Threa Almontaser
A Mother's Mouth Illuminated

Threa Almontaser - A Mother's Mouth Illuminated

Poetry
Threa Almontaser is a Yemeni-American writer born and raised in New York City. She is a MFA candidate in poetry at North Carolina State University. Her poetry won the 2016 NC State poetry contest, was… Read more »
Chloë Mattingly
A Tangle of Lines

Chloë Mattingly - A Tangle of Lines

Contest - 2nd Place
Chloë Mattingly was born in the south and raised in the north, and she’s been confused ever since. Presently, she is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has been anthologized in Creative… Read more »
Barb Johnson
Beggars and Choosers

Barb Johnson - Beggars and Choosers

Fiction
Barb Johnson worked as a carpenter in New Orleans for more than twenty years before receiving her MFA from the University of New Orleans. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Guernica, Glimmer… Read more »
Caylin Capra-Thomas
Bigfoot to Her Daughter

Caylin Capra-Thomas - Bigfoot to Her Daughter

Contest - 1st Place
Caylin Capra-Thomas's second chapbook Inside My Electric City is available through YesYes Books. The recipient of the Louisville Literary Arts Association's 2016 Writer's Block Prize in Poetry, and… Read more »
Leslie Adrienne Miller
Bone

Leslie Adrienne Miller - Bone

Poetry
Leslie Adrienne Miller’s sixth collection of poems is Y from Graywolf Press. Her previous collections include The Resurrection Trade and Eat Quite Everything You See (Graywolf), Yesterday Had a Man… Read more »
Maria Kuznetsova
Cornucopia

Maria Kuznetsova - Cornucopia

Fiction
Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kiev, Ukraine and grew up mostly in New Jersey. She is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Other stories in this series appear or are forthcoming in The… Read more »
Melissa Ostrom
For Every Pain, Consolation

Melissa Ostrom - For Every Pain, Consolation

Fiction
Melissa Ostrom teaches English in rural western New York. Her fiction has appeared in The Florida Review, Quarter After Eight, Portland Review, and Nat. Brut, among other journals. Her first novel,… Read more »
Terrance Wedin
I Am Thinking About Power Lines

Terrance Wedin - I Am Thinking About Power Lines

Poetry
Terrance Wedin is a professional bartender and an adjunct instructor at Columbus College of Art and Design. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Ninth Letter, New World Writing, Smartish Pace, Hobart,… Read more »
M.C. Williams
In the Light We Became Children

M.C. Williams - In the Light We Became Children

Fiction
M.C. Williams’s writing has appeared in The Open Bar (Tin House) and The Journal of Microliterature, and has also made the Top 25 list in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest. She lives in… Read more »
Kathryn McMahon
It’s Too Hot for Flannel

Kathryn McMahon - It’s Too Hot for Flannel

Fiction
Kathryn McMahon is an American writer living abroad with her wife and dog. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in (b)OINK, Split Lip, Jellyfish Review, Crack the Spine, Psychopomp, The Citron… Read more »
Dayna Patterson
Ophelia, Amphibian

Dayna Patterson - Ophelia, Amphibian

Contest - 3rd Place
Dayna Patterson received her MFA from Western Washington University. She is a former Managing Editor of Bellingham Review, Poetry Editor for Exponent II Magazine, and Founding Editor-in-Chief of… Read more »
Ruby Al-Qasem
The Girls

Ruby Al-Qasem - The Girls

Creative Nonfiction
Ruby Al-Qasem teaches creative writing and freshman composition as a teaching fellow at University of North Texas, where she is completing a PhD in creative writing. She currently serves as the… Read more »
Matthew Vollmer
The Subordinate Fragment

Matthew Vollmer - The Subordinate Fragment

Creative Nonfiction
Matthew Vollmer is the author of two collections of short fiction—Gateway to Paradise (Persea, 2015) and Future Missionaries of America (MacAdam/Cage, 2009; Salt Publishing, 2010)—as well as a… Read more »
Jennifer Carr
There Were Three

Jennifer Carr - There Were Three

Fiction
Jennifer Carr was born and raised in San Pedro, California, in the heart of the Port of Los Angeles, and descends from a long line of fishermen and longshore workers. Los Angeles and the waterfront… Read more »
P. Ivan Young
What Darkness Says

P. Ivan Young - What Darkness Says

Poetry
P. Ivan Young is author of Smell of Salt, Ghost of Rain (Brick House Books, 2015) and the chapbook, A Shape in the Waves (Stepping Stones Press, 2008). He received an Individual Artist Award from the… Read more »

The Subordinate Fragment

Matthew Vollmer

Because I lived in the middle of nowhere in a cove at the base of a mountain on a hill above two streams. Because all the people I knew and talked to were white. Because all the native people who had once lived in these mountains three centuries before would have outnumbered those of us living here now, before Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, before they were rounded up and marched by bayonet point to Oklahoma. Because whenever I heard the word “Indian,” the first thing that popped into my head were those chubby guys from Cherokee who stood on the side of the road in red and yellow Plains Indians headdresses, gripping spears and holding feathered shields. Because Tonto. Because plastic tommyhawks. Because once upon a time I liked to sing along to the song “What Made the Red Man Red” on my Peter Pan storybook record. Because the only thing left of that first civilization in our valley were pottery shards and musket balls and arrowheads, pieces of which you could find if you knew which fields to walk, and which overhanging rocks to dig under. Because the only real Indians were the few descendants of those few who were allowed to stay or those who remained hidden in these same mountains. Because kids liked to claim that they had Indian blood. Because me Chinese me play joke, me put pee pee in your Coke. Because my dad’s Japanese and my mom’s Chinese and I’m both. Because how many Polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb. Because kids turned their lips out and stuck their tongues flat against their upper lips. Because the only nonwhite person in our church—which was where the majority of our family’s socialization happened—was part Mexican. Because the only black people I knew were from TV and magazines and therefore mythical. The Huxtables. The Jeffersons. The family from Good Times. Whitney Houston. Vanessa Williams. Jordan and Dorsett and Magic and Rice. Gordon from Sesame Street. Fat Albert from Fat Albert. Sanford and Son. Carl Pickens, the wide receiver from the town where I went to school, who ended up playing for the Cincinnati Bengals. Because Uncle Remus. Because one of my favorite books, as a kid, was The Story of Little Black Sambo. Because I could ask an adult to read it to me and not blink an eye. Because I thought the story was about tigers who take Sambo’s clothes and then chase each other around a tree and turn to butter that Sambo takes to his mother, Black Mumbo, who makes tiger stripe pancakes which are eaten by Black Sambo and Black Jumbo. Because the word “General Lee” and the Confederate flag made me think of an orange Dodge Charger. Because a cross-stitched picture of a black man eating watermelon hung on a wall in our home. Because my grandfather—a man who’d lost the tops of the last three of his fingers when he was three years old and refused to move his hand from the chopping block where his sister was cutting wood, and then grew up to be a dentist who served as his own mechanic and took trips out west to ride horseback through canyons he read about so often in the Zane Grey books he collected—used the N-word. Because when I watched the NBA in his presence he stood there jingling the coins in his pockets and said, “I don’t know why anybody would wanna sit there and watch a bunch of N-words throw a ball around.” Because watercolors of black women in head wraps holding white babies hang in the houses of white people I know. Because there’s a cute little figurine of a black boy in overalls toting a sack of cotton on my grandmother’s windowsill. Because when I first read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and reached the scene where the grandmother sees a poor black child in a doorway and says, “Look at the cute little pickaninny,” it felt familiar to me, like something somebody I knew would say, and had said. Because I can still imagine plenty of people I know saying it. Because my other grandmother, when I said I was dating a Korean girl, said, “Now, Koreans—aren’t they the ugliest of the Asians?” Because we make up stories about people who aren’t us. Because the majority of my students are white girls. Because a kid in my class wrote an interesting reflection about not knowing what he was going to do with his life and that this pressure was somehow exacerbated by the fact that he was the only son of Asian immigrants, and that this sometimes felt as if they had sacrificed everything for him, and that he’d ultimately be a great disappointment, but when I asked if he thought that he might learn something were he to write about all that, he wrinkled his nose and said no, he didn’t want to write about being Asian, because writing about being Asian was so cliché, so expected, he just wanted to write about being a guy, you know, a regular guy. It may not surprise you to learn that this student didn’t much like it when I quoted whoever it was who said, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” because the student didn’t want to comfort the disturbed, he wanted to comfort the comfortable, wanted to be someone like, say, Phil Collins, because before Phil Collins, the band Genesis was overly complicated and like super weird but then Phil Collins arrived and dumbed that shit down, made it simpler and better and easier to like, the kind of music that was like pouring warm milk into your head. Because I didn’t know what to tell him after that, and because I happen to like Phil Collins, and because it’s not my job to tell him what story to tell, I told him that he should write what he wanted to write, and that if he needed any help, to please, by all means, let me know, though now I can’t help but worry that I may not be the best person for the job, which maybe is why, when he left, all I could think of to say was good luck and goodbye.

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