DUNES REVIEW
Fall 2017 (Volume 21, Issue I)
CONTRIBUTORS
Catherine Anderson is the author of Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press), The Work of Hands (Perugia Press) and In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books). Her poems have appeared in the I-70 Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Southern Review and others. Born in Detroit, she lived in the Boston area for two decades and now lives in Kansas City where she works with the region’s refugee communities.
Michael Bartelt is a high school English teacher and basketball coach who makes poems.
Anna Bernstein is a historical research assistant specializing in women’s history. Her work has appeared in Concho River Review, apt, decomP magazinE, and Inch, among others. She has two identical cats and currently lives in Brooklyn, like everyone else who grew up in Manhattan.
After twenty years in and around California, John F. Buckley once again lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife. His publications include various poems, two chapbooks, the collection Sky Sandwiches, and, with Martin Ott, Poets’ Guide to America and Yankee Broadcast Network. His website is www.johnfbuckley.net.
Patricia Clark has published poetry in Slate, The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Seattle Review, and in several books of poetry, most recently The Canopy (2017) and Sunday Rising (2013). Her fiction has appeared in the 2016 Write Michigan Anthology.
Dennis Cummings lives in Poway, California, where he collects stray golf balls and pre-1970 coins. He wrote “Armadillo” after reading an article in National Geographic about our disappearing species. Growing up in San Diego, he remembers often coming across the marvelous horned toad (actually a lizard) as he walked to school — always ready for a “duck and cover” response to the ever-present threat of a nuclear attack. Sadly, the horned toad has become scarce as hen’s teeth.
Jim Daniels is the author of sixteen poetry books, including his most recent, Rowing Inland (Wayne State University Press, 2017), and the forthcoming Street Calligraphy (Steel Toe Books). The End of Blessings, the fourth short film he has written and produced, appeared in numerous film festivals in 2016. A native of Detroit, Daniels is the Thomas Stockham University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
Merridawn Duckler is a poet and playwright from Portland, Oregon whose recent poetry is published or forthcoming in TAB (nominated for Best of the Net), Fifth Wednesday, The Offing, Literary Orphans, Whistling Shade, International Psychoanalysis, Unbroken, and interrupture. Her fellowships and awards include Writers@Work, NEA, Yaddo, Squaw Valley, SLS St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Southampton Poetry Conference. She is an editor at Narrative and the international philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics.
A lifelong resident of Michigan, CJ Giroux is an associate professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, where he also serves as the assistant director of the school’s Writing Center. He is the author of the chapbook Destination: Michigan.
A four-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Jonathan Greenhause was the winner of Kind of a Hurricane Press’s 2015 Editor’s Choice Poetry Award, the 2nd-prize winner in the 2016 Gemini Magazine Poetry Open, a finalist for this year’s Green Mountains Review Book Prize, a finalist for Soundings East’s 2016 Claire Keyes Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2016 Iowa Review Poetry Award. He is also a past contributor to Dunes Review.
Ed Hack was a teacher and is now a poet. He has written poetry for years, free verse mostly, until the last three years, when he started writing metered poetry, trying to find a new music, new kinds of precision, and, hopefully, depth, within a traditional form, the sonnet.
A native of Israel, Rinat Harel moved to the U.S. in 1991. With a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine art, she studied creative writing at Emerson College. Her work focuses on Israel’s social, political, and cultural challenges. She is currently working on a fictional memoir entailing her experience as an operations-room sergeant in an Israeli Air-Force squadron. Rinat’s work has been published in magazines such as the East Coast Ink, The Masters Review, Consequences Magazine, and Canyon Voices.
Stephanie Heit is a poet, dancer, and teacher of somatic writing, contemplative dance practice, and kundalini yoga. She lives with bipolar disorder and is a member of the Olimpias, an international disability-performance collective. The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System, 2017) is her first book, and her work most recently appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Typo, Streetnotes, Nerve Lantern, Queer Disability Anthology, Spoon Knife Anthology, and Theatre Topics. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Karen Paul Holmes has a full-length collection, Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press, 2014). Publications include Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Slipstream, and Best Emerging Poets 2015 (Stay Thirsty Media, 2016). To support fellow writers, Holmes originated and hosts a critique group in Atlanta, and Writers’ Night Out in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She grew up in Michigan and has an MA in music history from the University of Michigan.
- R. James’s poetry collections are Since Everything Is All I’ve Got (March Street, 2011) and five chapbooks, most recently Why War and Split-Level (Finishing Line 2014, 2017). Poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Poems in Michigan / Michigan in Poetry (New Issues, 2013). James lives in Saugatuck, Michigan, and has been teaching writing, literature, and peace-making at Hope College for going on 32 years.
Sonja Johanson has recent work appearing in the Best American Poetry blog, BOAAT, Epiphany, and The Writer’s Almanac. She is a contributing editor at the Found Poetry Review, and the author of Impossible Dovetail (IDES, Silver Birch Press), all those ragged scars (Choose the Sword Press), and Trees in Our Dooryards (Redbird Chapbooks). Sonja divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine. Follow her work at www.sonjajohanson.net.
Yukari Kaihori was born in Japan and grew up shifting from Asia to South America to North America. She creates paintings to examine the intersections between the physical and internal landscapes, with a special focus on how those landscapes interact with memory and imagination. Yukari earned her B.A. in studio art in 2004 from Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. She has lived and worked from her studio in New Zealand since 2011. In 2015, Yukari received a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant award. See more of her work at www.yukari-kaihori.com
Elizabeth Kerlikowske is president of Friends of Poetry, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing people and poetry together. Her most recent chapbook is Chain of Lakes, a letterpress book from the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center.
Peter Krumbach was born in what used to be Czechoslovakia. Shortly after graduating with a degree in visual arts, he left the country and began a journey that eventually took him to New York. He worked in commercial art and later as a translator and broadcaster. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Alaska Quarterly Review, Phoebe, RHINO, Columbia Poetry Review, and Fugue. He lives in La Jolla, California.
Kris Kunz graduated from the University of Michigan and has a master’s degree in English literature from Oakland University. Her poetry has appeared in Dunes Review and Scintilla Magazine, and she was awarded the William J. Shaw Memorial Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her chapbook, Crime Story, was published by Michigan Writers Cooperative Press in 2015. She taught in the Detroit area and now lives and writes in Frankfort, Michigan with her dog, horses, and husband.
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her most recent poetry collection is PearlStitch (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). Her stories appear in Sycamore Review, Future Fire, Capricious, Festival Writer, PodCastle, and Accessing the Future. She is the artistic director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective. She lives in Ann Arbor with her partner and collaborator, Stephanie Heit. Find her online at www.petrakuppersfiction.wordpress.com.
Anna Leahy’s books include Aperture, Generation Space: A Love Story, Tumor, and Constituents of Matter. Her essays won the top prizes at Ninth Letter and Dogwood in 2016 and were Notables in The Best American Essays 2013 and 2016. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Chapman University, where she curates the Tabula Poetica reading series and edits TAB: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics. www.generationspace.com
Michael Lisieski was born in Ohio, grew up in western Pennsylvania, and attended college in Buffalo. He now lives in Detroit with three cats, two rabbits, and one of his partners, and studies neuroscience. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Midwestern Gothic, Star*Line, Passages North, The Cape Rock, and other journals.
Todd Mercer won the Dyer-Ives Kent County Prize for Poetry (2016), the National Writers Series Poetry Prize (2016) and the Grand Rapids Festival Flash Fiction Award (2015). His digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, appeared at Right Hand Pointing. His poetry and fiction appear in 100 Word Story, Dogzplot, The Ekphrastic Review, Eunoia Review, EXPOUND, Flash Fiction Magazine. Fried Chicken and Coffee, Gnarled Oak, The Lake, Literary Orphans, Main Street Rag Anthologies, Split Lip Magazine, Star 82 Review, and Two Cities Review.
Rebecca Oet is a high-school student from Solon, Ohio. She enjoys reading fiction and comic books, writing short stories and poetry, and watching anime. Rebecca is a national silver medalist for photography in the 2015 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and has won gold and silver keys for poetry in the Regional Scholastic Writing Competition & Exhibition. Her poetry appears in Teen Ink Magazine, Freshwater Literary Journal, Zingara Poet and the Summer 2014 National Poetry Contest Anthology.
Alaina Pepin is a poet and writer born and raised on Lake Superior’s shore in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She is in the midst of her fourth and final year as an English secondary education major at Northern Michigan University and will be student teaching in the winter semester. Her poetry appears in Rust+Moth, Beech Street Review, Pif Magazine, Sink Hollow Literary Journal, and Ore Ink Review.
Adam Scheffler’s first book of poems, A Dog’s Life, was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the Jacar Press Poetry Book Contest and was published in 2016. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, Rattle, North American Review, Verse Daily, and many other venues. He grew up in California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently finishing his PhD in English at Harvard.
- Thomas Sheardy, a lifelong resident of Michigan, lives in Crockery Township. He has been writing most of his life, both fiction and for his profession, but is only recently published. His work has most recently appeared in the Write Michigan 2016 anthology. A retired professor of art history, he has done archaeological work in the jungles of Yucatan and is an avid traveler. He is also an artist, maintains a large English garden, and raises orchids.
Brendan Sherry lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.
Daniel Stewart is by training an historian and by profession a print and book designer and occasional radio producer, as well as a writer of memoir and fiction (which he tries to keep from overlapping). In other words, most of what he does is related to the telling of good and true stories. He has lived with his wife, Amanda Holmes, in Leelanau County, Michigan, since 2004.
Andrew Szilvasy teaches British literature outside of Boston and currently has poems in Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Shot Glass Journal, Boston Accent Lit, and Asses of Parnassus, among others. He lives in Boston with his wife and two cats. Aside from writing, reading and teaching, Andrew spends his time hiking and brewing beer.
Diz Warner has enjoyed an eclectic writing career. She was a frequent humor columnist for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and is a contributor to the books, The Sixties Chronicle and The Civil Rights Chronicle: The African-American Struggle for Freedom. Originally a Michigan poet, she is currently working on short stories and a novella and is a recent alumna of The Sirenland Conference in Positano, Italy. She earns her living ghostwriting policy articles and books.
Kirk Westphal is originally from Michigan, and now lives near Boston where he works as a water supply consultant. His poems have appeared in past issues of Dunes Review, The Road Not Taken, and Albatross, and he has also read on National Public Radio. In 2015, he published his first book, No Ordinary Game. To inspire further writing, he is building a cabin in the hills of Western Massachusetts along a trout stream.
Joanna White, a music professor, studies poetry with Robert Fanning and Jeffrey Bean, fiction with Darrin Doyle, and has works appearing in Examined Life Journal, Healing Muse, Measure, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Ars Medica, The Cape Rock, Chariton Review, Hummingbird, Pulse, Temenos, KYSO Flash Anthology #2, Minerva Rising Literary Journal, and the Naugatuck River Review. She lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan with her husband and has a daughter and son in college.