NEWS: Proximity’s editorial team is growing!
Proximity is excited to announce the addition of two new editors to our family: Shasta Grant and Stacy Muszynski. Thanks to the growth of our readership with each issue and the writers who continue to submit their wonderful work, we’ve decided to expand our team with the aim of increasing our abilities to work with so many outstanding true storytellers and to publish quality collections of their work. Our commitment to the writer-editor relationship, and offering a platform for emerging and established writers around the globe will only be strengthened by the addition of Grant and Muszynski. We are so grateful for their genuine affection for this growing publication, their shared vision for our future, and their own dedication to telling true stories.
Additionally, as many of you may have seen, we’ve recruited additional help via Proximity‘s new editorial fellowships. Each fellow has the opportunity to work on a single issue with that issue’s editor, a role that can include reading, editorial review, contributor contract collection, marketing, and more. They are also considered assistant editors for that issue. Many thanks to our inaugural fellow, Kristine Mahler, who worked with editor Towles Kintz on our current issue PLAY. And a big welcome to Jennifer Lang, Proximity’s current editorial fellow.
Both Muszynski and Grant will be working with editor Maggie Messitt and fellow Jennifer Lang on Proximity’s inaugural prize issue (submissions deadline Aug 1, to be published in October 2016), themed INSIDE / OUT. Muszynski will be editor of Issue 13 (submission deadline Oct 1, to be published in January 2017), themed GUNS. Grant will edit Issue 14 (submission deadline Jan 1, to be published in April 2017), themed INHERITANCE. Stay tuned for these submission calls!
** Please help us in congratulating these new members of the family! **
PROXIMITY’s NEWEST EDITORS
SHASTA GRANT is author of Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home, a forthcoming chapbook with Split Lip Press, and the 2016 SmokeLong Quarterly Kathy Fish Fellow. Winner of the 2015 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest, judged by Ann Patchett, her stories and essays have appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, Gargoyle, wigleaf, and elsewhere. (And, we love knowing that she was an early contributor to Proximity.) Grant has been selected as the Spring 2017 Writer-in-Residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Singapore and Indianapolis.
STACY MUSZYNSKI writes and edits to get to the heart of the story, uncover it and make it beat soundly. Her writing-editing-teaching has won awards in academia and at some of the world’s leading advertising and high-tech firms, including J Walter Thompson Detroit and Dell Inc. Her work quickly increased online readership at American Short Fiction. It led one of her university composition students to get his piece produced on NPR’s former “This I Believe” series. It has made National Book Award winners laugh and cry, and more. Her commitment to Proximity stems from her belief in story’s push-pull, its strangeness, its commitment to what is human. Stacy earned an MFA, with distinction, in Fiction. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and PEN America. She is at work on a genre-bending memoir.
PROXIMITY EDITORIAL FELLOWS
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 or is forthcoming in First Class Lit, New Plains Review, and Embodied Effigies. 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.
American-born, French by marriage, and Israeli by choice, JENNIFER LANG writes mostly about her divided self and search for home. Her stories have been published in the South Loop Review, Indian River Review, and Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women, among others. Occasionally, she contributes to the Wall Street Journal‘s expat blog. This summer, she will receive an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, an experience she wished had no end date. When not at her computer, she is on her yoga mat, either practicing or teaching to tame her monkey mind. In summer of 2011, she and her husband uprooted their teenagers and settled in Raanana, Israel, of all places. Most days, she focuses on and frets over every word in her memoir-in-progress, Finding Home: One Woman’s Transcontinental Journey through Judaism, Marriage, and Motherhood.