ISSUE FIVE Makers

Sara Deniz Akant grew up in New York City. She is currently getting an MFA at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.

Maps are a tall man with one eye.

Travis Brown lives in Wausau, Wisconsin, where he teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin--Marathon County. His writing has been published in Fence, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Bateau and Defunct. His chapbook In Lieu of Hartshorn is available from Greying Ghost Press.

Maps are always selling me one thing or the other.

Laura E. Davis is the author of the chapbook Braiding the Storm (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poems are featured or forthcoming in Moon Milk Review, qarrtsiluni, Diverse Voices, Whistling Fire, and Redactions, among others. She is the Founding Editor of Weave Magazine and currently teaches kids the art of translation for Poetry Inside Out in San Francisco, where she lives with her partner, Sal. She blogs at dearouterspace.blogspot.com.

Maps are pressed smooth beneath finger and thumb.

An MFA candidate at Pacific University, Jaydn DeWald currently lives with his wife in San Francisco, CA, where he writes, plays bass for the DeWald/Taylor Quintet, and serves as an Associate Poetry Editor for Silk Road. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the minnesota review, The National Poetry Review, Natural Bridge, Witness, Yemassee, and others.

Maps are 3-dimensional geo-bodies, resurrected, in the palm of your hand. 

Katy Gunn is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Alice Blue Review, elimae, and The Offending Adam, among others.

Maps are for decorating with pasta and glue.

Alec Hershman lives in St. Louis where he works in a coffee shop and teaches at St. Louis Community College and at the Center for Humanities at Washington University. Other poems can be found in new issues of Denver Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Burnside Review, The Journal, Juked, Lumina, and The Sugar House Review. He is currently poetry editor for The White Whale Review.

Maps are amps when you look at them too closely.

Sarah Jennings is a senior at the University of Alabama studying English Literature with a minor in Creative Writing. She is an intern at Slash Pine Projects, a small press affiliated with the University of Alabama. One of her short stories, “Sporadic Lightning”, was published in the inaugural issue of Dew Point.

Maps are ever-changing: a screen shot of a land’s identity before the rocks shift.

Shane Jones is the author of the forthcoming novel, Daniel Fights A Hurricane, which will be published by Penguin in August. 

Maps are labyrinths. 

David Laskowski lives in Kanab, UT.

Maps are useful when traveling.

Philip Matthews is a gallery assistant at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, and a Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches poetry and creative nonfiction. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, The Tusculum Review, Elimae, The Delinquent, and Assaracus.

Maps are relevant past their expiration dates.

Joe Milazzo is co-founder of the interdisciplinary arts organization Strophe, co-editor of the online journal [out of nothing] and proprietor of Imipolex Press. His short story "Accessible" appeared in Super Arrow 4, and his writings have also appeared in HTMLGiant, Antennae, Drunken Boat, H_NGM_N, Black Clock, and the anthologies Chronometry and Conversations at the Wartime Cafe: a Decade of War 2001-2011. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location is http://www.slowstudies.net/jmilazzo/.

Maps are gradual, not like geology, but in the manner of that which is asked finding itself received. 

Dawn Pendergast lives in Houston, Texas. She’s written four chapbooks: Sea Quills (Beard of Bees, 2011), leaves fall leaves (Dusie Kollectiv), Off Flaw (Dusie Kollectiv) and Mexico City (Macaw Macaw Press). She is currently an editor for Little Red Leaves and produces handmade chapbooks for the textile series. More of her writing can be found on her website.

Maps are folds of folds of folds.

Jess Stoner's novel I Have Blinded Myself Writing This will be published by Short Flight/Long Drive Books in March 2012.  She earned her PhD from the University of Denver and is the Education Programs Coordinator at Badgerdog Literary Publishing in Austin. Visit her at http://www.jessstoner.com. 

Maps are invitations to the fiction of memory.

Laura Vena is a writer, artist and translator whose work has appeared in TarpaulinSky, In Posse Review, The Dirty Fabulous, and Antennae. Laura holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Critical Studies from CalArts and teaches Latin American Literature and
writing. She is writing coordinator for Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park, co-founder of the interdisciplinary arts organization, Strophe, and co-curator of the lecture and performance series, Novum.

Maps are an involuntary compulsion.

They are a way we orient ourselves in a world in which each of us is small, ant-like. They allow us to survey a landscape—to spread our memories and ourselves across a broader expanse of geography than our own muscles, organs, flesh, and bones can reach. Maps are narratives in which scale, perspective, and story are all dictated by the mapmaker and reader. Mapmaking is sense-making; it's not just our way of understanding the world, but of organizing and categorizing it, as if we are conjuring a new universe. Intimate or public, political, or personal, maps are artifacts that document our need to explore worlds within and outside of our own experience.

B.j. Vogt received a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri. His current exhibitions include: I'll Be Your Mirror
at the Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis, MO, and Poetry in Place: The Platforms at Laumeier Sculptue Park, St. Louis, MO; with recent exhibitions at La Esquina, Urban Culture Project/Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City Missouri; Boots Contemporary Art Space, St. Louis, Missouri; SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio; and NURTUREart, Brooklyn, New York. Vogt has been awarded a Santo Foundation grant, Criticalmass for the Arts Creative Stimulus grant, and the Washington University in St. Louis Bill KohnTravel Scholarship/Cite' Internationale des Arts Residency in Paris, France. In 2012 he will attend a residency at the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture part of which will include creating work for the exhibition The Natural and the Man Made at the ODDGallery, both located in Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada. For more information about the artist and his work, please visit these websites: http://bjvogt.blogspot.com/, http://humananture.blogspot.com/, http://vimeo.com/bjvogt/videos.

Maps are temporary depictions of dynamically evolving forces and materials.

Kevin Weidner hails from Missouri and currently lives in Tuscaloosa, where he is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Alabama. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, storySouth, PANK, Midwestern Gothic, and Country Dog Review. He edits 751 Magazine.

Maps are to acknowledge that being Here means nothing without knowing what is There.

Joseph P. Wood is the author of two books, Fold of the Map (Salmon) and I & We, as well as five chapbooks of poetry. Recent poems appear in Boston Review, BOMB, Typo, Bateau, Hotel Amerika, among other journals. He is happy as a clam to be collaborating with Sarah Jennings, whose brilliant eye captured what his shaky hands could not.  

Maps are the physical manifestation of how to document how the ego can be usurped by the clouds, the stars, the grass, the ponds; maps teach us how small we are; that, like poems, cartography is an imperfect action, but one whose beauty lies in suggestion and mystery.

Jane Wong received her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and is a former U.S. Fulbright Fellow. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Poems appear recently or are forthcoming in CutBank, EOAGH, Mid-American Review, Barrow Street, Octopus, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, Versal, and Spinning Jenny. She has two chapbooks: Dendrochronology (dancing girl press) and the forthcoming Impossible Map (Fact-Simile). She lives in Seattle, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington.

Maps are easy to steal.