Poetry

Adam Strauss lives in Las Vegas, and has a full-length collection of poems For Days, out with BlazeVox press, poems in the recently released anthology The Arcadia Project (Ahsahta Press), as well as poems out in Word For/Word, the Laurel Review, Spork and Interim, and Verse. 

Angela Sorby is the author of three poetry collections: Distance Learning (New Issues Press, 1998); Bird Skin Coat (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); and The Sleeve Waves (forthcoming from Wisconsin). Among her recent honors are the Felix Pollak Prize, a Midwest Book Award, the Lorine Niedecker Prize, the Brittingham Prize, and a Fulbright fellowship to China. She teaches at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Caroline Kessler, originally from outside Baltimore, is a freelance writer and editor in San Francisco. Her prose and poetry has been published in The Susquehanna Review, Anderbo, In Bantam, Collision, and New Voices, among other places. She is an honors graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied creative writing and religion.  

Catherine E. Bailey is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Western Michigan University. Her creative writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Pomona Valley Review, Line Zero, Femspec, Broad!, Rose Red Review, Scythe, Lingerpost, Poetry South, Bricolage, and other publications. She has also published academic writing on queer female superheroes in Colloquy: Text Theory Critique and various articles and reviews in Yes! Magazine, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Worldchanging, and Three Percent. A play she wrote, based on interviews with over 50 women, was produced at the University of Rochester's Festival of One-Acts in 2011.

Cynthia Hogue has published seven collections of poetry, most recently, Or Consequence and When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, interview-poems and photographs (with Rebecca Ross), both in 2010. She co-translated Fortino Sámano (the overflowing of the poem), by Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy (Omnidawn 2012). Among her honors are an NEA in poetry, the H.D. Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Witter Bynner Translation Residency Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Hogue is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry in the English Department at ASU.© University of Arizona Poetry Center

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. Kirby is the author of numerous books, including The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award in poetry. His Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll was named one of Booklist's Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010, and the Times Literary Supplement called it "a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense." Kirby's forthcoming poetry collection is The Biscuit Joint, and there's more on his website.

Doug Fuller is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he is also the lead audio editor of Blackbird. He lives in Richmond, VA where he plays guitar and lap-steel in the local band The Kindling Kind. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mead, Bodega, and Monongahela Review.

Jonathan May grew up in Zimbabwe as the child of missionaries. He currently teaches in Memphis, TN. Other work has appeared in [PANK] and Rock & Sling. He is currently translating a play by Günter Eich into English and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Memphis.

Katelyn Kiley is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is the 2012-2013 Levis Fellow.

Lena Moses-Schmitt is a second-year MFA student in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is the lead associate editor of Blackbird. Prior to studying at VCU, she was an editorial assistant at NPR. Her work is forthcoming in THRUSH Poetry Journal.

Mary Carroll-Hackett took the MFA in Literature & Writing from Bennington College. Her work has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, Pedestal Magazine, Praxilla and Drunken Boat, among numerous others. Her collection of prose poems, The Real Politics of Lipstick, was released in August 2010 as the winner of the 2010 Slipstream Press Poetry competition, and she has another forthcoming, Animal Soul, from Kattywompus Press. She teaches Creative Writing at Longwood University where she also edits The Dos Passos Review, administers the Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry, and edits SPACES, an online journal of art and literature.

Priscilla Atkins lives in Holland, Michigan and has a collection, The Café´of Our Departure, forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in March 2015.

Rochelle Hurt is the author of In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). She's been awarded prizes and fellowships from Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. She lives in Orlando and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida. 

Ruth Baumann is an MFA student at the University of Memphis, & Poetry Editor of The Pinch. Her poems are published or forthcoming in birdfeast, elimae, Ilk, PANK, Revolution House, Thrush Poetry Journal, Timber & other journals. She attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop in 2012.

Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2019 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series. 

Sarah Wetzel is the author of River Electric with Light, which won the 2013 AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and is forthcoming from Red Hen Press, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published in 2010. Sarah currently teaches creative writing at The American University of Rome while splitting time between Manhattan, Tel Aviv, and Rome. You can read more of her work at www.sarahwetzel.com.

Shelley Puhak's first collection, Stalin in Aruba (Black Lawrence/Dzanc), was awarded the Towson Prize for Literature, and her chapbook The Consolation of Fairy Tales won the Stephen Dunn Prize. Her recent work appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, and many other journals. She teaches at Notre Dame of Maryland University and lives in Baltimore.