Masthead

Managing & Poetry Editor

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the founder and managing editor of Stirring and author of The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press, 2008), The Chainsaw Bears (Dancing Girl Press, 2010), and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press, 2011). Her poetry has appeared recently or is forthcoming in numerous literary magazines including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Blip, Palooka, Zone 3, Superstition Review, and Gargoyle. Erin holds an PhD from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and is currently a full-time lecturer at the University of Tennessee where she teaches poetry writing and literature and runs the Sundress Weekend Workshop series.

Fiction Editor

Josh Webster is a graduate of the PhD program at The University of Southern Mississippi, where he specialized in fiction. When he's not attending to his duties as the fiction editor of Stirring, he's struggling to overcome his disappointment that he is not, in fact, an orphan of the planet Krypton.

Book Review Editor

Letitia Trent's work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, The Black Warrior Review, Fence, Folio, The Journal, Diode, Blazevox, and many others. Her first full-length poetry collection, One Perfect Bird, is available from Sundress Publications. Her chapbooks include You aren't in this movie (dancing girl press), Splice (Blue Hour Press) and The Medical Diaries (Scantily Clad Press). She was the 2010 winner of the Alumni Flash Writing Award from the Ohio State University's The Journal and has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony. Letitia is a former co-editor of 21 Stars Review, a journal of constraints.

Broadside Editor

Rhonda Lott is a PhD candidate and Graduate Instructor at Texas Tech University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in cream city review, The Los Angeles Review, Oak Bend Review, Kennesaw Review, Journal of Truth and Consequence, The Southern Quarterly, and others.

Broadside Editor

In her spare time, Mary Ellen Knight is a student at the University of Tennessee where she has earned Bachelor of Arts in Art Education, as well as a degree in Painting and Drawing. She is currently working towards earning her Master of Science in Art Education.

Associate Poetry Editor

John Turner is an Instructor of English at Scott Community College in Davenport, Iowa. His work has appeared in Short Stuff, Samsara Quarterly, Astronomy, Lyrical Iowa, Haiku Hut, Squashblossom, Black&White, The Poet, and Stirring, among others. He is a James Hearst Poetry Award winner and the first on-line Slammaster for Simon&Shuster and Warner Brothers. He has judged the Third Fusion Poetry Competiton as well as the 2004 Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest. John has also written and starred in 30 plays in last 20 years, won poetry slams in the Quad Cities, had poems and plays commissioned in Illinois and Iowa, and has never beaten Erin Elizabeth at Insomniac's Society Poetry Slams.

Associate Poetry Editor

M has served as an Associate Poetry Editor for Stirring for over a decade. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals such as Rattle, Harpur Palate, and Pedestal, been nominated twice for Best New Poets, and was a finalist in the Rattle 2011 $5,000 Poetry Prize. She also serves as an Administrator of an online poetry workshop, as Co-Chair for the Portland Unit of the Oregon Poetry Association, and Co-Facilitator of the Figures of Speech Reading Series and critique group. She is severely allergic to any activity even remotely domestic (cooking, gardening, etc.), preferring instead to read, read, and if she has any spare time, to read.

Associate Poetry Editor

Kevin Matz was born in Champaign, Illinois, on May 12, 1977. He received a Bachelors degree in Rhetoric in 2000. He then worked a number of glamorous jobs, such as fork lift operator and deli grunt, to support his writing before returning to the University of Illinois to pursue graduate study. In 2004, he won the Carol Kyle Memorial Award for Poetry. He graduated with his MFA from the University of Illinois in May of 2005. He lives with his wife and daughter.

Associate Poetry Editor

Karen Skolfield is pleased to admit she enjoys teaching technical writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. When she's not reading papers on how gears work and the Haber-Bosch process, she gets to read a little poetry and even write some of her own. Her recent work appears in Boxcar Poetry Review, Cave Wall, failbetter, Memorious, RATTLE, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and others. Her manuscript Frost in the Low Areas won the First Book Award for Poetry from Zone 3 Press and will be published fall 2013. Visit her online at http://www.karenskolfield.blogspot.com/

Associate Poetry Editor

J.P. Craig is an assistant professor of English at Alabama State University and a contributing editor to New American Notes Online and the literary critical journal Reconfigurations. His work has appeared in 5_trope, Outerbridge, The Graduate Bulletin of the University of Iowa, The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Artful Dodge, Verse, River City magazine, and in the critical collection Reading Duncan Reading. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Memphis and his doctorate from the University of Iowa.

Associate Poetry Editor / Sundress Intern

Emily Janowick writes poems and makes big abstract paintings in a hundred-year-old Victorian house in Knoxville, Tennessee. Against her better judgement, she surrounds herself with an abundance of animals and people at all times. Her chapbook, The Rule of Threes, is forthcoming from Sundress.