Editorial Statement

Gregory Wolfe, A Metaphorical God

Fiction

Melanie Rae Thon, The Bodies of Birds
Erin McGraw, Breaking Glass; Priest; Happiness; Dogs

Poetry

Valerie Wohlfeld, Orchard
The Taste of Eden

Michael Ryan, The Ritz

John Terpstra, New Year, Good Work
Near-Annunciation at Carroll’s Point

Betsy Sholl, Daybreak, Winter

John Blair, A Song on Geronimo’s Grave
Bone Anthem

Jean Hollander, Against the Light

Jeffrey Harrison, Sharing a Painting
Waiting with Cynthia

Kathleen A. Wakefield, To Begin With
The Man in the New Pew
If I Decide to Pray Again It Won’t Be Words...

Visual Arts

Elizabeth Duffy, Jack Baumgartner and the School of the Transfer of Energy

Richard Davey, In Search of the Beautiful: The Art of Susie Hamilton

Interview

Nick Ripatrazone, A Conversation with Phil Klay

Essay

Mike Smith, Pigeons and Turtledoves
Lee Haupt, The Ring

Confessions

Ryan Masters, Unless a Kernel of Wheat Falls

Review

Lisa Ampleman, Jericho Brown’s The New Testament
Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Lighting the Shadow
Rickey Laurentiis’s Boy with Thorn

Read our web-exclusive interview with Lisa Ampleman here.

Lisa Ampleman is the author of Full Cry (NFSPS) and the chapbook I’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You (Kent State). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, 32 Poems, Massachusetts Review, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily, and her reviews in Diagram and Pleiades. She is a graduate of the PhD program at the University of Cincinnati.

John Blair has published six books. His new collection, Playful Song Called Beautiful, won the 2015 Iowa Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press.

Richard Davey is coordinating chaplain of Nottingham Trent University and a visiting fellow in its School of Art and Design. A member of the International Association of Art Critics, he is a curator and writes on contemporary art, including books and catalogue essays on Tess Jaray, Anselm Kiefer, and Anthony Whishaw. In 2015 he wrote the catalogue essay for the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, and he will be a judge for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2016.

Elizabeth Duffy blogs at Patheos and BettyDuffy.blogspot.com and is a contributor to Living Faith: Daily Catholic Devotions. Her essays have been published by Our Sunday Visitor, On Faith, The Catholic Educator, and Aleteia. She and her husband live in Indiana with their six children.

Jeffrey Harrison’s fifth book of poetry, Into Daylight (Tupelo), received the Dorset Prize. His poems have recently appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, Southern Review, AGNI, and elsewhere.

Lee Haupt was born in Vienna in 1938. In the 1970s she edited two award-winning collections of short fiction for middle- and high-school students, Man in the Fictional Mode and Literature Lives (both from McDougal, Littel). In 2002 she retired as chair of the humanities department at Richard J. Daley College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. She died in Chicago in 2013.

Jean Hollander has published five collections of poetry. Her chapbook Counterpoint won first prize in Bright Hill Press’s poetry contest, and an Italian translation was published in Italy last year. Her verse translation of Dante’s Commedia (with Robert Hollander) was published by Doubleday to enthusiastic reviews.

Ryan Masters earned his master’s in English at Liberty University. There, he discovered George Saunders and David Foster Wallace, who taught him to simultaneously love and laugh at humanity. He and his wife Georgie live in Lynchburg, Virginia, and have two children, Nehemiah and Eliza.

Erin McGraw is the author of six books of fiction, most recently the novel Better Food for a Better World (Slant). She recently retired from teaching at the Ohio State University. She and her husband, the poet Andrew Hudgins, divide their time between Ohio and Tennessee.

Nick Ripatrazone’s most recent books are The Fine Delight (Cascade), an examination of Catholic literature after Vatican II, and Ember Days (Braddock Avenue), a story collection. He is a staff writer for The Millions and contributor to the Atlantic, Esquire, and Kenyon Review.

Michael Ryan directs the MFA program in poetry at the University of California, Irvine, and has won many awards for his work. His most recent book is This Morning (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Betsy Sholl’s most recent book of poems is Otherwise Unseeable (Wisconsin), winner of the Maine Literary Award for poetry. She teaches in the MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and was poet laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.

Mike Smith teaches at Delta State University and has published three collections of poetry including Multiverse (BlazeVox), a collection of two anagrammatic cycles. Recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in December, Edgar Allan Poe Review, Grist, Notre Dame Magazine, The Sun, and Witness. His translation of the first part of Goethe’s Faust was published by Shearsman Books in 2012.

John Terpstra’s most recent poetry collection, Brilliant Falls, won the Hamilton Literary Award. His most recent work of nonfiction is The House with the Parapet Wall (both are from Gaspereau). He has been shortlisted for both the Governor General’s Award and the Charles Taylor Prize and is, by trade, a furniture-maker.

Melanie Rae Thon’s most recent books are Silence & Song (Alabama), The 7th Man (New Michigan), The Voice of the River (Fiction Collective 2), and In This Light (Graywolf). Originally from Montana, she now lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches in the creative writing and environmental humanities programs at the University of Utah.

Kathleen A. Wakefield’s Notations on the Visible World won the 1999 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry, Rattle, Sewanee Review, and Shenandoah. She has taught creative writing at the Eastman School of Music and as a poet-in-the-schools. 

Valerie Wohlfeld’s most recent book of poetry is Woman with Wing Removed (Truman State). Her first collection, Thinking the World Visible (Yale), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. She holds an MFA from Vermont College.

Read our interview with Lisa Ampleman, only available online!