Yume Kitasei
Monday, March 4

Yume Kitasei  is a Brooklyn-based Japanese and American writer of speculative fiction. Her stories have appeared in publications including New England Review, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, Baltimore Review, and Nashville Review. The Deep Sky (Flatiron Books, 2023) is her first novel. Her next book, The Stardust Grail, is out June 2024. She chirps occasionally @Yumewrites at Instagram, TikTok, and Blue Sky.

Joshua Zelesnick
Thursday, April 11

Joshua Zelesnick writes poetry and essays and fiddles around on the guitar or ukelele most evenings. Insert Coin, his first full-length collection of poems—which scrutinizes drone warfare, the colonization of virtual and physical space by banks, the moons of Saturn, and video games—was a finalist for the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize and the Trio Award; it will be published in 2024. Bonfire Books published his chapbook Cherub Poems in 2019 and his poetry and essays can be found in Counter Punch, DIAGRAM, Jubilat, Matter, Texas Review, Yes Poetry, and elsewhere. He has taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh and is now a librarian and creative writing teacher at a public school in Pittsburgh, where he lives with his partner and two young kids in a garden cohousing community. With friends, he hosts an occasional living-room music and reading series.

Robert Bensen
Wednesday, November 8

Robert Bensen ’s seventh book of poems is  What Lightning Spoke: New & Selected Poems  (2022). He directed the writing programs at Hartwick College from 1978–2017, where he taught composition, poetry and fiction writing, and literatures of the Caribbean, Native America, and the English Renaissance. Poems and essays have appeared in many journals, such as  AGNI , Callaloo, The Paris Review , The Caribbean Writer, Ploughshares , Native Realities, and elsewhere. His writing has earned awards and fellowships from the NEA, NEH, Newberry Library, NYSCA, Harvard University, NY State Fair, and elsewhere. He has edited anthologies of Native American and Caribbean literature. He consults with SUNY Oneonta’s Red Dragon Reading Series, conducts the Seeing Things Poetry Workshop at Bright Hill Press, and directs Woodland Arts Editions , a small literary publisher. More information is available at robertbensen.com .

Shena McAuliffe
Wednesday, October 11

Shena McAuliffe is the author of  We Are a Teeming Wilderness: Stories (2023), winner of the 2022 Press 53 Prize for Short Fiction, Glass, Light, Electricity: Essays (2020), and  The Good Echo: A Novel (2018). She grew up in Wisconsin and Colorado. She earned her MFA in fiction writing at Washington University in St. Louis, and a PhD at the University of Utah. She lives in Schenectady, New York, where she is assistant professor of English at Union College. She likes handmade things like canoe paddles, ice cream, books, and tree forts.

Sten Carlson
Friday, April 28

Sten Carlson is the author of the chapbook, written collaboratively with Robin Clarke, Lives of the Czars (Nonpolygon, 2011), three chapbooks, Fur & After , Fifteen False Propositions against Crowds , and Climate Chorale (BONFIRE, 2015, 2015, 2022), and several other little books. His poems and criticism have appeared in The Columbia Review, Whiskey and Fox, The Volta, Shampoo , Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He teaches poetry and creative writing as a non-tenure-track faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, is currently working on a nonfiction book, The New School Garden: Teaching Resilience and Regeneration in an Age of Climate Crisis, and owns and operates an ecological landscape design business. He lives in Pittsburgh with his partner, three children, and a host of friends at Borland Garden, an intentional community of poets, artists, activists, and gardeners.

Julian K. Jarboe
Wednesday, April 12

Julian K. Jarboe is the author of the Lambda Award winning collection, Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel (Lethe, 2020), and their fiction and poetry has appeared in Hypocrite Reader , Maudlin House , Nat. Brut , Uncanny Magazine , SmokeLong Quarterly , and elsewhere. They are also the author of the games Marshmallow Test (2020), Inscrutable Cities (2020), Over Easy: A Diner Heist , and others. They are currently working on a novel and more of their work can be found at JulianKJarboe.com .

Raena Shirali
Thursday, October 27

Raena Shirali is the author of two collections of poetry. Her first book, GILT (YesYes, 2017), won the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, and her second, summonings (Black Lawrence, 2022), won the 2021 Hudson Prize. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, Shirali is also the recipient of awards and honors from Boston Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Gulf Coast, and VIDA. She holds an MFA in Poetry from The Ohio State University and is assistant professor of English at Holy Family University. Shirali lives in Philadelphia and serves on the board for BreakBread, a literacy project serving young writers.

Tessa Yang
Wednesday, November 16

Book launch event for The Runaway Restaurant (7.13 Books).

Tessa Yang is the author of the short story collection The Runaway Restaurant (7.13 Books, 2022). Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, CRAFT, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Indiana University and currently lives in upstate New York, where she teaches creative writing at Hartwick College and is at work on a novel about a misunderstood sea monster. Find her online at www.tessayang.com .

Krys Malcolm Belc
Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood (Counterpoint, 2021) and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2018). His work has appeared in Granta, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus (also here), and elsewhere and has been anthologized in Best of the Net 2018 and Wigleaf Top 50. Belc has won contests at Redivider and Pigeon Pages, and his work has been supported by the Sustainable Arts Foundation. He received his BA from Swarthmore College, his MEd in Special Education from Arcadia University, and his MFA in Creative Writing at Northern Michigan University. Belc lives in Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children and works as an educator in a pediatric healthcare clinic.

Michael Peters
Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Michael Peters is the author of Vaast Bin (Calamari Press, 2007) and other assorted sound, visual, and text-based works. As certain as he is uncertain of access to “the real,” he explores this periphery in a variety of old and new media, utilizing sound-imaging strategies as something like a poet, visual poet, fictioneer, essayist, ecologist, musician, and programmer. In addition to online and print journals, his works are scattered in special collections and avant-garde libraries like The Sackner Archive and appear in poetry and visual poetry anthologies such as The Last Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics, 2012) and Resist Much/Obey Little (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017). Although Peters was once awarded an obscure poetry prize by the Academy of American Poets, he was immediately released back into the wild without being tagged. However, records indicate he holds a PhD in English from The University at Albany, teaches at SUNY Oneonta, and as a member of the band Poem Rocket, is a label-mate of Sun Ra on Atavistic Records. He recently played the part of Bosse-de-Nage in Dr. Faustroll’s re-make of Pierre Boulle’s original Planet of the Apes.

Roger W. Hecht
Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Roger W. Hecht is the author of two collections of poetry: Talking Pictures (Cervena Barva, 2012) and a recently published chapbook, Witness Report (Finishing Line, 2020). Poet Bertha Rogers calls Hecht “a poet unafraid to look at everyday life in the eye and tell the truth of it, in precise and elegant language.” Poet Robert Bensen writes that Hecht’s poems “create and shape a better, clearer vision.” A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Yes, Poetry, Puerto del Sol, The Piltdown Review, Diagram, and many other journals. He is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Oneonta, where he teaches literature and creative writing.

Su Cho
Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Su Cho is a poet and essayist living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College. Her debut poetry collection, Symmetry of Fish, won the 2021 National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from Penguin. She was a finalist for the 2020 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and currently serves as Consulting Editor for POETRY magazine after serving as guest editor. Find her on Twitter @su__cho or visit suchowrites.com.

Brendan Walsh
Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Brendan Walsh has lived and taught in South Korea, Laos, and South Florida. He graduated from Hartwick College in 2010 with a degree in English-Creative Writing. His work has recently appeared in Rattle, Glass Poetry, Indianapolis Review, American Literary Review, minnesota review, and other journals. He is the author of five books and chapbooks of poetry, including Go (Aldrich Press, 2016), Buddha vs. Bonobo (Sutra Press, 2017), and fort lauderdale (Grey Book Press, 2019). His next collection, concussion fragment, is forthcoming from NightBallet Press in 2020.

C. L. Clark
Wednesday, April 28, 2021

C.L. Clark is the author of The Unbroken (Orbit, 2021), the first book in the Magic of the Lost trilogy. She graduated from Indiana University’s creative writing MFA and was a 2012 Lambda Literary Fellow. She’s been a personal trainer, an English teacher, and an editor, and is some combination thereof as she travels the world. When she’s not writing or working, she’s learning languages, doing P90something, or reading about war and (post-)colonial history. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in FIYAH, PodCastle, Uncanny, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Shena McAuliffe
Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Shena McAuliffe’s debut novel, The Good Echo (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), won the Big Moose Prize and the Balcones Fiction Prize. Her essay collection, Glass, Light, Electricity, winner of the Permafrost Prize in nonfiction, is forthcoming from the University of Alaska Press in February 2020. She holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. She grew up in Wisconsin and Colorado, and now lives in Schenectady, New York, where she is an assistant professor of fiction at Union College.

Tessa Yang
Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Tessa Yang is a fiction writer from New York State whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Joyland, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere. Her flash fiction has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and was included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2018 and 2019. She received an MFA from Indiana University, where she served as editor of Indiana Review, and is currently assistant professor of English at Hartwick College.

George Hovis
Wednesday, October 16, 2019

George Hovis’s debut novel, The Skin Artist (SFK, 2019), explores the gothic urban South, a world of tattoo magic and failed upward mobility. His stories and essays have appeared widely in such journals as The Carolina Quarterly, The Fourth River, Mississippi Quarterly, New Madrid, North Carolina Literary Review, Southern Cultures, and The Southern Literary Journal. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is professor of English at SUNY Oneonta and a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Lauren Russell
Thursday, November 7, 2019

Lauren Russell is the author of What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta, 2017) and Descent (Tarpaulin Sky, forthcoming 2020), a winner of the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards. A 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry, she has also received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, City of Asylum/Passa Porta, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Rose O’Neill Literary House, VIDA/The Home School, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Bettering American Poetry 2015, boundary 2, The Brooklyn Rail, Cream City Review, jubilat, The New York Times Magazine, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, among others.

She is research assistant professor and assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Alice Lichtenstein
Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Alice Lichtenstein graduated from Brown University and received her MFA from Boston University, where she received the Boston University Fellowship in Fiction. She is the author of two novels, The Genius of the World (Zoland, 2000) and Lost (Scribner, 2010), which was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her forthcoming novel, The Crime of Being (Upper Hand, 2019), has been touted by National Book Award winner Robb Forman Dew as “reading with the intensity of a first class mystery, but Lichtenstein’s deft interweaving of subplots and all the shades of good and evil, belong to the finest literary tradition.” Lichtenstein’s short stories have appeared in several literary journals, including recent Pushcart Prize nominations for stories in Dead Friends, Narrative Magazine, Post Road, and Short Story. Her work has been translated into Chinese and she has received a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Fiction, has twice been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and is the recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial Grant Award for Fiction. Lichtenstein lives in Oneonta, New York, where she teaches fiction and poetry writing at Hartwick College, and in Surry, Maine.

Alice Lichtenstein will be reading from her new novel, The Crime of Being, which Upper Hand Press will publish on November 15, 2019.