Fiction

Katie Burgess is a fourth year doctoral candidate in creative writing. Her area of interest is the novel, in particular the graphic novel. Her minor area is the history of text technologies. She is a regular contributor to Lydia Feeds the Pigeons, a local comics anthology, and is currently at work on a graphic novel about tuberculosis.

Katie Cortese is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Creative Writing program at Florida State University. Her studies are focused on the history and development of the novel, with a minor area in 20th century American literature. She is currently working on a novel for her creative dissertation concerning an Italian family that emigrates from Calabria to Boston in the early 1900s and lives through the Spanish Flu, World War I, and the woman's rights movement leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. She recently presented at the Florida College English Association's 2010 conference, and will soon take part in a panel called "Love at First Query: Agents and Authors Share Strategies for Falling in Literary Love" at the 2011 Associated Writing Programs conference. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in New South, Willow Springs, Passages North, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Ampersand Review, The Superstition Review, Zone 3, Zahir, St. Ann's Review, and elsewhere, and she is currently the Editor-in-Chief of The Southeast Review. She received a BA in English and Theatre from Skidmore College, and an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University.

Holly Wilson is a PhD candidate in creative writing. She writes fiction and focuses her studies on 20th century American literature, with an emphasis on contemporary, postmodern, and cross-genre fiction. Her work has appeared most recently in New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2009, Narrative Magazine, and Redivider. She was a 2009-10 Kingsbury Fellow, as well as a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2009 Sewanee Writers' Conference. Holly received a BA in English from the University of Kansas and an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University.

Poetry

Michael Barach is a fourth year doctoral student in the English Department at Florida State University. His emphasis focuses on poetry writing with a minor concentration in Early-Modern literature. Most recently, his poems have appeared in journals such as "River Styx," "Fifth Wednesday," "Bayou," and "Reed," and his range of interests includes formalistic poetry, collaborative visual art, and sports writing. Before moving to Tallahassee, he worked as an editor for Moment Magazine in Washington, DC, earned an M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine, and a B.A. from the University of Michigan. Michael grew up in Philadelphia, PA, the best city on earth.

Kerry James Evans is currently working toward his PhD in poetry at Florida State University. He has published poems in Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, New Letters, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and his BA in English from Missouri State University.

Vincent Guerra is a third year doctoral student in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University, with a focus on poetry and gender studies. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, and Pleiades, among other journals. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of San Francisco and an M.F.A. in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis.

Jen Schomburg Kanke is a second year doctoral student in the Creative Writing program at Florida State University. Previously, she served as an editor of Quarter After Eight, a journal of experimental writing, and is currently the Assistant Poetry Editor of the Southeast Review. Her work has most recently appeared in Rattle, the Laurel Review, Review Americana, and Earths's Daughters. She holds an M.A. in English, an M.Ed in Higher Education, and a B.S.Ed in Secondary Education all from Ohio University.

Eric Lee is a native of the Jersey shore and a doctoral candidate in the Creative Writing program at Florida State University. His studies are currently focused on Contemporary American and World Poetry. He is also interested in Medieval and Early Modern travel narratives with a special focus on Genghis Khan, the Mongol Empire and its heirs. His poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, RATTLE, Georgetown Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Dos Passos Review, Slipstream, Big Muddy, Crab Creek Review, and many others. His work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes, and has won scholarships to attend numerous writing conferences. He received his M.F.A. from F.S.U. and a B.A. from The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

Rebecca Lehmann completed her PhD in the creative writing program in May, 2011. Her primary area of study is poetry, and her minor area is critical theory, with an emphasis on gender studies. In her poetry, she explores the ways genre is constructed, plays with form and language, and uses a sometimes-experimental style of writing to reflect/refract post-modern existence. Her poems have been published in numerous national journals, including Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, and Denver Quarterly, and her long poem, "The Factory: An Elegy in Six Parts," (originally published in Contrary) was recently anthologized in Best New Poets 2010. She has been awarded residencies at The Millay Colony for the Arts and The Vermont Studio Center, and she recently won the David Kirby Poetry Dissertation Award. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Jacob Newberry is a third-year Ph.D. student in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in Poetry. He has received a Fulbright Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as the University Fellowship from FSU. His poetry and nonfiction have been published or are forthcoming in Granta, The Iowa Review, The Crab Orchard Review, and Rattle, among others. He has an M.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Mississippi and is currently working on several translation projects. He is also the Poetry Editor for The Southeast Review.

Avni Vyas is a second-year doctoral student in the Creative Writing program at Florida State. Her studies are focused on contemporary poetics of the 20th century, but also how poetry operates as a teaching tool in the classroom. Avni has published poetry and fiction in journals such as Juked, River Styx, and Gargoyle. She received her B.A. in Literature and M.Ed in English Education from the University of Florida, and her M.F.A from Florida State University.