Meet Our Authors
Fall 2016 Issue
Bianca Flores
grew up tan and barefoot in Hawai‘i where she worked as the Managing Editor of Hawai‘i Pacific Review. Her most recent publications include Sigma Tau Delta’s The Rectangle and Crab Creek Review as a semi-finalist for the 2015 Poetry Prize. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she reads poetry for Tin House and does publicity and editorial work at Future Tense Books.
Janice Worthen
lives in the Bay Area of California. She received her MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco. Her poems have appeared in The Rectangle, Your Impossible Voice, Switchback, Bitterzoet Magazine, and as a printed insert inside bags of gourmet coffee by Nomadic Ground Press. She also works as a freelance journalist and manages a blog for a celebrity pug.
Stephanie Adams-Santos
is a Guatemalan-American writer, educator, and divination artist from Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Swarm Queen’s Crown (Fathom Books, 2016) and several chapbooks: Total Memory (Finishing Line Press, 2016); Little Fugues (Sola Books, 2015) and The Sundering (Poetry Society of America, 2009), which was selected by Linda Gregg as winner of the New York Chapbook Fellowship. Adams-Santos’ poems have appeared in many print and online journals and magazines, including Guernica Magazine, The Boston Review, and Orion. Her work has also been featured in Poetry Press Week at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center. She is the founder of the Aperture Workshop Series in Poetry.
Spring 2016 Issue
Lourdes Figueroa
was born in Yuba City, California during a trip her parents made from Mexico to the USA when they worked in the campo tilling the soil for tomatoes. Lourdes is a proud 2009 and 2011 VONA alum. Her work has been published in the SF Poet’s 11 2008 & 2010, in Generations Literary Magazine, Eleven Eleven, Something Worth Revising, and Spooky Actions Books published her first chapbook, yolotl. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of San Francisco. She works and lives in San Francisco.
Armin Tolentino
received his MFA at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Literary Laundry, Blue Earth Review, and New Millennium Writings. He was a 2014 Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship recipient and lets the New York Knickerbockers break his heart every year between October and March.
Laura Walker
(laura-walker.com) is the author of story (Apogee Press, forthcoming), Follow–Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012), bird book (Shearsman Books, 2011), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), and swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004), and the chapbook bird book (Albion Books, 2010). She has taught poetry at San Francisco State University, University of San Francisco, and UC Berkeley Extension. She lives in Berkeley with one spouse, one cat, two sons, five chickens, and 30,000 bees.
Fall 2015 Issue
Jeff Alessandrelli
is the author of the full-length collection THIS LAST TIME WILL BE THE FIRST. Other work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Boston Review and five chapbooks. The name of Jeff’s dog is Beckett Long Snout. The name of his micro-press is Dikembe Press.
Wes Solether
teaches English and lives on a dead end street somewhere in the Midwest. He runs Bitterzoet Magazine and Press with his co-editor, Pattie. Wes has been most recently published in Samizdat Literary Journal, Meat For Tea: The Valley Review, and Ossuary Whispers.
W. Vandoren Wheeler
has published poems in various journals, including H_ngM_n, Forklift, Conduit and ratemyprofessors.com. His manuscript The Accidentalist won the Dorothy Brunsman Prize and was published by Bear Star Press in 2012. He lives with his wife and daughter in Portland, Oregon, and is working on a manuscript called Lonely & Co.
Inaugural Issue, April 28, 2015
Kevin Sampsell
is the author of the novel, This Is Between Us, and other books. He has been published in The Rumpus, Salon, Hobart, Fairy Tale Review, and in anthologies such as Best Sex Writing 2012 and Best American Essays 2013. He's recently published his poetry and collage art in magazines such as Black Candies, Jerkpoet, and Kolaj Magazine. He lives in Portland, Oregon and runs the micro press, Future Tense Books.
Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). A 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, he has received honors from Kundiman, Poets House, The Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and a 2014 Pushcart Prize. His poems appear in the New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets 2014, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. He lives in New York City.