Feast: Poetry & Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner

Diane Goettel has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in English from Brooklyn College. She co-edited the anthologies Feast: Poetry & Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner and Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A&U. She lives in Mount Vernon, New York with her husband and daughter.

Anneli Matheson holds an MFA in Creative Writing from City University in Hong Kong.  Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Barely South Review, The Other Journal, Hawaii Pacific Review, The Ilanot Review, Sweet Literary, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, among others.  She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Connect with her via Twitter: @AnneliMatheson  Read more about her writings here: https://bio.site/amathesonwrites

Joe Wilkins’s debut, Killing the Murnion Dogs, was published by Black Lawrence in 2011 and subsequently named a finalist for a number of national post-publication book awards, including the Paterson Poetry Prize and the High Plains Book Award. Wilkins’s other books include a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers (Counterpoint 2012), winner of a 2014 GLCA New Writers Award—an honor that has previously recognized early works by the likes of Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, and Alice Munro, among others—and another book of poems, Notes from the Journey Westward (White Pine 2012). He has recently published two chapbooks, one of essays, We Had to Go On Living(Red Bird Chapbooks 2014) and one of poetry, Leviathan (Iron Horse 2014); his fiction chapbook Far Enough: A Western in Fragments was published by Black Lawrence Press last year. A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award finalist, Wilkins has published poems, essays, and stories inThe Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Sun, Orion, and Slate. Of Wilkins’s work, Deborah Kim, editor at the Indiana Review, writes, “The most striking component of it is its awareness of ‘the whole world.’ What is ordinary becomes transcendent. In places derelict and seemingly unexceptional, Wilkins compels us to recognize what is worth salvage, worth praise.” Wilkins lives with his wife, son, and daughter in McMinnville, Oregon, where he teaches writing at Linfield College. As the winner of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency from PEN Northwest, he and his family spent the summer and fall of 2015 living in a remote cabin along the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.

Marcela Sulak's fifth title with Black Lawrence Press,  a novella-in-verse, The Fault, is forthcoming in 2024. Her previous four titles include three poetry collections, City of Skypapers, a 2021 finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Decency, and Immigrant, as well as her lyric memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds. 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. Marcela Sulak directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University. She also edits The Ilanot Review.    

Yelizaveta P. Renfro is the author of a collection of short stories, A Catalogue of Everything in the World, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review, Witness, Reader’s Digest, Blue Mesa Review, Fourth River, Bayou Magazine, Untamed Ink, So to Speak, and the anthologies A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection (OV Books, 2008) and Commutability: Stories about the Journey from Here to There (Main Street Rag, 2010). She holds an MFA from George Mason University and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska. Born in the former Soviet Union, she has lived in California, Virginia, Nebraska, and Connecticut.

Kevin Pilkington is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of six collections: Spare Change was the La Jolla Poets Press National Book Award winner; Ready to Eat the Sky was a finalist for an Independent Publishers Books Award; In the Eyes of a Dog won the 2011 New York Book Festival Award; The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree was a Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award finalist. His poetry has appeared in many anthologies including: Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Western Wind, and Contemporary Poetry of New England. Over the years, he has been nominated for four Pushcarts. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including: The Harvard Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden’s Ferry, Columbia, North American Review, etc. He has taught and lectured at numerous colleges and universities including The New School, Manhattanville College, MIT, University of Michigan, Susquehanna University, Saint Vincent College. His debut novel Summer Shares was published in 2012 and a paperback edition was reissued in summer 2014. He recently completed a second novel and is working on a new collection of poems.

Daniele Pantano is a Swiss poet, essayist, literary translator, critic, editor, and artist born of Sicilian and German parentage in Langenthal (Canton of Berne). He has published over twenty volumes of poetry, essays, translations, and conceptual literature, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages. Pantano is Associate Professor (Reader) and Programme Leader for the MA Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln. For more information, please visit www.pantano.ch.

Laura McCullough’s newest book of poems is Women & Other Hostages (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her previous books from Black Lawrence Press are Jersey Mercy, Rigger Death & Hoist Another, and Speech Acts. Her other books include The Wild Night Dress, selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Series (University of Arkansas Press, 2017), Panic (winner of the Kinereth Kensler Award, Alice James Books, 2009), and What Men Want (XOXOX Press). She is the editor of two anthologies, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race (University of Georgia Press) and The Room and the World: Essays on Stephen Dunn (Syracuse University Press). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Guernica, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Pank, Hotel America, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and magazines. She has had scholarships or fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Arts, and has been a Dodge Poetry Festival poet, a Florida Writers Circuit poet, and a Decatur Book Festival poet. She has had three NJ State Arts Council Fellowships, two in poetry and one in prose. She received her MFA from Goddard College and teaches full time at Brookdale Community College in NJ where she founded the Creative Writing Program and is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-res MFA and has taught for Ramapo College and Stockton University. Visit her at www.lauramccullough.org

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, Pot Farm and Barolo (both from the University of Nebraska Press), and Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It (forthcoming from W.W. Norton: Liveright) the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and the chapbooks Four Hours to Mpumalanga and Aardvark.  Recent work appears in The New Republic, Field, Epoch, AGNI, The Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Quarterly West, The Best Food Writing, The Best Travel Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Hotel Amerika, Gastronomica, and others. He was born and raised in Illinois, and currently teaches Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North.  This winter, he prepared his first batch of fried trout ice cream.

Michele Battiste's third book of poems, Waiting for the Wreck to Burn (2019), won the Louise Bogan Award for Excellence in Poetry from Trio House Press. Her next book, The Elsewhere Oracle, doubles as an oracle deck and will be released in 2025 by Black Lawrence Press. She is also the author of several chapbooks, and her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in a wide array of journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Rain Taxi, the Rumpus, and Beloit Poetry Journal. Michele earned an MA in English from the University at Albany and an MFA in Creative Writing from Wichita State University. She loves silent discos, large bodies of water, the brown bear cam at Katmai National Park, space buns, and parlor games. She lives in Colorado where she raises money to tackle climate change and protect nature.