Nina Lohman Cilek lives in Iowa City, Iowa with her husband and two children. She holds a masters degree in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. Her work has been featured in Paste Magazine, Ink and Letters, and The Other Journal. She celebrates well, takes a decent picture, and has been known to foster and encourage wild ideas.

 

 

*

Heather Durham is a nature writer with a forthcoming MFA in creative nonfiction from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. Her essays have appeared in Portland Review, Cirque Literary Journal, Bacopa Literary Review, and others. She makes her home in the land of ravens and salmon, amidst the towering cedars and moody mists of the Pacific Northwest. She is still likely to come home dirty, with skinned knees. Learn more at heatherdurhamauthor.com.

 

 

*

Kimberly Girard is a wife, mother to two sons and a daughter, writer, and blogger in Nashville, Tennessee. When she’s not watching her children play, managing beautiful chaos, or honing the art of laundering and stain removal, you can find her at loudsinging.com and on Twitter.

 

 

*

Garth Jones is a lad from the desert; Melbourne, Australia-based. Designer and video guy by day: occasional illustrator, writer and editor of kooky trash ephemera at all hours. Former occupations and obsessions run the gamut of comics work for David Lee Roth through all manner of creative endeavours. He doesn’t mind a mean vest, a cruelly cut jean and a decent Cuban heel; he potentially over-accessorizes on occasion.

 

 

*

Greg Larson grew up on the frozen tundra of Elk River, Minnesota. Nowadays he’s an MFA candidate in Creative Writing-Nonfiction at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is a nonfiction editor for The Barely South Review and his work has appeared in Ruminate Magazine, Switchback, Belle Reve, and BlazeVOX. Although he no longer plays video games, he still uses his PlayStation 2 as a (very inconsistent) DVD player.

 

 

*

Kristine Langley Mahler is a nonfictioneer at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she received the McKenna Graduate Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in First Class Lit, New Plains Review, and Embodied Effigies, among other journals. After a childhood in Oregon, adolescence in North Carolina, and high school in Indiana, she has dug in her heels on the suburban prairie, where she and her husband raise their three daughters.

 

 

*

Rebecca D. Martin’s essays appear in journals including The Curator and Makes You Mom, and are forthcoming in Relief Journal and Coffee and Crumbs. She holds an M.A. in English Lit from the University of Georgia, but now calls Central Virginia home, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. She tells herself her feet won’t remain permanently wounded from stepping on Legos every night, but even so, her girls are worth it. Find her at www.rebarit.blogspot.com.

 

 

*

Emmet O’Cuana is a freelance writer originally from Dublin, Ireland and now living on the other side of the globe in Melbourne, Australia. His published material — reviews, features, comics and fiction — has featured in Hopscotch Friday, Film International, Outré Press, Decay Magazine and Aurealis. He also contributed an essay to Darragh Greene and Kate Hoddy’s Grant Morrison and the Superhero Renaissance.

 

*

Nicole Provencher-Natale is a poet and English teacher living in Ohio with her husband, three children, and some very interesting chickens.  She holds an MFA from The University of Arkansas, Monticello. Nicole’s work has appeared in Permafrost, Thin Air, Eleven Eleven, The San Pedro Review, Nimrod, and The San Antonio Express News. Visit her at www.nicoleprovenchernatale.com.

 

 

*

Billy Renkl grew up in Homewood, AL. He attended Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, where he received an MFA in Drawing. He currently teaches drawing and illustration at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN. Billy’s collage work often features fragments of old texts and diagrams, exploring the qualities inherent in paper ephemera. See more of his work at billyrenkl.com.

 

 

*

Margaret Renkl grew up in Homewood, Alabama, and was educated at Auburn University and the University of South Carolina. Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Black Warrior Review, The New York Times, and Good Housekeeping, among others, and she serves as editor of Chapter16.org, a daily source for literary news with a Tennessee focus. She always plays hooky on her birthday.

 

 

*

Marian Szczepanski holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and is author of the debut novel Playing St. Barbara (High Hill Press, 2013). She lives in Houston, Texas, and teaches creative writing workshops at Writespace Houston and beyond. During her family’s two-week trip to Turkey, she experienced a minor mishap on a country walk that resulted in an unplanned trip to an Istanbul hospital emergency room — but that’s another essay.

 

 

*

We are so grateful to the editors and photographers at Unsplash.com for their gorgeous collections of curated photographs, free to download and unlimited use. The photographers featured in Issue 10 are:

Kyle Anderson (Generation Mattel – feature image)

Fabian Blank (Farm Animals – feature image)

Kelley Bozarth (The Brilliance of Pretending)

Charlie Harutaka (Supplication)

Pawel Kadysz (All Alone Together)

Kazuend (All Alone Together – feature image)

Jennifer Langley (Farm Animals)

Edu Lauton (Cover Image)

Jason Long (The Brilliance of Pretending – feature image)

Simeon Muller (Chapel Tag – feature image)

Michal Parzuchowski  (Nana is a Card Shark & Supplication, both feature images)

Fre Sonneveld (Suleymaniye – feature image)

Cecil Vedemil (Recompense – feature image)

Emma Van Sant (Suleymaniye)

Jordan Whitt (Chapel Tag)

Billy Renkl (Recompense)

Angela Stansell, via Flickr (Nana is a Card Shark)