Announcing MQR’s 2015-2016 Blog Contributors

MQR is excited to announce the new line-up of bloggers for the 2015-2016 blog year. This year’s group comes to us from a wide range of backgrounds, with various areas of interest and expertise. We’re proud to have them aboard!


DANIEL DISTEFANO received his MFA in fiction from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He now lives and works in New York as a copywriter by day and a struggling novelist by night. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Whitefish Review, The Rambler, on The Missouri Review podcast, and on Ploughshares‘ blog. You can keep up with him on Twitter.

LINDSEY DRAGER is the author of the novel The Sorrow Proper (Dzanc, 2015). Her fiction and lyric essays have been published or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, Quarterly West, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cream City Review, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. She has received artist residencies from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center and her work will be anthologized in the Best Small Fictions 2015. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver where she edits the Denver Quarterly.

MEGHAN FORBES is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, and is currently living in Berlin, where she holds a Fulbright grant for dissertation research. She is the creator and co-editor of harlequin creature, a handmade arts & literary journal; elsewhere, her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books and When in Drought. Her dog writes book reviews @dogsinbedswithbooks.

B.J. HOLLARS is the author of several books, most recently Dispatches From The Drownings. He also has two forthcoming in 2015: From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death, and Being Human, as well as a collection of essays, This Is Only A Test. He serves as the reviews editor for Pleiades, a mentor for Creative Nonfiction, and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Visit him on his website.

MORGAN JERKINS is an essayist and novelist from New Jersey. She’s written for The Guardian, BuzzFeed, Talking Points Memo, Salon, Book Riot, Quartz, and The Toast, among others. She’s also the blog editor for Side B Magazine. You can visit her on Tumblr, her website, or follow her on Twitter.

SAM KROWCHENKO’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Salon, Full Stop, and MAKE. He lives in Ann Arbor.

KATIE O’REILLY is a creative nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. She’s also the managing editor of Ecotone Journal. Her work has appeared in The James Franco Review, Bustle, Texas Monthly, The Huffington Post, and on NPR. Her favorite thing to do is to ask people questions. You can follow her on Twitter.

LAUREN PRASTIEN is a Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She is a former student of anthropology and a New Jersey transplant, attempting to understand Midwestern culture and public transportation. She is working on a collection of short stories. Follow her on Twitter.

ANNA PRUSHINSKAYA’s writing can be found in the Sonora Review and on The Atlantic’s website, among other places. She manages digital media programs at UMS (University Musical Society) and edits the Midwest section of Joyland Magazine. She earned an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College-CUNY in 2011 and formerly served as an online editor with Electric Literature. Find out more about her through her website or follow her on Twitter.

ERIN RENEE WAHL’s work has appeared in Sterling, Blackmail Press, Spiral Orb, Cirque, Clementine Poetry Journal, and others. She’s currently an adjunct instructor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. You can visit her at her website.

RYO YAMAGUCHI is the author of The Refusal of Suitors (Noemi Press, April 2015). His work has appeared in journals such as The Iowa Review, Tin House, American Letters & Commentary, and Barrow Street, among others. He lives in Chicago where he works at the University of Chicago Press. You can visit him at his website or follow him on Twitter. (And stay tuned for an upcoming MQR interview with Ryo on his recently released collection of poems.)

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In addition to our new contributors, we’re excited to announce the following existing writers will continue to write for the blog in the coming year: Gina Balibrera, Kaveh Bassiri, Leah Falk, Nathan Go, Kevin Haworth, Lillian Li, Robert Sparrow Jones, Eric McDowell, Elizabeth Schmuhl, and Claire Skinner. Stay tuned for more great writing, and if you like what you see here, subscribe to our print journal for your quarterly dose of quality fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.


Image courtesy of shorpy.com: Multi-Processor Computing, 1924.

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