2020 Prose Bundle

Beth Alvarado, who has written extensively about her experiences as a Euro-American woman marrying into a Mexican-American family, has spent most of her life in Arizona. Her most recent book, Anxious Attachments, was a finalist for the 2020 Oregon Book Awards and was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Art of the Essay Award. She’s also the author of Anthropologies: A Family Memoir and the short story collection Not a Matter of Love. She now lives in Bend, Oregon, where she is core faculty at OSU-Cascades Low Residency MFA Program.

Jacob M. Appel is a physician, attorney and bioethicist based in New York City.   He is the author of more than two hundred published short stories and is a past winner of the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Dana Award, the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, the North American Review’s Kurt Vonnegut Prize, the Missouri Review’s Editor’s Prize, the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, the Briar Cliff Review’s Short Fiction Prize, the H. E. Francis Prize, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Award in four different years, an Elizabeth George Fellowship and a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Writers Grant.   His stories have been short-listed for the O. Henry Award, Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Mystery Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology on numerous occasions.   His first novel, The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up, won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012.  Jacob holds graduate degrees from Brown University, Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, Harvard Law School, New York University’s MFA program in fiction and Albany Medical College’s Alden March Institute of Bioethics.  He taught for many years at Brown University and currently teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

A writer and book artist working in both text and image,  Kristy Bowen is the author of  a number of chapbook, zine, and artists book projects, as well as several full-length collections of poetry/prose/hybrid work, including the recent salvage  (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), major characters in minor films (Sundress Publications, 2015) and girl show (Black Lawrence, 2014).  She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio.

Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage (Ballantine), Delta Girls (Ballantine), and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt), which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. She has two new books in 2017: a poetry collection, The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press) and a memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother's Suicide (Beacon Press). Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have been widely published and have received numerous honors, including a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award and a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. She currently teaches at Sierra Nevada College and the low residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles.

Sabrina Imbler is a half-Chinese writer and dyke based in Brooklyn. She is a staff writer for Atlas Obscura and the recipient of fellowships from Jack Jones Literary Arts, the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, and Paragraph NY. Sabrina wrote the monthly “My Life in Sea Creatures” column at Catapult and her essay collection How Far the Light Reaches is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2021.

Christopher Locke’s writing has appeared in such magazines as The North American Review, The Rumpus, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Sun, Poetry East, Verse Daily, Southwest Review, Slice, The Literary Review, West Branch, Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, Saranac Review, and NPR’s Morning Edition and Ireland’s Radio One, among others. Locke’s most recent book is Ordinary Gods, (Salmon Poetry, 2017), a collection of poems & essays detailing his 25 years of travel throughout Latin America. His first post-punk/spoken word album, Late Lights, was recently released by Burst & Bloom Records, and a book for children, Heart-Flight, (Cedar Grove Publishing), is forthcoming in 2019. Locke has received over a dozen grants, fellowships, and awards for his writing including the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, state grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and Poetry Fellowships from Fundacion Valparaiso, (Spain) and PARMA (Mexico). He teaches creative writing online at The Poetry Barn and in person at North Country Community College in the Adirondacks.

Veronica Montes was born in San Francisco and raised in the Filipino American enclave of Daly City, California. Her short stories have appeared in print journals such as Bamboo Ridge and Prism International, as well as in many anthologies including Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America, Growing Up Filipino, and Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas. Her flash fiction appears online in various journals including SmokeLong Quarterly, Cheap Pop, and Lost Balloon, among others. She is the author of Benedicta Takes Wing & Other Stories (Philippine American Literary House, 2018).

Ron Nyren’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Mississippi Review, Fourteen Hills, Able Muse, Dalhousie Review, 100 Word Story, and elsewhere. His stories have been shortlisted for the O. Henry Awards and the Pushcart Prize. He is the coauthor, with his spouse and writing partner Sarah Stone, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers, and a former editor of Furious Fictions: The Magazine of Short-Short Stories. Ron earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. He is the recipient of a major Hopwood award, the Farrar Prize in Playwriting, the Roy W. Cowden Memorial Fellowship, and the Andrea Beauchamp prize in short fiction. A former Stegner Fellow, he teaches fiction writing for Stanford University.

Alison Powell's lyric essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in A Public Space, Black Warrior Review, Broad Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sonora Review, and Proximity Magazine; recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Boston Review, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, jubilat, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, and more. Her book of poems, On the Desire to Levitate, won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and was published by Ohio University Press in 2014. Powell's work has been supported by fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Crosshatch Center for Art and Ecology, and she has received awards from the Greensboro Review, Proximity Magazine, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and more. Originally from Indiana, Powell completed her PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center with a specialization in the Romantic poets. She is now Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Oakland University and lives with her husband, son, and daughter in Metro Detroit.

Marcela Sulak has published three titles with Black Lawrence Press–two poetry collections, Decency (2015) and Immigrant (2010), as well as her lyric memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds (2020). Her third poetry collection City of Skypapers is forthcoming. She’s co-edited with Jacqueline Kolosov the 2015 Rose Metal Press title Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Sulak, who translates from the Hebrew, Czech, and French, is a 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, and her fourth book-length translation of poetry: Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, was nominated for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (University of Texas Press). Her essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and Gulf Coast online, among others. She coordinates the poetry track of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, where she is an associate professor in American Literature. She also edits The Ilanot Review and hosts the TLV.1 Radio podcast, Israel in Translation.