Purchase MQR 56:2 (Spring 2017) in print or as a downloadable PDF.
POETRY
Bruce Bond: “Lorca”
Bond is the author of eighteen books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press, 2016), Gold Bee (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017), and Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems, 1997-2015 (LSU Press, 2017). Three of his books are forthcoming: Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Press), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse Press), and Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas.
Michael Lavers: “How to Die, and When”
Lavers’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Arts & Letters, 32 Poems, The Hudson Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2016 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize. He teaches poetry at Brigham Young University.
T. J. McLemore: “M-Theory, or, A Piece for Eleven Strings”
McLemore lives and teaches in Fort Worth, Texas. His poems and interviews have appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Greensboro Review, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Yemassee, and other journals. He is a former Pinsky Teaching Fellow at Boston University and an alumnus of Baylor University, where he received the undergraduate Academy of American Poets’ Prize. Find out more about McLemore’s work at tjmclemore.com, or follow him on Twitter @amongtheserocks.
Susan Rich: “Ultimate Thule”
Rich is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Cloud Pharmacy and The Alchemist’s Kitchen, both from White Pine Press. Her poems have received awards from The Times Literary Supplement, the City of Seattle’s Mayor’s Office of Art and Culture, and PEN USA, and have been published in journals such as the Harvard Review, New England Review, and Poetry Ireland. She lives and works in Seattle, WA. Find her online at susanrich.net and thealchemistskitchen.blogspot.com, or follow her on Twitter @susanrichpoet and on Facebook.
Esther Schor: “The Gilded Infant: A Novella in Verse (Excerpts)”
Schor, a poet and professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language. Her biography, Emma Lazarus, won the National Jewish Book Award. She has published two books of poems—The Hills of Holland and Strange Nursery: New and Selected Poems—and a memoir, My Last J-Date. Her scholarship includes Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria and The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Tablet Magazine, and the Forward. Find out more here, or follow her on Twitter @EstherSchor.
Steven D. Schroeder: “Official Statement”
Schroeder’s second book, The Royal Nonesuch (Spark Wheel Press), won the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University. His poetry is available from New England Review, Crazyhorse, and Southern Indiana Review. He works as a creative content manager for a financial marketing agency in St. Louis. Find out more about his work at steveschroeder.info, or follow him on Twitter @antipoetry.
Kent Shaw: “The History I’m Living in Right Now!”
Shaw’s book, Calenture, was published by University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Find out more about his work at lotsandlotsofneat.com, or follow him on Twitter @kentdshaw.
Cathe Shubert: “Portrait of a Beach Babe”
A former Michigoose, Shubert currently works as Assistant Professor of English at Judson College in Alabama. Her writing appears in Crab Orchard Review, Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, and Madison Review, and she has won awards such as the Hopwood Award in Nonfiction and the Robert Haiduke Poetry prize. Find out more about her work at about.me/shubertcathe, or follow her on Twitter @cshubert.
Knute Skinner: “Today”
Skinner’s collected poems, Fifty Years: Poems 1957–2007, was published by Salmon Press in 2007. A limited edition of his poems, translated into Italian by Roberto Nassi, appeared from Damocle Edizioni, Chioggia, Italy. Other recent publications include a memoir, Help Me to a Getaway (2010), and Concerned Attentions (2013), from Salmon Press, as well as the 2016 chapbook, Against All Odds (Lapwing Publications). Skinner lives in County Clare, Ireland. Find out more about his work at knuteskinner.com.
Brian Swann: “Spring Clean”
Swann’s most recent poetry publications are St. Francis and the Flies (Autumn House Press, 2016) and Companions, Analogies (Sheep Meadow Press, 2016). Sheep Meadow Press will also publish his Selected Poems in 2018. In 2016, MadHat Press published a work of prose, Dogs on the Roof.
FICTION
Beth Aviv: “My Friend and My Ex or The Power of Fiction”
Aviv is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her recent work has appeared in New Letters, Raw Vision, Salon, and MQR. Bearing Witness: Teaching about the Holocaust was published by Heinemann in 2001. She won a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan in 1973. Find out more about Aviv’s work at bethaviv.wordpress.com, or follow her on Twitter @Be4Spring.
Kate Berson: “We Will Not Be Able to Go Back”
Berson’s fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Western Humanities Review, Monkeybicycle, and Denver Quarterly. Her translation of Carmen Boullosa’s “El Negro de la Autora” was published in The Brooklyn Rail. In collaboration with Velma García-Gorena, she is currently translating Gabriela Mistral’s Poema de Chile, poems from which are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review and Copper Nickel. Kate holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has worked with Fiction Collective Two and Vermont Studio Center, and currently lives in Pittsburgh.
Rebecca Givens Rolland: “Swimmer”
Rolland won the Dana Award in Short Fiction, as well as the May Sarton New Hampshire First Book Award. She has recent fiction in The Literary Review, North American Review, and Slice. Currently, she lives in Boston. Find out more at rebeccagrolland.com, or follow her on Twitter @rolland_rg.
Susan Tacent: “Discriminate Affections”
Tacent has been published in journals including Dostoevsky Studies, Blackbird, and DIAGRAM. She interviewed Charles Baxter for Tin House’s The Open Bar. She reviewed Baxter’s There’s Something I Want You to Do, Akashic Books’ Providence Noir, and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo for The Common Online. Her photo-literary blog appears at susantacent.weebly.com.
Wil Weitzel: “The Canoeist”
Weitzel’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017, Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere. He has received an NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship at the Center for Fiction and won the Washington Square Review Flash Fiction Award. His creative nonfiction was recognized as “Notable” in The Best American Essays 2016, and he is currently at work on a novel.
Jenny Williams: “Big Game”
Williams has lived and worked in the U.S., Germany, and Uganda. She is the author of the debut novel The Atlas of Forgotten Places (St. Martin’s Press, July 2017). Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Ethical Magazine, The Sun Magazine, Vela, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and currently lives in Seattle. Find out more about her work at jennydwilliams.com, or follow her on Instagram @stateofwander.
Hananah Zaheer: “In the Days of Old Things”
Zaheer lives, writes, and improvises (life and theatre) in Dubai. She is currently working on a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Gargoyle, Willow Review, Concho River Review, Westview, Word Riot, Moon City Review, Knee-Jerk, and Bartleby Snopes, among others. She earned an MFA from the University of Maryland, and is a co-founder of #MTGcollective as well as a founder of the Dubai Literary Salon. She also serves as a Fiction Editor for Four Way Review. Find out more about her work at hananahzaheer.com, or follow her on Twitter @hananahzaheer.
NONFICTION
Mary Ebbott: “Seeking Odysseus’s Sister”
Ebbott is a professor in the Classics Department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is the author of two books and several articles of scholarship on the Homeric epics and Greek tragedy, as well as essays in War, Literature, and the Arts (2012) and New England Review (2016). Find out more about her current work and publications here.
Ben Merriman: “The Promise and Problems and Unsolicited Submission”
Merriman, a former editor at Chicago Review, is an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas. Merriman’s essays have appeared in publications such as the Boston Review, Brick, the Chronicle of Higher Education, n+1, and Threepenny Review. Find out more at benmerriman.wordpress.com.
Jeffrey Meyers: “D.H. Lawrence and the American Indians”
Meyers is the author of D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy, D. H. Lawrence and Tradition, The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence, and D. H. Lawrence: A Biography. In 2016 he published Robert Lowell in Love, The Mystery of the Real: Correspondence with Alex Colville, and a reprint of Homosexuality and Literature.
Michael O’Rourke: “Purgatory”
O’Rourke’s narrative essays have appeared in North American Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, ISLE, and, many moons ago, Michigan Quarterly Review. Four have been listed as “Notable” by the editors of Best American Essays. His book is Paul Bunyan Lives! and Other Tales from the Natural World.
