Contest Winner
Josie Sigle was born Downriver Detroit and grew up in the Midwest. Her chapbook, Calamity, an ode to her childhood heroes Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley, was published by Proem Press in 2009. Her book of poems, living must bury, which represents the files of a taxonomer who falls in love with her subjects while studying the conditions of their suffering, won the 2010 Motherwell Prize and was published by Fence Books. Josie’s collection of short stories, The Galaxie and Other Rides, about the decline of the automobile industry and the abiding beauty of classic cars, is forthcoming from Livingston Press as the winner of the Ruby Pickens Tartt First Fiction Award. Josie recently completed a PEN Northwest Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Residency, which affords a writer the opportunity to work on a remote homestead near the Rogue River in southern Oregon’s Klamath Mountains. While so ensconced, she spent a good deal of time with a wild cougar that shared the same territory. Having survived that rare and spine-tingling friendship, she currently lives at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, where she is working on a novel and a new book of poems.

Jill Birdsall lives in New Jersey. Her stories have appeared in Iowa Review, Gargoyle, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Kansas Quarterly and Northwest Review.

Michael Blumenthal, formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, graduated from the Cornell Law School with a J.D. degree in 1974, after studying philosophy and economics at the State U. of New York at Binghamton. His seventh book of poems, And, was published by BOA Editions in May, 2009 and his eighth, No Hurry, will be published by Etruscan Press in 2012. He is the author of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel Weinstock Among The Dying, which won Hadassah Magazine’s Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, has recently been re-issued in paperback, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, was published in 1998. Two of his books, his memoir, and a collection of selected poems were recently published in Germany by Verlag André Thiele of Mainz. He is currently Visiting Professor of Law at The West Virginia University College of Law.

Rae Bryant’s short story collection, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals, released from Patasola Press (NY) in June 2011 and has been nominated for the Pen Hemingway award. Her stories have appeared in BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review), Opium Magazine, and Gargoyle Magazine, among other publications and have won the Whidbey Writers award, been nominated for the Pushcart, and short-listed for the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Award. She contributes nonfiction and reviews to such places as Puerto del Sol, Portland Book Review, and Beatrice. Rae has received Fellowships from the VCCA and Johns Hopkins University, where she earned a Masters in Writing. In summer 2011, she attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and JHU Conference on Craft in Florence, Italy, as a JHU Fellow. She teaches multimedia and creative writing in The Johns Hopkins University Master of Arts in Writing program.

Richard Burgin is a fiction writer, editor, composer, critic and teacher. Burgin is the author of 15 books, including the novels Rivers Last Longer (2010) and Ghost Quartet (l999), and the short story collections The Spirit Returns (2001), Fear of Blue Skies (l998), Private Fame (1991), and Man Without Memory (l989). Johns Hopkins University Press published Richard’s most recent story collections, Shadow Traffic and The Conference on Beautiful Moments (2007). Other stories have been reprinted in the anthologies New Jersey Noir (Akashic Books), New Stories from the Midwest, The Best of Witness and As the Story Goes: Twenty Five Years of the Johns Hopkins Short Fiction Series, among others. Burgin was the founding editor of Boston Review, New York Arts Journal and the founding and current editor of the internationally distributed literary journal Boulevard. Burgin’s most recent book is Shadow Traffic, a collection of stories from Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press (October 2011).

Lydia Davis is the author of Varities of Disturbance, which was a National Book Award Finalist, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, Almost No Memory, The End of the Story, and Break It Down. Her latest book is The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2009. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Bomb, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and many other magazines and literary journals. Davis is a translator of the French works by Maurice Blanchot and Michael Leiris, as well as a highly-acclaimed new translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way for Penguin Classics, and a new translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Among other honors, she has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Prize, and has been named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government. In 2003, she won the French-American Translation Prize, and in 2005, she was inducted into the Academy of Arts & Sciences. She lives in upstate New York with her family.

Sarah Gauch has lived in Cairo, Egypt for twenty-two years, covering the Middle East for a variety of news publications, including Newsweek, Business Week and The Christian Science Monitor. In 2007, she began writing fiction and creative nonfiction full time. She is at work on a collection of short stories about assimilation and alienation in the Arab world and a memoir weaving together her journalistic and personal experiences living in Egypt. Viking Press/New York recently published her children’s book, Voyage to the Pharos, with another book, historical fiction about the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, on the way. “Wall-E” is her first published short story.

William Reese Hamilton spent over three years of his youth imprisoned with his family in Japanese Internment Camp Number One, Manila, The Philippines, which can best be described as a near-death experience. He has since passed through a string of other experiences: lifeguard, factory worker, college magazine editor, ordinary seaman, Army Intelligence agent, Romanian interrogator, English teacher, advertising copywriter, and creative director. He now lives in a fishing village on the coast of Venezuela. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, The North American Review, The Adirondack Review, Puerto del Sol, Review Americana, Front Porch Journal, Night Train, FRiGG, Eclectica and elsewhere. James Tate Hill‘s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Sonora Review, The South Carolina Review, Monkeybicycle, The Texas Review, and elsewhere. Born in Charleston, West Virginia, he received an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he served as Fiction Editor of The Greensboro Review. He recently completed a novel about child stars and is working on a mystery set on the campus of a mediocre college.

T.R. Hummer‘s 10th book of poetry, Ephemeron, was published by LSU Press in Nov. 2011; his books of essays, Available Surfaces, will be published in 2012 by University of Michigan Press in their Poets on Poetry Series.

Jeffrey Ihlenfeldt received his MFA from Goddard College and was named finalist for the 2010 Fulton Prize in Short Fiction. He has been a featured author at the Lancaster Book Festival and the Greater Reading Literary Festival. His short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Southern Humanities Review, Columbia Review, Louisville Review, and Adirondack Review. He has been a writer-in-residence at Ledig House International Writer’s Colony, among others, and is currently Associate Professor in English at Harrisburg Area Community College, where he teachers writing and literature.

John Kinsella‘s new volume of short stories, In the Shade of the Shady Tree, is due out in February 2012 with Ohio University Press. His latest book of poetry is Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2011). He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University.

Virginia Konchan is a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2011, Boston Review, The Believer, The New Republic, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Jacket, among other places.

Samantha Levy earned her Ph.D. in fiction from the Florida State University. Her work has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Word Riot, the anthology HAVE I GOT A GUY FOR YOU, and elsewhere. Originally from New Jersey, she currently lives in southeast Georgia and teaches at the College of Coastal Georgia. She can be reached at SBLEVY3@aol.com.

Karen Malley received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She recently won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers for her story “Roof Dog.” She lives in Springfield, Massachusetts, and is working towards her Masters in ESOL Education at UMass.

James Marcus is the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut and six translations from the Italian, including works by Leonardo Sciscia, Goffredo Parise, and Oriana Fallaci. He has contributed to The Atlantic Monthly, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Salon, Newsday, StoryQuarterly, The Atlantic Monthly, Lingua Franca, The Nation, and many other publications.

T.C. McCarthy is a southern author who was working for the CIA during the September 11 terrorist attacks and was still there when US forces invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, allowing him to experience warfare from the perspective of an analyst. His short fiction has appeared in Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas, and in Nature, and his debut novel, Germline, is available worldwide. T.C.’s second novel, Exogene, is set for release in March 2012.

Ryan Meany‘s work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Confrontation, River City and elsewhere. It has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. He now is trying to give away his short story collection, Bama.

Idra Novey is the author of Exit, Civilian, a 2011 National Poetry Series selection forthcoming this April, and The Next Country. She has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her most recent translation is Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. (New Directions, 2012). She has taught in the Bard College Prison Initiative and in Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Gary Percesepe is Associate Editor at BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review), and a Contributor at The Nervous Breakdown. His work is featured at N + 1, Salon, The Millions, Westchester Review, and other places. He is the author of four books in philosophy and an epistolary novel with Susan Tepper, What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G (Cervana Barva Press). He seeks representation for his newest novel, Leaving Telluride, set in Telluride, Colorado.

Chaz Reetz-Laiolo’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Review, The Paris Review, Raritan, and the anthology Nights Like These, from Fiddleback Press.

James Robison has published many stories in The New Yorker, won a Whiting Grant for his short fiction, and a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his first novel, The Illustrator. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and Grand Street. He co-wrote the 2008 film, New Orleans Mon Amour, and has poetry and prose forthcoming or published in The Manchester Review, The Northwest Review, The Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. He taught for eight years at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, was Visiting Writer at Loyola College of Maryland, was Fiction Editor of The North Dakota Quarterly and 2011 Visiting Artist at The University of Southern Mississippi.

Larry Rothe is author of Music for a City, Music for the World: 100 Years with the San Francisco Symphony (Chronicle Books) and co-author of the essay collection For the Love of Music (Oxford University Press). He recently completed his first novel, Getaway. A Chicago native, he lives in Berkeley, California.

Contest Judge
Karen Russell graduated from Columbia University’s MFA program in 2006. Her stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zoetrope. Her first book of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was published in September 2006. In November 2009, she was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree. In June 2010, she was named a New Yorker “20 Under 40” honoree. Her first novel, Swamplandia!, was published in February 2011.

Tyler Sage, originally from Colorado, currently lives and teaches in Baltimore. He has fiction and essays forthcoming in PANK, The Portland Review, and Slushpile.

Rachel Siviski lives in Portland, Maine. She graduated from Middlebury College in 2010 with a degree in International Studies. In 2009, she received a scholarship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. This is her first publication.

David Vann was born in the Aleutian Islands and spent his childhood in Ketchikan, Alaska. For twelve years, no agent would send out his first book, Legend of a Suicide, so he went to sea and became a captain and boat builder. Legend of a Suicide has now won 10 prizes, including the Prix Medicis Etranger in France for best foreign novel, the Premi Llibreter in Spain for best foreign novel, the Grace Paley Prize, a California Book Award, and the L’Express Readers’ Prize (France). Translated into eighteen languages, Legend of a Suicide is an international bestseller and has also been on 40 Best Books of the Year lists worldwide, been selected by The New Yorker Book Club and The Times Book Club, read in full on North German radio, and will be made into a film. David has also been listed for the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the Story Prize, and others. His novel Caribou Island is an international bestseller currently shortlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. It was read on the BBC for two weeks, selected by the Danish book club, and shortlisted for the Prix du Roman Fnac and Prix Lire & Virgin in France, and also won several local prizes in France. His new novel, Dirt, will be published by HarperCollins in May 2012. He is the author of the bestselling memoir A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea and Last Day On Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter, winner of the AWP Nonfiction Prize. He has been in documentaries with the BBC, NOVA, National Geographic, CNN, E! Entertainment, and written for the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Outside, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Financial Times, Elle UK, Esquire UK, Esquire Russia, National Geographic Adventure, Writer’s Digest, and other magazines and newspapers. A current Guggenheim fellow and former Wallace Stegner fellow, John L’Heureux fellow, and NEA fellow, he has taught at Stanford, Cornell, FSU, and is currently a professor at the University of San Francisco. www.DavidVann.com

Josh Weil is the author of The New Valley (Grove/Atlantic 2009), a New York Times Editors Choice that won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New Writers Award from the GLCA; and a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation. Weil’s other fiction has appeared in Granta, One Story. Agni, and American Short Fiction; he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, Oxford American, and Poets & Writers. A recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, he teaches at the University of Mississippi where he is the Grisham Writer-in-Residence.

Blythe Winslow is a photographer from Cincinnati, Ohio. Her short fiction has appeared in various places, and she received her MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.