Purchase MQR 56:1 (Winter 2017) in print or as a downloadable PDF.
POETRY
Fleda Brown: “Reading the Smithsonian Magazine”
Brown’s “Reading the Smithsonian Magazine” was included in The Woods Are on Fire: New & Selected Poems, just out in March from University of Nebraska Press. Her eighth collection of poems was No Need of Sympathy, (BOA Editions, LTD). Keep up with her at fledabrown.com or follow her on Twitter @FledaBrown.
Susan Cobin: “The Man Who Loves Fish”
Cobin has published poems in many literary magazines in the United States and Canada. Originally from Los Angeles, she lives in Lexington, KY.
Nancy Eimers: “Trees at the Front” & “Partridges at the Front”
Eimers’s most recent poetry collection is Oz (Carnegie Mellon). She teaches Creative Writing at Western Michigan University.
Dan Gerber: “To Jim from the River,” “Dust 2,” & “The Weather Channel“
Gerber’s Sailing through Cassiopeia (Copper Canyon Press) received the Society of Midland Authors 2013 Award for Poetry, and his ninth, Particles: New and Selected Poems, will be published later this year, also from Copper Canyon.
Osip Mandelstam: “January 1, 1924“
A member of the Acmeist movement, Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was among a handful of the most consequential poets of Russian Modernism. In our own period of backlash against globalization, humanism, and free speech, his definition of Acmeism as a “longing for world culture,” and his response to the politically motivated execution of his colleague Nikolai Gumilev continue to ring true: “Only in Russia poetry is respected—it gets people killed.”
Alex Cigale’s own poems in English appear in Colorado Review, The Common Online, and The Literary Review, and translations in Kenyon Review Online, Modern Poetry in Translation, New England Review, PEN America, TriQuarterly and World Literature in Translation. His first full book, Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings is just out in the Northwestern University Press World Classics series. Follow him on Twitter @cigalex or on Facebook @alexander.cigale.
Kathleen Winter: “Dreamland Saint” & “Saint of Survival”
Winter’s second book, I will not kick my friends, won the 2017 Elixir Poetry Prize. Her debut collection, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, won the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters first book award. Her poems are forthcoming in AGNI, New Statesman, Prairie Schooner, and Yale Review.
FICTION
Marian Berges: “Bling Bling”
Berges’s play, “The Medea Hypothesis,” was recently produced in the Bay Area. Her short stories have been published in print and online and her current project—a novel set in Washington, D.C. during the first few months of the Civil War—is near completion.
Barrett Bowlin: “You Must Give of Yourself”
Bowlin teaches film and literature classes at Binghamton University, where he moonlights as a contributing editor for Memorious. New stories and essays of his appear in places like Ninth Letter, Hobart, The Rumpus, Salt Hill, Meridian, and Bayou, which awarded him last year’s James Knudsen Prize in Fiction. Follow him on Twitter @barrettbowlin.
Randy F. Nelson: “A Pendulum of Snow”
Nelson is a multiple-award-winning writer and teacher, whose stories have appeared in many national and international publications. He’s currently the Virginia Lasater Irvin Professor of English at Davidson College.
Su Tong (苏童): “White Snow, Pig Heads”
SU Tong (苏童) is one of the most acclaimed fiction writers in China. His major works include Wives and Concubines (which was adapted into the globally acclaimed film Raise the Red Lantern by director Zhang Yimou), Hongfen, The Poppy Family, Three-Lamp Lantern, Rice, My Life as Emperor, The Boat to Redemption, and Yellowbird Story, as well as over one hundred short stories. He was awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2009 and was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2011.
Ting Wang’s translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, Denver Quarterly, the Iowa Review, the Massachusetts Review, Metamorphoses, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from the School of Communication at Northwestern University, and lives and works in the Washington metropolitan area.
Sergio Troncoso: “Library Island”
Troncoso is the author of the novels From This Wicked Patch of Dust and The Nature of Truth, as well as Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, and The Last Tortilla and Other Stories. He teaches at the Yale Writers’ Conference in New Haven, CT, and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY. Keep up with him at sergiotroncoso.com or follow him on Twitter @SergioTroncoso.
Linda Woolford: “By Night”
Woolford’s fiction is published in Kenyon Review, West Branch, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, and North American Review, among others, and has been anthologized and nominated for a Pushcart.
NONFICTION
Piotr Florczyk: “The Act of Becoming,” A Review of Mark Irwin’s American Urn: Selected Poems
Florczyk is a poet, essayist, and translator of Polish poetry. His most recent books are East & West, a volume of poems from Lost Horse Press, and two volumes of translations published by Tavern Books, My People & Other Poems by Wojciech Bonowicz, and Building the Barricade by Anna Świrszczyńska, which was longlisted for both the 2017 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation and the 2017 Best Translated Book Award, and won the 2017 Found in Translation Award. Florczyk, a doctoral fellow at USC, lives in Mar Vista with his wife and daughter. Keep up with Florczyk at piotrflorczyk.com or follow him on Facebook @piotrflorczykpoet.
Steven Harvey: “The Other Steve Harvey”
Harvey is the author of The Book of Knowledge and Wonder (Ovenbird Books, 2014), a memoir about restoring the broken relationship with his mother who committed suicide when he was eleven. He is also the author of three books of personal essays. A Geometry of Lilies was twice honored as a finalist in the Associated Writing Program’s nonfiction contest before being published by the University of South Carolina Press. Since then he has published two books from The University of Georgia Press: Lost in Translation and Bound for Shady Grove. He has edited an anthology of essays written by men on middle age called In a Dark Wood, also from Georgia. His essay “The Book of Knowledge” was selected by Cheryl Strayed for Best American Essays 2013 and became the basis for his 2014 memoir. Harvey received his PhD in American literature from the University of Virginia, and is a professor emeritus of English at Young Harris College. He is a founding faculty member in the Ashland University MFA program in Creative Writing, a Senior Editor of River Teeth, and the creator of The Humble Essayist. Keep up with him at steven-harvey-author.com.
Craig McDaniel & Jean Robertson: “Extreme Painting: Eyeballing”
McDaniel is Professor of Fine Arts and Associate Dean and Robertson is Chancellor’s Professor of Art History at Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. They have co-authored three books: Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980 (Oxford University Press); Spellbound: Rethinking the Alphabet (Intellect); and Painting as a Language: Material, Technique, Form, Content (Harcourt Brace).
Molly McQuade: “The Music in Brooklyn”
McQuade is writing a series of epistolary essays. The most recent are addressed to Charlotte Bronte, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry David Thoreau.
Frank M. Meola: “Spanish in America: Notes on Feeling Culturally Multiple”
Meola has published work in a variety of places, including New England Review and the New York Times, frequently on American culture. He recently completed a novel and is at work on a new one; both involve cultural conflict, families, and communities against a background of American history.
