contributors notes

Brian Beatty’s flash fictions “The Glass Eye” and “The Saxophone” come from a sequence-in-progress tentatively titled Smalls. Other stories from this series have appeared in Cowboy Jamboree, The Drabble, Floyd County Moonshine, Hoot, Paragraph Planet and SoFloPoJo.

Mary Birnbaum was born, raised, and educated in New York City. She has studied poetry at the Joiner Institute at UMass, Boston. Mary’s translation of the Haitian poet Felix Morisseau-Leroy has been published in The Massachusetts Review, the anthology Into English (Graywolf Press), and in “And There Will Be Singing”: An Anthology of International Writing by The Massachusetts Review, 2019 as well. Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Lake Effect, J-Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Soundings East, and Barrow Street.

Tricia Gates Brown’s essays have appeared in various publications, including Oregon Humanities, Portland Magazine, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and Rathalla Review. Her novel Wren won a 2022 Independent Publisher Award Bronze Medal

Vincent Casaregola teaches American literature and film, creative writing, and rhetorical studies at Saint Louis University. He has published poetry in a number of journals, including 2River, The Bellevue Literary Review, Blood and Thunder, Dappled Things, The Examined Life, Lifelines, Natural Bridge, Please See Me, WLA, and Work. He has also published creative nonfiction in New Letters and The North American Review. He has recently completed a book-length manuscript of poetry dealing with issues of medicine, illness, and loss (Vital Signs).

A.S. Cordova is a beginning writer living in Philadelphia. Her fiction has never been published, but a short story she wrote received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train magazine back in 2008. Since then, she has spent her twenties pursuing a professional career and only recently refocused on writing fiction.

Olga-Maria Cruz (she/her/ella) is a Latinx poet and essayist whose work has appeared in journals including Poetry East, Pen & Brush, Carolina Quarterly, and Bellevue Literary Review, and anthologies, Same Time Next Week: True Stories of Working Through Mental Illness (In-Fact Books) and The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing). Her chapbook, A Philosopher Speaks of Rivers, was published by Finishing Line Press. She has received poetry and creative nonfiction grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and Kentucky Foundation for Women and residencies at Hopscotch House and the Weymouth Center in North Carolina.

Jim Daniels’ eighteeth poetry book, Gun/Shy, was published by Wayne State University Press. Other recent books include his fiction collection, The Perp Walk, and his anthology, RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music, co-edited with M.L. Liebler, which was a Michigan Notable Book and received the Tillie Olsen Prize from the Working-Class Studies Association. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.

Kristen Dorsey is a USMC veteran, award-winning visual artist, and MFA candidate within UNC Wilmington’s Creative Writing program. Her writing has appeared in Chautauqua, Collateral, Press Pause Press, and Atlantis. Kristen’s essay, “Semper Fi,” was a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee. Writing and art samples can be found at KristenDorseyArtist.com.

Kristina Erny is a third-culture poet who grew up in South Korea and elsewhere abroad. She holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her work has been the recipient of the Tupelo Quarterly Inaugural Poetry Prize and the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award, as well as a finalist for the Coniston Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Yemassee, Blackbird, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals. She currently lives and works in Shanghai, China, where she teaches at an international school with her partner and their three young children.

Yueyi Huang (going by Taylen) is a 15-year-old writer from Shanghai, China. Other than writing nonstop from noon to early morning, her interests include reading, basketball, debate, and photography, as well as figuring out ways to make avocadoes actually palatable. She has been published in Inlandia: A Literary Journey and was winner of the 2021 Writing for Peace Young Writer’s Contest.

JUSTIN HUNT grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. His work has won several awards and appears in a wide range of literary journals and anthologies in the U.S., Ireland and the U.K., including, among others, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Solstice, River Styx, The Florida Review, Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Crab Creek Review, Terrain.org, Southword, Live Canon and The Bridport Prize Anthology. He is currently working on a debut poetry collection.

Rick Kempa is a poet, essayist, and editor living in Grand Junction, Colorado. For more info, please see rickkempa.com

Louise Kim is a student at the Horace Mann School in The Bronx, NY. Their writing has been published in a number of publications, including Et Cetera Magazine, Girls Right the World, and The Star Collective Zine, and is forthcoming in Ricochet Review. Her work has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. In their free time, Louise enjoys practicing archery, studying French, developing their spiritual practice, and reading and writing.

JAmes King is a poet from New Hampshire and an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His short stories and poems have appeared in The Foundationalist, Humana Obscura, and High Shelf. His poem “Our Respective Squares” was the winner of the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize from Dartmouth College. He currently serves as Managing Editor of Chautauqua and as a coordinator for the UNCW Young Writers Workshop. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Jak Emerson Kurdi is a master’s student at Texas Tech University, concentrating in creative writing. If he has a weekend to spare, you could find him hiking in the New Mexican wilderness or pretending to like craft beer with his friends on a restaurant patio. His work has also been published in Inklette Magazine and The Dillydoun Review.

Charlotte Matthews is the author of four poetry collections, a memoir, and a novel. An Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, she teaches writing to adult learners. She lives in Crozet, Virginia.

Nancy McCabe is the author of six books, most recently Can This Marriage Be Saved? A Memoir (Missouri 2020). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in ACM, Entropy, Manifest Station, the Brevity blog, and Salon; her Salon piece was chosen for their Best of 2021 list. Her work has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, LARB, Massachusetts Review, Newsweek, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, and many others. She’s the recipient of the Pushcart Prize and eight recognitions in the notable sections of Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading.

Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 1000+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 15 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the 2019 full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. Her newest poetry collection is My Body the Guitar, inspired by famous guitarists, and published in January 2022 by Before Your Quiet Eyes Publications Holograph Series. Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing) received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is a frequent contributor to The Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, and assistant editor and poetry book reviewer emerita for The Centrifugal Eye. Find her at: www.karlalinnmerrifield.org;

Christopher Mohar is the author of The Denialist’s Almanac of American Plague and Pestilence, winner of the Etchings Press Novella Prize.

He has been the recipient of a Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship and The Southwest Review’s McGinnis Ritchie Award for fiction, and has previously taught writing in a men’s correctional facility. Selected works can be found in X-R-A-Y, The Mississippi Review, North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, Arts & Letters, Gastronomica, and New Stories from the Midwest (Indiana University Press).

Emma Paris is a homeschooling junior living in Putney Vermont. Some of her most recent publications have been with Scholastic Art and Writing Awards where she received two Gold Keys for her poetry, she was also accepted into an intensive poetry retreat this was summer, Next Galaxy Poetry Retreat with Bianca Stone and Arisa White.

Holly Pelesky writes essays, fiction and poetry. She received her MFA from the University of Nebraska. Her prose can be found in The Normal School, Okay Donkey, and Jellyfish Review, among other places. Her collection of letters to her daughter, Cleave, was recently released by Autofocus Books. She works a librarian and writing center consultant while raising boys in Omaha.

Erin Pesut received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared on Vermont Public Radio and in Poetry South, Camas Magazine, CityView, The Peal, Legacy Magazine, and HeartWood Literary Magazine, among others.

Jennifer Sauers co-founded a personal history business after a 20+ year career in clinical research. She is working on a nonfiction book about a mid-20th century black concert artist who rose to fame in Europe during the 1930s, but struggled with acceptance when she returned to her native Cincinnati, Ohio. Jennifer graduated from the University of Georgia’s MFA in Narrative Nonfiction Writing program in 2019. She lives in Cincinnati.

Adam Scheffler is the author of two books of poetry: Heartworm, which won the 2021 Moon City Press Poetry Award, and A Dog’s Life, which won the 2016 Jacar Press Poetry Contest. He teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program.

Sue William Silverman is an award-winning author of seven works of creative nonfiction and poetry. Her most recent book, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences won the gold star in Foreword Review’s Indie Book of the Year Award as well as the 2021 Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature, sponsored by The Jane’s Story Press Foundation. Other nonfiction books include Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, which was made into a Lifetime TV movie; Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, which won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award; The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew; and Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir. She teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is the current creative nonfiction editor of Hunger Mountain.

Joanna Theiss (she/her) is a lawyer turned writer living in Washington, DC. Her publication credits include flash, short stories, articles and essays in literary and academic journals and popular magazines, and her microfiction won Best Microfiction 2022. Twitter: @JoannaVTheiss.

Cammy Thomas’s newest poetry collection, Tremors, came out in fall 2021. Her first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second, Inscriptions. All are published by Four Way Books. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and in the anthologies Poems in the Aftermath (2017), and Echoes From Walden (2021). Two poems titled “Far Past War” are the text for a choral work by her sister, com- poser Augusta Read Thomas, premiering at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC in 2022. She lives in the Boston area.

Brayden Titus is a student in Valencia, California. A sophomore high school student with an interest in writing and art. Find him at braydenytitus@icloud.com.

Connemara Wadsworth’s chapbook, The Possibility of Scorpions, about the years her family lived in Iraq in the early fifties, won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2009 Chapbook Contest. Her poems are forthcoming or appeared in Prairie Schooner, Solstice, San Pedro River Review, Chautauqua, and Valparaiso. “The Women” was nominated for publication in Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses by Bloodroot Magazine. Connemara and her husband live in Newton, Massachusetts.

Chautauqua is open to submissions from any writer. The editors welcome original, previously unpublished works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, particularly those pieces that embody the vision of Chautauqua Institution, as much a philosophy and an aesthetic as a physical place whose soul lies in the American passion for self-improvement—the drive to enrich oneself culturally, artistically, morally, and intellectually. Check the website for information on themes and reading periods: chq.org / season / literary-arts / readers / literary-journal.

General submission guidelines are also available on the web at chq.org / season / literary-arts / readers / literary-journal. Book reviews, interviews, and profiles are by invitation only; please query the editor before submitting. Other queries may be addressed to chautauquajournal@gmail.com.