Dear Readers,

After much consideration, we have decided that Tin House Online will no longer be publishing original work. This is a difficult decision as we have been proud of the writers featured on our site over the past year as we made the transition from our print magazine to digital-only.

In closing Tin House Magazine, we cited a desire to shift resources to our other two divisions: Tin House Books and the Tin House Workshop. That same reasoning applies to this decision, and we could not be more excited about starting the decade with a new Workshop Residential Program and a 2020 list that will see us publishing a record number of titles.

We want to thank online editors Alana Csaposs and Camille T Dungy for their passion for championing new voices and for bringing some of our dearest friends back to Tin House.

And to all those who submitted, read, and helped amplify the work, thank you! We hope to share space with you again as we continue to strive to find new ways to engage and support our community.

Onward,
Tin House

From Tin House publisher and editor-in-chief, Win McCormack:

Tin House’s 20th Anniversary Issue, to be published in June 2019, will be the publication’s last. I’m grateful to Rob Spillman, Elissa Schappell, Holly MacArthur, and the entire magazine staff, current, and past, for their part in creating a vital, versatile outlet and hosting important literary and cultural conversations over the past twenty years. It has been a remarkable run.

Given the current costs of producing a literary magazine, I have decided to shift resources to Tin House’s other two divisions: Tin House Books and the Tin House Workshop. This will allow the workshop to create more scholarship opportunities for its participants and expand the scope of what types of classes it offers, while our book division will look to publish more titles in the coming years. We will continue to publish original fiction, nonfiction, and poetry online at tinhouse.com, with a focus on new voices, a cause the magazine championed throughout its twenty-year history.

From our authors to our readers, I’m honored to have had the support of a remarkable literary community and look forward to continuing those relationships in the years to come. To those writers who have submitted to us over the years, thank you for tirelessly tackling the difficult, important work of making art. It’s been our honor and pleasure to read your writing. To all the members of the community to whom the magazine spoke, know that the spirit and ethos of that enterprise will continue to live on in the remaining divisions.

From Tin House editor Rob Spillman:

As a co-founding editor, with Elissa Schappell, I am proud of the magazine’s dedication to promoting new voices and lifting up overlooked ones, for leading the way in gender balance among literary magazines, and for expanding the ethos of inclusivity and genre-bending to our book division and summer workshop. It has been an honor to work with such smart, dedicated colleagues, and to publish the most exciting, vital voices of our time. Twenty years feels like the right time to be stepping away and moving on to new adventures. I look forward to focusing on other opportunities at the intersection of art and activism.

 

 

 

The Summer Reading 2018 edition is out now wherever literary magazines are sold! The issue is full of new works by the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Yusef Komunyakaa, Catherine Lacey, Lia Purpura, and Shane McCrae, but the first thing you’ll see is the cover, featuring this painting by Luisa Rivera.

This issue’s cover artist, Luisa Rivera, sees a creation myth in her painting The Secrets of the Night. Though the women depicted are decidedly modern—Rivera says they remind her of “themed synchronized swimmers”—they speak to the ancient tradition of storytelling. The secrets they share generate “something strange that allows the earth to be shaped around them.” They manifest ideas of mythology and folklore.

Nature and the female figure have always been instinctual subjects for Rivera. Now she approaches those themes with more intention and other topics have emerged for her, such as spirituality, mythology, and environmental issues. In addition to her figurative work, she has a number of pieces that play with patterns of flora and fauna, inspired by the designs of William Morris.

Rivera enjoys studying gestures, often using multiple photo references for one piece. She combines images, “like a collage: the hand from one, the nose from the other.” She primarily works by hand with watercolor and gouache and makes final adjustments digitally. Rivera finds the layering of water-based paints meditative, a process in which she can trust her intuition.

Rivera’s palette has a vintage quality. The composition in The Secrets of the Night is almost baroque in its use of diagonal shapes and movement. Her aesthetic has been called surrealist, but she identifies more with magical realism, “which creates uncanny or strange atmospheres in daily scenarios.” Her lush flora and narrative style made her the perfect artist for the illustrated edition of a classic of magical realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. You can see more of Rivera’s art at www.luisarivera.cl.

Written by Tin House designer Jakob Vala, based on an interview with the artist.

The following essay was originally given as a lecture at the Sylvia Beach Hotel as part of our 2018 Poetry Winter Workshop. 

The alternate title of this, of course, is how the fuck do we write now.

Just as the customary greeting of hello has been replaced with what the fuck is going on, and you grab your friend’s arm almost against your will and shake her a little bit and say no seriously, what the fuck is happening.

We recently concluded our fifth year of hosting winter workshops out on the Oregon Coast and fitting for an anniversary associated with wood our 2018 Winter Scholars are building towards an impressive collection of stories, novels, memoirs, and poems. As such, it was an honor for us to be the scaffolding as these five writers spent their time in Newport working towards what is sure to be vital and well-regarded work in the years to come (if not already).

We cannot wait to see where their words take them (and us).

Jabari Jawan Allen is a poet from the South Side of Chicago, IL. A Tin House Scholar, Jabari has received fellowships, grants and support from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA), Poets House and The Home School. Jabari’s poems either appear or are forthcoming in Four Chambers, The Shade Journal, Vinyl Poetry & Prose, among others. Jabari currently lives in Phoenix, AZ where he is working on his first full-length manuscript of poetry tentatively titled Bridegroom.

Ginger Gaffney received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico earning top honor in Creative Non-fiction. Five chapters of her new book; Half-Broke have been published in Tin House, The Utner Reader, Witness Magazine, Quarterly West, and Animal Literary Magazine. She has received writing fellowships from Tin House, Writers at Work, and Corporeal Writing, as well as a writer’s residency from Writing X Writers. Poetry, the landscape of New Mexico, and her relationships with people and animals have the most influence over Ginger’s writing. She has lived and worked as a horse trainer in northern New Mexico for over twenty years. She is currently working on a collection of short stories based on her work as farm manager at a recovery center.

Nancy Huang grew up in America and China. She is a winner of the 2016 Write Bloody Poetry contest, an Andrew Julius Gutow Academy of American Poets Prize, a James F. Parker Award in Poetry, a 2015 YoungArts Award, and more. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Vinyl, Bodega Magazine, TRACK//FOUR, Winter Tangerine Review, The Shade Journal, and others. She is an alum of Voices/VONA and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop summer graduate session. Her debut poetry collection, Favorite Daughter, is out by Write Bloody Publishing. You can find her here.

Tsering Lama is a New York-based Tibetan writer who was born in Nepal and grew up in Canada. Her fiction, plays, and poetry have been published in journals and magazines such as The Malahat Review, Grain, Vela, LaLit, Dolma and Himal SouthAsian, as well as the anthologies Old Demons, New Deities: Twenty-Two Short Stories from Tibet, House of Snow, and Brave New Play Rites. She is a 2018 Hedgebrook Resident, and in the past has been supported by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, as well as residencies at the Lillian E. Smith Center, Omi Writers International, Catwalk Institute, WildAcres, and Playa Summerlake. Tsering earned an MFA in writing from Columbia University as a TOMS Fellow, a Writing Fellow, and a University Writing Teaching Fellow. She works as a Storytelling Advisor for Greenpeace International. 

Maegan Poland is a Black Mountain Institute Ph.D. Fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and she holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Juked, Notre Dame Review, Day One, and LitHub. One of her stories was awarded a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. She has served as Fiction Editor for Witness magazine, and as a Managing Editor for Yalobusha Review.

They are rattling breakfast plates/ In basement kitchens.- “Morning at the Window”, T. S. Eliot

1.

When I was fourteen and on a visit to my grandparents’ house in India, I read this sentence aloud while sitting alone on a balcony. It was the first line of poetry I memorized on purpose, drawn by the feeling of opposition it contained, between “breakfast”, out in the clean space of morning, and “basement”, dirty and dank, an antagonism I couldn’t yet articulate, of being in the sacred light versus trapped in the dark.

“Rattling.” A word written by T.S. Eliot from some doubtlessly-cleaner room than the one in which I sat, a room of Eliot’s own, granted to him, first indirectly, but eventually as a direct honor, an Order of Merit, by his adopted sovereign, in the capital city of an acquisitive island. His Great Imperial Britain of temperate greens, reasonable roadways and soothing teas, carefully-spiced.

The English poets occupy a place of pride on my grandfather’s shelf, which sits in a decaying house built by the Raj, allotted to him as part of the salary of a government servant, which my grandfather was, a judge, serving enthusiastically and loyally, as proud of his books of English poetry as he was of studying law in England for a few months, of learning a substantial amount of Greek and Latin in college in India, as Eliot did in college too.

Like Pound, Eliot is one of my grandfather’s favorites. As if my anti-fundamentalist, anti-sectarian, atheist grandfather never read the openly anti-Semitic line, “The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs,” a line that makes me later, at twenty-two when I discover it, try and retract my admiration for “Morning at the Window” and “Prufrock” without quite succeeding.

My grandfather never got to know my sentiments before he died. When I was fourteen, racism, anti-Semitism (nightmares about Nazis after reading Anne Frank), sectarianism (fanatics throwing babies of the other religion off of balconies, amputating Sikh men’s arms during the post assassination riots that killed 2,000 Sikhs in New Delhi) already filled me with rage. Target of my teenage bravado, colonialism was a red-faced bigot on a corner asking to be punched.

In my neighborhood in Flushing, when I walked home from the Main Street subway station after commuting from my magnet high school in the city, there were indeed such people, on corners, ranging in age from twelve to late sixties, shouting with vigor, “Fucking Hindoo.”

In India, when I sat reading Eliot’s poetry, as I heard his words in my head, I saw myself from the outside, as if I were sitting in a room with that Colonial Enemy and daring to sip tea from his own cup. I was a brown girl the erudite Eliot might have looked at in passing, maybe with a moment’s curiosity, but never stopped to talk with about Shantih, shantih, shantih, though just a few short years later, I would be studying Sanskrit at Yale (just as Eliot studied Sanskrit at Harvard).

In my first week at Yale, three years after the summer I first memorized Eliot’s line about breakfast plates, I bought a gold-leaf copy of The Four Quartets. By then I was seventeen, old enough to be certain my life would be different from my grandparents’, but not yet able to see how.

Eliot, long-dead by then, had written (to me) in that golden, costly book, “communication/ Of the dead is tongued with a fire beyond the language of the living.” I yearned for Eliot to notice me, to include me somehow, the way he never could Grandfather.

That autumn in New Haven, spending more dollars than I could afford to buy that book, it excited me, rather than giving me peace, to copy out Eliot’s line, Shantih, shantih, shantih in Devanagari, a native script whose brush-strokes Eliot had taken pains to memorize, persevering thru his academic probation at Harvard, before he went on to win renown and scholarships).

But years before, in India at fourteen, I already knew that to Eliot, I would probably have been part of the “brown waves of fog” that appear in “Morning at the Window” ‘s second verse. (His friend, Pound, was an anti-Semite, after all).

2.

My straight-backed, carved wood chair was set down in a very dusty room, in my grandfather’s house in India, upstairs, on the verandah of a balcony that afforded a view of the garden and the street and its children and beggars and animals, and doubtless settled my nerves, affording me time to be alone and uncrowded.

While reciting Eliot’s line about dirty plates, I could hear, from where I sat, the rattling, the clattering, of metal plates downstairs in a quite-dirty-seeming kitchen that was actually swept out and washed nearly five times a day.

The impression of dirtiness came from the kitchen being traditional and Indian. That is to say, floor drains were used to dispense water, dirt, and human secretions (hair, blood, and crumbs) that had accumulated on the rough concrete floor. Buckets of water were poured, to mix with whatever refuse was still there after the first two sweeps; then the brownish solution was swept into the floor drains.

“Basement kitchens”, hidden away in shame. Always at a remove from the proud life of a colonial Indian house like my grandfather’s, exemplary, thereby exempt from the rulers’ scorn, an example of “fully dominated”, properly-educated Indians’ disgust from the way that other Indians lived – Macaulay’s directive, realized.

I remember: the visceral discomfort for anyone crossing the kitchen floors in their bare feet (the majority of laborers, servants, cooks, who couldn’t afford shoes). The sound, starting at dawn, extending late into the night, of sweeping with muddied birch brooms, loud with the efforts made by women bending and swinging, harvesting dirty water, hidden, vigorous, singing songs and emanating what my father referred to in Tamil as “the smell of whores”, while the cheap bangles at their wrists clicked, shimmied, perhaps rattled, as they moved.

To my mind, at fourteen, the dirtiness was inherent to an Indian kitchen, and not because I wasn’t cleaning it. I’d literally never stoop to wash that kitchen since I was not only a woman but a visiting American, granddaughter of a judge from the colonial era and therefore a memsaahb too.

But this fact was noble to me then. Not cruel. I would be independent, a writer. I would never lower myself to do housework. I’d live in a way that changed the meaning of “woman.” My smiles would be triumphant, showy, visible – never ineffectual or “vanishing” like those of the women Eliot pitied.

The phrase “They are rattling” was critical to why I fell in love, indeed fell into, sentences, and with writing in general. For, if one (to lean on Virginia Woolf) is sitting in a former library with dust thick from books that haven’t been unearthed in decades, with some books unread within the current century (in stacks inherited by my grandfather from his grandfather, who could read in Sanskrit but who didn’t read in English) – if one is sitting and reading, perhaps indistinguishable, at that moment, from an Englishman reading – then one is not serving a master. One is not doing anything with dishes – an unseen they is bothering with them. Without saying so, by focusing her attention on the quality of the meal served, to a writer, at a rich college versus a poor one, Virginia Woolf intends us to take it for granted that we the women writers are digesting and dreaming, not rattling, not silenced by domestic expectations.

Eliot must want me out of the kitchen. Without saying so, he is suggesting I might be muffled by those rattles in the kitchen, unless I watch out. Without knowing and indeed without ever having consented to it, T.S. Eliot is showing me sedition, thrilling me. Without ever inviting me into his soothingly-pristine bed (which I suspected he might have thought would become dirty, for my brown skin being naked in it), he has seduced and liberated my chubby fourteen-year-old reading self.

3.

No dishes or dirty floors for me ever, I think. Reading and writing (for I have a blank notebook here with me in this upstairs room next to my grandfather’s library) will occupy the time for breathing, for seeing, for moving and thinking.

Already there is talk of how I won’t know how to cook when I’m married, how I “study too much” to be married. Yet this poem, Eliot’s line, reminds me that domestic noises, “rattling” that resonates with people being gathered, watched, fed, around a table first wiped down by someone’s wife – these noises could be like the rattling of a kettle being brought to boil, before it blows.

Whoa, bleak! Mutters my fourteen-year-0ld self. But how can it be otherwise, for women whose souls, if they don’t explode into fire, will eventually turn into Eliot’s “damp souls”, of the second verse of the poem, and whose smiles will only be smiles of resignation, and never have any effect upon anyone, becoming smiles that are “aimless”? Eliot’s pity, veering toward contempt, is palpable for the women (those aimless women busy with meaningless errands). This is the female equivalent of “measuring out (one’s) life in coffee spoons”, as the Eliot of “Prufrock” writes.

4.

And yet – and yet – somebody has to clean dirty dishes. In a hotel, a restaurant, a house. They do pile up. And children generate errands, some of which prove aimless, even when enjoyable.

5.

Everything I was afraid of came to pass. When my children make damp, sticky disasters in a re-finished basement, I bend down to clean up after them, aware of the morning light visible through the large windows of a drawing room upstairs I’d hoped would be the holy place I wrote in undisturbed.

I do the dishes as often as we must. I clatter them, scraping off debris, sweeping my own kitchen of dirt. Even as I write this, a mess of wadded-up towels awaits me in our basement, thanks to a toddler.

Even worse, I’m stuck with the thoughts in English I’ll pass onto my children. I cannot speak or write this language – no one can – in a way that doesn’t reference Eliot’s cadence, a Modernist’s cadence.

Try as I might to push him out, I find that Eliot’s abiding contempt – for the domestic, for brown skin, and thereby for the substance of my life, my “soul’s sap” as a woman in a life with mess and stink– is not repulsive in a simple way. His stone-cold glare through those oddly-effeminate eye-glasses isn’t enough to turn me away.

Even now I can summon up the image of him at the chalkboard in Encyclopedia Britannica, in the edition my parents bought for me as a child from a traveling salesman who promised them that buying these books would make me successful in America. How painful it is to contemplate that the same person who could grasp the pain of being poor, unknown, of being consigned to domestic obscurity, the same poet who could write, in true humility, about how in mid-life he found himself still “Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt /Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure” – this person is the same one who wrote “Inventions of the March Hare” in his twenties, when he was the same age that my grandfather was when studying with such awe in England. “March Hare” contains poems, as Michiko Kakutani pointed out in a 1997 review, like Eliot’s blithe meditation on Bolo, a king who presided over brown subjects the poet refers to as ”a wild and hardy set”—calling all foreign, dark people ”an innocent and playful lot/But most disgusting dirty.”

The idea that “the first cut is the deepest” (itself inflected with description of Jesus Christ as “the wounded surgeon” who “plies the steel) – this image, this idea that has become part of my thinking, our thinking, must be why Eliot’s hatred of the domestic, of brown lives, of entire nations of people, hurts me so more than the hatred expressed by other Modernists.

Stevens, with his “pale Ramon,” “not intended to be anyone at all”, but actually the name of a Nazi collaborator and Marxist critic who replaced a Jewish professor sent to the camps in Vichy France. Marianne Moore, perhaps my favorite poet in college, for what I read as her resistance, her ‘feminism’, sister of Virginia Woolf in her irreverence and independence – Moore had her anonymous “Negro” pointing to the Washington monument and, in the background of her art, the ‘re-education’ school for Indian children where Moore passionately supported the racist “educator” Pratt, committed to cultural genocide. Pound isn’t worth talking about – his poetry too artificial to grab me enough to care that he could write, and dare to broadcast, lines like, “The big Jew has rotted EVERY nation he has wormed into.” Woolf had already broken my heart too, when we were assigned to read her diary in high school and I’d found her pitying statement about a “nigger gentleman” and the “degradation stamped on him” because of his hand “black as a monkey’s on the outside…tinged with flesh color within” and cried, putting down her book and staring at my own similarly dorsal-dark, palmar-light hands, because of how much I had loved To The Lighthouse.

But Eliot introduced me not just to poetry but to productive melancholia in general, with that one line, “They are rattling breakfast plates/ In basement kitchens.” Even now, he provokes a double-shame – my shame at still remembering his words, and the shame I share with both the servants in my grandfather’s regal house and with my grandparents themselves, that none of us are more like Eliot, in his clean, burnished, hallowed place. All the brown millions of us being from the side that was dirty, a race deemed by his chosen people, the British, to forever be lacking the capacity for an adequate scrub.

By inviting me, seducing me, to think in his language, to see my own face the way my grandfather saw his – not as a face to represent ‘faces’ – Eliot re-educated me, though when I first read him in my grandfather’s house, I was on my summer vacation, out of school.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician and writer whose story collection is forthcoming in University Press of Kentucky’s Contemporary Poetry and Prose series, and whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Awl, Narrative Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Asian American Literary Review, Compose, Redux, r.k.v.r.y., Bangalore Review, Notre Dame Review, aaduna, jellyfish review and elsewhere. Her fiction has received Squaw Valley and Grub Street scholarships, as well as a Henfield award, and she is at work on a novel. 

 

Works Cited

T.S. Eliot. Collected Poems. Harcourt Brace (1971).
T.S. Eliot. Inventions of the March Hare. Mariner Books; First edition (April 1, 1998)
Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own. Albatross Publishers (September 24, 2015)
Michiko Kakutani. “Bigotry in Motion.” March 16, 1997. Accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/16/magazine/bigotry-in-motion.html
Marianne Moore. “The Hero.” In Complete Poems, Penguin Books, 1981.
Wallace Stevens. “The Idea of Order at Key West.” In Vintage; Reissue edition (February 19, 1990)
Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (1981): The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol 3: 1925-1930, Harvest/ HBJ Books, 1981.

We are now accepting applications for our 2018 Winter Workshops. Held in Newport, Oregon, these workshops combine the rugged beauty of the Oregon Coast with a weekend immersed in all things literary. The program consists of morning classes, one-on-one meetings with faculty, afternoon craft discussions, and generative exercises. Evenings are reserved for coastal revelry (aka oysters and karaoke).

The scholarship deadline is October 22nd, while general applications are due by November 15th.

More information (including application links) can be found here.

Now that the dust (and karaoke) has settled, one last dispatch from our summer writing camp….

We are thrilled to announce the recipients of our 2017 Summer Workshop Scholarships. It was an honor to host them at Reed College and get to know their work through the application process and workshop.  These sixteen Tin House Scholars not only represent our best and brightest, but carry the torch of being good literary citizens as well.

It is a true privilege to have them be a part of the Tin House family. As such, we hope they write home now and again. 

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She writes about queerness, Appalachia, ambivalence, having a body, and being alive. Her essays, and reportage have appeared/will appear shortly in VICE, Catapult, Splinter (Fusion), The New Republic, Salon, Slate, The Marshall Project, Hyperallergic, The Rumpus, 100 Days in Appalachia, The Daily Yonder, Autostraddle, The Philadelphia Inquirer and others; her fiction in Granta, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Gulf Coast. She lives in West Philadelphia.

Ethan Feuer is a writer and designer living in Virginia. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Indiana Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Open Bar, DIAGRAM, Smokelong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was runner-up for the 2017 Henfield Prize. Design work (at Architecture Research Office) includes project for Brookly Bridge Park, Tulane University, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He is at work on a novel about plague and acculturation in a fictional city.

Aidan Forster studies creative writing at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, South Carolina. He reads poetry for The Adroit Journal and The Blueshift Journal. His work appears in BOAAT, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Sixth Finch, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Verse, among others. He was a finalist for the 2017 Vinyl 45s Chapbook Contest, and his debut chapbook, Exit Pastoral, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2018.

Sarah Fuchs taught high school and middle school for nineteen years in Lomé, Accra, Kampala, Dar es Salaam and Oakland, CA, where she co-founded the School for Social Justice and Community Development. A graduate of the NYU Writers Workshop in Paris, she is the 2016-17 Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellow at UW Madison, and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Tin House, Aspen Summer Words and Writing by Writers Tamales Bay. She is working on her first novel.

Caoilinn Hughes’ debut novel, Orchid & the Wasp, will be published in 2018 by Hogarth (U.S.), Oneworld (U.K.) and Les Éditions Bourgois (France). Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence (Carcanet 2014), won the Irish Times Shine/Strong Award, the Patrick Kavanagh Award and was a finalist for four other prizes. She has received fellowships from the James Merrill Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Centre Culturel Irlandais, and scholarships from the Tin House Summer Workshop 2017 and the Arts Council of Ireland. Her work has appeared in POETRY, Tin House, Best British Poetry, Best NZ Poems, Poetry Ireland, BBC Radio 3 and elsewhere. She is represented by Bill Clegg.

Taylor Johnson is proud of being from Washington, DC. They’ve received fellowships and scholarships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, Lambda Literary foundation, VONA, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers Conference. Their work appears in, or is forthcoming from, CALLALOO, the minnesota review, Vinyl Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Winter Tangerine, Third Coast, the shade journal, and elsewhere.

Hannah Perrin King grew up on a dirt road in rural California and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. When people ask her, “What do you write about?” she cringes and mumbles something about god and horses. As a one-time pre-med escapee, King is primarily interested in blending genres and disciplines in a way that speaks to the human condition but still helps poetry’s bad rep. She is currently a MFA candidate in Poetry at The New School, and recently received honorable mention in The Cincinnati Review‘s Robert and Adele Schiff Awards in Poetry and Prose.

While Ben Kingsley is best known for his Academy Award winning role as Mahatma Gandhi, this Ben is a touch less famous (having not acted since a third-grade debut as the undertaker in Music Man). He is the 22^nd Tickner Writing Fellow, recipient of a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, scholarships from Kundiman, Sewanee, VONA, & belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. In 2017 his work will be featured in Apex, the Iowa Review, Narrative, Ninth Letter, PANK, PEN America, the Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Sugar House, & Water-Stone Review, among others.

Joyce Li is an MFA candidate in fiction at Brooklyn College. In addition to Tin House, she has received fellowships and awards from the Norton Island Residency Program and the New York State Writers Institute. A Jersey girl at heart, she now lives in New York, where she works at a non-profit organization for immigrants in the arts and sciences and enjoys copious amounts of dim sum. She is working on her first novel, set in the Kowloon Walled City.

Regina Porter is a graduate of the MFA fiction program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She is the recipient of a 2017-2018 Rae Armour West Postgraduate Scholarship. Her fiction has been published in the Harvard Review. An award-winning writer with a background in playwriting, Regina has worked with Playwrights Horizons, The Joseph Papp Theater, New York Stage & Film, The Women’s Project, Woolly Mammoth Theater, and Horizons Theater Company. She has been anthologized in Plays from Woolly Mammoth by Broadway Play Services, and Heinemann’s Scenes For Women by Women. Regina lives in Brooklyn.

Charlie Schneider completed an MFA in fiction at the University of Oregon. His work explores the ways people construct clever edifices of denial in order to rationalize their own wrongdoing. Of late, this has taken the form of stories about the perpetrators of lynchings. He has received a fellowship from the Tin House Summer Workshop and a Work-Study Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. This fall, he will spend a month at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, where he will hunt ghosts.

Rajat Singh is an essayist living in New York. His work appears in The Gay & Lesbian Review, in two anthologies, Moving Truth(s) and Kajal, and on Catapult, LitHub, and Papercuts, among others. This summer, in addition to Tin House, he is attending the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat. He is working on a collection of essays on queer melancholy.

Brandon Taylor is the assistant editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Lit Hub. This fall he will begin an MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently lives in Madison, WI where he is a PhD candidate in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Cab Tran was born in Vietnam and raised in rural Oregon.  He received his BA from the University of Montana and his MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. A former David T. K. Wong Fellow, he has also been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the Writers’ and Translators’ Center of Rhodes in Rhodes, Greece.  His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Vagabond: Bulgaria’s English Monthly, and elsewhere. In 2011 he was longlisted for the inaugural Paris Literary Prize. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

Dawnie Walton is a fiction writer and journalist whose work explores identity, place, and the influence of pop culture. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (2015) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she is currently working on her first novel. Her fiction was most recently featured in audio form as part of Let’s Play, a gallery exhibition of AfroSurreal artists in Oakland, California. Before following literary muses, she was an editor for Time Inc. titles including Essence, Entertainment Weekly, and LIFE.

Hannah Withers is a writer and joke-teller living in Portland, OR. She received her MFA from the University of Montana, was a 2016 Fiction Fellow at the Idyllwild Arts Writers Week, has had work published with The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Believer Logger, The Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere, and was a finalist for the 2016 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. She’s currently working on a novel that she’s calling a “western,” which is both accurate and misleading. She can be found online @hbwithers, and can be found in the world next to the chips and guac.

Aidan Forster studies creative writing at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, South Carolina. He reads poetry for The Adroit Journal and The Blueshift Journal. His work appears in BOAAT, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Sixth Finch, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Verse, among others. He was a finalist for the 2017 Vinyl 45s Chapbook Contest, and his debut chapbook, Exit Pastoral, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2018.

Allie Rowbottom was an East Coast based writer, splitting her time between the City lights and her equine companion at his barn. In 2008 she received her bachelor’s degree from NYU’s Gallatin for writing and women’s studies; in 2009 she relocated to the West to attend the California Institute of the Arts to continue nurturing these pursuits. She now lives in Houston pursuing her Phd.

Allison Hutchcraft is a poet and teacher living in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, The Cincinnati Review, Barrow Street, theBeloit Poetry Journal, American Letters & Commentary, West Branch, and other journals. The recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council and a Regional Artist Project Grant from the Arts & Science Council for the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, she has been awarded scholarships from the Tin HouseWriters Workshop, the Key West Literary Seminars, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She holds an MFA from Purdue University and teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. A 2017 fellow at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences, she will be a resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast in spring of 2018.

Ana Owusu-Tyo has a master’s degree in eighteenth-century literature from Indiana University. She is Spanish and Ghanaian and currently lives far away from her native Brooklyn on ten acres in rural North Carolina where she raises her three children and chickens.  She is finishing a memoir about losing a daughter and beginning a novel inspired by the spirits on the former plantation she lives on. An excerpt of her memoir, Footnotes, has recently appeared in the anthology Stories that Need to be Told. She is also semi insta-famous for her crochet and recently learned to do a headstand in the middle of the room.

Born in Iloilo City, Philippines, Angela Peñaredondo is a Pilipinx/Pin@y poet and artist (on other days, she identifies as a usual ghost, comet or part-time animal) . Peñaredondo is the author of All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, 2016), winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize and the chapbook,Maroon (Jamii Publications). Her work has appeared in Asian American Writers’ Workshop: The Margins, Drunken Boat, Four Way Review, Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. She/Siya is a VONA/Voices of our Nations Art fello, a recipient of a University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Grant, Gluck Program of the Arts Fellowship, Naropa University’s Zora Neal Hurston Award, Squaw Valley Writers Fellowship and Fishtrap Fellowship. She/Siya has received scholarships from Tin House, Split This Rock, Dzanc Books International Literary Program and others. Angela resides in Southern California, drifiting between deserts, beaches, lowly cities and socially engineered suburbs.

A Pushcart-nominated writer, Aurvi Sharma has been awarded the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Prairie Schooner Essay Prize, the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the AWP Emerging Writer Prize. Sharma’s work has also appeared inFourth Genre and Essay Daily. She recently received the MacDowell Colony Fellowship.

While Ben Kingsley is best known for his Academy Award winning role as Mahatma Gandhi, this Ben is a touch less famous (having not acted since a third-grade debut as the undertaker in Music Man). He is the 22^nd Tickner Writing Fellow, recipient of a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, scholarships from Kundiman, Sewanee, VONA, & belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. In 2017 his work will be featured in Apex, the Iowa Review, Narrative, Ninth Letter, PANK, PEN America, the Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Sugar House, & Water-Stone Review, among others.

Ben Shattuck is a graduate and former Teaching-Writing Fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught fiction writing courses at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington, the University of Iowa, and on Cuttyhunk Island. He has written for The Paris Review Daily, Salon.com, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Five Chapters, The Morning News, and the Millions, among other publications.  He exhibits paintings (benshattuck.com) and is currently working on his first novel. Ben is also a contra dancer, banjo player, and avid birdwatcher.

Brandon Taylor is the assistant editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Lit Hub. This fall he will begin an MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently lives in Madison, WI where he is a PhD candidate in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Bryan Hurt is the author of Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France (winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction) and editor of Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest. His fiction and essays have appeared in The American Reader, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and many other publications. He’s been awarded fellowships from Tin House and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is an assistant professor of English at Capital University in Columbus, OH.

C Pam Zhang’s fiction is in or coming to Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, The Offing, Tin House Open Bar, and elsewhere. An Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow and a Hambidge Center Distinguished Fellow, she was recently a runner up in The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize and an honorable mention in the Zoetrope Short Fiction Contest. She’s not quite sure where home is, but lives online @cpamzhang.

Cab Tran was born in Vietnam and raised in rural Oregon.  He received his BA from the University of Montana and his MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. A former David T. K. Wong Fellow, he has also been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the Writers’ and Translators’ Center of Rhodes in Rhodes, Greece.  His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Vagabond: Bulgaria’s English Monthly, and elsewhere. In 2011 he was longlisted for the inaugural Paris Literary Prize. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

Cam Terwilliger’s fiction and narrative journalism can be found online in American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and Narrative, where he was named one of Narrative’s “15 Under 30.” In print, his writing appears in West Branch, Post Road, and Gettysburg Review, among others. His work has been supported by fellowships and scholarships from the Fulbright Program, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

Caoilinn Hughes’ debut novel, Orchid & the Wasp, will be published in 2018 by Hogarth (U.S.), Oneworld (U.K.) and Les Éditions Bourgois (France). Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence (Carcanet 2014), won the Irish Times Shine/Strong Award, the Patrick Kavanagh Award and was a finalist for four other prizes. She has received fellowships from the James Merrill Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Centre Culturel Irlandais, and scholarships from the Tin House Summer Workshop 2017 and the Arts Council of Ireland. Her work has appeared in POETRY, Tin House, Best British Poetry, Best NZ Poems, Poetry Ireland, BBC Radio 3 and elsewhere. She is represented by Bill Clegg.

Caroline O’Connor Thomas is a poet living in Oakland, California. She received her MFA from St. Mary’s College of California, where she was awarded the Russell and Yvonne Lannan Prize. Her work has appeared in Foothill Journal and Quiet Lightning. She is the curator of the Living Room reading series.

Carson Beker is a writer, playwright, storyteller, and actor with an MFA and MA from SFSU. She is the co-founder of The Escapery, an SF Bay Writing Unschool and has also taught creative writing at San Francisco State University. She is the former Fiction Editor of Fourteen Hills. Her work has appeared in Gigantic Sequins, Sparkle + Blink, Transfer Magazine, and Bourbon Penn, her plays have been at the San Francisco Olympians Festival and at Z Space. She’ll be a 2016 Lamdba Literary Resident in Fiction.

Casey Fleming is a writer and teacher in Houston, Texas where she cofounded the Poison Pen Reading Series.  Her work–fiction and nonfiction–has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, Sojourners Magazine, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Sugar & Rice, and Literary Mama, among other print and online publications.  Her writing has been a finalist for the Iowa Review Prize in Nonfiction, the Willis Barnstone Translating Poetry Award, and a runner-up for the Tobias Wolff Award in Creative Nonfiction.  She teaches memoir writing at the Hines Center for Spirituality and Prayer and critical theory and literature at The Kinkaid School.

Charlie Schneider completed an MFA in fiction at the University of Oregon. His work explores the ways people construct clever edifices of denial in order to rationalize their own wrongdoing. Of late, this has taken the form of stories about the perpetrators of lynchings. He has received a fellowship from the Tin House Summer Workshop and a Work-Study Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. This fall, he will spend a month at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, where he will hunt ghosts.

Christie VanLaningham writes fiction inspired by failed places, heirlooms, witchy women, abandoned children, lumberjacks, lovable demagogues, every kind of fairy tale, and what it means to be home. Her short stories have appeared in several North American literary journals, and she is currently working on a novel, from which her reading has been excerpted.

Cody Carvel was raised in Oklahoma and West Texas. He received a BA in English and African-American Studies from Harvard University and an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. His work has appeared in Mirage #4 Period(ical), Userlands (ed. Dennis Cooper), Tin House Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Elderly, and the Harvard Advocate. In 2012 he was a fellow at the Millay Colony. He is married to the famous playwright and director Julia Jarcho. He lives in New York City where he skips around town looking for landmarks related to modernist poetry and art.

Danielle Bainbridge graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 with a B.A. in English and Theatre Arts, Cum Laude. Danielle’s past research has included comparative work on African American and Caribbean theatre. She is currently pursuing a joint degree at Yale University in African-American Studies and American Studies and the certificate in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her creative non-fiction has been published in Moko Magazine and Killens Review of Arts & Letters.

David Bersell is the author of the essay collections The Way I’ve Seen Her Ever Since (Lettered Streets Press) and Nashville Notebook (Ursus Americanus Press). David studied writing at the University of New Hampshire, University of Maine Farmington, the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, and the Tin House Summer Workshop, which he attended as a nonfiction scholar. He lives in Brooklyn.

David James Poissant’s stories and essays have appeared inThe Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The New York Times, One Story, Playboy, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in the New Stories from the South and Best New American Voices anthologies. His writing has been awarded the Matt Clark Prize, the George Garrett Fiction Award, the RopeWalk Fiction Chapbook Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and the Alice White Reeves Memorial Award from the National Society of Arts & Letters, as well as awards from The Chicago Tribune and The Atlantic Monthly and Playboy magazines. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters. His debut short story collection, The Heaven of Animals, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2014. He is currently at work on a novel, which is also forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

Dawnie Walton is a fiction writer and journalist whose work explores identity, place, and the influence of pop culture. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (2015) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she is currently working on her first novel. Her fiction was most recently featured in audio form as part of Let’s Play, a gallery exhibition of AfroSurreal artists in Oakland, California. Before following literary muses, she was an editor for Time Inc. titles including Essence, Entertainment Weekly, and LIFE.

Dennis Norris II is a graduate of Haverford College and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. His writing has appeared in Bound Off: An Online Literary Audio Magazine and Madcap Review. In 2015 he was named a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and has previously won awards and fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, VONA, and the NYS Summer Writers Institute. He lives in Harlem and is hard at work on a novel.

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.

Drew Johnson was raised in Mississippi and lives in Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in Harper’s, VQR, Cosmonauts Avenue, and as a single-issue chapbook from The Cupboard. His nonfiction has appeared at Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review Daily. These pieces and others may be found at walkswithmoose.com.

Emma Copley Eisenberg is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She writes about queerness, Appalachia, ambivalence, having a body, and being alive. Her essays, and reportage have appeared/will appear shortly in VICE, Catapult, Splinter (Fusion), The New Republic, Salon, Slate, The Marshall Project, Hyperallergic, The Rumpus, 100 Days in Appalachia, The Daily Yonder, Autostraddle, The Philadelphia Inquirer and others; her fiction in Granta, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Gulf Coast. She lives in West Philadelphia.

Ethan Feuer is a writer and designer living in Virginia. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Indiana Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Open Bar, DIAGRAM, Smokelong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was runner-up for the 2017 Henfield Prize. Design work (at Architecture Research Office) includes project for Brookly Bridge Park, Tulane University, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He is at work on a novel about plague and acculturation in a fictional city.

Gabriel Houck is originally from New Orleans, where his family still lives. He holds MFAs in writing from California Institute of the Arts and from the University of Iowa, and is currently a PhD candidate and Maude Hammond Fling Fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s creative writing program. His story, “When the Time Came,” was selected as a distinguished story in the 2015 edition of The Best American Short Stories, edited by T.C. Boyle, and his writing appears in journals such as Mid American Review, Western Humanities Review, Grist, PANK, Moon City Review, The Adirondack Review, Fourteen Hills, Lunch Ticket, and The Pinch. His fiction has also won Mid American Review’s 2014 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, and has earned finalist honors in StoryQuarterly’s 2014 Fiction Prize, among others.

Gabriel Tallent grew up in Mendocino, California, thrashing through the underbrush in search of anything awesome. He attended the Mendocino Community High School and spent a lot of time backpacking, re-reading Greek tragedies, and trying to figure out Moby Dick. Tallent received his BA from Willamette University and wrote his thesis on the discursive construction of pleasure in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, which is more interesting than it sounds. He has worked as a crew leader for Northwest Youth Corps, as an extremely bored and distracted checker at Target, as dining room staff at the Alta Lodge, and as a food runner and server at The Copper Onion. He lives in Salt Lake City, where he can be found climbing or futilely trying to identify plants in Little Cottonwood Canyon. His stories have been published in Narrative and in the St Petersburg Review. His debut novel, My Absolute Darling, was published in August 2017 by Riverhead Books.

Hannah Perrin King grew up on a dirt road in rural California and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. When people ask her, “What do you write about?” she cringes and mumbles something about god and horses. As a one-time pre-med escapee, King is primarily interested in blending genres and disciplines in a way that speaks to the human condition but still helps poetry’s bad rep. She is currently a MFA candidate in Poetry at The New School, and recently received honorable mention in The Cincinnati Review‘s Robert and Adele Schiff Awards in Poetry and Prose.

Hannah Withers is a writer and joke-teller living in Portland, OR. She received her MFA from the University of Montana, was a 2016 Fiction Fellow at the Idyllwild Arts Writers Week, has had work published with The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Believer Logger, The Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere, and was a finalist for the 2016 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. She’s currently working on a novel that she’s calling a “western,” which is both accurate and misleading. She can be found online @hbwithers, and can be found in the world next to the chips and guac.

Jae Choi’s poems have appeared in Tin House, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Weekday, LVNG, Poor Claudia, and Flying Object’s It’s My Decision series. The chapbook Woman Carrying Thing was published last year by The Song Cave. She divides her time, discriminately, along the West Coast, but currently lives in Joshua Tree, CA.

Jamel Brinkley is a Kimbilio Fellow, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the 2015-16 Provost’s Visiting Writer in Fiction at the University of Iowa. He has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as the diFilipis-Rosselli scholarship from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. He is at work on a collection and a novel, and his short stories have appeared in A Public Space.

James Scott earned his bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College and his MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. He has received awards from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Millay Colony, the Saint Botolph Club, the Tin House Summer Writer’s Conference, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His work has been short listed for the Pushcart Prize and nominated for the Best New American Voices.

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Miami Beach, Jaquira Díaz is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, the Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and an NEA Fellowship to the Hambidge Center for the Arts. She’s been awarded fellowships or scholarships from The MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Summer Literary Seminars, the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Best American Essays 2016, Rolling Stone, Pushcart Prize XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses, The Guardian, The FADER, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, Salon, Brevity, Ninth Letter, Slice, TriQuarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.

Jenn Shapland is a nonfiction writer. Her essays appear in Tin House, The Lifted Brow, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She’s currently writing a book of nonfiction called The Autobiography of Carson McCullers.

Jennifer Croft is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize, and her translations from Polish, Spanish, and Ukrainian have appeared in The New York Times, n+1, Electric Literature, BOMB, Guernica, The New Republic and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a Founding Editor of The Buenos Aires Review. Read illustrated chapters of her novel—in a wide range of languages—at homesickbook.space.

Jesse Donaldson was born and raised in Kentucky, educated in Texas, and now lives in Oregon. He is the author of The More They Disappear and On Homesickness.

Jessica Guzman Alderman is a Cuban-American writer from southwest Florida. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Sycamore Review, The Normal School, BOAAT, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from West Virginia University and currently studies as a doctoral student at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. She reads for Memorious.

Jon Lewis-Katz has taught in the New York City public school system and at Cornell University where he completed his M.F.A. in Creative Writing. He has received the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and the Alonzo Davis Fellowship at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. At present, he teaches writing at Bronx Community College and is finishing a collection of linked short stories about West Indians and West Indian-Americans in New York City.

Joyce Li is an MFA candidate in fiction at Brooklyn College. In addition to Tin House, she has received fellowships and awards from the Norton Island Residency Program and the New York State Writers Institute. A Jersey girl at heart, she now lives in New York, where she works at a non-profit organization for immigrants in the arts and sciences and enjoys copious amounts of dim sum. She is working on her first novel, set in the Kowloon Walled City.

Kate Milliken’s stories have appeared in Zyzzyva, Fiction, New Orleans Review, and Santa Monica Review, among others. A graduate of the Bennington College Writing Seminars, the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop, and several Pushcart Prize nominations, Kate has also written for television and commercial advertising. Kate’s debut collection of stories, If I’d Known You Were Coming, published by the University of Iowa Press, was chosen for the 2013 John Simmons Short Fiction Award by author Julie Orringer.

Kate Petersen is from Arizona. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, New England Review, Epoch, Paris Review Daily, The Collagist and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Stegner Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, and currently teaches at Stanford as a Jones lecturer.

Kathryn Scanlan’s work has appeared in NOON, Fence, Caketrain, DIAGRAM, Two Serious Ladies, Pastelegram, and The Collagist, among other places. She has received fellowships from the Tin House Writer’s Workshop and the Vermont Studio Center, and her story “The Old Mill” was selected for the 2010 Iowa Review Fiction Prize.

Kelly Luce is the author of Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (A Strange Object, 2013), which won Foreword Review’s Editor’s Choice Prize for Fiction, and the novel Pull Me Under, out November 1, 2016 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She grew up in Brookfield, Illinois. After graduating from Northwestern University with a degree in cognitive science, she moved to Japan, where she lived and worked for three years. Her work has been recognized by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, Sozopol Fiction Seminars, Ragdale Foundation, the Kerouac Project, and Jentel Arts, and has appeared in New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Salon, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Southern Review, and other publications. She received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin in 2015 and lives in Charlestown, MA. She is a Contributing Editor for Electric Literature and a 2016-17 fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she is working on her next novel.

Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Big Island of Hawai’i. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016, McSweeney’s, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and Mid-American Review, among others. He also received a 2015 scholarship to the Bread Loaf writer’s conference. You can find out more about him at www.kawaistrongwashburn.com.

Laura Maylene Walter is the recipient of the 2010 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction and the Ohioana Library Association’s 2011 Walter Rumsey Marvin grant. Her short story collection, Living Arrangements (BkMk Press 2011), won a national gold IPPY award and a silver Foreword Book of the Year award. Laura’s writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, The Sun, The Writer, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chicago Tribune‘s Printers Row, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square Review, Puerto del Sol, Tampa Review, Portland Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, South Carolina Review, Fourteen Hills, SmokeLong Quarterly, Green Mountains Review Online, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, American Literary Review, Ohioana Quarterly, Flyway, Crab Creek Review, South Dakota Review, Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology, Equus, Cat Fancy (yes, Cat Fancy) and elsewhere. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Writers Omi at Ledig House residency, the Writers in the Heartland writing residency, and was a 2013 Tin House Writers’ Workshop Fiction Scholar.

Leila Chatti is Tunisian-American dual citizen, who has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. She received her M.F.A. in poetry from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work appears in Best New Poets 2015, Boston Review, North American Review, Narrative, Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, and other journals and anthologies, and she serves on the poetry staff at The Adroit Journal. She currently lives with her partner Henrik and their cat in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and will be heading to the Fine Arts Work Center as a writing fellow this fall.

Lyz Pfister is a freelance writer and translator based in Berlin. Her work has been featured in S T I L L, No Man’s Land, and The Bastille, among others. She is the poetry editor of SAND, Berlin’s English-language literary journal, and the author of the food and culture blog Eat Me. Drink Me.

Mai Nardone’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Slice, and the Tin House Open Bar. He has received also received a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. He lives in Bangkok.

Maria Lioutai was born in Moscow four years before the Soviet Union collapsed. Her childhood consisted of wearing giant bows in her hair, eating borscht, and visiting Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum on school field trips. She now writes short stories in Toronto, Canada. She was on the longlist for both the 2015 and the 2016 CBC short story prize.

Mo McFeely is a poet living in Portland.

Nick Greer is from the San Francisco Bay Area. He is an editor of Territory, a literary project about maps and other strange objects. Recent work can be found in Salt Hill, Phantom, Witch Craft Magazine, and the Pacifica Literary Review.

Olaniyi Omiwale was born in Lagos, Nigeria. He shares his birthday with Fela Kuti, the late Afrobeat pioneer. His favorite writers include Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe— both of whom he cursorily read in his childhood but rediscovered with renewed interest in his youth. Olaniyi was also a participating writer at the 2015 Yale Writers’ Conference.

Olivia Clare is the author of a short story collection, Disasters in the First World, and a novel, both forthcoming from Grove Atlantic. She is also the author of a book of poems, The 26-Hour Day (New Issues, 2015). In fiction, she is a recipient of a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2014 O. Henry Prize.

Rajat Singh is an essayist living in New York. His work appears in The Gay & Lesbian Review, in two anthologies, Moving Truth(s) and Kajal, and on Catapult, LitHub, and Papercuts, among others. This summer, in addition to Tin House, he is attending the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat. He is working on a collection of essays on queer melancholy.

Randall Tyrone has an MFA in poetry from the University of Wyoming and is an Editor for Essay Press. He’s been published in Okey-Panky/Electric Literature & Oversound Poetry.

Regina Porter is a graduate of the MFA fiction program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She is the recipient of a 2017-2018 Rae Armour West Postgraduate Scholarship. Her fiction has been published in the Harvard Review. An award-winning writer with a background in playwriting, Regina has worked with Playwrights Horizons, The Joseph Papp Theater, New York Stage & Film, The Women’s Project, Woolly Mammoth Theater, and Horizons Theater Company. She has been anthologized in Plays from Woolly Mammoth by Broadway Play Services, and Heinemann’s Scenes For Women by Women. Regina lives in Brooklyn.

Rosalie Moffett’s work has been published or is forthcoming in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Journal,FIELD, and Tin House, among others.

Ruth Madievsky is the author of a poetry collection, “Emergency Brake,” which was named Tavern Books’ 2015 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series selection and was published in February 2016. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She is originally from Moldova and lives in Los Angeles, where she is a doctoral student at USC’s School of Pharmacy. You can find her at ruthmadievsky.com.

Sarah Fuchs taught high school and middle school for nineteen years in Lomé, Accra, Kampala, Dar es Salaam and Oakland, CA, where she co-founded the School for Social Justice and Community Development. A graduate of the NYU Writers Workshop in Paris, she is the 2016-17 Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellow at UW Madison, and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Tin House, Aspen Summer Words and Writing by Writers Tamales Bay. She is working on her first novel.

Sarah Gerard is the author of the novel Binary Star (Two Dollar Radio), the forthcoming essay collection Sunshine State (Harper Perennial), and two chapbooks, most recently BFF (Guillotine). Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, New York Magazine‘s “The Cut”, The Paris Review Daily, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, Joyland, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies for Joyland and The Saturday Evening Post. She’s been supported by fellowships and residencies from Yaddo and PlatteForum. She writes a monthly column on artists’ notebooks for Hazlitt and teaches writing in New York City.

Shelly Oria’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s and The Paris Review among many other places, and has won a number of awards, including the Indiana Review Fiction Prize. Her short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (FSG & Random House Canada, 2014) earned nominations for a Lambda Literary Award, a Goldie Award, and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. The book was recently translated into Hebrew and published in Israel by Keter Publishing. www.shellyoria.com

Will Mackin lives and writes in New Mexico. His work has been published in The New Yorker, GQ, Tin House, Rhapsody, and The New York Times Magazine. His short story “Kattekoppen” was included in The Best American Short Stories 2014. 

Taylor Johnson is proud of being from Washington, DC. They’ve received fellowships and scholarships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, Lambda Literary foundation, VONA, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers Conference. Their work appears in, or is forthcoming from, CALLALOO, the minnesota review, Vinyl Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Winter Tangerine, Third Coast, the shade journal, and elsewhere.

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint graduated from Brown University in 2011 with a B.A. in Literary Arts and International Relations. Her short stories have appeared in Caketrain, The Kenyon Review Online, The Bicycle Review, Adj Noun Magazine, and various Brown-RISD literary journals. She spent April 2012 as an artist-in-residence at Hedgebook on Whidbey Island, Washington

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is author of the chapbook app absentMINDR (VERBALVISUAL, 2014), the books IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016), Nature Poem (forthcoming 2017 from Tin House Books), and the zine series Hey, Teebs. He was the founder and editor in chief of birdsong, an antiracist/queer-positive collective, small press, and zine that published art and writing from 2008-2013. He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, 2016 Tin House summer poetry scholar, was longlisted for Cosmonauts Avenue’s inaugural poetry prize (judged by Claudia Rankine), and has poems in BOMB, Guernica, the Offing, and elsewhere. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn.

Tracey Knapp is a poet living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works in IT communications and graphic design. Knapp’s first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and was published in 2015. Tracey was a Tin House Writers’ Workshop Fellow, and a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010, The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems, and has appeared in Poetry Daily, Five Points, The National Poetry Review, Red Wheelbarrow Review, The New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review and elsewhere. ​

Val Brelinski was born and raised in Nampa, Idaho, the daughter of devout evangelical Christians. From 2003 to 2005, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she was also a Jones Lecturer in fiction writing. She received an MFA from the University of Virginia, and her recent writing has been featured in Vogue, MORE, Salon, VQR and The Rumpus. She received prizes for her fiction from the San Francisco Chronicle, The Charlottesville Weekly, and The Boise Weekly, and was also a finalist for the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Val lives in Northern California and teaches creative writing in Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program. Her debut novel, The Girl Who Slept with God, is now available in paperback.

Vishwas R. Gaitonde is a writer whose work has been published or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Hawaii Review, Verbatim – The Language Quarterly, Santa Monica Review, Gargoyle, and Bellevue Literary Review, among other publications. One of his short stories was cited as a “Distinguished Story” in the notable stories list in Best American Short Stories 2016. In 2017, he was awarded a Hawthornden literary fellowship from Scotland.

Zack Strait is pursuing his PhD at Florida State University and serving as Poetry Editor for BOAAT (boaatpress.com). Recent work can be found in Pleiades.

Zana Previti was born and raised in New England. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and her MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho. Her work has been published in The New England Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, RHINO Poetry, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She was recently named the recipient of Poetry International’s 2014 C.P. Cavafy Prize for Poetry and the Fall 2016 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State Altoona.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who has time for side projects? You barely have the mental energy to write a paragraph of your own work each day, let alone expend effort on some half-assed thing that may never see the light of completion or publication. You’re already in a rut; you’d rather pull your entire goddamned set of teeth than take off on some tangent, further delaying your celebrated debut or star turn on the literary scene, or the music scene, or the painting or theater or comedy scene.

But don’t sleep on the side project. The best work I’ve ever done is due largely to a lot of glorious wanderings in between. In a lifetime of making art—theater, music, and writing—my best creative bursts have almost always come after a side project, work outside my genre or practice, collaborations with others, one-offs and even joke projects. And often, some of my best work has ended up being these projects themselves.

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We are boring people, by ourselves. We burrow into our own heads, absorb nothing but our own echoes, style ourselves after ourselves. We become feedback loops, escalating sound, repeating endlessly, signifying nothing but our own creative burnout.