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Stephen Ackerman
Stephen Ackerman has worked since 1989 as an attorney in the Legal Counsel Division of the New York City Law Department. His poems, which have appeared previously in Salamander, have also appeared in Antioch Review, Best New Poets 2010, Boulevard, Columbia Review, Jewish Quarterly, Mudfish, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Seneca Review, upstreet, and on Poetry Daily. "September Song" is from his manuscript Late Life.
Dana Alsamsam
Dana Alsamsam is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit (tenderness lit, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, North American Review, Tinderbox Poetry, Bone Bouquet, The Massachusetts Review, BOOTH, and others. She is a Lambda Literary Fellow in the 2018 Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. A Chicago native, Dana is currently an MFA candidate and a teacher at Emerson College.
Michael Ansara
Michael Ansara is a co-founder of Mass Poetry. His work has appeared in numerous local literary magazines.
Maya Bailey-Clark
Maya Bailey-Clark is a writer living in Boston. She received a BA in English from Simmons University and is the recent winner of the George W. Nitchie Award for Creative Writing.
Susan Nisenbaum Becker
Susan Nisenbaum Becker is a psychotherapist, poet, actor, and playwright, collaborating and performing with musicians and dancers. Widely published in print and online, she’s received numerous awards including residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. Her book, Little Architects of Time and Space, was published in 2013.
M.J. Bender
M.J. Bender received a PhD from Columbia University and an MFA from Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Her poems have appeared in Origin, Cimarron Review, Mantis, 580 Split, Barrow Street, and Four Way Review, among others.
Rosebud Ben-Oni
Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow; her most recent collection of poems, turn around, BRXGHT XYXS, was selected as Agape Editions' Editors’ Choice (2019). Recently, her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online.
Charles W. Brice
Charles W. Brice is a retired psychoanalyst and is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016), Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), and An Accident of Blood (forthcoming), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated for the Best in Net anthology and a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, SLAB, The Paterson Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Jeffrey Brown
Jeffrey Brown is the editor of VAN Magazine. His work has also appeared in Slate, INTO and Electric Literature. He lives in Berlin with his husband.
Teresa Cader
Teresa Cader is the author of History of Hurricanes, The Paper Wasp, and Guests. She has won The Norma Farber First Book Award, The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, the George Bogin Memorial Award, and fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, Macdowell, and Bread Loaf.
Kate Lister Campbell
Kate Lister Campbell’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review and Nashville Review, among others. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and is currently at work on a collection of linked short stories.
Caroline Chavatel
Caroline Chavatel is the author of White Noises (Greentower Press, 2019), which won The Laurel Review’s 2018 Midwest Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in AGNI Online, Gulf Coast, and The Journal, among others. She is currently Poetry Editor of Puerto del Sol and co-founder and editor of a chapbook press, Madhouse Press.
Heather Christle
Heather Christle is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Heliopause (Wesleyan University Press, 2015). Her first work of nonfiction, The Crying Book, will be out from Catapult in 2019.
Jennifer Clarvoe
Jennifer Clarvoe is the author of two books of poems, Invisible Tender and Counter-Amores. A recipient of the Poets Out Loud Prize, the Rome Prize, and fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the James Merrill House, she recently retired from teaching at Kenyon College.
Steven Cramer
Steven Cramer is the author of five poetry books, most recently Clangings (Sarabande, 2012). Recipient of an NEA fellowship and two Massachusetts Cultural Council grants, he founded and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University.
Heather De Bel
Heather De Bel is a writer from New Jersey. She received her BA from Ramapo College and her MFA from the University of Maryland. Heather is the recipient of UMD’s Jack Salamanca Thesis Award. She currently teaches at William Paterson University.
Matthew Dougherty
Matthew Dougherty is a current MFA student at West Virginia University. His fiction has been awarded the Charles Johnson Fiction Award and published in literary journals such as Crab Orchard Review, Sphere, and others.
Wendy Drexler
Wendy Drexler’s third poetry collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in March 2017. She’s the Poet-in-Residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, for the 2018–2019 school year.
Valerie Duff-Strautmann
Valerie Duff-Strautmann is the poetry editor of Salamander. Her poems have appeared recently in Poetry, The Common, and Cortland Review. This year she will also serve as a consultant to Bob Atwan for The Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
David Ferry
David Ferry’s collected poems in French, Qui est là? (translated by Peter Brown, Emmanuel Merle, and Caroline Talpe), was published in 2018 by La rumeur libre. Ferry’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid was published in 2017 by the University of Chicago Press. He received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2011, and the National Book Award in 2012 for his collection Bewilderment. He is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Suffolk University.
Rebecca Foust
Rebecca Foust’s books include Paradise Drive, reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. Recent recognitions include the Cavafy Prize, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Lascaux Flash Fiction Prize and the ALR Fiction Prize.
George Franklin
George Franklin practices law in Miami and teaches poetry workshops in Florida state prisons. He also finds himself in the totally unexpected position of having two books coming out shortly. His full-length poetry collection, Traveling for No Good Reason, won the 2018 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions contest, and a bilingual collection, Among the Ruins, is forthcoming from Katakana Editores.
Neta Goren
Neta Goren is a self-taught artist, using mostly oil, graphite and colored pencils, and different surfaces as she comes across them. She paints reality in a non-realistic style. She paints as often as she can, mainly indoors. Her goal is to create art that makes people look again, and question norms and conventions. She lives in Israel.
Tanya Grae
Tanya Grae is the author of UNDOLL (YesYes Books 2019), a National Poetry Series finalist. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and elsewhere. Grae is pursuing her PhD at Florida State University, where she recently won the Academy of American Poets Prize.
Peter Grandbois
Peter Grandbois is the author of nine previous books, the most recent of which is Kissing the Lobster (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York.
Jessica Greenbaum
Jessica Greenbaum's third book, Spilled and Gone, will come out from U. Pitt Press in spring 2019. She teaches inside and outside academia, and is the poetry editor of London's Jewish Quarterly.
Ceridwen Hall
Ceridwen Hall is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Utah and serves as an editorial assistant at Western Humanities Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in SLANT, Grist, The Pinch, Tar River Poetry, and other journals.
W.J. Herbert
W.J. Herbert’s poetry, fiction, and reviews appear, or are forthcoming, in Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Best American Poetry 2017, Crazyhorse, New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, and others. She lives in Portland, ME, and Kingston, NY.
Rage Hezekiah
Rage Hezekiah is a Cave Canem and MacDowell Fellow who earned her MFA from Emerson College. Her debut collection, Stray Harbor (Finishing Line Press) is forthcoming in 2019.
Dennis Hinrichsen
Dennis Hinrichsen is the author of seven books of poetry. His most recent is Skin Music, from Southern Indiana University Press. He has new poems in Field, Under a Warm Green Linden, and forthcoming in Blackbird. Since May 2017, he has served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing area. He is currently the Visiting Writer at Western Michigan University.
Robert Hirschfield
Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based poet and journalist whose work has appeared in Tablet, Descant, Pamplemousse, Jewish Review of Books, European Judaism, The Writer, The Progressive, and other publications.
Allison Hraban
Allison Hraban received her MFA from Creighton University in 2017. Her poems have appeared in Third Coast, Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Flat Water Stirs: An Anthology of Emerging Nebraska Poets, and elsewhere. She currently lives and teaches in Lincoln, NE.
J. Bailey Hutchinson
J. Bailey Hutchinson lives in Fayetteville, AR, where she is Poetry Editor for the Arkansas International and Assistant Director of the Open Mouth non-profit reading series. Hutchinson has work featured or forthcoming in LIT Magazine, Beloit, Nimrod, and more. She was a finalist for Black Warrior Review’s 2017 Poetry Contest and the 2018 Nimrod Literary Award, and her poem, “Carne e Spirito,” was chosen by Safiya Sinclair to win First Prize in the 2018 New South Writing Contest.
Joshua Jones
Joshua Jones's poems have appeared in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, The Woven Tale Press, and Dappled Things, among others. He holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston and is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of North Texas.
George Kalogeris
George Kalogeris is the author of a book of paired poems in translation, Dialogos (Antilever, 2012), and of a book of poems based on the notebooks of Albert Camus, Camus: Carnets (Pressed Wafer, 2006). His poems and translations were anthologized in Joining Music with Reason, chosen by Christopher Ricks (Waywiser, 2010). His book of poems, Guide to Greece, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in December of 2018. He teaches English Literature and Classics in Translation at Suffolk University.
Jen Karetnick
Jen Karetnick is the author of eight poetry collections, including The Crossing Over (May 2019), winner of the Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in JAMA, The Hamilton Stone Review, Lunch Ticket, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Ovenbird.
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley
Ben Kingsley is best known for his Academy Award winning role as Mahatma Gandhi. A touch less famous, Affrilachian author Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley has not acted since his third-grade debut as the undertaker in The Music Man. He belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. Peep his first book, out fall 2018: Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot, selected by Bob Hicok.
Elizabeth Knapp
Elizabeth Knapp is the author of The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 De Novo Poetry Prize. Her work has recently appeared in Kenyon Review Online, The Massachusetts Review, and Quarterly West, among others.
Jacqueline Kolosov
Jacqueline Kolosov is Professor of English at Texas Tech University where she directs The CH Foundation Arts for Healing Workshops and Programming, bringing the arts to at-risk populations in West Texas. Her third poetry collection is Memory of Blue (Salmon, 2014), and she coedited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres, Winner of Foreword's IndieFab Gold Medal in Writing (Rose Metal, 2015). She lives on 3 acres of pine trees and cactus with her horses, dogs & daughter.
Aviya Kushner
Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is the author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau / Random House, 2015), a finalist for The National Jewish Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize. She is The Forward’s language columnist and an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago.
Jacob Lindberg
Born in Superior, WI, Jacob Lindberg is an MFA student at the University of Arkansas. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Up North Lit. His poetry can be found in Rattle, cream city review, River Styx, and others.
Daniel Lusk
Daniel Lusk is author of five poetry collections, most recent The Vermeer Suite and The Shower Scene from Hamlet. Other books include his poet’s memoir, Girls I Never Married. He lives in Vermont with his wife, Irish poet Angela Patten.
Jacquelyn Malone
Jacquelyn Malone recently won a Tupelo Press Broadside Prize. Two of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook All Waters Run to Lethe was published by Finishing Line Press.
Fred Marchant
Fred Marchant is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Said Not Said (Graywolf Press, 2017). Earlier books include The Looking House, Full Moon Boat, House on Water, House in Air, and Tipping Point, the latter reissued by The Word Works in a twentieth anniversary second edition. Marchant is also the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, and the founding director of the Suffolk University Poetry Center in Boston.
Joshua Martin
Joshua Martin is a doctoral student at Georgia State University. He has published poems in Tupelo Quarterly, Nashville Review, Raleigh Review, The Cortland Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook Passing Through Meat Camp was a finalist in the 2015 Jacar Press Chapbook Contest.
Gail Mazur
Gail Mazur is author of seven poetry collections, including They Can’t Take That Away from Me, finalist for the National Book Award, Zeppo’s First Wife, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, Figures in a Landscape, and Forbidden City. Her eighth book, Land’s End: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming.
Gardner McFall
Gardner McFall is the author of two books of poetry and an opera libretto. Her chapbook, On the Line, has been recently published by Finishing Line Press. She lives and works in New York City.
Diane Mehta
Diane Mehta’s poetry collection, Forest with Castanets, comes out in March 2019 with Four Way Books. She is finishing a historical novel set in 1946 India while working on a collection of essays. She has been an editor at PEN America’s Glossolalia, Guernica, and A Public Space. She lives in Brooklyn.
Kathryn Merwin
Kathryn Merwin’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Cutbank, Quiddity, Sugar House Review, Prairie Schooner, and Blackbird. She has read or reviewed for the Bellingham Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Adroit Journal, and serves as co-editor-in-chief of Milk Journal. She holds an MFA in poetry from Western Washington University and currently lives in the District of Columbia.
Oona Patrick
Oona Patrick is the co-editor of Behind the Stars, More Stars: The Tagus/Disquiet Collection of New Luso-American Writing (Tagus/UMass Press, February 2019). She earned an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington and was a nonfiction fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in the US, Canada, and Portugal.
Jill Pearlman
Jill Pearlman is a poet and blogger. Her work is a polyvocal exploration of history, place and the ecstatic. She is based in Providence, RI.
Alison Pelegrin
Alison Pelegrin is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Waterlines (LSU 2016) and Hurricane Party (U. Akron 2011). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, her poems have appeared recently in The Southern Review, Image, and The Cincinnati Review.
Joyce Peseroff
Joyce Peseroff's fifth book of poems, Know Thyself, was named a "must read" by the 2016 Massachusetts Book Awards. Recent work appears in The American Journal of Poetry, Consequence, On the Seawall and Plume.
Matthew Porto
Matthew Porto holds an MFA in Poetry from Boston University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, storySouth, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at Texas Tech University.
Vincent Poturica
Vincent Poturica's writing appears in New England Review, DIAGRAM, Western Humanities Review, and 7x7. He lives with his wife and daughter in Ukiah, CA, where he teaches at Mendocino College.
Vismai Rao
Vismai Rao grew up in Delhi, India. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in the Indianapolis Review, RHINO Poetry & elsewhere.
Paul Rowe
Paul Rowe is an Adjunct Lecturer of English at Endicott College and Merrimack College who lives north of Boston with his wife and cat. His articles, reviews, translations, poems, and interviews appear in Literary Imagination, Pusteblume, Literary Matters, Berfrois, Moonchild Magazine, FULCRUM, and The New England Review of Books. Paul is co-editor of The Charles River Journal, feature writer at PopMatters, and editor of two books, The Taletellers by Peter Caputo and The Selected Poems of Ted Richer, both forthcoming from Pen & Anvil Press.
Ira Sadoff
Ira Sadoff has published seven books of poems, most recently True Faith (BOA Editions), and has new work in APR, Tin House, and AGNI. He taught at Colby College and now lives in a little stone house in upstate New York.
Heather Sellers
Heather Sellers teaches poetry in the MFA program at the University of South Florida. She is the author of a textbook for the multi-genre creative writing classroom, The Practice of Creative Writing (MacMillan).
Yudit Shahar
Yudit Shahar grew up on the border of Sh’chunat HaTikvah, or “the neighborhood of hope,” in Tel Aviv. She is the author of the poetry collections It’s Me Speaking (2009) and Every Street Has Its Own Madwoman(2013), and recently won the prestigious Prime Minister’s Prize in Hebrew Literature. Her first collection, It’s Me Speaking, won five separate literary prizes in Israel.
Hilary Sideris
Hilary Sideris is the author of Most Likely to Die (Poets Wear Prada, 2014) and The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful, 2016). Her collection Un Amore Veloce will be published by Kelsay Books in 2019.
Joshua Michael Stewart
Joshua Michael Stewart has had poems published in the Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Brilliant Corners, and many journals. His collection of poems, Break Every String, was published by Hedgerow Books in 2016.
Katie Sticca
Katie Sticca is the managing editor of Salamander. She received her MFA from Emerson College, and lives in Boston.
Benjamin Stillerman
Benjamin Stillerman is an editor & co-founder of the journal ctrl + v, a 2019 UnionDocs fellow, and a PhD candidate at New York University. He co-produced the short film The Mole for the Visible Poetry Project & his poetry has appeared in Virga Magazine. He lives in Queens.
Drew Swinger
Drew Swinger’s poems have appeared in Poetry and AGNI. Recent review work for Salamander has appeared in Poetry Daily's Prose Feature. He is a graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing Program and manages analytics for a global higher education company headquartered in Chicago. He lives in Lexington, MA.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. Her latest collection of poetry is The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016). She lives in Paris.
Grace Talusan
Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. She graduated from Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines, an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Talusan teaches at Grub Street and Tufts.
Adam Tavel
Adam Tavel won the 2017 Richard Wilbur Award for his third poetry collection, Catafalque (University of Evansville Press, 2018).
AD Tenn
AD Tenn is a nonbinary trans poet and musician thrilled to be in this issue of Salamander. They are pursuing their MFA at NYU's low-residency program in Paris and are a current poetry editor at Narrative Magazine.
Brian Timmerman
Brian Timmerman lives in West Hills, CA, with his wife and two daughters. He has coached club youth swim teams for 24 years, and is currently with CCAT swimming. His poems have appeared in Blue Earth Review, Welter, and Northridge Review.
Heather Treseler
Heather Treseler is an associate professor of English at Worcester State University and a visiting scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. Her work appears in many journals and in four books about postwar American poetry.
Travis Truax
Travis Truax grew up in Virginia and Oklahoma and spent most of his twenties working in various national parks out west. A graduate of Southeastern Oklahoma State University, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Small Orange, Quarterly West, The Pinch, Raleigh Review, and Bird's Thumb. He lives in Bozeman, MT.
Jeanine Walker
Jeanine Walker is the co-producer and host of Mixed Bag, a variety show with a literary bent. She teaches poetry through WITS, Seattle Writes, and works as a writing coach. Recent poems have appeared in Hobart, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.
Dai Weina
Dai Weina is a poet, short story writer, and playwright based in Beijing. She has authored four poetry collections in Chinese, and she edits Guangnian (Light-Year), a magazine devoted to introducing world poetry into Chinese.
Josh Weston
Josh Weston's recent work can be found in/at Hobart, Midwestern Gothic, Smokelong Quarterly, and Guesthouse, among others.
Joyce Wilson
Joyce Wilson is editor of the Internet magazine The Poetry Porch, which has been online since 1997. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, among them Free Inquiry, The Lyric, and Poetry Ireland. Her chapbook The Need for a Bridge will appear with Finishing Line Press in 2019.
Keith Woodruff
Keith Woodruff's poetry has appeared in The Journal, Quarter After 8, Best Small Fictions, and is forthcoming in RHINO. His short fiction has appeared in Juked and Sundog Lit. His flash fiction, Elegy, published by Wigleaf, won a 2018 Pushcart Prize. He lives in Akron, OH.
Duo Yu
Born in Shandong in 1973, Chinese poet and essayist Duo Yu co-founded the “Lower Body” Movement during the early 2000s. Among his multiple books of poetry and prose are Meanings Annoy Us (2004), Chasing Butterflies (2009), and The Last Darkness (2013).
Liang Yujing
Liang Yujing, a PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, is the Chinese translator of Best New Zealand Poems 2014 (Wai-te-ata Press) and the English translator of Zero Distance: New Poetry from China (Tinfish Press).
