KATHARINE BEUTNER, Editor-in-Chief
Katharine Beutner is an assistant professor of English at the College of Wooster, where she teaches creative writing and literature. From 2013-2017, she was an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. Her first novel, Alcestis, published in 2010 by Soho Press, received the 2011 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction from the Publishing Triangle. Her writing has also appeared in triQuarterly, The Toast, the LA Review of Books, Public Books, Humanities, and other publications.
DANIEL BOURNE, Founder, Poetry Editor
Daniel Bourne, born on March 2, 1955 in Olney, Illinois, grew up on a farm. In 1979 he received his B.A. from Indiana University with a double major in Comparative Literature (receiving the Outstanding Undergraduate in Comparative Literature Award) and in History. In 1987 he received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University. Currently he teaches creative writing at The College of Wooster and has previously taught at Western Illinois University. He is the author of Boys Who Go Aloft, a poetry chapbook published by Sparrow Press in 1987. His first full-length book of poetry, The Household Gods, was published in 1995 in the Cleveland State University Poetry Center series. The recipient of Ohio Arts Council fellowships for 1990-1992 and 1992-1993, he has in the past contributed poems to such journals as Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Shenandoah (nominated for a Pushcart), Field, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Tar River Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Salmagundi, Graham House Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Chariton Review, Carolina Quarterly, Clockwatch Review, Confrontation, Minnesota Review, Mississippi Valley Review, River Styx, Spoon River Quarterly, Laurel Review, Kansas Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Willow Springs, Yellow Silk, Exquisite Corpse, and Louisville Review. His poem “The Language of the Dead” appeared in A Gathering of Poets (Kent State University Press), an anthology in observance of the 20th anniversary of the 1970 Kent State shootings, and his poem “Beside the Road” won first place for poetry in Indiana Review’s 15th anniversary literary competition in 1993.
From 1978 to 1985 he worked in a rare book library at Indiana University, spending the summer of 1980 as an English instructor at the Polytechnic Institute of Wroclaw, Poland and returning to Poland in 1982-83 as a research fellow on a graduate exchange program between Indiana University and Warsaw University. In 1985 he once again returned to Poland on a two-year Fulbright fellowship for more work on the translation of younger Polish poets. His translations of Polish poet Tomasz Jastrun are in Penguin’s anthology of Eastern European poetry, Child of Europe, and in Norton’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (edited by Carolyn Forché), and have also been in Northwest Review, Partisan Review, Salmagundi, Ohio Review, River Styx, Shenandoah (nominated for a Pushcart), Prairie Schooner, Confrontation, Beloit Poetry Journal, Willow Springs, Quarterly West, Chariton Review, Literary Review, New Orleans Review, Cutbank, Another Chicago Magazine, Artful Dodge, Witness, and Graham House Review. His translations of another younger Polish poet, Bronislaw Maj, have been featured in Beloit Poetry Journal and also appear in Cross-currents, Salmagundi, Hawaii Review, and Seneca Review. In the summer of 1989 he returned to Poland on a fellowship to do further translation work, and he continues to travel to Poland and the surrounding countries for more work with Polish authors. He is the editor of the section on Polish for Shifting Borders, an anthology of Eastern European poetry published in 1993 by Associated University Presses.
To learn more about Daniel Bourne’s comments on what influenced him early on as a writer, read his essay “War and Peace and Me” first published in Poet’s Bookshelf II, here.
JAMES DE MONTE, Fiction Editor
James De Monte is an Associate Professor of English at Lakeland Community College and previously taught at Columbus State Community College, Central State University, in Sardinia and Sicily, and at the Wick Poetry Center. His novella Brotherhood was published by Blue Cubicle Press in 2015 and longlisted for Shakespeare and Company’s Paris Literary Prize. At Lakeland, he is an editor of the Chagrin River Review. An Ohio native, he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from the NEOMFA program at Kent State University in 2009.
CHRISTOPHER KANG, Poetry Editor
Christopher Kang is an assistant professor of English at the College of Wooster. His first book of stories, When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, and Fell Dead, We Clung Together with Faint Hearts, and Mutely Questioned Each Other, was selected by Sarah Manguso for the 2016 GMR Book Prize. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in LitHub, Epiphany, jubilat, Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, Verse Daily, Cimarron Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Open City, and elsewhere. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The Collected Works of Monday, an online press that will publish works of visual and experimental poetry.
LEONARD KRESS, Editor
Leonard Kress has published poetry and fiction in Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. His recent collections are The Orpheus Complex and Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz were both published in 2018. Craniotomy appeared in 2019. He teaches philosophy and religion at Owens College in Ohio.
DAVID WIESENBERG, Publisher, Designer
David Wiesenberg began his career as a technical writer and as a plant manager of a large-volume printing factory. In 1985 he was elected a member of the Master Printers of America for his expertise, accomplishment, and service to the graphic arts industry. Shifting gears slightly from the production side, Wiesenberg established The Wooster Book Company in 1992, an independent retail bookstore and regional publishing company. The Wooster Book Company has been responsible for not only the publication of many new works of local, regional, and environmental interest, but also the reprinting of books by Pulitzer-prize winning writer Louis Bromfield, Lannan Literary Award winner Scott Russell Sanders, and the Amish farmer and nature writer, David Kline, among others. Additionally, The Wooster Book Company has been the receipient of such recognition as an Ohioana Citation in 2002 for distinguished service to Ohio in the field of the humanities and was named an Advocate for the Literary Arts Award winner in 2008 from the Center for the Book of the Library of Congress. While in college, Wiesenberg was the winner of the Emerson Poetry Contest in 1970.
CAROLYNE WRIGHT, Translation Editor
Carolyne Wright grew up in Seattle, studied with poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Hugo, and William Stafford, and graduated with a Doctor of Arts in English and Creative Writing from Syracuse University. Working her way across countries and cultures, she spent years in India, Bangladesh, Brazil and Chile on Fulbright Fellowships and other grants. She has held writing fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, the NEA, Jentel (Pushcart Residency), and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.
Her most recent books are This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009; and the bilingual volume in her translation from Spanish of Seattle-based Chilean poet Eugenia Toledo, Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre / Map Traces, Blood Traces (Mayapple Press, 2017), Finalist for the 2018 Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and the 2018 PEN Los Angeles Award in Translation. Carolyne’s ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), received ten Pushcart Prize nominations. She has nine earlier books and chapbooks of poetry;; and four earlier award-winning volumes of poetry in translation.
In 2003-2004, as a Visiting Poet and Professor at the College of Wooster, Carolyne was Special Guest Editor for Artful Dodge 44/45, and she served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) from 2004 – 2008. After teaching as Visiting Poet and Professor at a series of colleges and universities around the U.S. for over a dozen years, she returned in 2005 to her native Seattle, where she served on the faculty of the Whidbey Writers Workshop low-residency MFA Program from 2005 until the program’s closure in 2016. She continues to teach for Richard Hugo House, Seattle’s community literary center, and for literary conferences and festivals around the country.
A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, Carolyne returned to Brazil in 2018 on an Instituto Sacatar artists residency in Bahia. She has received grants from the NEA, 4Culture, and Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture; and a 2020-2021 Fulbright Scholar Award will take her back to Bahia after the worldwide CoVid-19 travel advisory is lifted. Meanwhile, along with writing, teaching, editing, and literary and social / environmental activism, Carolyne practices Zumba and Afro-Brazilian dance; and she continues to study, read, write, and translate from Portuguese in preparation for return visits to Bahia.
