Author Biographies

Poetry

Lydia Lindenberg: Lydia is an English, pish, & Linguistics student at Northern Illinois University. She has known from a very early age that the written word would hold a special significance in her life. She is working for the university as an editor for a textbook and hopes to pursue a career in the editing and publishing field. Though free time is minimal, she continually writes and searches for opportunities to showcase her writing.

Dana Isokawa: Dana is from the California Bay Area. She attended Princeton University where she majored in philosophy and minored in creative writing. In her poetry, she aspires to evoke interstices and thresholds in which thinking and feeling can converge.

Amanda Auerbach: Amanda is a twenty-year-old English major at Duke University. She currently lives with her parents, her twin sister Emily, and the family’s golden retriever Holly in Columbus, Georgia. Amanda has had multiple works published in Duke’s literary magazine, The Archive. Amanda’s poetry has grown increasingly direct (and at times adversarial toward her reader), but she has found success in this style, winning the Anne Flexner Memorial Award for Poetry for her work “Birth Night.”Amanda would like to become an English professor.

Jessica Lynn Wickman: Jessica recently graduated from Emerson College with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She currently resides just outside of Boston and spends her free time knitting, baking, and photographing her surroundings. She hopes to eventually work in culinary publishing.

Hannah Dow: Hannah is an English major at the University of Pennsylvania. She is from New Hampshire and enjoys running, singing, and traveling. Hannah is also very fond of unicorns, Disney movies, and dark chocolate. Hannah loves words and letters. She is fascinated by how words appear on a page and how they sound when spoken. Much of her poetry is inspired by language itself, though she also finds poetic inspiration in the seemingly mundane, like fortune cookies, T-shirts, slogans, geometric theories, textbooks, etc.

D. Gilson: Mr. Gilson recently received his MA in English from Missouri State University and is now pursuing an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction at Chatham. A native of the Ozark Mountain region, he is particularly interested in outsider status in such a place—his work meditates on this, focusing particularly on issues of queerness and masculinity. His poetry is forthcoming in Moon City Review, The New York Quarterly, Elder Mountain, and IEzine.

Wendy Xu: Wendy was born in China. She recently graduated from the University of Iowa’s Creative Writing program. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming fromWOLF Review, Writers Review, and Milk Money Magazine. She writes and blogs from Iowa City at extrahumanarchitecture.wordpress.com and is currently working on a collection of travel-inspired poems.

Edward Church: Edward is an English major at Vanderbilt University. Through his poems, Edward seeks to establish a dialogue between today’s socio-cultural milieu and the voices of the literary past that still linger in our everyday present.

Matt Wimberley: Matt is an undergraduate at North Carolina State University, studying Creative Writing and Political Science. He enjoys the Blue Ridge Mountains, his dogs, sweet tea, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He currently lives in a basement that is closer to a cave, but hopes one day to live anywhere with a window and a view.Through his poetry, he seeks to explore the discoveries and hazards, inspirations and fears, of love.

Tej Patel: Tej studies Integrative Physiology and Neurobiology at North Carolina State.

Prose Fiction

Kelly Swope: Kelly is a student of languages and philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. His home is a small town in Ohio called Granville. He hopes one day to be a professor of comparative literature.

Sydney Langway: Sydney studies English and pish at the University of Georgia. He writes because writing makes him feel alive and connected; it helps him to make sense of life. He describes himself as a Raymond Carver fanatic. His work is inspired by Carver’s minimalism and “dirty” realism.

Len Kuntz: Len lives on a lake in rural Washington State with an eagle and three pesky beavers. His short fiction appears in over ninety literary journals, both online and in print, and can also be found at lenkuntz.blogspot.com. Len wrote nearly 200 stories in the last year, though “After the Rainy Season” remains his favorite.

Matt Popkin: Matt is a student at Vanderbilt University, majoring in Creative Writing. He has been published in The Vanderbilt Review as well as on American Songwriter Magazine's website, where he covers all things music. Matt intends to continue writing after graduation, as he hopes to pursue writing as a career.

Samantha Toh: Samatha is a recent graduate of Stanford University. She majored in International Relations but considers herself an English major at heart. She writes with tea and cookies as reliable companions. She wishes she had a fat animal as a pet, such as a hairy dog or a panda.

Drama

Erin E. McGuff: Erin, a writer who drinks way too much black tea, dreams of one day owning a small cabin in the Irish countryside. Her goal every time she picks up a pen is to write what needs to be written, nothing more and nothing less.

Carly Augenstein: Carly is a senior Musical Theater Major at Syracuse University. She hails from Marion, OH, which is the birthplace of Warren G. Harding. Carly, however, does not plan on further disgracing Marion by running for president. She'd rather write a few good plays.