Issue #48 Contributors

Contributors

David Blair

David Blair is the author of three books of poetry: Ascension Days, Friends with Dogs, and Arsonville. He is also the author of Walk Around: Essays on Poetry and Place, and a forthcoming poetry collection, Barbarian Seasons, both from MadHat Press.

Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok (1880-1921) was a Russian poet and playwright. A prominent Symbolist, his later work took on urban motifs. He was widely respected by poets of many movements and temperaments; in 1921, Maxim Gorky considered him “Russia’s finest poet.” In 1917, he embraced the Russian Revolution and wrote his most popular poems, “The Twelve” and “The Scythians,” under its influence. Soon disillusioned, he stopped writing; unable to leave Russia for medical treatment, his health deteriorated fatally in 1921. Anna Akhmatova’s poetic tribute to him closes with these lines: “Our sun, extinguished in torment–/Alexander, pure swan.”

Kevin Bowen

Kevin Bowen was for thirty years the Director of the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts Boston. A poet and translator, his most recent collections are Eight True Maps of the West (Dedalus Press, Dublin) and, with Nguyen Ba Chung, Six Vietnamese Poets (Curbstone). He is also co-editor (with Nora Paley) of A Grace Paley Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Peter Brown

Peter Brown is a fiction writer and translator. He is a founding editor, with Jennifer Barber, of Salamander.

Sarah M. Brownsberger

Sarah M. Brownsberger is a poet, essayist, novelist, and Icelandic-English translator. Her poems have previously appeared in Field, Poetry East, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Hudson Review, and other journals.

Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen’s new collection, Nightshade, will be out this year with Four Way Books. Recent books include Unfathoming and Furs Not Mine. Cohen directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA, and the Writers House at Merrimack College.

Martha Collins

Martha Collins has published nine books of poetry, most recently Night Unto Night (Milkweed, 2018) and Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016). Because What Else Could I Do is forthcoming from Pittsburgh in September 2019.

Will Cordeiro

Will Cordeiro co-edits the small press Eggtooth Editions and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University. His work is in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, and The Threepenny Review.

Ally Covino

Ally Covino is a graduate of the New Writer’s Project, as well as the recipient of a Michener Fellowship and a prize from the Academy of American Poets. She lives in San Francisco.

Kelly Cressio-Moeller

Kelly Cressio-Moeller’s poetry can be found in Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, North American Review, Poet Lore, Radar Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. She is an Associate Editor at Glass Lyre Press.

Jessica Cuello

Jessica Cuello is the author of Hunt (Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). She won the 2018 New Ohio Review Poetry Prize and has recent work in Cave Wall, Pleiades, Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, and Bat City Review.

Michael Czyzniejewski

Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of three story collections, most recently I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories (Curbside Splendor, 2015). He teaches at Missouri State University, where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Review and Literary Editor of Moon City Press.

John F. Deane

John F. Deane was born on Achill Island off the west coast of Ireland. He is founder of Poetry Ireland, Ireland’s national poetry society, and its journal, The Poetry Ireland Review. He is also founder and first editor of The Dedalus Press. His latest collection Dear Pilgrims appeared from Carcanet in 2018. In 2016, Deane was the Teilhard de Chardin Fellow in Catholic Studies at Loyola University, Chicago, and taught a course in poetry and Christianity.

Rachel Dragos

Rachel Dragos is a graduate of Kenyon College, where she studied English and chemistry. Her poetry has been published in Bellevue Literary Review. She lives in San Francisco and teaches high school chemistry.

Terry Dubow

Terry Dubow has published more than 20 stories, most recently in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, Witness, and Ninth Letter. Salamander published “The Healing of Saint Christopher” in 2006. He is currently at work revising a novel. He teaches and lives in Cleveland Heights, OH, with his wife and two daughters.

Valerie Duff

Valerie Duff ’s next book of poems will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2021. New work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Common, and The Cortland Review. She is a contributing editor to The Critical Flame, and this is her twelfth year as poetry editor for Salamander.

Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn’s latest book of poems is I Will Destroy You (Graywolf ), which is where the poem (“Saint Augustine”) in this magazine (Salamander) will spend eternity.

Jennifer Franklin

Jennifer Franklin is the author of two full-length collections, most recently No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Nation, Paris Review, Poem-a-Day (poets.org), and Prairie Schooner. She teaches manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, where she serves as Program Director.

Remmi Franklin

Remmi Franklin creates aerial and abstract series that play with many different components. The pieces challenge perceptions, and through abstract art or geography, are new ways to look at something assumed to be familiar. Within each series, she is exploring pattern, paint, paper, and other media.

David Freeman

David Freeman is a poet from Long Lake, MN. His poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, and others. He is the recipient of a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award in Poetry.

Alison Gaines

Alison Gaines holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida. She is originally from Vancouver, WA, and has a BA from Knox College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Sweet Tree Review, Hawk & Handsaw, and The Southern Review.

Danielle Legros Georges

Danielle Legros Georges is a poet, translator, essayist, and the author of two books of poetry, Maroon and The Dear Remote Nearness of You, the chapbook Letters from Congo, and editor of City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems. She served as Boston’s second Poet Laureate and teaches at Lesley University.

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, author of OPINEL and the chapbooks Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition, received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Heinrich Böll Cottage, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A longtime poetry lecturer at Tufts, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Hyderabad, India. She is founder of The Loom poetry series in Harrisville, NH.

Jessica Greenbaum

Jessica Greenbaum’s third book, Spilled and Gone, came out from U. Pittsburgh Press this spring.

Sonia Greenfield

Sonia Greenfield is the author of two books of poetry: American Parable and Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market. Her collection of prose poems, Letdown, is forthcoming in 2020 with White Pine Press as part of the Marie Alexander Series. She lives with her husband, son, and two rescue dogs in Hollywood, where she edits the Rise Up Review and directs the Southern California Poetry Festival.

Jeffrey Harrison

Jeffrey Harrison’s sixth book of poetry, Between Lakes (after a poem first published in Salamander), will be published by Four Way Books in fall 2020.

Jim Henle

Jim Henle lives in Jamaica Plain, MA. His poems have been published in Consequence, Cambridge River Review, and elsewhere. He wishes to thank Susan Carlisle, for whose class he first wrote this translation.

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield’s ninth poetry book, Ledger, will appear in spring 2020 from Knopf. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hirshfield’s work appears also in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and ten volumes of The Best American Poem.

Tom Holmes

Tom Holmes is the editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics and the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Cave (winner of The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013). He writes about poetry, wine, and other things on his blog, The Line Break.

Kalila Holt

Kalila Holt has published work in wigleaf and The Baltimore Review, and she produces the podcast Heavyweight. Whenever she makes a salad, people say, “Wow, that salad looks great.”

Eva Hooker

Eva Hooker is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, IN. 3 Taos Press published her first book, Godwit, in 2016. Chapiteau Press published two of her chapbooks: The Winter Keeper and Notes for Survival in the Wilderness.

Gabriel Houck

Gabriel Houck’s fiction appears in journals such as Glimmer Train, The Sewanee Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and Mid-American Review. He is originally from New Orleans, and now lives in Lincoln, NE, where he teaches in the English Department at The University of Nebraska.

Joan Houlihan

Joan Houlihan is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Shadow-feast. She is Professor of Practice at Clark University and also teaches in the Lesley University Low-Res MFA Program in Cambridge, MA. She is founder and director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.

Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe has published novels, poetry, and essays, and a new book of her poems is due out from Graywolf Press in fall 2019.

Kasey Jueds

Kasey Jueds is the author of a book of poems, Keeper, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Narrative, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, Cave Wall, Colorado Review, Pleiades, and Crazyhorse. She lives in Philadelphia.

Nancy Kassell

Text(isles), Nancy Kassell’s first book of poetry, and Be(longing), a chap- book, were published by Dos Madres Press in 2013 and 2016, respectively. “Parenthesis Enclosing Empty Space” is the title poem of a new chapbook. She lives in Brookline, MA.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston is author of the long poem, “I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.” She was conferred the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton, and the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.

John Kinsella

John Kinsella’s most recent books of poetry include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016), Firebreaks (WW Norton, 2016), and Insomnia (Picador, 2018). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment, Curtin University, Western Australia.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Neon Vernacular (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize), Taboo, Warhorses, The Chameleon Couch, and The Emperor of Water Clocks. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed nationally and include Wakonda’s Dream, Saturnalia, Testimony, and Gilgamesh: A verse play. He teaches at New York University.

Frannie Lindsay

Frannie Lindsay’s sixth volume of poetry is forthcoming from Cavankerry Press in 2020. Her work appears in Best American Poetry 2014, The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Plume, and many others. In 2008, she was awarded the Missouri Review Prize. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Heather Madden

Heather Madden lives between two fields—with her husband, son, and a small assortment of beasties—in Chesterfield, NH. She works in human services and has served as a contributing editor to Salamander.

Gail Mazur

Gail Mazur’s eighth collection, Land’s End, is forthcoming from University of Chicago in 2020. They Can’t Take That Away From Me was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Zeppo’s First Wife won the Massachusetts Book Prize and was finalist for the LA Times Book Award. She is founder of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, and has taught widely, including as Visiting Professor in Boston University’s MFA Program and in the summer workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center. An early draft of “Ravine” appeared alongside Michael Mazur’s painting in a deCordova Museum bulletin.

Jill McDonough

Three-time Pushcart prize winner Jill McDonough is the recipient of Lannan, NEA, Cullman Center, and Stegner fellowships. Her most recent book is Reaper (Alice James, 2017); Here All Night, her fifth collection, is forthcoming from Alice James Books. She teaches in the MFA program at University of Massachusetts Boston and in a Boston jail.

Leslie McGrath

Leslie McGrath’s third poetry collection, Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives, was published by The Word Works in 2018. She teaches poetry at Central CT State University and lives in Essex, CT.

Emmanuel Merle

Emmanuel Merle is a leading French poet who has published many books. His translation of poems by Jennifer Barber, Délivrances (La rumeur libre éditions), was published in France in 2018. One volume of his poems, Elsewhere on Earth, translated by Peter Brown, is available in English from Guernica Editions (Toronto).grew up in New England and now lives in Baltimore, sur- rounded by impressive rivers. When not writing poetry, she works on the fine flutes of professional musicians.

S.B. Merrow

S.B. Merrow grew up in New England and now lives in Baltimore, surrounded by impressive rivers. When not writing poetry, she works on the fine flutes of professional musicians.

Isaac Ginsberg Miller

Isaac Ginsberg Miller’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Callaloo, The Collagist, Colorado Review, Sonora Review, The Shallow Ends, and Tupelo Quarterly. His chapbook Stopgap won The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest, and is forthcoming in 2019.

Kathy Nilsson

Kathy Nilsson’s book, The Infant Scholar, was published by Tupelo Press in January 2015. Her chapbook, The Abattoir, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2008, and in 2011 she received the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Award.

Dan O'Brien

Dan O’Brien is a poet and playwright living in Los Angeles. His three poetry collections, published in the US and the UK, are War Reporter, Scarsdale, and New Life. He is a recent Guggenheim Fellow in Drama.

Laurence O'Dwyer

Laurence O’Dwyer holds a PhD in paradigms of memory formation from Trinity College Dublin. His first collection of poetry, Tractography (Templar), received the Patrick Kavanagh Award and is currently shortlisted for the Shine Strong Award 2019.

Thomas Pfau

Thomas Pfau lives in the city of Muscat, Oman. He holds degrees in Classics and in English; his poems and essays have been published in the Southwest Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Colorado Review, and elsewhere.

Jacquelyn Pope

Jacquelyn Pope’s books include Watermark, Dreamboat, and Hungerpots: Selected Poems of Hester Knibbe.

Martha Rhodes

Martha Rhodes is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Thin Wall (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). She teaches in the MFA programs of Sarah Lawrence College and Warren Wilson College. She is the director of Four Way Books.

David Rivard

David Rivard’s most recent book, Standoff, won the 2017 PEN/New England Award and was published by Graywolf. He teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire.

Anna V.Q. Ross

Anna V.Q. Ross is a 2018 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Poetry and the author of the poetry collection If a Storm and the chapbooks Figuring and Hawk Weather. She teaches in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Program at Emerson College and hosts the poetry and music series Unearthed Song & Poetry.

Laura Sobbott Ross

Laura Sobbott Ross has worked as a teacher and a writing coach for Lake County Schools, where she has been named as the inaugural poet laureate for the county. Her work has been published in many fine journals, including the Florida Review, Meridian, and 32 Poems. She was the winner of the Southern Humanities Review Auburn Witness Poetry Prize.

Aimée M. Sands

Aimée M. Sands’ second manuscript, Signatories in a Darkened Field, was a semi-finalist for the Tupelo Press 2018 Dorset Prize. Her work has appeared in FIELD, Missouri Review Online, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Ireland, Saranac Review, Poet Lore, Measure, and other literary journals. In 2013, she was awarded a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. She is a co-director of the Brookline Poetry Series, an 18-year-old Boston area venue. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Lloyd Schwartz

Lloyd Schwartz teaches in the University of Massachusetts Boston MFA program, reviews for NPR’s Fresh Air, and co-edited the Library of America Elizabeth Bishop. His latest poetry collection is Little Kisses. He is Poet Laureate of Somerville, MA.

Don Share

Don Share is editor of POETRY, and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books.

Brian Simoneau

Brian Simoneau is the author of the poetry collection River Bound (C&R Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, RHINO, Southern Indiana Review, Third Coast, and other journals. Originally from Lowell, MA, he lives in Connecticut with his family.

Joanna Solfrian

Joanna Solfrian lives and works in New York City. Her first poetry collection, Visible Heavens, was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye for a Wick First Book Prize. Her second collection, The Mud Room, is due from MadHat Press in 2019.

Kathleen Spivack

Kathleen Spivack is the author of ten books of prose and poetry (Doubleday, Graywolf, Knopf, and others). Her most recent are the novel Unspeakable Things (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), and With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and Others (University of New England Press, 2012). Kathleen teaches in the Boston area and in France.

Kim Stafford

Kim Stafford is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, and currently serves as Oregon’s poet laureate. He directs the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College.

Julian Stannard

Julian Stannard is a Reader at the University of Winchester (UK), where he teaches poetry. He is the author of six collections, the most recent being Sottoripa (Canneto Editore, 2018), a bilingual publication of his Genoese poems.

Katie Sticca

Katie Sticca is the managing editor of Salamander. She received her MFA from Emerson College, and lives in Boston.

Jacob Strautmann

Jacob Strautmann’s debut poetry collection The Land of the Dead is Open for Business is forthcoming from Four Way Books in Spring 2020. He was awarded a 2018 Massachusetts Poetry Fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His poems have appeared in Agni, Forklift, Ohio, Appalachian Heritage, and elsewhere. He is a contributing editor for Salamander, and he teaches creative writing at Boston University, where he is the Managing Director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre.

Caroline Talpe

Caroline Talpe is a Franco-American translator who lives in Cambridge, MA. Among other projects, she has collaborated with Emmanuel Merle and Peter Brown in the translation into French of the collected poems of David Ferry, Qui est là (La rumeur libre éditions, 2018), the forthcoming collection of the poems of Arthur Gold, Poèmes écrits pendant une période de maladie (Èditions Encre et lumiere, 2019), and an anthology of women poets in Boston (ongoing project).

Anne-Marie Thompson

Anne-Marie Thompson works as a technical writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Recent poems and essays appear in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, and other journals. Her poetry collection, Audiation, won the 2013 Donald Justice Award.

Daniel Tobin

Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, including From Nothing, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award, The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the German of Paul Celan, and most recently Blood Labors, named one of the Best Poetry Books of the year by the New York Times. His poetry has won many awards, among them the Massachusetts Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston.

Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad

Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad’s poetry has appeared in Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Waxwing , among others. She is the poetry editor for Noble / Gas Qtrly, and is a Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets nominee. She lives in New York, where she practices matrimonial law.

Iain Twiddy

Iain Twiddy studied literature at university, and lived for several years in northern Japan. His poems have been published in Flyway, Quiddity, Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine, and elsewhere.

Meg Tyler

Meg Tyler teaches at Boston University, where she also directs the Poetry Reading Series and chairs the Institute for the Study of Irish Culture. Her chapbook, Poor Earth, came out from Finishing Line Press in 2014.

Megan Waring

Megan Waring is a poet, playwright, and fiber artist who originally hails from Virginia. She is currently earning her MFA in poetry from University of Massachusetts Boston. Her work has previously appeared in The Legendary, Pulp Literature, and Germ, and has been performed by Greene Room Productions.

Afaa M. Weaver

Afaa M. Weaver has been awarded the St. Botolph Club 57th Distinguished Artist Award. His recent book is Spirit Boxing (U. Pitt, 2017).

Kathleen Weaver

A volume of Kathleen Weaver’s poems, Too Much Happens, was published by The Post-Apollo Press. Her biography of the poet, feminist, and social radical Magda Portal, Peruvian Rebel, The World of Magda Portal, was published by Penn State University Press. She is also a translator from Spanish, working now on Cuban poets. Her poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Under a Warm Green Linden, Chariton Review, Cimarron Review, Permafrost, and other journals.

Gary Whited

Gary Whited is a poet, philosopher, and psychotherapist. His book, Having Listened, was the 2013 Homebound Publications Poetry Contest winner. He has translated the 5th century BCE poem of Parmenides from the classical Greek.

Linda Zisquit

Linda Zisquit has published five full-length poetry collections, most recently Return from Elsewhere and Havoc: New & Selected Poems. Her translations from Hebrew include Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach and These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam. She lives in Jerusalem, Israel, where she teaches, translates, and runs Artspace Gallery.