Fiction

Aaron Michael Morales is an Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at Indiana State University. His first novel, Drowning Tucson (2010) cited by Esquire as the bleakly human debut of the new Bukowskiwas named a Top Five Fiction Debut by Poets & Writers. Other books include a chapbook of short fiction, titled From Here You Can Almost See the End of the Desert (2008), and a textbook, The American Mashup (2011). He edits fiction for Grasslands Review and reviews books for Latino Poetry Review and Multicultural Review. He is completing his second novel, Eat Your Children.

Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding editor of the Baltimore Review and a Master of Arts in Writing student at Johns Hopkins University. She works at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. A winner of Artscape and Maryland Writers Association prizes, her short stories and poems have been published or accepted for publication in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Eureka Literary Magazine, MacGuffin, Confrontation, Rosebud, Thema, JMWW, Potomac Review, American Poetry Journal, Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Caper Literary Journal, Avatar, Able Muse, Gargoyle, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

David Meischen has a short story online at Talking Writing and fiction forthcoming in Prime Number and Bellingham Review. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. As a founder of Dos Gatos Press, he is co-editing Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, which is scheduled for an August release. Meischen has an MFA in fiction from Texas State, San Marcos. He is the recipient of a writing residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

John J. Clayton has published nine volumes of fiction, both novels and short stories. His stories have appeared in AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, Sewanee Review, over twenty times in Commentary; in Kerem, Conjunctions, Notre Dame Review, Missouri Review and The Journal. Stories have been published recently in MQR and Missouri Review. His stories have won prizes in O.Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He taught modern literature and fiction writing as professor and then Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

Peter Makuck’s fourth collection of short stories, Wins and Losses, was published in 2016 by Syracuse University Press. An earlier collection, Costly Habits, was nominated for the Pen/Faulkner Award. He has three times received honorable mention in Best American Short Stories. One of his stories, "Filling The Igloo," was included for The Best of the Southern Review. His poems and stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, Cimmaron Review, Yale Review, and others. He is Distinguished Professor emeritus from East Carolina University where he founded and edited Tar River Poetry from 1978 to 2006.

Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily, and many more. In 2010 he has been a finalist in fiction at Black Warrior Review and Mississippi Review and in poetry at Cloudbank and Mississippi Review.

Samuel Kolawoles fiction has appeared in Black Biro, Storytime, Authorme, Storymoja, Eastown fiction, is forthcoming in Jungle Jim, and elsewhere. His story collection The book of M is due to be out soon. A recipient of the Reading Bridges fellowship, Samuel lives in Ibadan, southwest Nigeria where he has begun work on his novel Olivia of Hustle House.

The many faces of Terese Svoboda's writing include eleven books of poetry, fiction, translation, and over 100 short stories. Weapons Grade, published 2009, contains poems "as haunting as they are funny...," according to Publishers Weekly. She is also author of Cannibal, Trailer Girl and Other Stories, Tin God, and Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, which was selected as a Japan Times "Best of Asia 2008" book and winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Svoboda is also the recipient of the Bobst Prize, the Iowa Prize, and the O. Henry Award. She is teaching fiction this spring at Columbias School of the Arts.