Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal Summer 2016

Tom Lutz is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, a nonprofit, multimedia literary and cultural arts magazine that combines the great American tradition of the serious book review with the evolving technologies of the web. Readers of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, join a community of writers, critics, journalists, artists, filmmakers, and scholars dedicated to promoting the best that is thought and written, with an enduring commitment to the intellectual rigor, the incisiveness, and the power of the written word. He lives in Los Angeles.

Diana del Ángel (Mexico City, 1982) is a poet, essayist, and human rights defender. She has received creative writing grants from the Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas (Foundation for Mexican Literature) and from the FONCA (Mexico’s national fund for culture and the arts). She is the author of the poetry collection Vasija (2013) and has published numerous articles on literature in Mexican journals; her second book, Barranca, received an honorable mention from the Dolores Castro national poetry prize in 2013. She is currently pursuing a PhD in literature.

Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, September 2016). His poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, PEN Poetry Series, Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Suzanne Berne’s most recent novel is The Dogs of Littlefield.

David Biespiel’s ninth book, A Long High Whistle, received the Frances Fuller Victor Award. Recent books include Charming Gardeners and The Book of Men and Women. He’s a contributor to The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Partisan, New Republic, Politico, The New York Times, and Slate.

J. Malcolm Garcia is a freelance writer and author of The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul and What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and the Forgotten. He is a recipient of the Studs Terkel Prize for writing about the working classes and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for excellence in journalism. His work has been anthologized in Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing and Best American Nonrequired Reading.

Peter Gizzi is the author of six collections, including Threshold Songsand In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011. A new book, Archeophonics is forthcoming fall of 2016.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. Her most recent collection of poetry, Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books), was published in 2015. Griffiths teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Brooklyn.

Lee Gulyas is a senior lecturer at Western Washington University, where she is also faculty in the Service-Learning Study Abroad Program to Rwanda. She received a 2014 Grants for Artists award, and her work has appeared in journals including The Common, Prime Number, Kahini Magazine, Tinderbox, Literary Mama, Sweet, Full Grown People, and reDIVIDer.

Richie Hofmann is the author of Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award. He is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and his poems appear in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and Poetry. He is co-editor of Lightbox Poetry, an online educational resource for students and teachers of contemporary poetry.

Vanessa Hua is author of Deceit and Other Possibilities (Willow Books). She is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and her two novels are forthcoming from Ballantine. She writes primarily about Asia and the diaspora. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award for Fiction, and was a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, PRI’s The World, ZYZZYVA, Guernica, and elsewhere.

M. J. Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. She is director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor at St. John Fisher College. Her lyric essays have appeared in In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal, edited by Mary Paumier Jones and Judith Kitchen (Norton, 1999), Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction, edited by Judith Kitchen (Norton, 2005) and Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, edited by Judith Kitchen and Dinah Lenney (Norton, 2015), and her third full-length collection Small Worlds Floating is forthcoming from Cherry Grove Collections, August 2016.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nancy Jooyoun Kim is a graduate of UCLA and the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Margins, Electric Literature’s Okey-Panky, The Offing, Apogee Journal’s Perigee, The Butter, Prairie Schooner blog, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she’s working on a novel and personal essays.

Michael Klein’s fourth book of poems (and some prose) is When I Was a Twin (Sibling Rivalry Press), and his current work appears in Ploughshares. He is currently working on a manuscript called The Early Minutes of Without and teaches at Goddard College in Vermont and Hunter College in New York City, where he lives.

Joanna Klink is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy.

Paul Lisicky is the author of five books, including The Narrow Door, a New York Times Editor’s Choice; Unbuilt Projects; and The Burning House. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, and other magazines and anthologies. He teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden.

Nathaniel Mackey recently published the full-length poetry collection Blue Fasa (New Directions, 2015) and the chapbook Moment’s Omen (Selva Oscura, 2015). Late Arcade, volume five of his ongoing prose work From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2017. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University. He received the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry in 2015.

Anthony McCann is the author of several collections of poetry, including Thing Music and I Heart Your Fate. He lives in the Mojave Desert.

Rebecca McClanahan’s 10 books include The Tribal Knot, Word Painting, and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, winner of the Glasgow Award. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Boulevard, The Sun, The Best American Essays, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and other publications. She teaches in the MFA programs of Queens University and Rainier Writing Workshop.

Brenda Miller is the author of several essay collections, including An Earlier Life; Listening Against the Stone; Blessing of the Animals; and Season of the Body. She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a professor of English at Western Washington University, and associate faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop.

Robin Myers (New York, 1987) translates Latin American literature and writes poetry. In 2009 she was named a fellow of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA); in 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Banff Literary Translation Centre (BILTC) to translate the work of Argentine poet Alejandro Crotto; she was also a resident writer at the Vermont Studio Center in 2015. She is the first-place poetry winner of the 2016 Enizagam Contest and is currently based in Mexico City.

Born in California, Diana Khoi Nguyen is currently a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry, American Poetry Review, PEN America, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of Fra Keeler. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree.

Tom Stevenson is Middle East and North Africa correspondent for Deutsche Welle and The Globe and Mail based in Istanbul and Cairo.

Abigail Thomas’s latest book is a memoir, What Comes Next and How To Like It.

Anna Rose Welch is an editor and violinist in Erie, Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2014, The Kenyon Review Online, Guernica, Crab Orchard Review, Barrow Street, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2016 Alice James Award. Her first book, We, the Almighty Fires, will be published by Alice James Books in 2018.