Check Out our Fall 2013 Compose Contributors
UPDATE: We’ve just launched our Fall 2013 issue! You can read it here.
Things have been pretty intense around the journal these last few weeks, but we’re nearly ready to publish our second issue.
In the meantime, please check out our list of fabulous contributors (in alphabetical order).
Browse their publications and websites, and we think you’ll be as excited as we are about launching our Fall 2013 issue of Compose.
Paul David Adkins
Paul David Adkins lives in New York and works as a counselor.
Jon Alston
Jon Alston is a native of Northern California, and graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from California State University, Sacramento. Married for over seven years, he and his wife run JSA Photography. On the off chance he isn’t writing or working on photography, he works for Copilot Press as Assistant Editor editing and binding handmade books, and teaches English at the International Academy of Design and Technology. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in such journals as Midnight Screaming, Conium Review, Skive, and The Encyclopedia Project.
Cathleen Calbert
Cathleen Calbert’s poetry and prose have appeared in many publications, including Ms. Magazine, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. She is the author of three books of poetry: Lessons in Space (University of Florida Press), Bad Judgment (Sarabande Books), and Sleeping with a Famous Poet (C.W. Books). She has been awarded The Nation Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Mary Tucker Thorp Award from Rhode Island College, where she professes.
Debra Eve
Debra Eve is a former archaeologist who now writes about midlife creativity at LaterBloomer.com. She published her most popular essays in Later Bloomers: 35 People Over Age 35 Who Found Their Passion and Purpose.
Ira Joel Haber
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had nine one-man-shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 100 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. Currently, he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.
Lorrie Hartshorn
Lorrie Hartshorn is an English literary and speculative fiction writer, whose work has appeared in The F-Word, FlashFlood, Six Sentences, 1000 Words, The Pygmy Giant, Six Words Magazine, Anthem and Vagabond. She is also a busy self-employed copywriter, editor and translator, meaning that her valiant attempts to write the next Great British Novel are frequently abandoned but never quite forgotten. She blogs at circlesunderstreetlights.wordpress.com.
Rachel Heimowitz
Rachel Heimowitz is an emerging poet living in Israel. Her work has appeared, or is due to appear in Spillway, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, and Oberon Poetry. Her poems were nominated for The 2013 Pushcart Prize. Rachel is currently pursuing her MFA at Pacific University.
Lori Horvitz
Lori Horvitz’ short stories, poetry, and personal essays have appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies including South Dakota Review, The Tusculum Review, Southeast Review, Hotel Amerika, Thirteenth Moon, Juked, Dos Passos Review, Quarter After Eight and the Seal Press anthology, P.S.: What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends. She has been awarded writing fellowships from Fundación Valparaiso, The Ragdale Foundation, Yaddo, Cottages at Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Blue Mountain Center. An Associate Professor of Literature and Language at University of North Carolina at Asheville, Horvitz teaches courses in creative writing, literature and women’s studies.
Amorak Huey
Amorak Huey, a former newspaper editor and reporter, teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, The Southern Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Menacing Hedge, Caketrain, and other journals.
Tom Ipri
Tom Ipri is a librarian and writer currently back in his hometown of Philadelphia, PA after four years in Las Vegas. His creative works have appeared in Ayris Magazine, Small Brushes, Superior Poetry News and The Vermillion Literary Project. You can visit him online at Being and Formulating.
Katrina Kenison
A graduate of Smith College, Katrina Kenison spent many years working in publishing, first as a literary editor at Houghton Mifflin Company in New Haven, New York, and Boston, and then, from 1990 through 2006, as the series editor of the best-selling The Best American Short Stories anthology, published annually by Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt. She co-edited, with John Updike, The Best American Short Stories of the Century.
She is the author of Mitten Strings for God: Reflections for Mothers in a Hurry, The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother’s Memoir, and Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment. Her book trailer for The Gift of an Ordinary Day has had more than two million views on YouTube.
Katrina is also the author, with her first yoga teacher, Rolf Gates, of Meditations from the Mat: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga. She lives with her family in rural New Hampshire, where she writes a popular weekly blog, teaches yoga, practices Reiki, and celebrates each ordinary day.
Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart is the award-winning writer of sixteen books—memoir, young adult novels, history, and fable. Her memoir Handling the Truth (Gotham Books, 2013) has received starred reviews, was named a Top Ten September book of the month by BookPage, and was featured in O Magazine. Kephart teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania and was named a Philadelphia Literary Legacy writer.
Lita Kurth
Lita A. Kurth (MFA Rainier Writers Workshop) has published essays, poems, and short stories in Tikkun, NewVerseNews, Blast Furnace, eliipsis…literature and art, the Santa Clara Review, the Exploratorium Quarterly, Tattoo Highway, Vermont Literary Review, and others. An excerpt of her novel appeared as a story, “Marius Martin, Proletarian,” in On the Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work (Bottom Dog Press). Her nonfiction, “Pivot,” which appears in the 2012 University of Nebraska anthology, Becoming:What Makes a Woman, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work “Lifetime TV Movie” was a finalist for the 2012 Writers@Work contest. She regularly contributes to Tikkun.org/tikkundaily, TheReviewReview.net, and classism.org.
Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the author of three collections of poetry, Sharks in the Rivers, This Big Fake World, and Lucky Wreck. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals including Harvard Review, TriQuarterly Online, Poetry Daily, and The New Yorker. She has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. She is currently a judge for the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry and will join the 2014 faculty for the low-residency MFA-Latin America for Queens University of Charlotte. She is currently finishing her first novel, a book of essays, and a fourth collection of poems. She works as a writer and lives in Kentucky and California.
William Logan
William Logan’s new book of poems, Madame X, was published by Penguin last fall. He received the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry in the spring. His next book of criticism, Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure, will be published by Columbia University Press in the spring of 2014.
Ana Consuelo Matiella
Ana Consuelo Matiella, MA, was born in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico and raised in Ambos Nogales, on the U.S./Mexico border by a clan of Spaniards and Mexicans. She is author of The Truth About Alicia and Other Stories (University of Arizona Press), and of various books on multicultural education, including Positively Different, Cultural Pride, and La Familia (ETR Associates). She has been a political columnist for The Santa Fe New Mexican for over 10 years, and her work has been anthologized in Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest (Northland Press) and in Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latino and Latina Writing (University of Arizona Press).
Daniel Nicholls
Daniel A. Nicholls can be found declaiming poets and poetry on Twitter (@nomopoetry) and Tumblr (nomopoetry.tumblr.com). He has other poems online at Specter, Commas and Colons, and Halfway Down the Stairs, which ran a piece from the same project “dia de los muertos” comes from.
Milena Nigam
Milena Nigam lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she directs a small group of applied researchers studying child development. After decades of thinking about writing, Milena has declared this the decade to write about all those years of thinking. She is grateful for the opportunity to share “Stolen Family Jewels, and Other Gifts” with Compose readers.
Robert Peake
Robert Peake is an American poet living in England. His newest short collection is The Silence Teacher (Poetry Salzburg, 2013). His poems have appeared in North American Review, Poetry International, Rattle, and Magma Poetry. He writes about poetry and culture at The Huffington Post and at www.robertpeake.com.
Keith Powell
Keith J. Powell earned his MFA at the University of San Francisco. He is a founder and the managing editor of Your Impossible Voice. His work has appeared in Able Muse, Dramatics Magazine, Rougarou, Fiction 365, Playscripts, Inc, and elsewhere.
Eliana Ramage
Eliana Ramage is an English teacher and freelance writer from Nashville, Tennessee. In 2009, she was awarded a silver medal in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. A recent graduate of Dartmouth College, she has just begun an MFA in creative writing at Bar-Ilan University. She lives in Israel with her husband.
Rebecca Rosenblum
Rebecca Rosenblum is a writer and editor living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Rebecca’s short fiction has been short-listed for the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Danuta Gleed Award, longlisted for the Relit Award, and she was herself a juror for the Journey Prize 21. Her work has been seen in Exile Quarterly, The Windsor Review‘s Best under 35 Issue, The New Quarterly, Journey Prize Stories 19, Maisonnueve, Coming Attractions, and Best Canadian Stories. Her first collection of stories, Once, won the Metcalf-Rooke Award and was one of Quill and Quire’s 15 Books That Mattered in 2008. The Maclean’s blog called Rebecca “Canlit Rookie of the Year” in 2008. Her second collection, The Big Dream, was published by Biblioasis in September 2011.
Timothy Ruane
Timothy A. Ruane is an experimental artist, photographer, creative writer and art reviewer for Artist Portfolio Magazine. He graduated from Georgetown University, where he studied English and the fine arts. He taught photography at the Edmund Burke School in Washington D.C. and was a chief copy editor in the editorial department of The Washington Post, where he also worked as a freelance photographer. He worked as an editor for the Department of State and as a technical writer for the Department of the Treasury. He has exhibited his photographs in London, Turkey, New York, Washington D.C. and a number of other U.S. cities. He has published his photographs in The Washington Post, Simon & Schuster, New York Review Books, quiet Shorts, The Good Men Project, and Whisperings. He has written hundreds of poems, many short stories and essays, has two novels in progress, and will publish a dime novel—Tiramisu: Seven Songs About God-damned Love—in the fall. He has published his writing in The Washington Post, Whisperings, and Durham Editing and E-books. Mr. Ruane lives and works in Garrett Park Maryland USA, just outside Washington D.C.
Thaddeus Rutkowski
Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of the novels Haywire, Tetched and Roughhouse. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA, both in New York. His writing has appeared in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Fiction, and Fiction International. He was awarded a 2012 fellowship in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Marion Roach Smith
Three weeks out of college, Marion went to work for The New York Times. Four books and countless magazine and radio essays later, the lessons learned at that great newspaper—getting it right and making it short—inform every piece she writes. Most of her work is now in the form of memoir writing, including her most recent book, The Memoir Project, A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text on Writing & Life, released by Grand Central Publishing in 2011.
Her first book, Another Name for Madness (Houghton Mifflin 1985), described the devastating effects of her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s Disease in an era, not so long ago, when no one had heard of it. She has also written The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning and Sexual Power of Red Hair (Bloomsbury 2005). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Prevention, Vogue, Good Housekeeping, The Los Angeles Times, and NPR’s All Things Considered.
Hannah Stephenson
Hannah Stephenson is a poet, editor, and instructor living in Columbus, Ohio (where she also runs a monthly literary event series called Paging Columbus). Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Hobart, Contrary, MAYDAY, and The Nervous Breakdown; her collection, In the Kettle, the Shriek, is now available from Gold Wake Press. You can visit her online at The Storialist (www.thestorialist.com).
Elizabeth Kate Switaj
Elizabeth Kate Switaj is a Humanities Instructor at the College of the Marshall Islands and a Contributing Editor to Poets’ Quarterly. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Queen’s University Belfast and an M.F.A. in Poetics and Creative Writing from New College of California. Her first collection of poetry, Magdalene & the Mermaids, was published in 2009 by Paper Kite Press. Recent poems have appeared in UCity Review and Coldnoon. For more information visit www.elizabethkateswitaj.net
Caitlin Thomson
Caitlin Elizabeth Thomson is a Canadian who married an American. She resides in rural Washington state. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous places, including The Literary Review of Canada, The Liner, EDGE, Echolocation, and the anthology Killer Verse. Her second chapbook Incident Reports is forthcoming in 2014 from Hyacinth Girl Press.
Dr. Ernest Williamson III
Dr. Ernest Williamson III has published poetry and visual art in over 400 national and international online and print journals. Some of Dr. Williamson’s visual art and/or poetry has been published in journals representing over 40 colleges and universities around the world. Dr. Williamson is an Assistant Professor of English at Allen University, self-taught pianist, poet, singer, composer, social scientist, private tutor, and a self-taught painter. His poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of the Net Anthology. Visit his website: www.yessy.com/
Laura Madeline Wiseman
Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of ten collections of poetry, including the full-length book Sprung (San Francisco Bay Press, 2012), and the chapbooks Men and Their Whims (Writing Knights Press, 2013), First Wife (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013) and Stranger Still (Finishing Line Press, 2013). She is the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013).
