Purchase MQR 57:4 (Fall 2018) — our special issue on Caregiving — in print or as a downloadable PDF.
Ahmad Almallah | poetry | “House/Cleaning”
Ahmad Almallah received the 2018 Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing and the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship from Hunter College, where he obtained his MFA. His poems have appeared in various journals, and his book of poems, Bitter English, is forthcoming in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press.
Idris Anderson | poetry | “A Shuffle In the Woods”
Idris Anderson’s second collection of poems, Doubtful Harbor, was selected by Sherod Santos for the Hollis Summers Prize of Ohio UP and was published in 2018. Her first collection of poems, Mrs. Ramsay’s Knee, was selected by Harold Bloom for the May Swenson Poetry Award and published by Utah State UP. She has held a number of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study lyric poetry with Helen Vendler at Harvard, Greek tragedy at Stanford, and Virginia Woolf in London.
Elizabeth Aquino | poetry | “Three Meditations on Caregiving”
Elizabeth Aquino is a writer living in Los Angeles with her three children. Published in several literary anthologies, The Los Angeles Times, and online at Slow Trains and quaartsiluni, among others, she is currently working on a memoir about her life with her severely disabled young adult daughter. Her blog, a moon worn as if it had been a shell, is a place where disability, poetry, parenting, and politics intersect. She is passionate about telling the stories of caregivers in a new project, a podcast called Who Lives Like This?!, that airs each Tuesday.
Amy Beeder | poetry | “Leviathan”
Amy Beeder’s third book, And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. A receipt of a “Discovery”/ The Nation Award and an NEA Fellowship, her work has appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, AGNI and other journals. She serves as Editor-at-large for Plume.
Chloë Boxer | fiction | “Dog Days”
Chloë Boxer is a writer of fiction and true crime television pursuing an MFA in fiction at Arizona State University.
Karen Brennan | poetry | “Everyone Sad” & “When Rachel Sings”
Karen Brennan is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is a hybrid short fiction collection, Monsters. Professor Emerita at the University of Utah, she is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Marc Brenman | poetry | “Family Archaeology”
Marc Brenman is a semi-retired bureaucrat who lives in suburban Washington, DC, and in San Francisco. He publishes mostly on civil and human rights issues, including the books The Right to Transportation and Planning as if People Matter: Governing for Social Equity.
Jeff Camhi | essay | “Words Unspoken”
Jeff Camhi is a seventy-seven-year-old new writer of creative nonfiction. He is also a retired professor of neurobiology; founding director of a university museum; and, for the past seven years, a devoted student of creative nonfiction writing. “Words Unspoken” is modified from a chapter of his memoir-in-progress, now coming to a conclusion, about “surviving” his wife’s Alzheimer’s.
Rafael Campo | poetry | “Gastroenterology” & “Immunology”
Rafael Campo teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he is Director of Literature and Writing Programs in the Art and Humanities Initiative. His work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Image, The Hudson Review, The New Criterion, Poetry, The Poetry Review (UK), The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Duke University Press will publish his new and selected poems, Comfort Measure Only, in the fall of 2018.
Victoria Chang | poetry | “Obit”
Victoria Chang’s most recent book is Barbie Chang, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. Other books are The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2017. In 2018, she was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for her manuscript-in-progress, OBIT. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches within Antioch’s low-residency MFA Program. Find out more at victoriachangpoet.com, or follow her on Twitter @VChangPoet.
Maryah Converse | essay | “Bringing Umm Saleh Home”
Maryah Converse was a Peace Corps educator in Jordan, 2004–2006, and was studying in Cairo during the 2011 Arab Spring. She has written for such publications as From Sac, New Madrid Journal, BLYNKT, Silk Road Review, Newfound, and The Matador Review. Gulf Stream Literary Magazine nominated her work for the 2017 “Best of the Net” collection. Maryah holds a Masters in Near Eastern Languages, teaches Arabic and English as foreign languages in the New York area, and blogs intermittently at bymaryah.wordpress.com. Follow her on Twitter @MaryahRC.
Desiree Cooper | essay | “When Persephone Goes Away”
Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, former attorney, and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. Her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, is a 2017 Michigan Notable Book and a 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award winner. Cooper’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2018, Callaloo, Hypertext Review, and Best African American Fiction 2010, among other online and print publications. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets. Follow her on Twitter @descooper.
Barbara Crooker | poetry | “Mirror” & “Linguistics”
Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian-Americana, and author of eight full-length books and twelve chapbooks of poetry. Her awards include the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. She is the mother of a thirty-three-year-old son with autism. Find out more at barbaracrooker.com, or follow her on Twitter @barbaracrooker.
Vicki Derderian | fiction | “Tango”
Vicki Derderian is a writer living in North Carolina. She is working on a collection of short stories.
Chard de Niord | poetry | “I Couldn’t Grieve” & “Like a Cicada”
Chard de Niord is the poet laureate of Vermont and author of six books of poetry, most recently Interstate, (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). He is also the author of a new book of interviews with nine American poets (Galway Kinnell, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forche, Martin Esppada, Stephen Kuusisto, Ed Ochester, Peter Everwine, Stephen Sandy, Ntasha Trethewey) and James Wright’s widow, Anne Wright titled I Would Lie To You If I Could. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Providence College, where he has taught since 1998 and trustee of the Ruth Stone Trust. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife, Liz.
Suzanne Edison | poetry | “When My Child Fell Ill”
Suzanne Edison MA, MFA, writes most often about the intersection of illness, healing, medicine and art. She has a child living with Juvenile Myositis. Her chapbook, The Moth Eaten World, was published by Finishing Line Press. Poetry can be found in CMAJ, HEAL, Isacoustic, Persimmon Tree, JAMA, SWWIM, What Rough Beast, Bombay Gin, The Naugatuck River Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and in several anthologies, including, The Healing Art of Writing, Volume One. Find out more at seedison.com, or keep up with Edison’s work on Facebook.
Margaret Gibson | poetry | “Washing the Body”
Margaret Gibson is the author of twelve books of poems, all from LSU Press, most recently Not Hearing the Wood Thrush in 2018. A poem from that collection, “Passage,” was included in The Best American Poetry, 2017. The title poem from her previous collection, Broken Cup (2014), won a Pushcart Prize for 2016. The Vigil was a Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry in 1993. She has also written a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter (University of Missouri Press, 2008). Gibson is Professor Emerita, University of Connecticut, and lives in Preston, CT.
Jeremy Gregersen | poetry | “Sistine Notebooks: The Delphic Sybil”
Jeremy Gregersen is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Michigan, where he won the Meader Family Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Poet Lore, The Maine Review, and Cortland Review. He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada with his wife and son, where he works as Head of School at The Meadows School.
Karen Heuler | fiction | “The Year of His Father”
Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over a hundred literary and speculative magazines and anthologies, from Alaska Quarterly Review to Confrontation to Weird Tales, as well as a number of Best Of anthologies. She has published four novels, three collections, and a novella, and has received a number of awards. This is her third appearance in MQR. Find out more at karenheuler.com, or follow her Twitter @KarenHeuler.
J.D. Ho | essay | “We Will Return After These Messages”
J.D. Ho received an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas in Austin, and has work in Ninth Letter, Georgia Review, and other journals.
Tom C. Hunley | poetry | “Prayer Asking for Mercy”
Tom C. Hunley is a professor in the MFA/BA Creative Writing programs at Western Kentucky University and a father of four. His latest collection of poems is Here Lies (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018). He recently signed a contract with McFarland for an expanded second edition of his textbook, The Poetry Gymasium.
Joshua Kryah | poetry | “Children of the Middle Ages” & “Survival by Children”
Joshua Kryah is the author of two collections of poetry, Glean and We Are Starved. He lives in St. Louis. Find out more at joshuakryah.com.
Heather Kirn Lanier | poetry | “The Baby Is”
Heather Kirn Lanier’s poems most recently appear (or are forthcoming) in Image, Barrow Street, Rogue Agent, and Rhino. She’s the author of the nonfiction book Teaching in the Terrordome, along with two award-winning poetry chapbooks. Her memoir about raising a daughter with a rare chromosomal syndrome is forthcoming from Penguin Press. Find out more at heatherkirnlanier.com, or follow her on Twitter @heatherklanier.
Amy Lemmon | poetry | “Sea-Bands™”
Amy Lemmon is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Miracles (C&R Press, 2019). She is Professor and Chairperson of English and Communication Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and co-editor (with Sarah Freligh) of The CDC Poetry Project. Find out more at saint-nobody.blogspot.com, follow her on Facebook @amy.lemmon.16, on Twitter @thatAmyLemmon, or on Instagram @thatamylemmon.
Elisabeth Lewis Corley | poetry | “What Belongs to Us”
Elisabeth Lewis Corley’s poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Hyperion, Carolina Quarterly, Feminist Studies, BigCityLit, MahMag, New Haven Review, Cold Mountain Review, Consequence, and other magazines. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a BA with Highest Honors in Poetry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she sometimes teaches poetry in performance and screenwriting.
J. Estanislao Lopez | poetry | “Aubade on the 8th Floor of St. Luke’s” & “The Figurative”
J. Estanislao Lopez lives and teaches in Houston, TX. His work has appeared in Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. Find him on Twitter @EstanislaoPoet.
Ed Madden | poetry | “What Time is Made Of,” “Never,” & “Imminent”
Ed Madden is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Ark, a memoir in verse about his father’s last months with cancer. His poetry has been published in Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals, as well as in Best New Poets 2007 and Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry. He is a professor of English and director of Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. In 2015, he was named the poet laureate for the City of Columbia, SC.
Kai Maristed | fiction | “Mrs. Trefoil’s Parlor”
Kai Maristed is a writer, translator, playwright, and engaged ecolo-gist. Her books include Broken Ground: a Berlin novel, and the story collection Belong to Me. Short work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Zoetrope, The American Scholar, the Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, Agni, the Iowa Review, and other publications. Find out more at kaimaristed.net.
Michael Mark | poetry | “It’s all in your head, Estelle,” “The year we’re living in,” & “In the handicap stall”
Michael Mark is a hospice volunteer and author of two books of stories, Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Pleiades, Rattle, River Styx, Spillway, Sugar House Review, The New York Times, The Sun, Verse Daily and The Poetry Foundation’s American Life in Poetry. His poetry has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and the Best of the Net. Find out more at michaeljmark.com, or follow him on Twitter @Michaelgrow.
Nancy McCabe | essay | “The Inmost Cave”
Nancy McCabe is the author of the novel Following Disasters and four books of creative nonfiction, most recently From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, won a Pushcart, and made notable lists in Best American anthologies six times. She directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and teaches in the low residency MFA program in writing at Spalding University.
Heather McHugh | introduction | “Emit and Edit”
Heather McHugh spent her working life in college classrooms with some gifted writers. At seventy she is having the time of her life exploring bays and islands with a kindly and gifted sailor. Her first new poetry collection in ten years will be published by Copper Canyon in 2019, as will a chapbook from Sarabande.
Gregory Leon Miller | fiction | “Something Else”
Gregory Leon Miller’s book reviews regularly appear in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Something Else” is his first published work of fiction. He teaches at the University of California, Davis and received his MFA in 2018 from Warren Wilson College.
Carol Tell Morse | essay | “There Must Be More to Life”
Carol Tell Morse teaches writing at the University of Michigan and directs the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program, an undergraduate program for writing and the arts. She has her PhD in Irish poetry from the University College, Dublin.
Sara Parrott | poetry | “At the Pillow of the Sick”
Sara Parrott’s work has appeared in Nine Mile Magazine, Ghost City Review, and the Syracuse Poster Project. She holds an MA from Binghamton University and is a former Bookspan Creative Director. She currently is a member of the Downtown Writers Center in Syracuse, NY, and the UK Poetry School.
Irma Pineda (translated by Wendy call) | poetry | “Cándida”
Irma Pineda is an author, editor, translator, and educator who lives in Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico. Her seventh book of bilingual Spanish-Isthmus Zapotec poetry, Naxiña’ Rului’ladxe’ – Rojo Deseo (Red Desire) (Pluralia Ediciones, 2018), has earned national awards and significant media attention in Mexico. Pineda is the only woman to have been president of Mexico’s national Association of Writers in Indigenous Languages (ELIAC). She was a 2013-2015 member of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, the equivalent of the National Endowment for the Arts. She serves on the faculty of the National Teachers’ University in Ixtepec, Oaxaca and travels widely to perform her poetry.
Wendy Call is an author, editor, translator, and educator who lives in Seattle. Her book No Word for Welcome (Nebraska, 2011) won the Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction. An essay from her book-in-progress, Grief Ephemera(l), won the StoryQuarterly Nonfiction Prize and was named a “Notable Essay of 2017” by Best American Essays. Call’s translations of Irma Pineda’s poetry have appeared in two dozen publications. She was a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and is a 2018 Fulbright Core Scholar to Colombia. She serves on the faculty of Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) in Tacoma, Washington and currently directs PLU’s Spanish immersion program in Oaxaca, Mexico. Find out more at wendycall.com.
Christa Romanosky | fiction | “The Hard Burn of Traveling Light”
Christa Romanoksy is a native of northern Appalachia. She was a 2017–2018 fiction fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and a 2018 Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, the Kenyon Review Online, The Massachusetts Review, the Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches creative writing and STEM workshops to elementary students through various programs.
Robin Rosen Chang | poetry | “Black Bubbles” & “Physical Exam”
Robin Rosen Chang’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Zone 3, Paterson Literary Review, Yemassee Journal, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, and other journals and anthologies. She is currently completing her first full-length manuscript. She has an MFA in poetry from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. An educator and resident of New Jersey, Robin has lived in different parts of the U.S. and overseas. Follow her on Twitter @chang_rosen.
Tina Schumann | poetry | “Interlude”
Tina Schumann is the author of three poetry collections: As If (Parlor City Press, 2010), winner of the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize; Requiem: A Patrimony of Fugues (Diode Editions, 2017), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Contest; and Praising the Paradox (Red Hen Press, 2019.) She is editor of the anthology Two Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen Press, 2017.)
Betsy Sholl | poetry | “Knot”
Betsy Sholl’s eighth collection of poetry is Otherwise Unseeable. In 2019 the University of Wisconsin Press will publish House of Sparrows: New & Selected Poems. She teaches in the MFA Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Kate Osana Simonian | fiction | “Transference”
Kate Osana Simonian is an Armenian-Australian hailing from Sydney, but she’s currently a PhD candidate at Texas Tech. Her work centers on moral dilemmas, especially those concerning sex and feminism. Her work has been published by, or is forthcoming in, Colorado Review, Shenandoah, Chicago Tribune, and Best Australian Stories. Recent honors include the Nelson Algren Award, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a position as the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Writer-in-Residence. Find her at katesimonian.com or follow her on Twitter @kate_o_simonian.
Shirley Stephenson | poetry | “Hand Carriage”
Shirley Stephenson works as a Nurse Practitioner on Chicago’s west side. She is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship and her poems have appeared in The Gettybsburg Review, Blackbird, The Southern Review, and other journals.
Connie Voisine | poetry | “All is Well, Safely Rest, God Is Nigh”
Connie Voisine is the author of the forthcoming chapbook And God Created Women and the forthcoming book The Bower. Find out more at connievoisine.com, or follow her on Twitter @CLVoisine.
Kim Wyatt | essay | “Terroir”
Kim Wyatt’s work has been published in Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Travel Writing 2017, as well as in dozens of newspapers and regional magazines. She holds an MFA from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. She lives in South Lake Tahoe.
