United States
I was born and raised in central North Carolina with a love of imaginative writing. I recently graduated with my MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte, and have been published in the Little Rose Magazine, and will be published in Bewildering Stories in their spring issue.
I have worked as an Editorial Assistant with QU Magazine and as a Contributor for reviews and interviews with the Southern Review of Books.
I still currently reside in North Carolina, with my cat, Fluffy.
In Tom Bredehoft's new mystery novel Foote, the main character, Big Jim Foote, harbors a secret as legendary as his name: that he is indeed a Bigfoot. But this is not the only secret being kept in the community of Morgantown, West Virginia. Soon enough, Big Jim finds himself neck deep in two murder investigations.
Whether it's the gold dust surrounding her mother's face on stage, or the "holy" absence of her father, parent-child relationships are the nucleus of Katie Marya's first full length poetry collection, Sugar Work .
Kendra DeColo's "I Want to Burn the Frat House of America to the Ground" ends: "I mean my mother's body was a house burning / and I've been burning ever since." The poetry that makes up DeColo's new collection I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World is filled with raw, comedic, politically eclipsing language that leaves you choking on the brilliance of a rebirth.
In Ashleigh Bell Pedersen's debut novel, The Crocodile Bride , she writes: "In the clear water, a school of minnows scattered like arrows. Sand drifted and swirled. The water just past the yellow rope was a strange, shadowy green. How thrilling to know that there, so close, only a few breast strokes away, was a whole other world."
In her new poetry collection, Our Lady of Bewilderment, Alison Pelegrin writes, "Queen of bestiaries and stained glass, lone feathered martyr / spraying gore - by name alone we could be twins." These lines from the poem, " The Pelegrin in Her Piety: A Lingo Sonnet," give readers a good introduction to the humorous, intelligent, and achingly real language they will find in this book.
C.T. Salazar has a way of pointing out the quietest moments and rendering them holy, especially in his latest poetry collection Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking . There is a sense that Salazar brings you inside of himself while he unravels his own practical divinity in the piece, which speaks volumes in the silence between stanzas.
Poetry, by virtue of being poetry, has its own internal music. The sway and beat, the rhyme, even punctuation helps to mold the poem into its unique sound. The poetry in Cody-Rose Clevidence's new collection, Aux Arc Trypt Ich: Poppycock and Assphodel; Winter; A Night of Dark Trees , is a symphony and a secret language at once.
Bradley Sides creates worlds of fantasy and sets them into a reality you may think you know in his new short story collection Those Fantastic Lives and Other Strange Stories from City of Light Publishing.
"Home is where the heart is" is how the oft-quoted phrase runs, and, as A.J. Gnuse notes in his debut novel,, home is a symbol for much more than that. Home is a living, breathing creature that is just as important as the people inhabiting it, openly shedding its skin to the studs, a vector of change, and yet a gatekeeper of memory.