Editorial Statement

Gregory Wolfe, Rowing for Shore

Fiction

A.N. Muia, The Vermilion Saint
Shannon Skelton, A Viewing Party

Poetry

Joanna Solfrian,  Psalm Ghazal I
Psalm Ghazal II

Stephen Haven, Ars Poetica: Baptismal Story

Peter Cooley, The Holy Fool Meets Himself...
Anti-poetics

Robert McNamara, Ex Nihilo, Then Us
Venetian Villanelle

Katharine Coles, Bewilder
Annunciation

Claude Wilkinson, The Egret Tree
Deus ex Machina

Stephen Cushman, Syllable Nutshell
The Fruit Thereof

Ravi Shankar, Conjoined

Dan Bellm, The Sanctuary at Chimayó

Heather Sellers, In the Candleroom at Saint Bartholomew’s...
Appeal to the Self

Paul Mariani, Psalm for the Lost
The Open Window

Interview

Gregory Wolfe, A Conversation with Roberta Ahmanson

Visual Arts

Wayne Roosa, The Avant-Garde and Sacred Discontent: Contemporary Performance Artists Meet Ancient Jewish Prophets

Gordon Fuglie, Karen Laub-Novak: A Catholic Expressionist in the Era of Vatican II

Essays

Jonathan Hiskes, The Rage of Peter De Vries: Reckoning with a Brokenhearted Humorist

Ilana M. Blumberg, Transfers

Book Review

Bryan Bliss, Scott Cheshire's High as the Horses' Bridles, 
John Darnielle's Wolf in White Van, 
Dave Eggers's Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

Bryan Bliss is the author of the forthcoming novel No Parking at the End Times(HarperCollins) and a graduate of the Seattle Pacific University MFA program in creative writing. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.

Ilana M. Blumberg is the author of Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman among Books (Bison), which won a Sami Rohr Choice Award and was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award and Moment Prize for Emerging Writers, and Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels (Ohio State). She teaches at Bar Ilan University and Michigan State University.

Dan Bellm, poet and translator, lives in Berkeley, California. The most recent of his three books of poetry, Practice (Sixteen Rivers), won a 2009 California Book Award, and he has received fellowships from the NEA and the California Arts Council. Description of a Flash of Cobalt Blue, his translation of Mexican poet Jorge Esquinca, is forthcoming from Unicorn Press. He teaches literary translation at Antioch University Los Angeles. See www.danbellm.com.

Katharine Coles’s sixth poetry collection, Flight, will be out from Red Hen Press in 2016. Recent poems and essays have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, andCrazyhorse. A 2012–13 Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches at the University of Utah.

Peter Cooley has published nine books, most recently Night Bus to the Afterlife (Carnegie Mellon). He teaches creative writing at Tulane University and lives in New Orleans.

Stephen Cushman’s most recent books are The Red List: A Poem (Louisiana State) andBelligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (North Carolina). He is general editor of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Gordon Fuglie, a UCLA-educated art historian, began his career at the J. Paul Getty Museum, continuing at UCLA’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, then directing the Laband Gallery at Loyola Marymount University. He currently works as an art journalist and independent curator.

Stephen Haven is the author of The Last Sacred Place in North America (New American) and two earlier poetry collections. His poems have appeared in Image, Southern Review,Parnassus, Salmagundi, and American Poetry Review, among other journals.

Jonathan Hiskes is a writer in Seattle. His essays have appeared in The Sun, The Other Journal, Books & Culture, The Mennonite, Geez, and Comment. His journalistic work has appeared online at The Guardian, Mother Jones, Grist, Puget Sound Business Journal, and elsewhere. Find his work at www.jonathanhiskes.com.

Paul Mariani’s most recent books are Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected, and Revised Poems (Wipf & Stock) and the forthcoming The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens (Simon & Schuster).

Robert McNamara has published three books of poetry, most recently Incomplete Strangers(Lost Horse). A recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Commission and NEA, he teaches in the interdisciplinary writing program at the University of Washington. He is also the university director of the Puget Sound Writing Project.

A.N. Muia works with Tierra Nueva in Burlington, Washington, serving as a jail chaplain and directing homes for those in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. “The Vermilion Saint,” published in this issue, is the first chapter of a novel-in-progress set in Baja California, Mexico.

Wayne Roosa’s essays have appeared in Books & Culture, Arts, and Image, as well as in exhibition catalogues for Michelle Grabner, William Tucker, Betty Woodman, and MOBIA’s The Next Generation; as well as in books including The Art of Joel Sheesley (Valparaiso), Guy Chase (Square Halo), and Stuart Davis (Guggenheim-Venice). His most recent painting exhibition was with the Traffic Zone Gallery in Minneapolis.

Heather Sellers is the author of two volumes of poetry, Drinking Girls and Their Dresses(Ahsahta) and The Boys I Borrow (New Issues). She is at work on a collection of poems on the subject of her father’s death. She teaches poetry and nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of South Florida.

Ravi Shankar’s books include the forthcoming What Else Could It Be: Ekphrastics and Collaborations (Carolina Wren) and New and Selected Poems (Nirala). Founding editor of the online journal Drunken Boat and chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust, he also teaches in the MFA program at City University of Hong Kong and at Central Connecticut State University.

Shannon Skelton is a teaching fellow and MFA candidate in fiction at Georgia College and State University. Her work has appeared in Ruminate and Relief.

Joanna Solfrian’s first book of poems, Visible Heavens (Kent State), won the 2009 Wick Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Margie, Southern Review, Pleiades, and Harvard Review. She works with teenagers in New York City.

Claude Wilkinson is a critic, painter, and poet. His poetry collections include Reading the Earth (Michigan State), winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, and Joy in the Morning (Louisiana State), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He currently lives in Nesbit, Mississippi.

Read our interview with Wayne Roosa, only available online!