, her daughter, Artemis Grace, and their provocative housecat, Radio. Keep up with J's work at jenlazar.com. - [Bones](https://gristjournal.com/2022/06/bones/) - J. Kasper Kramer is the author of the critically acclaimed middle-grade novel The Story That Cannot Be Told (2019) and The List of Unspeakable Fears (2021), and an adjunct professor in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her nonfiction can be found in The Rumpus, Writer’s Digest, and The Coachella Review. Visit her at jkasperkramer.com. - [Elephants Bury Their Dead](https://gristjournal.com/2022/06/elephants-bury-their-dead/) - Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow in fiction and a graduate of the MFA program at Indiana University. Originally from Buffalo, New York, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis. Sawers’s work has appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, Fairy Tale Review, and The Offing. Find out more at JasmineSawers.com - [Therapy Animals and Other Performers](https://gristjournal.com/2022/06/therapy-animals-and-other-performers/) - Katie DePasquale enjoys telling a good story and making sure it's correctly punctuated. A Pushcart Prize nominee for fiction, her writing has appeared in Tin House online, Tupelo Quarterly, Milk Candy Review, GASHER Journal, and Atticus Review, among other publications. She has an M.A. in writing and publishing from Emerson College and works as a freelance writer and editor. - [The Temperate Zone](https://gristjournal.com/2022/06/the-temperate-zone/) - Sara Joyce Robinson is a native and current resident of Southern California. She earned her MFA in Fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and served as Editor-in-Chief for their literary magazine Faultline for two years. Her past work has been published in Scribendi and been recognized as a finalist for Glimmertrain's New Voices Prize. She is currently at work on a novel. - [Grocery Store Translator](https://gristjournal.com/2022/06/grocery-store-translator/) - Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Houston. His writing can be found most recently in Talking Writing, Brooklyn Rail, and Miracle Monocle. Currently Joshua tutors in a Writing Center, is the weekend desk attendant for the Cy Twombly Gallery at The Menil Collection, and teaches a senior memoir workshop for Inprint as well as poetry for Writers in the Schools. Joshua lives in Houston with his wife, Lauren, and son, Owen. - [Those Fantastic Lives, and Other Strange Stories by Bradley Sides](https://gristjournal.com/2022/06/those-fantastic-lives-and-other-strange-stories-by-bradley-sides/) - Reviewed by Rebecca Pyle | June 8, 2022Backlight Press, 2021Paperback, 130 pages, $16.95 A method artists and photographers use for determining the worthiness or power of an image is to distill, in their minds or through photograph technologies, a color image till it becomes black and white or monochromatic. All distractions of color gone, and - [Grocery Store Scientist](https://gristjournal.com/2022/06/grocery-store-scientist/) - Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Houston. His writing can be found most recently in Talking Writing, Brooklyn Rail, and Miracle Monocle. Currently Joshua tutors in a Writing Center, is the weekend desk attendant for the Cy Twombly Gallery at The Menil Collection, and teaches a senior memoir workshop for Inprint as well as poetry for Writers in the Schools. Joshua lives in Houston with his wife, Lauren, and son, Owen. - [Sometimes I Am Too Impatient for Poetry and Also for Sex](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/sometimes-i-am-too-impatient-for-poetry-and-also-for-sex/) - (Photo Credit: Petra Lee) J. Bailey Hutchinson is a poet from Memphis, Tennessee. Her debut collection, Gut, won the 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. She is an associate editor at Milkweed Editions, and her work can be found in Muzzle Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, and more. A complete list of her work can be found at jbaileyhutchinson.com - [Grocery Store Musician](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/grocery-store-musician/) - Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Houston. His writing can be found most recently in Talking Writing, Brooklyn Rail, and Miracle Monocle. Currently Joshua tutors in a Writing Center, is the weekend desk attendant for the Cy Twombly Gallery at The Menil Collection, and teaches a senior memoir workshop for Inprint as well as poetry for Writers in the Schools. Joshua lives in Houston with his wife, Lauren, and son, Owen. - [A Man of My Own Sex](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/a-man-of-my-own-sex/) - Weston Richey is a writer and academic. Weston earned a BA in philosophy and English from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University—Newark, and is now a PhD student in English at The University of Texas at Austin. Weston’s work has appeared elsewhere in Pigeon Pages, Strange Horizons, and FreezeRay Poetry. - [Dastardly](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/dastardly/) - Weston Richey is a writer and academic. Weston earned a BA in philosophy and English from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University—Newark, and is now a PhD student in English at The University of Texas at Austin. Weston’s work has appeared elsewhere in Pigeon Pages, Strange Horizons, and FreezeRay Poetry. - [Patrizate (intransitive verb)](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/patrizate-intransitive-verb/) - Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer is a poet from Maryland. Their work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Memorious, The Roanoke Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and L’Éphémère Review. They were a poetry semifinalist for the 2017 St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press) and the 2019 and 2020 recipient of the Bryn Mawr Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prize. - [When I am a mother](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/when-i-am-a-mother/) - Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a writer and a poet from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in Longleaf Review, Tint Journal, and perhappened mag, among others. Find her on Twitter @mandrigall. - [(yikes!) Poetica](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/yikes-poetica/) - George Abraham (they/he) is a Palestinian american poet from Jacksonville, FL. They are the author of Birthright (Button Poetry) and the specimen’s apology (Sibling Rivalry Press). He is a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Boston Foundation, and a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). Their poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, Mizna, and elsewhere. He currently resides on stolen Massachusett land, where he is a Bioengineering PhD candidate at Harvard University, and teaches in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College. - [Ser La Leche](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/ser-la-leche/) - Clayre Benzadón is an MFA graduate student at the University of Miami, managing editor of Sinking City, and Broadsided Press’s Instagram editor. Her chapbook, “Liminal Zenith” was published by SurVision Books. She was also awarded the 2019 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize for "Linguistic Rewilding" and published in places including SWWIM, 14poems, and Crêpe and Penn, as well as forthcoming in ANMLY and Fairy Tale Review. You can find more about her at clayrebenzadon.com. - [The Moonshine Economy](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/the-moonshine-economy/) - Jake Goldwasser is a poet and cartoonist based in Brooklyn. You can find his poetry in The Spectacle, The Meadow, and elsewhere. His cartoon work has appeared in The New Yorker, Weekly Humorist, and elsewhere. He is a New Jewish Culture Fellow for the 2020-2021 cycle, for which he is teaching a graphic memoir seminar. You can find him on Instagram at @jakegoldwasser. - [The Weather in Brooklyn](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/the-weather-in-brooklyn/) - Jake Goldwasser is a poet and cartoonist based in Brooklyn. You can find his poetry in The Spectacle, The Meadow, and elsewhere. His cartoon work has appeared in The New Yorker, Weekly Humorist, and elsewhere. He is a New Jewish Culture Fellow for the 2020-2021 cycle, for which he is teaching a graphic memoir seminar. You can find him on Instagram at @jakegoldwasser. - [Alien Abduction Insurance](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/alien-abduction-insurance/) - Corey Ginsberg's prose and poetry have appeared in such publications as The Fiddlehead, Yemassee, Third Coast, and The Gettysburg Review. Corey enjoys eating spaghetti, spoiling her dachshunds, and listening to The Beatles. - [The Predatory Animal Ball by Jennifer Fliss](https://gristjournal.com/2022/05/the-predatory-animal-ball-by-jennifer-fliss/) - Reviewed by Rebecca Pyle | May 2, 2022Okay Donkey Press, December 2021Paperback, 190 pages, $15.00 The shadow of war—our collective guilt, its drifting, numbing effect even many decades later on all our lives—seems to this reviewer what Jennifer Fliss is writing about in her collection of flash fiction pieces The Predatory Animal Ball. The conclusion - [Animal Disorders by Deborah Thompson](https://gristjournal.com/2022/04/animal-disorders-by-deborah-thompson/) - Reviewed by Torrie Jay White | April 26, 2022Black Lawrence Press, 2021Paperback, 102 pages, $19.95 “I would characterize myself,” Deborah Thompson writes in the introduction to her book of essays, Animal Disorders, published by Black Lawrence Press in September of 2021, “as having a fairly representative case of early-stage animal disorder.” The title is a - [One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan](https://gristjournal.com/2022/04/one-person-holds-so-much-silence-by-david-greenspan/) - Reviewed by María Castro Dominguez | April 19, 2022Driftwood Press, 2022Paperback, 80 pages, $14.99 One Person Holds So Much Silence is an eye-ear-mind-kicking collection of nineteen poems divided into three sections: a body of poems that become disembodied and subsequently embodied by the reader who succumbs into its magnetic enchantment. As if following Roland Barthes’s - [An Interview with Leah Silvieus | by Hope Fischbach](https://gristjournal.com/2022/04/an-interview-with-leah-silvieus-by-hope-fischbach/) - Leah Silvieus is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Arabilis (Sundress Publications 2019), and is the co-editor with Lee Herrick of The World I Leave You: An Anthology of Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books 2020). She is a Kundiman fellow, holds degrees from Whitworth University and the University of Miami, and is currently studying literature and religion at Yale Divinity School. - [What Pecan Light by Hannah VanderHart](https://gristjournal.com/2022/04/what-pecan-light-by-hannah-vanderhart/) - Reviewed by Christian J. Collier and Kasey Jueds | April 14, 2022Bull City Press, 2021Paperback, 68 pages, $18.95 KJ: Christian, I’m so happy to be talking about this beloved book with you. I’m struggling with the question of where to begin! It’s a question that often comes up when I’m beginning a review of a - [On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson](https://gristjournal.com/2022/03/on-freedom-four-songs-of-care-and-constraint-by-maggie-nelson/) - Reviewed by Bess Cooley | March 22, 2022Graywolf Press, September 2021Hardcover, 288 pages, $27.00 Maggie Nelson isn’t unique in saying that the concept of freedom is complicated. And she doesn’t pretend that On Freedom isn’t going to be an ambitious discussion or a difficult conversation. From the beginning, she acknowledges the animosity of the word, - [The Poet as God and Failure by Chris McCrackin](https://gristjournal.com/2022/03/the-poet-as-god-and-failure-by-chris-mccrackin/) - Chris McCrackin was born and raised on a small farm in Georgia and holds an undergraduate degree from Washington and Lee University in English and Classics. Currently, he is pursuing an MA in Classics at the University of Georgia as a Beinecke Scholar and Osbourne Fellow. Currently, his academic and creative interests include indigeneity, disability studies, classical reception theory, and hybridity. - [The Benefits of Not Knowing Your Audience by Jen Grow](https://gristjournal.com/2022/02/the-benefits-of-not-knowing-your-audience-by-jen-grow/) - Jen Grow's work has appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, About Place Journal, The Sun Magazine, The GSU Review, Hunger Mountain, Indiana Review and many others. Her debut story collection, My Life as a Mermaid, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Competition. She was also awarded the 2016 Mary Sawyers Baker Prize for her work as well as a Ruby Award from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives in Baltimore and can be reached at www.jengrow.com. - [Reversing Time by Charlotte R. Mendel](https://gristjournal.com/2022/02/reversing-time-by-charlotte-r-mendel/) - Reviewed by Jennifer Smith | February 15, 2022Guernica Edition/Microland Publishers, Fall 2021 Paperback, 314 pages, $21.95 Like many teenagers, Simon just wants to survive the school day. His daily complication: the bullies who follow him home. Every day he outwits and outruns them. That changes when they slow Simon down with a tripwire. Realizing he won’t - [The Dark Pages: Updating Patterns of Rape in Fiction by Zoe Marzo](https://gristjournal.com/2022/01/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](https://gristjournal.com/2021/12/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. - [On Her Knees: Memoir of a Prayerful Jezebel by Brenda Marie Davies](https://gristjournal.com/2021/11/on-her-knees-memoir-of-a-prayerful-jezebel-by-brenda-marie-davies/) - Reviewed by Anna Genevieve Winham | November 22, 2021Eerdmans, April 2021Hardcover, 232 pages, $22.00 On Her Knees: Memoir of a Prayerful Jezebel is the coming-of-age memoir of Brenda Davies, the former evangelical Christian behind the YouTube channel “God is Grey,” which has over one hundred thousand subscribers. The story snakes from the purity culture of - [Dig Me Out by Amy Lee Lillard](https://gristjournal.com/2021/11/dig-me-out-by-amy-lee-lillard/) - Reviewed by Jennifer Marie Donahue | November 16, 2021Atelier26 Books, October 2021Paperback, 214 pages, $16.00 The ten stories within Amy Lee Lillard’s debut collection, Dig Me Out, thrum with the visceral energy of a well-curated playlist. Each story’s title draws from a diverse mix of feminist and punk rock musical influences. These musical origins serve - [Cultivating Empathy through Mimetic Forms by Brenna Womer](https://gristjournal.com/2021/11/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. - [Tree by Melina Sempill Watts](https://gristjournal.com/2021/11/tree-by-melina-sempill-watts/) - Reviewed by Melinda Backer | November 2, 2021Change the World Books, April 2017Paperback, 246 pages, $18.00 Tree, a novel written by Melina Sempill Watts, takes on the challenge of showcasing the world through the eyes of a California live oak in Topanga, California. The most challenging part of the text is also the most rewarding: in order to buy into the conceit - [Dead Uncles by Ben Kline](https://gristjournal.com/2021/10/dead-uncles-by-ben-kline/) - Reviewed by Laura Rashley | October 26, 2021Driftwood Press, 2021Paperback, 37 pages, $7.99 In Ben Kline’s latest poetry chapbook, Dead Uncles: Poems, Folklore, Reverie, we’re cast into an environment that is both vast and incredibly specific, grounded yet otherworldly. Illusions are built into illusions, and reality becomes a question of perception and what we believe - [Being Nobody, or How I Was Radicalized by Emily Dickinson | by M. Jamie Zuckerman](https://gristjournal.com/2021/10/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. - [Kind by Gretchen Primack](https://gristjournal.com/2021/09/kind-by-gretchen-primack/) - Reviewed by Chloë Hanson | September 27, 2021Lantern Press, 2021Hardcover, 98 pages, $15.00 I first encountered Gretchen Primack’s work a few years ago, when a dear friend and colleague recommended the original publication of Kind to me in a poetry workshop. As a writer beginning to discuss nonhuman animals, their rights, and their lives in - [On Place | by Sharon Fagan McDermott & When I Say Here | by M.C. Benner Dixon](https://gristjournal.com/2021/09/on-place-by-sharon-fagan-mcdermott-when-i-say-here-by-m-c-benner-dixon/) - Sharon Fagan McDermott is a poet, musician, and a teacher of literature at a private school in Pittsburgh, PA. Her most recent collection of poetry, Life Without Furniture, published by Jacar Press (2018) wrestles with finding and feeling at home in the world and seeking sanctuary in an often challenging life. As National Book Award winning poet Terrance Hayes says about this new collection: “Sharon Fagan McDermott inhabits the spaces between the common and the uncommon…The whole world, visible and invisible, inhabits this wonderful new book.” Additionally, Fagan McDermott has published three chapbook collections, Voluptuous, Alley Scatting (Parallel Press, 2005), and Bitter Acoustic, which won the 2011 Jacar Press Chapbook competition. M.C. Benner Dixon lives, writes, and grows things in Pittsburgh, PA. Working in both prose and poetry, her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review Online, Sampsonia Way, SLICE Magazine, Appalachian Review, Vastarien, HeartWood Literary Magazine, pacificREVIEW, Paperbark Literary Magazine, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and elsewhere. - [There Is No Good Time for Bad News by Aruni Kashyap](https://gristjournal.com/2021/08/there-is-no-good-time-for-bad-news-by-aruni-kashyap/) - Reviewed by Maggie Rue Hess | August 31, 2021Future Cycle Press, April 2021Paperback, 58 pages, $15.95 Reminding us that to turn your eyes away from suffering is to turn away from compassion, Aruni Kashyap wrote his unflinching collection of poems There is No Good Time for Bad News about the largely undocumented insurgency within Assam. - [Hamlet Figura by Daniel Gabriel](https://gristjournal.com/2021/04/hamlet-figura-by-daniel-gabriel/) - Reviewed by Michael Sutherlin | April 22, 2021Dos Madres Press, 2020Paperback, 196 pages, $20.00 If you are looking for a cerebral investigation into the nature of language, Daniel Gabriel’s Hamlet Figura is for you. It is a single work divided into a series of 175 individual poems, each written in free verse and organized into - [Dramatic Situation: On Listening for Story in Poetry | by A. Loudermilk](https://gristjournal.com/2021/04/dramatic-situation-on-listening-for-story-in-poetry-by-a-loudermilk/) - A. Loudermilk’s Strange Valentine won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. His poems can be found in publications like Cream City Review, Gargoyle, Smaritsh Pace, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, and Tin House, and his essays in The Writer’s Chronicle, PopMatters, Midwest Quarterly, and the Journal of International Women’s Studies. He’s taught creative writing at Hampshire College and Maryland Institute College of Arts. - [Dissent by Descent—Diving into the Madness and Rejecting Genre Boundaries | by Cassidy McCants](https://gristjournal.com/2021/04/dissent-by-descent-diving-into-the-madness-and-rejecting-genre-boundaries-by-cassidy-mccants/) - Cassidy McCants is a writer and editor from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She received her M.F.A. in fiction writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She edits for Nimrod Journal and is creator/editor of Apple in the Dark. Her prose has appeared in The Lascaux Review, Liars’ League NYC, Gravel, The Idle Class, filling Station, Witch Craft Magazine, and other publications. She won the 2020 Innovative Short Fiction Contest from The Conium Review, and her stories have received honorable mentions from Glimmer Train Press. She is a 2020 Artist INC fellow. - [Magnolia Canopy Otherworld by Erin Carlyle](https://gristjournal.com/2021/04/magnolia-canopy-otherworld-by-erin-carlyle/) - Reviewed by Rachel Bryan | April 13, 2021Driftwood Press, December 2020Paperback, 82 pages, $14.99 Erin Carlyle’s debut poetry collection Magnolia Canopy Otherworld opens with an epigraph out of Dorothy Allison’s 1992 novel Bastard Out of Carolina: “Family is family, but even love can’t keep people from eating at each other.” Like Bone Boatwright, Carlyle’s collection - [The Nonfiction of Skin | by Alizabeth Worley](https://gristjournal.com/2021/04/the-nonfiction-of-skin-by-alizabeth-worley/) - Alizabeth Worley lives in Utah with her husband, Michael, and their two sons, just north of BYU where she received an MFA. She was a 2016 poetry winner of the AWP Intro Journals award and her essays, poems, and illustrated works have appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Hobart, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and elsewhere. You can find more of her work at alizabethworley.com. - [What Is Poetry For? | by James McKee](https://gristjournal.com/2021/04/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. - [My Name Is Romero by David A. Romero](https://gristjournal.com/2021/03/my-name-is-romero-by-david-a-romero/) - Reviewed by Maggie Rue Hess | March 23, 2021Flowersong Press, 2020Paperback, 109 pages, $20 There are many occasions that prompt us to introduce ourselves: over the phone, in an email, at a business meeting, for a friendly get-together, on our first day at a new job. The typical introduction requires that we share our names - [“That they are there”: On George Oppen and the Role of Poetry | by Jonathan Farmer](https://gristjournal.com/2021/03/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](https://gristjournal.com/2021/03/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](https://gristjournal.com/2021/03/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. - [If We're Here Now: Movements Toward the Lyric Essay | by Anna Leahy](https://gristjournal.com/2021/03/if-were-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. - [Susie Revisited](https://gristjournal.com/2021/03/susie-revisited/) - Peter Galligan is a communications manager from Denver, Colorado. He is currently pursuing an interdisciplinary master’s degree in writing and business administration at Western New Mexico University. His work has appeared in journals such as Mud Season Review, From Whispers to Roars, Red Savina Review, and Metrosphere. He also produces electronic dance music under the name “Medias Res,” and his music has been featured on numerous EDM compilations. - [Grist 10th Anniversary T-Shirt](https://gristjournal.com/2021/02/grist-10th-anniversary-t-shirt/) - Grist 10th Anniversary T-Shirt // $15 USD in U.S. // $25 USD outside U.S. - [Grist Alan Shapiro Broadside](https://gristjournal.com/2021/02/grist-alan-shapiro-broadside/) - "A Walk in Winter" by Alan Shapiro Broadside // $25 USD in U.S. // $35 USD outside U.S. - [Grist Earl Sherman Braggs Broadside](https://gristjournal.com/2021/02/grist-earl-sherman-braggs-broadside/) - "Now" by Earl Sherman Bragg Broadside // $25 USD in U.S. // $35 USD outside U.S. - [Grist Lying Reader T-Shirt](https://gristjournal.com/2021/02/grist-lying-reader-t-shirt-2/) - Grist Lying Reader T-Shirt // $15 USD in U.S. // $25 USD outside U.S. - [Grist Sitting Reader T-Shirt](https://gristjournal.com/2021/02/grist-sitting-reader-t-shirt-2/) - Grist Sitting Reader T-Shirt // $15 USD in U.S. // $25 USD outside U.S. - [Original Grist Orange Bird T-Shirt](https://gristjournal.com/2021/02/original-grist-orange-bird-t-shirt-2/) - Original Grist Orange Bird T-Shirt // $15 USD in U.S. // $25 USD outside U.S. - [Grist Issue 11 Moon T-Shirt](https://gristjournal.com/2021/02/grist-issue-11-moon-t-shirt-post/) - Grist Issue 11 Moon T-Shirt // $15 USD in U.S. // $25 USD outside U.S. - [Grist Reflection T-Shirt](https://gristjournal.com/2021/02/grist-reflection-t-shirt-2/) - Grist Reflection T-Shirt // $15 USD in U.S. // $25 USD outside U.S. - [Beit by Daniel Biegelson](https://gristjournal.com/2021/01/1060/) - Daniel Biegelson is the author of the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE) and Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University as well as an Associate Editor for The Laurel Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Denver Quarterly, cream city review, FIELD, Interim, Mid-American Review, and Zone 3, among other places. He hails from New Jersey. - [Thrall](https://gristjournal.com/2013/01/thrall/) - Stephen Lackaye has his MSc from the University of Edinburgh, and his MFA from the Johns Hopkins University. Other poems can be found in Cave Wall, Crab Orchard Review, The Normal School, The Pinch, RHINO, and Waccamaw. He lives in Beaverton, OR, where he works for Powell’s Books, and teaches online for Northeastern University. - [This Vigil I Keep for Comfort](https://gristjournal.com/2013/01/this-vigil-i-keep-for-comfort/) - Sandy Longhorn is the author of Blood Almanac which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. Longhorn teaches at Pulaski Technical College, where she directs the Big Rock Reading Series. In addition, she co-edits the online journal Heron Tree, is an Arkansas Arts Council fellow, and blogs at Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty. - [This Equation](https://gristjournal.com/2013/01/this-equation/) - Jami Macarty is a recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts poetry fellowship and has an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her poems have appeared in American & Canadian journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Verse Daily, Cimarron Review, Volt, Drunken Boat, The Fiddlehead, and Interrupture. Poems are forthcoming in Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Grain, Interim, Quiddity, and So To Speak. Her manuscript, You Is to Door, was a finalist for Persea Books’ 2012 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Former Executive Director of Tucson Poetry Festival (1996-2004), she divides her time between the Arizona desert and Vancouver, BC, where she teaches poetry at Simon Fraser University. - [Suddenly This Devastation after Jack Gilbert](https://gristjournal.com/2013/01/suddenly-this-devastation-after-jack-gilbert/) - Helen Vitoria’s work can be found and is forthcoming in The Offending Adam, PANK, The Awl, Ping Pong Journal, Rougarou, Gargoyle, Barn Owl Review, Pebble Lake Review and many others. Her poems have been nominated for Best New Poets and the Pushcart Prize. She edits THRUSH Poetry Journal & THRUSH Press. - [Egg and Ash](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/egg-and-ash/) - Anne Barngrover earned her MFA at Florida State and is a current PhD student at the University of Missouri. Her first book of poems, Yell Hound Blues, is forthcoming with Shipwreckt Books later this year, and her chapbook, Candy in Our Brains, co-written with poet Avni Vyas, is forthcoming in 2014 with CutBank. Anne’s poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Meridian, and others. - [[If all the love we'll know is the kind of love]](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/if-all-the-love-well-know-is-the-kind-of-love/) - Monica Berlin’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Witness, DIAGRAM, The Southeast Review, Third Coast, RHINO, The Missouri Review, Fourteen Hills, New Orleans Review, and Passages North, among others. Collaborations with Beth Marzoni have been published in Colorado Review, New Orleans Review, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, Vela, TYPO, Better: Culture & Lit, ellipsis…, and others. She is the project director for The Knox Writers’ House digital archives of contemporary literature, and was the nonfiction editor at Fifth Wednesday Journal (2011-13). An Associate Professor of English at Knox College, Berlin also serves as Associate Director of the Program in Creative Writing. - [Hotel Room](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/hotel-room/) - Holli Carrell is a writer originally from Utah, now based in Queens. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Blackbird, The Florida Review, Poet Lore, Fugue, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other places. She has received generous support from the NY State Summer Writers Institute and is a graduate of the MFA program in poetry at Hunter College, where she was a recipient of the Colie Hoffman Poetry Prize and a Norma Lubetsky Friedman Scholarship. - [John Cho](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/john-cho/) - Originally from Brooklyn, Dan Chu holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston, where he was a recipient of the Inprint Verlaine Prize. He has poems forthcoming in Fence, Prairie Schooner, and Grist. - [Where the Map Is](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/where-the-map-is/) - Adam Clay’s most recent collection is Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016). His work has appeared recently in Georgia Review, Tin House, and jubilat. He teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and edits Mississippi Review. - [In My Brother’s House](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/in-my-brothers-house/) - Cydnee Devereaux is a writer from Florida. Her poetry has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Sewanee Writers Conference. She is the Robert Penn Warren Fellow at Vanderbilt University, where she received her MFA in Poetry. - [The Hundredth Anniversary](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/the-hundredth-anniversary/) - Leah Falk’s poems and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, FIELD, Thrush, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She’s received support for her writing from the Yiddish Book Center, the Vermont Studio Center, Asylum Arts, and the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. She lives in Philadelphia and runs programming at the Writers House at Rutgers University-Camden. - [Quaking Aspen, or dendrophilia](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/quaking-aspen-or-dendrophilia/) - Matty Layne Glasgow is the author of the poetry collection, deciduous qween, selected by Richard Blanco as the winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and forthcoming from Red Hen Press in June 2019. His recent poems appear in or are forthcoming from the Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Daily, Collagist, BOAAT, Puerto del Sol,Nimrod, and elsewhere. Matty received his MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University and currently lives in Houston, Texas where he teaches with Writers in the Schools. - [Slash on a Bicycle](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/slash-on-a-bicycle/) - W. Todd Kaneko is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor, 2014) and This Is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), and co-author of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). A Kundiman fellow, he is co-editor of Waxwing magazine and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he teaches at Grand Valley State University. Amorak Huey is author of the poetry collections Boom Box (Sundress, 2019), Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank, 2018), and Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015), as well as two chapbooks. He is co-author of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. - [Reading Is Fundamental](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/reading-is-fundamental/) - Hailing from the farm valleys of west Appalachia, Ben Kline lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, toiling away on his full-length manuscript Twang while drinking just the right amount of bourbon, but more coffee than seems wise. His work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Rappahannock Review, Toe Good, Riggwelter, The Mantle, Ghost City Review, apt, ImageOutWrite Vol. 7, The Offing, Impossible Archetype, Ink & Nebula, The Matador Review and many more. - [receding monologue](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/receding-monologue/) - Mackenzie Kozak is a poet living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds an MFA from UNC-Greensboro, where she served as Poetry Editor of The Greensboro Review. Currently, she is an Associate Editor at Orison Books and Asheville Poetry Review. Her manuscript in place of a mouth & far flung was a finalist for the 2018 National Poetry Series. Mackenzie’s poetry appears in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Sixth Finch, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Find her online at mackenziekozak.com - [Museums of Natural Histories (1)](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/museums-of-natural-histories-1/) - Beth Marzoni’s poems have recently appeared in Cimarron Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review,and American Literary Review among others. She co-edits Pilot Light, a journal of contemporary poetics and criticism, and she teaches literature and writing at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin. - [Guada Mabuya](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/guada-mabuya/) - Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, raised in Essex County, New Jersey, Poetry Reader for Muzzle Magazine, and current recipient of the Atlantis Award for Poetry, Julio Cesar Villegas is the writer that your abuelos warned you about. His scriptures can be found or are forthcoming in PANK, Rigorous Mag, Subprimal Poetry Art, Bridge Eight, Into The Void, Waccamaw, Bare Fiction, as well as the inescapable mouth of the abyss. Puerto Rico Se Levanta. Follow Julio’s tweets from the abyss at @VforVillegas. - [Lost in Parallax](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/lost-in-parallax/) - Logo and spouse live in the upper Midwest with their puckish quadruped. He has worked with patients, students and those enduring homelessness. Logo writes (and bakes and bikes) as solacing means of existence. Logo’s poetry has appeared or will appear in The Notre Dame Review, Pedestal Magazine, Parhelion, AZURE, and others. - [Portrait of My Father as a Cartoon Robber](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/portrait-of-my-father-as-a-cartoon-robber/) - Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The author of two chapbooks, How We Came Upon the Colony (Unicorn Press, 2014) and The Polite Society (Unicorn Press, 2017), he teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. He is the poetry editor of Four Way Review. Follow him on Twitter: @rosswhite. - [Now You Have Many Legs to Stand On](https://gristjournal.com/2015/01/now-you-have-many-legs-to-stand-on/) - Ashley-Elizabeth Best is from Cobourg, ON, Canada. She was on the poetry shortlist for the 2011 and 2013 Matrix Litpop Awards and Prism's Poetry Prize 2012. Her work can be seen in Fjords, Tampa Review, CV2, The Columbia Review, Berfrois, The Rusty Toque, The Battersea Review, The Puritan, Zouch Magazine, Grist, and Branch Magazine, among other publications. She placed first for poetry in This Magazine's Great Canadian Literary Hunt 2012, and was the poetry runner-up for subTerrain Magazine's Lush Triumphant Literary Awards 2012. She has a chapbook published with Cactus Press called Slow States of Collapse. She lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario. - [National Park](https://gristjournal.com/2015/01/national-park/) - Alex Greenberg is a 15-year-old poet whose work can be found or is forthcoming in The Florida Review, The Cortland Review, Kweli, and Spinning Jenny, among others. He was the recipient of the 2014 46er Prize for the Adirondack Review and the Critical Pass Review Junior Poets Prize. - [Love Poem with False Labyrinth](https://gristjournal.com/2015/01/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. - [Haibun on the 650 lb. Grand Piano Standing Upright in Biscayne Bay](https://gristjournal.com/2015/01/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. - [Nicole Oquendo and Mike Shier On Collaboration and Folie à Deux](https://gristjournal.com/2015/01/nicole-oquendo-and-mike-shier-on-collaboration-and-folie-a-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. - [Portrait](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/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. - [Frida Kahlo Takes a Muse in Detroit after her smallest self-portrait](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/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. - [Manifest Destiny](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/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. - [Athletic Director Greenshield Evaluates the New Hire](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/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. - [The Radio is Full](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/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. - [What Did I Do To Deserve This](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/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. - [Jesus in the Desert](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/jesus-in-the-desert/) - Colin Cheney is the author of - [Where the Fired Body is Porous](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/where-the-fired-body-is-porous/) - Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry chapbook Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She is the winner of the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. Tiana is currently an MFA candidate and teaching assistant at Vanderbilt University where she serves as Poetry Editor for Nashville Review. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Sewanee Review, Rattle, Best New Poets 2015, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Thrush Poetry Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. Tiana received the Tennessee Williams scholarship to The Sewanee Writers' Conference. You can find her online at tianaclark.com. - [Dear Birthplace](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/dear-birthplace/) - Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is working on a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature & Literary Theory program where her research focuses on the rendering of trauma in contemporary American poetry related to the Holocaust. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Missouri Review, and Narrative Magazine, among others. She is the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars, winner of Split Lip Magazine's 2014 Uppercut Chapbook Award. Julia is also Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine. - [Nanny Fairchild Offers Wisdom to her Nearly Grown Up Charge](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/nanny-fairchild-offers-wisdom-to-her-nearly-grown-up-charge/) - Kathleen Jones is a poet, designer, and technical writer in Wilmington, NC. She has an MFA in poetry from UNC Wilmington. Her poems included in Grist are part of an in-progress book length project. Her work is forthcoming from Rust + Moth and can be found in Meridian, BOAAT, storySouth, LEVELER, and others. - [Alibi](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/alibi/) - Lisa Lewis’s books include The Unbeliever (Brittingham Prize, 1994), Silent Treatment (National Poetry Series, 1998), Vivisect, (New Issues Press, 2010), Burned House with Swimming Pool (American Poetry Journal Prize, Dream Horse Press, 2011), and The Body Double (Georgetown Review Press, 2016). Recent work appears in New England Review, Carolina Quarterly, Guernica, Four Way Review, American Literary Review, Florida Review, and elsewhere. She directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as poetry editor for the Cimarron Review. - [Point of origin after Li-Young Lee](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/point-of-origin-after-li-young-lee/) - Éireann Lorsung is making a very long prose object about archives and earthquakes. She is also residency director at Dickinson House (dickinsonhouse.be). You can find other of her poems in Music for Landing Planes By, Her book, and a third collection forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. - [Fever](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/fever/) - Max McDonough is a Creative Writing Fellow at Vanderbilt University. His work appears in Gulf Coast, CutBank, The Adroit Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere. - [The Names Are Not Revealed](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/the-names-are-not-revealed/) - Phoebe Reeves earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and now teaches English at the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont College in rural southern Ohio, where she advises East Fork: An Online Journal of the Arts. Her chapbook The Lobes and Petals of the Inanimate was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2009. Her poems have recently appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Drunken Boat, Phoebe, and Memorious. - [Tear Down](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/tear-down/) - Sandy Solomon teaches at Vanderbilt University where she is Writer in Residence and Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program. Her book, Pears, Lake, Sun, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, was also published in the U.K. by Peterloo Poets. Her poems have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, New Republic, Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry Review (UK), and the Times Literary Supplement. Jana Harper is a visual artist who works both collaboratively and individually on themes related to quietude, connection, authenticity, and environment. She works in a variety of media including printmaking, drawing, installation, photography, and artists' books. Her work has been shown in both solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and she has enjoyed artist residencies both in the United States and abroad. Jana teaches at Vanderbilt University. - [Rod](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/rod/) - Jess Williard’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The New Orleans Review, North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Oxford Poetry and other journals. He was a 2016 finalist for the Janet B. McCabe Prize in poetry from Ruminate Magazine and lives in Illinois. - [No one needs another poem about the Second World War](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/no-one-needs-another-poem-about-the-second-world-war/) - Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is also the author of BETWEEN, winner of the 2017 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Prize from Finishing Line Press. A two-time Academy of American Poets prize winner and a Pushcart nominee, her recent work in various genres appears in Rambutan Literary, The Shallow Ends, The Recluse, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP/J, and other venues. She lives in Maryland and teaches at Washington College, and you can find her on Twitter @kqandrews. - [Interview Questions for Death](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/interview-questions-for-death/) - Heather Altfeld’s first book, “The Disappearing Theatre” won the Poets at Work Book Prize, selected by Stephen Dunn. Her poems appear in Narrative Magazine, Pleiades, ZYZZYVA, and others. She is the recipient of the 2017 Robert H. Winner Award with the Poetry Society of America and the 2015 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She lives in Chico, CA and has just completed two new poetry collections. - [Speaking in Tongues](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/speaking-in-tongues/) - Mary Jo Balistreri has two full books of poetry, Joy in the Morning and Gathering The Harvest, published by Bellowing Ark Press, and a chapbook, Best Brothers, published by Tiger's Eye Press. She has recent work in Parabola, The Hurricane Press, Plainsongs, The Tiger's Eye, Avocet, Crab Creek Review, Quill and Parchment, The Heron's Nest, Acorn, and A Hundred Gourds. Poetrystorehouse has offered videos and a soundscape of two of her poems. She has six Pushcart nominations, one of which is for “What is it About Snow,” published by Grist in 2014, and two Best of the Net nominations. Mary Jo is one of the founders of Grace River Poets, an outreach for women's shelters, churches, and schools. Please visit her at maryjobalistreripoet.com. - [Interview with the Dead](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/interview-with-the-dead/) - Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, farmer, freelance editor, critic, and small-town librarian. She is the author of MIDDEN (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). Her poems and book reviews appear in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Muzzle, Salamander, RHINO, River Styx, and other journals. She is the recipient of the 2016-17 Poets Out Loud Prize, the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award, and residencies from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. A former Managing Editor for Alice James Books, Bouwsma currently serves as Book Review Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine. - [Are they wild or feral?](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/are-they-wild-or-feral/) - Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of The Feeder (YesYes Books, 2016). She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. - [Sinners must live with what their sins sow](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/sinners-must-live-with-what-their-sins-sow/) - Kayleb Rae Candrilli is author of What Runs Over, forthcoming with YesYes Books and winner of the 2016 Pamet River Prize. They are published or forthcoming in BOAAT Press, Puerto del Sol, Booth, Vinyl, Muzzle, Cream City Review, and others. Candrilli is a Best of the Net winner and a Pushcart Prize nominated poet. They serve as an assistant poetry editor for BOAAT Press and they hold an MFA from the University of Alabama. Candrilli now lives in Philadelphia with their partner. - [Revlon](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/revlon/) - Peter LaBerge is the author of the chapbooks Makeshift Cathedral (YesYes Books, 2017) and Hook (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). His recent work appears in Best New Poets, Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Pleiades, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Adroit Journal, and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Bucknell University Stadler Center for Poetry. He recently graduated with his B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, and currently lives and works in the Bay Area. - [Interview](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/interview/) - Matt MacFarland’s manuscript Singing Saw was a finalist for the 2017 New Issues Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Third Coast, Memorious, Mid-American Review, Iron Horse, and elsewhere. He graduated from the University of Virginia MFA program and lives in Charlottesville, where he works as a business journalist and editor. - [Kalamazoo](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/kalamazoo/) - Michael Marberry’s poetry has appeared in journals like The New Republic, West Branch, Sycamore Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere and in anthologies like The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best of the Net, The Southern Poetry Anthology, and New Poetry from the Midwest. He is originally from rural Tennessee and is currently the Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University. More of his work can be found at www.michaelmarberry.com. - [Maw-Maw’s Pineapple Pantsuit](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/maw-maws-pineapple-pantsuit/) - Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande Books 2017), I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books 2009), and several chapbooks including The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs Editions 2016). Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, Georgia Review, Witness, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, and earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston where she served as Managing Editor for Gulf Coast. Her honors include the Verlaine Prize, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, the Hopwood Award, and the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin. Karyna recently taught in the Creative Writing department at Oberlin College and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature & Languages at Christian Brothers University. Find her online at www.karyna.io. - [Indiana, Not Indiana](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/indiana-not-indiana/) - Sam Ross’s first book Company was selected by Carl Phillips for the Levis Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in 2019 from Four Way Books. - [the villagers’ story](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/the-villagers-story/) - Raena Shirali is the author of GILT (YesYes Books, 2017). Her honors include a 2016 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize, the 2014 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, & a “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. Her poems & reviews have appeared in Blackbird, Ninth Letter, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Four Way Review, & several other journals. She has performed at Indiana University, Wright State University, Slam Free or Die!, Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, Columbus College of Art & Design, & elsewhere. Born in Houston, Texas, & raised in Charleston, South Carolina, the Indian American poet earned her MFA from The Ohio State University. Most recently, she was the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. She currently lives in Philadelphia & serves as a poetry reader for YesYes Books & Muzzle Magazine. - [LXVI.](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/lxvi/) - Benjamin Winkler lives in Philadelphia, PA. His work has been published in The Ilanot Review, Makeout Creek, and Lockjaw Mag. Find him on social media at @cmdrcallowhill. - [Archive](https://gristjournal.com/2019/01/archive/) - Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania where her research focuses on contemporary American poetry about the Holocaust. Julia is the author of THE MANY NAMES FOR MOTHER, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize, forthcoming from Kent State University Press in the fall of 2019, and The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from POETRY, Best New Poets, American PoetryReview, TriQuarterly, and Nashville Review, among others. Julia is the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine (www.constructionlitmag.com) and when not busy chasing her toddler around the playgrounds of Philadelphia, she writes a blog about motherhood (https://otherwomendonttellyou.wordpress.com/). Check out her website at www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com - [My Luxurious Escalade](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/my-luxurious-escalade/) - Ally Harris is the author of three chapbooks of poetry: Dispersal (The Song Cave, 2019), Her Twin Was After Me (Slim Princess Holdings, 2014) and floor baby (dancing girl press, 2011). She has poems in Apology Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, BOAAT Press, Grist Journal, Salt Hill, The Volta, and more. She was the recent recipient of a Regional Arts & Culture Council Grant for a project related to her reading series Submission, based out of Portland, OR. You can follow her on Twitter at @submissionpdx. - [Inventory. Spring. Amity.](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/inventory-spring-amity/) - Angie Mason lives in Duluth, Minnesota. Her poems have recently been published or are forthcoming in Bluestem, Nashville Review, and Tar River Poetry. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato. - [Summer’s Volta](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/summers-volta/) - Alison Missler lives in Tampa, Florida where she teaches creative writing at a local middle school. She is co-founder and co-host for the Read Herring reading series and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of South Florida. - [Ode to Venison](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/ode-to-venison/) - Laura Rashley is a writer and editor living in Charleston, South Carolina. She holds a degree in English from the College of Charleston, and her poems have been featured in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Quarterly, Fall Lines, and others, in addition to having been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery. A Presidential Scholar in the Arts and a National YoungArts Finalist, she currently works as an editorial manager, has recently adopted a second cat, and ran her first marathon last January. - [Cloister of Habits](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/cloister-of-habits/) - Bronwen Tate is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Marlboro College in Vermont. A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, Bronwen earned an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. Her poems and essays have appeared in publications including Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, The Rumpus, and the Journal of Modern Literature. Her debut poetry collection The Silk the Moths Ignore, National Winner of the 2019 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, is forthcoming from Inlandia Institute. - [Hunger Meditation](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/hunger-meditation/) - Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press) and the 2020 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University. - [First Poem at 40](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/first-poem-at-40/) - Lebanese-American poet, writer, and educator Rewa Zeinati is the founding editor of Sukoon. Recipient of the 2019 Edward Stanley award for poetry, she is the author of the poetry chapbook, Bullets & Orchids (Corrupt Press, 2013). Her work is published in several journals and anthologies including, Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Diode, So To Speak, The Spectacle, Natural Bridge Journal, Quiddity, Mizna, Uncommon: Dubai, Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by Refugees, Common Boundary, among others. She’s spent the last decade and a half moving countries and cities in the US and Arab region and currently considers Metro Detroit her new home. - [The Preserved Wreckage of the World](https://gristjournal.com/2013/01/the-preserved-wreckage-of-the-world/) - Abigail Greenbaum has an MFA from the University of Mississippi. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Louisville Review, Creative Loafing Atlanta, Orion, and other places. - [Cinderella](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/cinderella/) - Sarah Harshbarger is an MFA candidate at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She is originally from Woodbine, Maryland. Her fiction has also appeared in So to Speak. - [Nuthatch](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/nuthatch/) - Olivia Postelli is a writer from Chicago. She is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at Oregon State University, and her work has been featured in Kenyon Review Online. - [I Haven’t Always Been the Walt Whitman Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/i-havent-always-been-the-walt-whitman-service-area-on-the-new-jersey-turnpike/) - Rob Roensch’s collection of stories, The Wildflowers of Baltimore, won the 2012 International Scott Prize for Short Stories from Salt Publishing. He lives in Oklahoma City and teaches at Oklahoma City University. His website is sites.google.com/site/robroensch. - [Fishing for Mermaids](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/fishing-for-mermaids/) - Kate Tighe-Pigott earned her MFA at the University of Kentucky. Her short fiction is recently published (or forthcoming) from Blackbird, Passages North, River River, and Willow Springs. Earlier work has appeared in Literary Mama and Apocrypha and Abstractions. She lives in Brooklyn. - [Fusion](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/fusion/) - Laura Wang is a writer and educator in New York City public schools, where she teaches human beings about molecules. - [Breakfast](https://gristjournal.com/2015/01/breakfast/) - Jennifer Savran Kelly works as managing editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and binds books in Ithaca, New York. Her fiction recently appeared in Stone Canoe, and her film Invisible Ink, co-written with Christopher Julian, was released by Vanguard Cinema in 2012. She is currently working on her first novel with generous support from the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program hosted by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. - [A Guy Walks into a Bar by Kristen Arnett](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/a-guy-walks-into-a-bar-by-kristen-arnett/) - Kristen Arnett is a fiction and essay writer who has held fellowships at Tin House, Kenyon Review, and Lambda Literary Foundation. She was awarded Ninth Letter’s 2015 Literary Award in Fiction and was named an honorable mention for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. Her work has either appeared or is upcoming at North American Review, The Normal School, The Greensboro Review, Tin House Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @Kristen_Arnett - [The Rut by Cody Bowie](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/the-rut-by-cody-bowie/) - Cody Bowie is a graduate of the MFA program at Oregon State University. She currently lives in Texas with her boyfriend and their ficus. This is her first publication. - [Any Idiot Can Feel Pain by Matt Cashion](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/any-idiot-can-feel-pain-by-matt-cashion/) - Matt Cashion won the 2015 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in fiction for his story collection Last Words of the Holy Ghost (judged by Lee K. Abbott), to be published fall, 2015 (UNT Press). He is also the author of a novel, How the Sun Shines on Noise, and his second novel, Our 13th Divorce, will be published spring, 2016 (Livingston). Born in North Wilkesboro, NC, he grew up in Brunswick, GA, earned an MFA at the University of Oregon and is now Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (mattcashion.com). - [Backcountry Devils by Jennifer Christie](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/backcountry-devils-by-jennifer-christie/) - Jennifer Christie is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Oregon State University. Her master’s thesis (a short story collection titled The Four-Chambered Heart) won the 2013 OSU Outstanding Thesis Award, and in 2012 her short story “The Festival” won the Salem College International Literary Awards’ Reynolds Price Fiction Award, judged by Kate Bernheimer. She currently lives in Corvallis, OR where she teaches, tutors, and writes. - [All She Wants](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/all-she-wants/) - Molly Edmonds was born and raised in North Carolina. She received her MFA in Fiction at North Carolina State University. Her work has been featured in Slate and the American Literary Review. - [THE 20 SPECULATIVE REGIONS OF MISTY HORROR](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/the-20-speculative-regions-of-misty-horror/) - Jo Letke has lived in the following places: Westminster, MD, Chicago, IL, London, UK, Columbus, OH, Valencia, CA, Los Angeles, CA. - [The Perfect Crime by Hisham Bustani](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/the-perfect-crime-by-hisham-bustani/) - Hisham Bustani is a Jordanian award-winning author of four collections of short fiction. His fiction has been translated into five languages, with English-language translations appearing in journals across the U.S., U.K., and Canada, including World Literature Today, Los Angeles Review of Books and The Literary Review. In 2009, he was chosen by the German review Inamo as one of the Arab world's emerging and influential new writers. In 2013, the UK-based cultural webzine The Culture Trip listed him as one of Jordan’s top six contemporary writers. His book The Perception of Meaning won the 2014 University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award, and was published in 2015 by Syracuse University Press. One of Hisham’s stories was recently chosen to be featured in the inaugural edition of The Best Asian Short Stories anthology, forthcoming in 2017. - [Twenty-One Beginnings for the Same Short Story](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/twenty-one-beginnings-for-the-same-short-story/) - Eric Dovigi lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. His work can be found at: Hobart, Westwind Journal, Sourland Mountain Review, Blue Planet Journal, and elsewhere. - [There Are Such Unfortunates](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/there-are-such-unfortunates/) - Sean Ennis is the author of the short story collection Chase Us (New Harvest), and teaches writing and literature at the University of Mississippi. More of his work can be found at seanennis.net. - [Automat](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/automat/) - Sarah Marie Kosch recently earned her MFA in fiction from Oregon State University. Originally from the Midwest, she now lives in Corvallis. She is a former fiction editor of OSU’s new lit mag 45th Parallel and is involved with Anomalous Press. Other stories of hers can be found in Rappahannock Review, Gemini Magazine, Knee-Jerk Magazine, Print-Oriented Bastards, The Quotable, and Blinders Journal. - [Keep ’Em in The Cart](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/keep-em-in-the-cart/) - Nickalus Rupert spent most of his life near the Gulf Coast of Florida. In 2015, he completed an MFA fellowship at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he works as an associate editor for Mississippi Review. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in Slice Magazine, The Literary Review, Pleiades, Passages North, Sonora Review Online, and other journals. - [Need](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/need/) - Nina Schuyler is the author of The Translator, which won the 2014 Next Generation Indie Award for General Fiction and was shortlisted for the Saroyan International Writing Award. Her first novel, The Painting, was nominated for the Northern California Book Award and named a Best Book by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her short stories have been published in ZYZZYVA, Your Impossible Voice, Fugue, Santa Clara Review and elsewhere. She writes a column for Fiction Advocate about style and teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco. - [Vegas Baby](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/vegas-baby/) - Jessica Walker’s short stories are published or forthcoming in Indiana Review, Booth, Bayou, Ninth Letter Online, and elsewhere. She is the winner of Bayou’s James Knudsen Prize for Short Fiction and an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Virginia. She recently received her first nomination for the Pushcart Prize. - [Wolfy](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/wolfy/) - Andrew Joseph Kane’s fiction is forthcoming in Eckleburg. He is also a produced playwright and professional actor. He holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. - [Hardware](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/hardware/) - Thomas Legendre’s most recent novel, Keeping Time, was published by Acre Books in March. His previous work includes The Burning (a novel), Half Life (a play), and Dream Repair (a radio drama). He is an Assistant Professor in English at the University of Nottingham. For more detail visit thomaslegendre.com. - [Imaginary Friends by Jacqueline Doyle and Stephen D. Gutierrez](https://gristjournal.com/2015/01/imaginary-friends-by-jacqueline-doyle-and-stephen-d-gutierrez/) - Jacqueline Doyle and Stephen D. Gutierrez live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they teach at California State University, East Bay. A recent Pushcart nominee, she has work in South Dakota Review, Ninth Letter online, South Loop Review, Confrontation, Southern Indiana Review, and a Notable Essay listed in Best American Essays 2013. His work can be found in Sudden Fiction Latino (W.W. Norton), New California Writing 2013 (Heyday), and Alaska Quarterly Review. He has published three collections of stories and essays: Elements (FC2), Live from Fresno y Los (Bear Star Press), winner of an American Book Award, and The Mexican Man in His Backyard (Roan Press). Learn more about Jacqueline Doyle and - [Triptych by Daryl Farmer](https://gristjournal.com/2015/01/triptych-by-daryl-farmer/) - Daryl Farmer’s first book, Bicycling Beyond the Divide, received a Barnes and Noble Discover Award. His recent work has appeared in The Whitefish Review, The Potomac Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Fourth River. He is an assistant professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks where he teaches creative writing and literature. - [Summer’s Last Will and Testament by Nancy Wayson Dinan](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/summers-last-will-and-testament-by-nancy-wayson-dinan/) - Nancy Wayson Dinan holds an MFA from the Ohio State University. She is currently a PhD student at Texas Tech University, where she serves as a managing editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Texas Observer, Waccamaw, and Watershed Review. - [This Closet Smells Like Chicken by Dana Staves](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/this-closet-smells-like-chicken-by-dana-staves/) - Dana Staves earned her MFA in Fiction from Old Dominion University. Her work has appeared in Shaking Magazine, Alimentum, and Distinction Magazine. Dana is the voice behind the blog Whisks & Words, a blog about a writer who cooks. She currently lives in southeast Virginia, and she is working on her first novel. - [Wüsthof Silverpoint II 10-Piece Set by Brenna Womer](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/wusthof-silverpoint-ii-10-piece-set-by-brenna-womer/) - Brenna Womer is a graduate student at Missouri State University where she teaches composition and serves as an assistant editor of Moon City Review. Her work is forthcoming in Booth, New Delta Review, Prick of the Spindle, Perversion Magazine, Bayou Magazine, Dewpoint, and the Sierra Nevada Review and has appeared in Maudlin House, The Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, Midwestern Gothic, and NEAT. - [An Injection of Independence: Megan Volpert’s 1976](https://gristjournal.com/2016/09/an-injection-of-independence-megan-volperts-1976/) - Review by Michael Shou-Yung Shum // September 6, 2016Sibling Rivalry Press, April 2016Paperback, 240 pp., $19.76 First things first—Megan Volpert informs us in her introduction to 1976 that she was born in 1981, and that, therefore, this invitingly messy collection of essays, observations, and verbal assaults on our Bicentennial Year is by definition not a retrospective, but - [Some Notes on the Document After 11/8 by Susan Briante](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/some-notes-on-the-document-after-11-8-by-susan-briante/) - Susan Briante is the author of three books of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders all from Ahsahta Press. Recent work has appeared in Guernica, Gulf Coast, as well as The Boston Review’s Poems for Political Disaster. She is an associate professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arizona, where she serves as faculty liaison for the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. The program brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to work with community-based environmental and social justice groups. Briante hosts the radio program Speedway and Swan, an hour of poetry and music on KXCI 91.3 Tucson. She is writing a book on documentary poetics forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2019. - [Biography of Orange (An Excerpt) After Maggie Nelson by Chloe Firetto-Toomey](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/biography-of-orange-an-excerpt-after-maggie-nelson-by-chloe-firetto-toomey/) - Chloe Firetto-Toomey has an MFA degree from Florida International University, where she currently teaches creative writing. She also teaches nonfiction at Everglades Correctional Institution. She is a two-time finalist in Tupelo Quarterly’s Prose Open Contest and a finalist in Diagram’s chapbook contest. She won the 2017 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry and 2020 Scotti Merrill Award for poetry. Her chapbook of poems, Little Cauliflower, was published in 2019 by Dancing Girl Press. - [When Birds Devour the Breadcrumb Trail by Tessa Mellas](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/when-birds-devour-the-breadcrumb-trail-by-tessa-mellas/) - Tessa Mellas received the 2013 Iowa Short Fiction Award for her collection Lungs Full of Noise. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. She teaches writing at the University of Maine at Machias, a college so far east it is the first in the nation each morning to see the sun. Figure skater, vermicomposter, vegan and tender of a fierce feline twosome, she relates to soil and snow. - [Grief by David Carlin](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/grief-by-david-carlin/) - David Carlin is a writer and creative artist based in Melbourne, Australia. David’s books include 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder, Our Father Who Wasn’t There, The Abyssinian Contortionist, and the edited anthology of new Asian and Australian writing, The Near and the Far. His award-winning work includes essays, plays, radio features, exhibitions, documentary and short films; recent projects include the Circus Oz Living Archive and WrICE. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at RMIT University where he co-directs the non/fictionLab. - [Red by Andrea Rehani](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/red-by-andrea-rehani/) - Andrea Rehani is an Assyrian-Iraqi-American prose and poet writer. Her work has been published in MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Currently, she is an ESL professor for international students. In addition, she is working toward her PhD in Curriculum Studies at DePaul University. Andrea is a captain and member of Poems While You Wait. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Prose from The New School and an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Northeastern Illinois University. Andrea lives in Chicago. - [Grass by Nicole Walker](https://gristjournal.com/2019/01/grass-by-nicole-walker/) - Nicole Walker is the author of Sustainability: A Love Story (2018). She has previously published the books Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and This Noisy Egg (2010). She edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections Science of Story with Sean Prentiss and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, with Margot Singer. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and is a noted author in Best American Essays. - [Evaporated by Magda Montiel Davis](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/evaporated-by-magda-montiel-davis/) - Magda Montiel Davis is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, where she was awarded an Iowa Arts Fellowship. Kissing Fidel: a Memoir of Cuban-American Terrorism in the United States won the 2020 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction and will be published in the fall. “Ashes Over Havana” won the 2019 Earl Weaver Baseball Prize and was selected for inclusion in Best Women’s Travel Writing. Magda is a former Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress, an immigration lawyer, and was the first recipient of the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s national Pro Bono Award. She divides her time between Key Biscayne, Florida, and Iowa City, a UNESCO City of Literature. - [How to Photograph Your Newborn by Krys Malcolm Belc](https://gristjournal.com/2014/01/how-to-photograph-your-newborn-by-krys-malcolm-belc/) - Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet) and essays that have appeared or are forthcoming in Granta, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives in snowy Marquette, Michigan, with his partner and their three children. - [How to Renew the People and the Land: Stephanie Anderson’s One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture](https://gristjournal.com/2019/02/how-to-renew-the-people-and-the-land-stephanie-andersons-one-size-fits-none-a-farm-girls-search-for-the-promise-of-regenerative-agriculture/) - Review by John Nichols // February 13, 2019University of Nebraska Press$21.95, pp.321 Stephanie Anderson’s One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture forwards an old idea repurposed for a century of people wondering what to do to create sustainable food sources. The non-fiction work blends memoir, scholarly argumentation, and interviews to - [Beyond the Black and White: Adding Depth and Complexity to the Short Story by Tawnysha Greene](https://gristjournal.com/2012/08/beyond-the-black-and-white-adding-depth-and-complexity-to-the-short-story-by-tawnysha-greene/) - Tawnysha Greene received her PhD from the University of Tennessee where she served as the fiction editor for Grist: The Journal for Writers. Her work has appeared in PANK, Bellingham Review, and Weave Magazine. Her first novel, A House Made of Stars, was released from Burlesque Press in 2015. - [On Messiness and Polish: Some Thoughts on Publishing and Why We’re Launching a Blog by Christian Anton Gerard](https://gristjournal.com/2013/10/on-messiness-and-polish-some-thoughts-on-publishing-and-why-were-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. - [A Bio You Won’t Read: I Am From Nowhere and My Work Does Not Address a Sense of Place by Charlotte Pence](https://gristjournal.com/2013/11/a-bio-you-wont-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). - [Why Translate? by Darren Jackson](https://gristjournal.com/2014/02/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). - [Advice to Beginning Writers: Be Quick and Take Your Chances by Vanessa Blakeslee](https://gristjournal.com/2014/03/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. - [All Roads Leading Home by Elwin Cotman](https://gristjournal.com/2015/02/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. - [The Business of Writing by Heather Dobbins](https://gristjournal.com/2015/05/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 - [The Art of the Aural Narrative: Podcasts to Inspire Your Writing by Rob McGinley Myers](https://gristjournal.com/2015/08/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 Signifier Expresses Its Meaning Through the Writer: Superstition, Synchronicity and Writing Style by Michael Shou-Yung Shum](https://gristjournal.com/2015/10/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. - [Doubting Narcissism by Katie Condon](https://gristjournal.com/2016/01/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. - [Performing Poetry by Brynn Martin](https://gristjournal.com/2016/07/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. - [On Teaching Young Writers: Getting Better, Not Being Good by Jason Linden](https://gristjournal.com/2016/08/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. - [Ticks by Stephanie Anderson](https://gristjournal.com/2016/09/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. - [Say What?: Writing in Regional Accents by Alex Bledsoe](https://gristjournal.com/2016/09/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. - [What Meditation Did For Me During My MFA by Nancy Zigler](https://gristjournal.com/2016/10/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. - [Dorothea Lasky, I Wouldn’t Be a Poet Without You: How Black Life Influenced My Poetics by Katie Condon](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/dorothea-lasky-i-wouldnt-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 - [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](https://gristjournal.com/2017/03/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. - [Death, Art, and Writing by Ryan Masters](https://gristjournal.com/2017/03/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. - [Wings and Scythes: An Interview with Kristin Robertson About Craft and Her Debut Poetry Collection, Surgical Wing by Hank Backer](https://gristjournal.com/2017/07/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. - [The Shattered Novel: Rules of Fragmented Fiction by Samantha Edmonds](https://gristjournal.com/2017/10/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. - [Current: An Interview with Rebecca Morgan Frank About Her 2017 Collection Sometimes We’re All Living in A Foreign Country by Allison Pitinii Davis](https://gristjournal.com/2018/03/current-an-interview-with-rebecca-morgan-frank-about-her-2017-collection-sometimes-were-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 Wild Feminine: Five poems by Ada Limón by Dion O’Reilly](https://gristjournal.com/2019/10/the-wild-feminine-five-poems-by-ada-limon-by-dion-oreilly/) - 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. - [Against the Death Drive: Queer Joy in Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Dana Alsamsam](https://gristjournal.com/2020/01/against-the-death-drive-queer-joy-in-chen-chens-when-i-grow-up-i-want-to-be-a-list-of-further-possibilities-by-dana-alsamsam/) - Dana Alsamsam is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit (tenderness lit, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, The Shallow Ends, Gigantic Sequins, Tinderbox Poetry, Salamander, BOOTH, The Common and others. Critical prose appears in The Rumpus. Her work has been supported by a fellowship from Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. - [The Flowers of Afterthought: Premises and Strategies for Revision by David Jauss](https://gristjournal.com/2020/02/the-flowers-of-afterthought-premises-and-strategies-for-revision-by-david-jauss/) - David Jauss is the author of four collections of short stories, including Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories and Nice People: New & Selected Stories II, two volumes of poetry, and the essay collection Alone With All That Could Happen (reprinted in paperback as On Writing Fiction). His stories have won the AWP Award for Short Fiction and National Endowment for the Arts and Michener Fellowships and they have been reprinted in the Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Award, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He teaches fiction writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is completing a new collection of essays on the craft of fiction titled The World Inside the World. - [Heartwood by Kimberly Hoff](https://gristjournal.com/2020/09/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). - [The Issue of Race in Writing by Cynthia Robinson Young](https://gristjournal.com/2020/10/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. - [Zoshchenko’s Unstable We: The Tension of Collective Plurals in Soviet Fiction by Alina Stefanescu](https://gristjournal.com/2020/11/zoshchenkos-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. - [“She grimaces, a better way of speaking”: Rachel Levy’s A Book So Red](https://gristjournal.com/2015/09/she-grimaces-a-better-way-of-speaking-rachel-levys-a-book-so-red/) - Review by Jaclyn Watterson // September 16, 2015Caketrain Press, June 2015Paperback. 140pp. $9 The lightning-quick flash fictions that make up Rachel Levy’s A Book So Red read like skin blistering: before you become aware of your delicious discomfort in such daring prose, there’s a bubble, erupting. Each section ends, leaving you a little sore, perhaps wishing for - [Articulate Bodies and Missed Connections: May-Lan Tan’s Things to Make and Break](https://gristjournal.com/2015/10/articulate-bodies-and-missed-connections-may-lan-tans-things-to-make-and-break/) - Review by Evan Dardano // October 7, 2015CB editions, Feb 2014Paperback. 216pp. £8.99 Things to Make and Break, May-Lan Tan’s debut story collection, is fascinated with articulate bodies. A woman becomes transfixed with the scarred body of her lover’s ex after discovering his cache of nude photos; a shotgun-wielding child comes of age through murder, - [Reconstructing the End: Jeff Wood’s The Glacier](https://gristjournal.com/2016/08/reconstructing-the-end-jeff-woods-the-glacier/) - Review by Joe Seale // August 1, 2016Two Dollar Radio, Oct. 2015Paperback, 160 pp., $15.95 The early pages of Jeff Wood’s cinematic novel The Glacier depict a landscape rearranged through a series of instantaneous and radical changes. Jonah, the character who comes closest to serving as a protagonist, works hundreds of yards away from his fellow surveyors, - [Rosa Liksom’s Compartment No. 6](https://gristjournal.com/2016/10/rosa-liksoms-compartment-no-6/) - Review by Torrie Jay White // October 24, 2016Graywolf Press, August 2016Paperback, 192 pp., $16 Compartment No. 6 is a tense, terse, dense novel. In less than 200 pages, Rosa Liksom jails the entire, crumbling Soviet Union, and gives it to us to unspool. This novel, published in early August by Graywolf Press, starts in Moscow. - [Quinn Dalton’s Midnight Bowling](https://gristjournal.com/2016/12/quinn-daltons-midnight-bowling/) - Review by Courtney Mullis // December 5, 2016Carolina Wren Press, March 2016Paperback, 263pp. $17.95 Quinn Dalton’s second novel Midnight Bowling is more than just a teenage love story. A skillfully written young adult crossover, Midnight Bowling uses parallel memoirs to recount two romances as well as one coming-of-age story. Middle-aged Leo Florida owns The Galaxy, Sandusky’s timeworn bowling alley - [Stars and Bright Signs: Tawnysha Greene’s A House Made of Stars](https://gristjournal.com/2017/02/stars-and-bright-signs-tawnysha-greenes-a-house-made-of-stars/) - Review by Justin LaFreniere // February 27, 2017Burlesque Press, 2015Paperback, 196 pp. $16.95 Tawnysha Greene’s A House Made of Stars opens with danger disguised as play: the young hearing-impaired girl who serves as unnamed narrator hides in the bathtub with her younger deaf sister because “Momma tells us it’s a game.” But the observant narrator knows the - [Exquisite Desolation: Emily Fridlund’s Catapult](https://gristjournal.com/2018/01/exquisite-desolation-emily-fridlunds-catapult/) - Review by Sarah Appleton // January 18, 2018Sarabande Books, 2017ISBN: 978-1946448057240 pp. / $15.95 Emily Fridlund has had an eventful year: her novel The History of Wolves was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and her short story collection, Catapult, won Sarabande Books’s Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Ben Marcus. Fridlund’s short stories are riveting; - [Avuncularly Pynchonian: Joe Ponepinto’s Mr. Neutron](https://gristjournal.com/2018/03/avuncularly-pynchonian-joe-ponepintos-mr-neutron/) - Review by David A. Southard // March 20, 20187.13 Books, March 2018Paperback, 300pp., $15.99 You have heard it before: you are the lead in the running film or the voluminous Proustian saga that is your life. This is what you tell yourself, whether as a result of confidence, privilege, evolutionary machinations, or sheer tyranny of - [The Death of Empathy: Anna Moschovakis’ Eleanor or the Rejection of the Progress of Love](https://gristjournal.com/2018/09/the-death-of-empathy-anna-moschovakis-eleanor-or-the-rejection-of-the-progress-of-love/) - Review by Amy Lee Lillard // September 9, 2018Coffee House Press, August 2018Paperback, 224 pp. $16.95 Something has happened to Eleanor, the thirty-nine-year-old teacher and writer at the center of Anna Moschovakis’ debut novel. This thing permeates Eleanor’s daily routine of teaching, reading, and wandering her Brooklyn neighborhood. This thing also haunts Eleanor when she - [How to Survive the Rest of Your Life: Vanessa Blakeslee’s Perfect Conditions](https://gristjournal.com/2018/11/how-to-survive-the-rest-of-your-life-vanessa-blakeslees-perfect-conditions/) - Review by Samantha Edmonds // November 15, 2018 Several weeks after finishing Vanessa Blakeslee’s Perfect Conditions (Curbside Splendor, 2018), I still feel these stories overflowing in my head, the way salt lingers on skin after an ocean swim. An apt comparison—of the ten stories in Blakeslee’s collection, six are water-based, set in coastal regions (particularly, but not - [Nineteen Letters by Kathleen McGookey](https://gristjournal.com/2019/08/nineteen-letters-by-kathleen-mcgookey/) - Reviewed by Natalie Tomlin // August 6, 2019Batcat Press, April 2019Hardcover, 45 pages, $24.00 With the publication of her latest chapbook, Nineteen Letters, Kathleen McGookey continues her playful and inventive interest in mortality, especially as it relates to the experience of parenting. This collection of epistolary prose poems addressed to death is an expansion on several poems - [The Skin that Heats and Sparks: Anya Krugovoy Silver’s From Nothing](https://gristjournal.com/2017/03/the-skin-that-heats-and-sparks-anya-krugovoy-silvers-from-nothing/) - Review by Paige Sullivan // March 27, 2017Louisiana State University Press, September 2016Paperback, 80pp. $17.95 Though From Nothing, Anya Silver’s third collection of poetry, begins with the titular, Donne-esque poem that distills the book’s overarching themes, one can flip a few pages ahead to “Just Red” to feel the collection’s pulse. In the poem, the speaker - [Justin Boening’s Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last](https://gristjournal.com/2017/01/justin-boenings-not-on-the-last-day-but-on-the-very-last/) - Review by Emily Corwin // January 9, 2017Milkweed Editions, 2016Paperback, 61 pp. $16 Justin Boening’s Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last is a book that gives pleasure, a visceral sensation that starts somewhere in the chest and ripples down to the feet. These poems are wild, lush, and dreamy. I even love the - [In the Room Made of Broken Mockingbirds: Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds](https://gristjournal.com/2016/09/in-the-room-made-of-broken-mockingbirds-ocean-vuongs-night-sky-with-exit-wounds/) - Review by Jeremy Michael Reed // September 19, 2016Copper Canyon Press, April 2016Paperback, 70 pp. $16 Ocean Vuong’s debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, has received rave reviews from seemingly everywhere, but, beneath all of this fanfare, his poetry speaks in a quietly strong, self-questioning tone. From cover to cover, Vuong narrates the process of - [Our Lives Happen Between the Memorable: A Review of Dexter L. Booth’s Scratching the Ghost](https://gristjournal.com/2015/01/our-lives-happen-between-the-memorable-a-review-of-dexter-l-booths-scratching-the-ghost/) - Review by Darius Stewart // January 13, 2015 Too often I’ve been asked, “what exactly is poetry?” The people who ask this question tend to be intelligent professionals—which bewilders me—and some of them, understandably, ask because they are so young; they ask because they haven’t (yet) been exposed to poetry in their compulsory curricula—at least not enough—and - [The Words Will Keep Us Connected to Each Other: A Review of Grace Bauer’s Nowhere All At Once](https://gristjournal.com/2015/02/the-words-will-keep-us-connected-to-each-other-a-review-of-grace-bauers-nowhere-all-at-once/) - Review by Darius Stewart // February 26, 2015 What is it about Grace Bauer that compels us so much to her work? How many lines defining poetry does she write that enable us to identify our own lives so viscerally because her words, with enormous empathy, eventually translate into poems of sympathy? It’s as if - [To Take Note of Where We Are: Adam Clay’s Stranger](https://gristjournal.com/2016/02/to-take-note-of-where-we-are-adam-clays-stranger/) - Review by Jeremy Michael Reed // February 26, 2016Milkweed Editions, February 2016Paperback, 96pp. $16 Adam Clay’s third book, Stranger, examines the ways we can be estranged from each other and the places we live, as well as the philosophical questions that arise from our attenuated relationships. Throughout the book, Clay uses colloquial phrases to convey abstract - [Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity](https://gristjournal.com/2016/08/political-punch-contemporary-poems-on-the-politics-of-identity/) - Review by Ryo Yamaguchi // August 15, 2016Edited by Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth SmithSundress Press, March 2016Paperback, 236 pp, $20.00 When I finished reading Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, edited by Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith, I was waiting for my partner in Daley Plaza in Chicago under its famed - [Emily O’Neill’s Make a Fist & Tongue the Knuckles](https://gristjournal.com/2016/08/emily-oneills-make-a-fist-tongue-the-knuckles/) - Review by Emily Corwin // August 29, 2016Nostrovia Press, June 2016Paperback, 30 pp. $5.00 What I love and admire about O’Neill’s poems is where they take me. Often, she starts with an image—such as the image of the “world’s smallest woman” in the opening poem—and this image quickly twists and leaps and transforms, bringing me - [Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry](https://gristjournal.com/2016/11/hard-lines-rough-south-poetry/) - Review by Paige Sullivan // November 14, 2016University of South Carolina Press, April 2016Hardcover, 312pp. $49.99 Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry anthologizes contemporary Southern poetry filled with the “visceral, gut-level realism” of a gritty South that swiftly denounces “the sweet-rotten effluvium of magnolia in the moonlight.” Readers will find 20th and 21st century Southern poetry stalwarts–James - [Impossible Questions: Leif Haven’s Arcane Rituals](https://gristjournal.com/2017/03/impossible-questions-leif-havens-arcane-rituals/) - Review by Justin Goodman // March 13, 20171913 Press, 2016Paperback, 100 pp. $15.00 Exhortations are poetic. Think Homer’s “Tell me, O Muse,” to Rilke’s “you must change your life,” to Whitman’s “This is what you shall do.” One can say they are diaristic, but it is more an acknowledgement of one’s temporality; poems are extended - [Mostly in Dreams: Chris Santiago’s Tula](https://gristjournal.com/2017/07/mostly-in-dreams-chris-santiagos-tula/) - Review by Tyler Burdwood // July 31, 2017Milkweed Press, December 2016Paperback, 100pp., $16 Chris Santiago’s first book of poetry, Tula from Milkweed Editions, opens with a definition. It turns out “tula,” referring not to four letters but two syllables, two sounds, exists as many words in many languages. Many poems in the book are titled only, “Tula,” and - [Seeking Stars: Jordan Rice’s Constellarium](https://gristjournal.com/2017/08/seeking-stars-jordan-rices-constellarium/) - Review by Hannah Widdifield // August 7, 2017Orison BooksISBN 978-0-9906917-7-890 pp. / $16.00 In her debut collection of poetry, Jordan Rice guides readers through the transformative process of being and becoming. The central topic at hand is Rice’s transition from biologically male to female, but as the title of her collection suggests, this is only - [“Henry Puts the Casual Back in Casualty”: Conor Bracken’s Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour](https://gristjournal.com/2017/12/henry-puts-the-casual-back-in-casualty-conor-brackens-henry-kissinger-mon-amour/) - Review by Allison Pitinii Davis // December 4, 2017Bull City Press, 2017ISBN: 978-1-4951-5768-448 pp. / $12.00 In Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger takes the speaker on a surreal tour of international atrocities. The collection’s absurdism deglorifies and satirizes Kissinger and his neo-imperialist policies. By posing as Kissinger’s lover, the speaker inhabits a self-incriminating position. This suggests that Kissinger represents both himself but also the - [Editor Recommends: An Everyday Practice of Starting Over in Stephanie McCarley Dugger’s Either Way, You’re Done](https://gristjournal.com/2018/02/editor-recommends-an-everyday-practice-of-starting-over-in-stephanie-mccarley-duggers-either-way-youre-done/) - Review by Jeremy Michael Reed // February 23, 2018Sundress Publications, October 2017Paperback, 88 pp. $12.99 Former Grist poetry editor Stephanie McCarley Dugger’s first full-length collection of poems Either Way, You’re Done speaks from a rural environment of crops, tractors, catfish, and hawks. Dugger’s book moves through such archetypal images from her narrator’s past in order to make sense of - [Searching the Roots of Female Existence : Melissa Queen’s Girls Named for Flowers](https://gristjournal.com/2018/06/searching-the-roots-of-female-existence-melissa-queens-girls-named-for-flowers/) - Review by Jocelyn Heath // June 13, 2018dancing girl press, 2017Paperback, 32 pp. $7 We may never meet young women named Zephyranthes, Ipomoea, and Caladium in real life, but we do in Melissa Queen’s Girls Named for Flowers. In her debut chapbook, Queen grapples with sweeping questions of femininity and identity. Where the title seems to beckon us toward pretty things, Queen shifts our - [The Cracks are How the Light Gets In: Amy Strauss Friedman’s The Eggshell Skull Rule](https://gristjournal.com/2018/06/the-cracks-are-how-the-light-gets-in-amy-strauss-friedmans-the-eggshell-skull-rule/) - Review by Donna Vorreyer // June 22, 2018Kelsay Books, 2018Paperback, 78pp. $14.00 “For every//passageway leads to potential/and to poison. We drink//what we can, reaching and grateful.” This line is from the titular poem of Amy Strauss Friedman’s collection The Eggshell Skull Rule. The poem’s epigraph explains the meaning of the “eggshell skull rule.” It states that - [A Conversation of Selves: Canese Jarboe’s dark acre](https://gristjournal.com/2018/07/a-conversation-of-selves-canese-jarboes-dark-acre/) - Review by Emily Corwin // July 13, 2018Willow Springs BooksACME Poetry Series, 2018 Neosporin Pussy Queen, Rodeo Queen, Rapunzel, figurine, showgirl, apex predator, a midnight bride with a 40-foot train: Canese Jarboe’s speaker is all of these and more, riveting us in their debut chapbook, dark acre (Willow Springs, 2018). I have been entranced, awe-struck with Canese ever since I met them (digitally) in 2016, and was floored - [The Wolf at the Door: Darren Demaree’s Two Towns Over](https://gristjournal.com/2018/07/the-wolf-at-the-door-darren-demarees-two-towns-over/) - Review by Donna Vorreyer // July 31, 2018 Trio House Press, 2018Paperback, 84 pp, $16 Meet the wolf. Seductive. Dangerous. In Darren Demaree’s Two Towns Over, drugs are the wolves that infiltrate and prowl the author’s home state of Ohio, turning the kingdom of his childhood into a fairy tale in reverse, haunted by lost dreams - [Girl, Deconstructed: Erin Hoover’s Barnburner](https://gristjournal.com/2018/10/girl-deconstructed-erin-hoovers-barnburner/) - Review by Stephanie Walls // October 9, 2018Elixir Press, 2018$17.00 Erin Hoover fearlessly explores and reports on the experiences of a young Millennial woman entering adulthood in her debut full-length collection of poems. The overall structure of the book is a three-part narrative that steadily grows in intensity from smolder to burn and finally culminates - [Voice, Body, Form, Line: Brenna Womer’s Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance](https://gristjournal.com/2018/12/voice-body-form-line-brenna-womers-atypical-cells-of-undetermined-significance/) - Review by Shane Stricker // December 27, 2018 C&R Press$10.00, pp. 54 Brenna Womer’s Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2017) unfurls like a person aging, unfolding, unraveling, becoming itself. It is essay and poetry and lyricism in word and line and form choice. It is voice. One voice for the one who forgets what she was searching for only the night previous. “It’s true, - [Editor Recommends: Umansky, Mountain & Miller](https://gristjournal.com/2019/08/editor-recommends-umansky-mountain-miller/) - Review by Jeremy Michael Reed // August 14, 2019The Barbarous Century by Leah UmanskyEyewear Publishing, March 2018 // 106 pages, £10.99High Ground Coward by Alicia MountainUniversity of Iowa Press, April 2018 // 112 pages, $19.95Ceremonial by Carly Joy MillerOrison Books, May 2018 // 104 pages, $16.00 As 2019 began, I found myself looking to books from last year - [Fludde by Peter Mishler](https://gristjournal.com/2019/08/fludde-by-peter-mishler/) - Reviewed by Joseph LaBine // August 30, 2019 I first read Peter Mishler’s book of poetry, Fludde, in manuscript in 2015, and it called up my small secret memories: cubby holes at school, the feeling of a field under foot, the smell of well water, the length of a certain flight of stairs, a flood of - [Pathos, Wry Wit, and a Yellow Mustard Penis: Renee Simms’ Debut Story Collection Meet Behind Mars](https://gristjournal.com/2019/05/pathos-wry-wit-and-a-yellow-mustard-penis-renee-simms-debut-story-collection-meet-behind-mars/) - Reviewed by Jody Hobbs Hesler // May 28, 2019 Renee Simms’ outstanding debut collection, Meet Behind Mars from Wayne State University Press, captivates with fully-imagined characters who are writers, parents, adopted children, rocket scientists, pawn clerks, poets, professors, and children and spouses of Motown stars. They face fatal illnesses, crash-testing monkeys, “The Yellow Mustard Penis Incident,” as - [The Many Names for Mother by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach](https://gristjournal.com/2019/12/the-many-names-for-mother-by-julia-kolchinsky-dasbach/) - Reviewed by Emily Bradley // December 2, 2019The Kent State University Press, 2019Paperback, 98 pages Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s The Many Names for Mother is a collection of bravery. By this, I do not mean merely that the poet herself is brave in sharing her art – though she is – or that her poetry looks the hardships - [Skin Memory by John Sibley Williams](https://gristjournal.com/2020/03/skin-memory-by-john-sibley-williams/) - Reviewed by Rachel Harper // March 6, 2020The Backwaters Press, 2020Paperback, 84 pp. $15.95 Loss, the pain that accompanies such an experience, and the process of re-purposing that pain to a greater cause are concepts many authors attempt to grasp and grapple with through language; readers hope to catch a glimpse of themselves in the - [Infinity Standing Up by Drew Pisarra](https://gristjournal.com/2019/11/infinity-standing-up-by-drew-pisarra/) - Reviewed by Michael Sutherlin // November 4, 2019Capturing Fire Press, 2019Paperback, 68 pp. $10 Drew Pisarra takes on the topic of the modern on-again off-again relationship in his raw and clever collection of poems entitled Infinity Standing Up. The work is comprised of 40 Shakespearean sonnets divided into 5 sections. Despite the formal structure inherited from the - [Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing by Julie Marie Wade](https://gristjournal.com/2020/03/just-an-ordinary-woman-breathing-by-julie-marie-wade/) - Reviewed by Emily Jalloul // March 17, 2020Mad Creek Books, 2020Paperback, 208 pages, $18.95 “Just An Ordinary Woman Breathing” is Julie Marie Wade’s eleventh book. Her others, a mix of poetry, lyric-essay, and memoir, have garnered wide praise, including winning a Lambda Literary Award, among others prizes. The voice and lyricism that exists in her ## Pages - [Homepage](https://gristjournal.com/) - Show us your work. In 2025, we will accept submissions for our ProForma Contest between June 1 and July 15. We will be open to general submissions between August 1 and October 31. We publish our print issue annually and online content more regularly. 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Read More » Issue 18 The - [Fiction](https://gristjournal.com/elementor-989/) - New Fiction Search Issue 18 The Flatlander Courtney Pasko is a writer and public library worker. Originally from rural Pennsylvania, she currently resides in Baltimore with her husband and their cat, Poe. Her work has previously appeared in HAD, hex literary, and The Dodge. Read more or get in touch at courtneypasko.com. Read More » - [Contact Us](https://gristjournal.com/contact-us/) - CONTACT US Andrew ButlerEditor-in-ChiefSarah HarshbargerFiction EditorMariah RiggNonfiction EditorKate WrightPoetry EditorSam Herschel WeinPoetry EditorAndrew ButlerArt EditorEmily JalloulManaging EditorMaggie HessManaging Editor for Online Content Alex SausaReviews EditorAmber Walters-MolinaSocial Media EditorSara Mae HenkeEvents & Promotions Coordinator PRO FORMA CONTEST ProForma Contest We welcome submissions of unpublished work for our ProForma contest every spring. 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She has an MFA in Poetry from - [CNF Reviews](https://gristjournal.com/cnf-reviews/) - CNF Reviews Search CNF Review All Hat, No Cattle by Mariah Rigg Reviewed by Sarah Harshbarger | August 8, 2023Bull City Press, 2023Paperback, $4.99 Mariah Rigg’s chapbook All Hat, No Cattle is a masterclass in “Compressions,” the Read More » August 8, 2023 No Comments CNF Review Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative ## My Templates - [Grist Site Footer](https://gristjournal.com/?elementor_library=grist-site-footer) - Content area - [Grist Site Header](https://gristjournal.com/?elementor_library=elementor-header-71) - Content area - [Poetry](https://gristjournal.com/?elementor_library=fiction-review-3) - POETRY Could be the last time Robin Rahija March 30 2026 More Poetry Issue 18 Could be the last time Robin LaMer Rahija is the author of Inside Out Egg (Variant Lit 2024). 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