Best of the Net 2011  



CONTRIBUTORS


Dilruba Ahmed's debut book of poems, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2010 Bakeless Prize for poetry. Ahmed's writing has appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. A graduate of Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers, Ahmed has taught in Chatham University's Low-Residency MFA Program. You can find her online at www.dilrubaahmed.com.

Dan Albergotti, is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008). His poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Connotation Press, Five Points, and The Southern Review, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies A Face to Meet the Faces, From the Fishouse, and Pushcart Prize XXXIII. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, Albergotti is an associate professor at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, where he teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal Waccamaw.

Matthew Baker has an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review and where he now holds the program;s Postgraduate Fiction Fellowship. His interlinked novel The Numberless can be read at www.thenumberless.com and his randomized novella Kaleidoscope can be read at www.kaleidoscopeof.com. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Kenyon Review, Memorious, Annalemma, Conjunctions, and Denver Quarterly, among others.

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), winner the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (SIU Press, 2010), winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, VQR, New England Review, and elsewhere. A former Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she's currently a doctoral candidate and King/Ch‡vez/Parks Fellow at Western Michigan University. You can visit her online at www.tracibrimhall.com.

Faith Gardner lives in Oakland and has stories in places like ZYZZYVA, PANK, and The Good Men Project. She also plays and sings in bands Dark Beach and Hooray for Everything. Find her at faithgardner.com.

Mary Kovaleski Byrnes' poems have appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals including the Cimmaron Review, Poet Lore, PANK, the Minnetonka Review, Poets & Artists, Silk Road, and her travel writing has appeared on Boston.com's Passport. She teaches in the First Year Writing Program at Emerson College where she received her MFA in Creative Writing. She can be found online at marykovaleskibyrnes.com.

Michelle Cacho-Negrete, a retired social worker, lives on an old granite quarry in the state of Maine. She's extremely honored to be have been chosen for Best of The Net. Three of her essays have been selected as 100 of the most notable, and she's won The Hope Award, as well as having five Pushcart nominations. She currently teaches students both on-line and in person and can be reached at Mcacho@maine.rr.com.

Kevin Carey teaches in the English Department at Salem State University. His work can be found in several literary journals, the most recent being: The Literary Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The Apple Valley Review, and The Comstock Review. He has two works under contract with The Carolyn Jenks Agency in Cambridge Mass, a young adult novel, The Junkman, and a crime novel, Rumney Marsh. His new book of poetry, The One Fifteen to Penn Station, is available in April 2012 from CavanKerry Press, NJ. Kevin is also a seventh grade basketball coach in Beverly, Mass and a part-timer filmmaker. You can visit him at his website www.kevincareywriter.com.

Sarah Einstein is an PhD Candidate at Ohio University in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in journals such as Ninth Letter, Fringe, Whitefish Review, and PANK and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize.

Stacia M. Fleegal is the author of Versus (BlazeVOX 2011), Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter (Word Press 2010), and two chapbooks, co-founder and managing editor of Blood Lotus, and digital media coordinator for The Los Angeles Review. A two-time Pushcart prize nominee (whatever that means), her poems have appeared most recently in North American Review, Mud Luscious, and Glass. She tweets too much about 90s music, football, and living in the woods of northern MD and not nearly enough about writing, but does keep a writing blog: www.staciamfleegal.com.

Sari Fordham teaches at La Sierra University. She is currently writing a manuscript titled Wait for God to Notice about growing up in Uganda during the dictatorship of Idi Amin. The title comes from one of her mother's letters in which she describes Uganda's food shortage and then wryly states Òwait for God to notice.Ó Sari's work has appeared in Brevity and Cerise Press.

Manda Frederick holds an MFA in creative nonfiction and an MA in literary studies. She has work published or forthcoming through Wayne State University Press, Vagabondage Press, Muse & Stone, the Sierra Nevada Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Stirring, Four Paper Letters, White Whale Review, Switchback, the Bellingham Review, and Adventum Magazine where her essay was a finalist in their Ridge to River essay contest. She is the winner of the 2011 Press 53 Open Award for Poetry, three of her poems appearing in the winners' anthology. She is an Asst. Professor of Writing Arts at Rowan University.

Dorianne Laux's most recent collections are The Book of Men, winner of The Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University. "Second Hand Coat" appears in The Book of Women, a fine press edition chapbook from Red Dragonfly Press.

Nick McRae is the author of Mountain Redemption, winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition and forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, and Moravia, forthcoming from Folded Word Press. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared or will soon appear in Iron Horse Literary Review, Linebreak, Passages North, The Southern Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere.

Roberto Montes is currently pursuing an MFA at The New School. His work has previously appeared in or is forthcoming from Sixth Finch, Forklift, Ohio, NAP, and Vinyl Poetry.

Carrie Murphy is the of a full-length collection of poetry, Pretty Tilt (Keyhole Press, 2012) and a chapbook, Meet the Lavenders (Birds of Lace, 2011). She received her MFA from New Mexico State University and her BA from the University of Maryland.

Khadijah Queen is the author of two poetry collections, Conduit (Black Goat/Akashic) and Black Peculiar, which won the 2010 Noemi Press book award. Individual poems, four times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, appear widely in anthologies and journals, including Villanelles (Random House 2012) and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (2012). Visit her website: www.khadijahqueen.com.

Nancy Reddy;s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Linebreak, Memorious, The Journal, Boxcar Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2011, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is currently a doctoral student in composition and rhetoric.

Michael Royce has published fiction and creative nonfiction stories in Fringe Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, Linnet's Wing, Midwest Literary Review, and is scheduled to appear in Prime Number Magazine in March 2012. He is a graduate of Portland's 2011 Attic Atheneum, a one-year alternative to a MFA program.

Leslie Seldin's poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, failbetter.com, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, and Bateau Press. She lives in New York City.

Karen Skolfield lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two kids and teaches travel and technical writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a contributing editor at the literary magazine Bateau and her poems appeared in 2011 or are forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, Apple Valley Review, failbetter, Memorious, PANK, RATTLE, Sugar House Review, Superstition Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and others. Visit her online at www.karenskolfield.blogspot.com/.

Susan Slaviero is the author of CYBORGIA, a full length collection of poetry available from Mayapple Press. She has written four chapbooks: An Introduction to the Archetypes (Shadowbox Press 2008), Apocrypha (Dancing Girl Press 2009), A Wicked Apple (Hyacinth Girl Press 2011), and Selections From the Murder Book (Ghost Ocean Press, forthcoming 2012). Her work has appeared in Artifice Magazine, PANK, Rhino, Mythic Delirium, and elsewhere. She has a BA in English/Creative & Professional Writing from Lewis University.

George Singleton has published four collections of stories and two novels. His new collection, Stray Decorum, will be published in September from Dzanc.

Mathias Svalina is the author of one book of prose, I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur (Mud Luscious, 2011), & two books of poetry, Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010) and The Explosions (Subito, 2012). With Zachary Schomburg & Alisa Heinzman he co-edits Octopus Books.

Karen J. Weyant is the author of two chapbooks, Stealing Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2009) and Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt (Winner of Main Street Rag's 2011 Chapbook Contest). Her most recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Cave Wall, Conte, Sugar House Review, and River Styx. She lives in Warren, Pennsylvania but teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. She blogs at www.thescrapperpoet.wordpress.com.

Robert Wrigley’s most recent book is Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010), his eighth collection of poems. A former Guggenheim and two-time NEA Fellow, he and teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Idaho.



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