Meg Pokrass
By Barb Johnson Originally from the U.S., Meg Pokrass currently resides in the U.K., where she works as an editor and teacher. She’s published nine collections of flash fiction and two novellas and received extensive recognition for her literary contributions, including more than eight hundred stories. Her story, “You and Your Middle-Aged Cat,” was published […]
Ramona Reeves
By Barb Johnson Photo by Claire Mulkey Issue 75 author, Ramona Reeves, won the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her linked short story collection, It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories. We were thrilled to catch up with her and talk about her trajectory as an author. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Southampton Review, Pembroke, Bayou […]
Sandra Beasley
By Nikki Ummel & Michelle Nicholson Photo by Andrew Lightman This year’s judge for the Kay Murphy Prize in Poetry is Sandra Beasley. Beasley is the author of four poetry collections: Made to Explode (W. W. Norton, 2021); Count the Waves (W. W. Norton, 2015); I Was the Jukebox (W. W. Norton, 2010), winner of […]
Lori Ostlund
By Alex Moersen This year’s fiction contest judge, Lori Ostlund, is the author of the novel, After the Parade and the short story collection, The Bigness of the World, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award. The Bigness of […]
Trace Peterson
By Christina Firl TRACE PETERSON is a trans woman poet critic. She is the author of two books of poetry, including Since I Moved In (new & revised) (Chax Press, 2019). She is also Founding Editor / Publisher of EOAGH which has won 2 Lambda Literary Awards, including the first Lammy in Transgender Poetry. She co-edited the anthology Troubling […]
Stephanie Soileau
By Barb Johnson This year’s fiction contest judge, Stephanie Soileau, is the author of the short story collection, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights (Little Brown & Co., 2020). Her work has also appeared in Glimmer Train, Oxford American, Ecotone, Tin House, New Stories from the South, and other journals and anthologies, and has […]
Minrose Gwin
By Barb Johnson MINROSE GWIN is the award-winning author of nine books, most recently the novels, The Accidentals, (William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2019); Promise; and The Queen of Palmyra; a memoir, Wishing for Snow; and a biography, Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. A native of Tupelo, Mississippi, Gwin has been a writer all of her working life, beginning as […]
Anne Valente
By Emily Choate Anne Valente is the author of two novels, The Desert Sky Before Us (2019) and Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (2016), both released by William Morrow/HarperCollins. Her short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, won the 2014 Dzanc Books Short Story Prize, and in 2017, an earlier chapbook, An […]
Magdalena Zurawski
By Ross Nervig In her latest collection of poems, The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom, Magdalena Zurawski investigates the complexities of the human experience through experimentation and total sincerity, concrete details and radiant abstractions, humor and hurt. “You knew something could beautifully erupt inside you,” she writes early on in this collection, and it’s […]
Michael Garriga
By Ross Nervig Of the opponents pitted against one another in Michael Garriga’s The Book of Duels, Robert Olen Butler writes: “His characters sing the yearning of their very souls.” Inhabiting the adversaries in ninety-nine duels recorded throughout human history, Garriga crafts a study of honor, vengeance, and struggle in prose that grabs the reader. […]