Editorial Statement

Gregory Wolfe, The Erasmus Option

Fiction

Chris Gavaler, The Afterlife

Sarah Shermyen, Peace Be with You (And Also with You)

Molly McNett, The River

Poetry

Alison Pelegrin, Feast Days

Jeanne Murray Walker, God Reads the Poem of the World with Interest; The Years Were Patient with Me

Bruce Bond, Ex Nihilo; The Border

Farouk Goweda, Egypt's Grief

Joseph J. Capista, Entreaty; Mid-Flight, Mid-Ascension Virgin Photograph

G.C. Waldrep, Blue Heron, Marlborough

Jason Gray, Harmonium; Doubt at Easter

Dimitri Psurtsev, [We have nothing...]; [Today, having swigged a half-liter]; [My brain is like a millstone]

Robert Avery, Saint Taciturn; Woodpile

Visual Arts

Mark Sprinkle, Lost and Found: Karen Swenholt Unmakes Identity Politics

Confessions

Mark Bosco, SJ, Higher Mathematics: An Introduction

Flannery O’Connor, Higher Mathematics

Essay

Mary McCampbell, Search Results: The Real-Life Douglas Coupland

Philip Metres, Singing the Darkness: On Russia, Suffering, and Poetry

Book Review

Jen Hinst-White, Steve Stern's The Pinch; Mary Rakow's This Is Why I Came; David Williams's When The English Fall

Walid Abdallah is an Egyptian author and an assistant professor of English language and comparative literature. His previous translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Rhino, and Reunion: The Dallas Review. 

Robert Avery is a teacher and musician from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His poems have appeared in such journals as the Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, Poetry East, and Verse Daily.

Bruce Bond is the author of eighteen books, most recently Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (Michigan), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU), The Other Sky (Etruscan), Black Anthem (Tampa, winner of the Tampa Review Prize), Gold Bee (Southern Illinois, winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition), and Sacrum (Four Way Books). He is Regents Professor at University of North Texas.

Mark Bosco, SJ, is vice president for mission and ministry at Georgetown University, where he also teaches in the English department. He is an acclaimed scholar of the works of Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene, and along with Elizabeth Coffman he is co-producer, director, and writer of a forthcoming documentary film, Flannery O’Connor: Acts of Redemption.

Joseph J. Capista’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Slate, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Towson University and lives with his family in Baltimore.

Andy Fogle has published poems, memoir, interviews, criticism, and educational research in Blackbird, Writer’s Chronicle, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, English Journal, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. He lives in upstate New York, teaching high school and working on a PhD in education.

Chris Gavaler has published two novels, School for Tricksters (Southern Methodist) and Pretend I’m Not Here (HarperCollins), and two nonfiction studies, On the Origin of Superheroes (Iowa) and Superhero Comics (Bloomsbury). He is an assistant professor of English at Washington and Lee University.

Farouk Goweda is an Egyptian poet who has been widely influential in the Arab world, having published forty-three books, including eighteen collections of poetry and three plays. His work has been awarded several national and international prizes.

Jason Gray is the author of Photographing Eden (Ohio) and two chapbooks, How to Paint the Savior Dead (Kent State) and Adam & Eve Go to the Zoo (Dream Horse). He coedits the online journal Unsplendid and serves as associate editor for AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle.

Jen Hinst-White’s fiction and essays have appeared in Big Fiction, The Common, Missouri Review, Southampton Review, Consequence, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and blogs at jenhinstwhite.com.

Mary McCampbell is associate professor of humanities at Lee University and winter 2018 scholar-in-residence at Regent College. She writes on literature, film, and music and is currently working on a book titled Postmodern Prophetic: The Religious Impulse in Contemporary Fiction.

Molly McNett teaches writing at Northern Illinois University. She is the author of a book of stories, One Dog Happy (Iowa). Her story “La Pulchra Nota,” published in Image in 2014, was included in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology.

Philip Metres is the author of Pictures at an Exhibition (Akron), Sand Opera (Alice James), and others. A recipient of Lannan and NEA fellowships as well as two Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English at John Carroll University. www.philipmetres.com

Flannery O’Connor (1925–64) is the author of three story collections and two novels. Taken together, her books are a landmark of twentieth-century American fiction. In 2013 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published A Prayer Journal, a journal she kept in her early twenties.

Alison Pelegrin is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Waterlines (LSU). The recipient of fellowships from the NEA and Louisiana Division of the Arts, she has recently published work in the Southern Review, Cincinnati Review, and Poetry Daily. She teaches English at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Dimitri Psurtsev, Russian poet and translator, has translated and edited works by Frank Baum, A.S. Byatt, David Malouf, John Steinbeck, Dylan Thomas, and others. He has published two books of poems, From the Third Rome and Tengiz Notebook, and is a professor at Moscow State Linguistic University.

Sarah Shermyen is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Georgia.

Mark Sprinkle is an artist, craftsman, writer, and curator. His PhD from the College of William and Mary focused on the phenomenology of art in domestic environments. He has served as senior fellow in arts and humanities at the BioLogos Foundation and now convenes conversations on faith and culture from his home in Richmond, Virginia. www.marksprinkle.com.

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent book is a long poem, Testament (BOA); a new collection, feast gently, is due out from Tupelo Press in 2018. He teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as editor-at-large for the Kenyon Review.

Jeanne Murray Walker’s most recent books are Helping the Morning (Word Farm) and The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage through Alzheimer’s (Hachette). A book of sonnets, Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking, is forthcoming next year from Paraclete. She teaches in the Seattle Pacific University MFA program. www.JeanneMurrayWalker.com.