Posts tagged ‘Kelly Luce’

The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom

About | Reviews
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About this book:

Edited by Joanne Merriam, The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom is an anthology of science fiction featuring blunt force trauma, explosions, adventure, derring-do, tigers, Martians, zombies, fanged monsters, dinosaurs (alien and domestic), ray guns, rocket ships, and anthropomorphized marshmallows.

The anthology contains work by 40 authors: fiction by Jim Comer, James Dorr, Aidan Doyle, Tom Doyle, Kendra Fortmeyer, Nick Kocz, David Kopaska-Merkel, Ken Liu, Kelly Luce, Tim Major, Laurent McAllister, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Jerry Oltion, Ursula Pflug, Leonard Richardson, Erica L. Satifka, G. A. Semones, Matthew Sanborn Smith, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Lucy Sussex, Mary A. Turzillo, Nick Wood, and K. Ceres Wright, and poetry by Khadija Anderson, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Kristin Bock, Alicia Cole, Estíbaliz Espinosa (translated by Neil Anderson), Miriam Bird Greenberg, Benjamin Grossberg, Julie Bloss Kelsey, Katie Manning, Martha McCollough, Marc McKee, Richard King Perkins II, Christina Sng, J. J. Steinfeld, Sonya Taaffe, Deborah Walker, and Ali Znaidi.

The actual Museum of All Things Awesome and that Go Boom is housed in the half-kiloSmoot-square, two-centuries-old dancing building, the Old Ptolemy, in the city of Draconis on the planet Epsilon Eridani b.

Table of Contents:

  • Khadija Anderson, “Observational Couplets upon returning to Los Angeles from Outer Space”
  • Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, “Photograph of a Secret”
  • Kristin Bock, “I Wish I Could Write a Poem about Pole-Vaulting Robots”
  • Alicia Cole, “Asteroid Orphan”
  • Jim Comer, “Soldier’s Coat”
  • James Dorr, “Bubba Claus Conquers the Martians”
  • Aidan Doyle, “Mr. Nine and the Gentleman Ghost”
  • Tom Doyle, “Crossing Borders”
  • Estíbaliz Espinosa, “Dissidence” (translated by Neil Anderson)
  • Kendra Fortmeyer, “Squaline”
  • Miriam Bird Greenberg, “Brazilian Telephone”
  • Benjamin Grossberg, “The Space Traveler and Runaway Stars”
  • Julie Bloss Kelsey, two scifaiku
  • Nick Kocz, “The Last American Tiger”
  • David Kopaska-Merkel, “Captain Marshmallow”
  • Ken Liu, “Nova Verba, Mundus Novus”
  • Kelly Luce, “Ideal Head of a Woman”
  • Tim Major, “Read/Write Head”
  • Katie Manning, “Baba Yaga’s Answer”
  • Laurent McAllister, “Kapuzine and the Wolf: A Hortatory Tale”
  • Martha McCollough, “valley of the talking dolls” and “adventures of cartoon bee”
  • Marc McKee, “A Moment in Fill-In-The-Blank City”
  • Sequoia Nagamatsu, “Headwater LLC”
  • Jerry Oltion, “A Star Is Born”
  • Richard King Perkins II, “The Sleeper’s Requiem”
  • Ursula Pflug, “Airport Shoes”
  • Leonard Richardson, “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs”
  • Erica L. Satifka, “Thirty-Six Questions Propounded by the Human-Powered Plasma Bomb in the Moments Before Her Imminent Detonation”
  • G. A. Semones, “Never Forget Some Things”
  • Matthew Sanborn Smith, “The Empire State Building Strikes Back!”
  • Christina Sng, “Medusa in LA”
  • J. J. Steinfeld, “The Loudest Sound Imaginable”
  • Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, “The Wanderers”
  • Lucy Sussex, “A Sentimental, Sordid Education”
  • Sonya Taaffe, “And Black Unfathomable Lakes”
  • Mary Turzillo, “Pride”
  • Deborah Walker, “Sea Monkey Mermaid”
  • Nick Wood, “The Girl Who Called the World”
  • K. Ceres Wright, “The Haunting of M117”
  • Ali Znaidi, “A Dolphin Scene” and “Australian Horoscope”

About the Contributors:

Butoh dancer, Muslim convert, and Pushcart nominated poet Khadija Anderson has been published extensively in print and online. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University LA and her first book of poetry History of Butoh was published in 2012 through Writ Large Press. Find her at khadijaanderson.com.

Neil Anderson is a translator and teacher living in Lubbock, Texas. His translations from Galician have been published in Asymptote, The Bitter Oleander, Shearsman, Absinthe, M-Dash, and elsewhere.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the 2013 Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange poetry winner. She has work published in American Poetry Review, CALYX, and Acentos Review among others. A short dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Chicano activist and Hollywood director, Jesús Salvador Treviño can be viewed at latinopia.com. She curates the quarterly reading series HITCHED and co-founded Women Who Submit. Her debut poetry collection, Built with Safe Spaces, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications.

Kristin Bock holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts—Amherst where she currently teaches. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and journals, including VERSE, Columbia, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The Black Warrior Review, and FENCE, as well as the URB anthology Apocalypse Now: Poems & Prose from the End of Days. She lives with her husband, artist Geoffrey Kostecki, in Montague, Massachusetts where they refurbish liturgical art. She is also a contributing editor to the literary magazine, Bateau. Bock’s debut collection of poetry, Cloisters, won Tupelo Press’s First Book Award and the da Vinci Eye Award.

Alicia Cole is a recent New Orleanian transplant by way of Atlanta, GA. She’s a professional writer, editor, and artist. Her sci-fi serial Blinded is currently being published by Rainbow Rumpus, and her work has recently appeared on PodCastle, and been reviewed in Dead Reckonings. You can find more of her work at www.facebook.com/AliciaColewriter and https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6470571.Alicia_Cole.

Jim Comer is an author and teacher who lives in Arkansas.

Indiana writer James Dorr‘s The Tears of Isis was a 2014 Bram Stoker Award nominee for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. Other books include Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance, Darker Loves: Tales of Mystery and Regret, and his all-poetry Vamps (A Retrospective). For more, visit Dorr’s blog at jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com.

Aidan Doyle is an Australian writer and computer programmer. He has visited more than 90 countries and his experiences include teaching English in Japan, interviewing ninjas in Bolivia and going ten-pin bowling in North Korea. Find him at aidandoyle.net and @aidan_doyle.

In 2014, Tor Books published American Craftsmen, Tom Doyle‘s first novel in a three-book deal. The Left-Hand Way followed in 2015. He is a winner of the WSFA Small Press Award and a Writers of the Future Award. His short fiction has appeared in Aeon, Buzzy Mag, Daily Science Fiction, Futurismic, and the URB anthology How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens. Paper Golem has published his short story collection, The Wizard of Macatawa and Other Stories.

Estíbaliz Espinosa is a Spanish- and Galician-language writer, author of the books Pan (libro de ler e desler) (2000); -orama (2002); Número e (2004); zoommm. textos biónicos (2007); and Curiosidade (2015). Find her at estibalizes.wordpress.com.

Kendra Fortmeyer received her MFA in fiction from UT Austin, and is the fiction editor for Broad! magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, NANO Fiction, Forge, apt, Juked, Fiddleblack (under pen name Zoe Abramson), Corium and elsewhere.

Miriam Bird Greenberg is the author of the chapbooks All night in the new country and Pact-Blood, Fever Grass, and her work has been awarded fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the NEA. She lives in Berkeley and teaches ESL.

Benjamin S. Grossberg is Director of Creative Writing at The University of Hartford. His most recent book of poems, Space Traveler, was published by the University of Tampa Press in spring of 2014. His earlier collections include Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa, 2009), winner of the 2008 Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award.

Julie Bloss Kelsey writes speculative poetry and short stories from her home in suburban Maryland. Her work has been published in Scifaikuest, Seven by Twenty, Eye to the Telescope, Star*Line, and Mad Scientist Journal, among others. She is currently writing a scifaiku chapbook about an ill-fated alien romance. Visit her on Twitter @MamaJoules.

Nick Kocz‘s stories and essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Entropy, Five Chapters, Mid-American Review, and The Nervous Breakdown. He has an MFA from Virginia Tech and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, VA with his wife and three children.

An aether compactor by trade, David C. Kopaska-Merkel began writing poetry after witnessing the Ascension of Tim. He won the Rhysling award for best long poem in 2006 for a collaboration with Kendall Evans. He has written 23 books, of which one of the latest is SETI Hits Paydirt (Popcorn Press, 2014). Kopaska-Merkel has edited Dreams & Nightmares since 1986.

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, published his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, in 2015, and will publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in 2016.

Kelly Luce‘s story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, won the 2013 Foreword Review‘s Editors Choice Prize in Fiction. Her debut novel, Pull Me Under, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2016. A Contributing Editor for Electric Literature, she hails from Illinois and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Tim Major lives in Oxford with his wife and son. His time-travel novel, You Don’t Belong Here, will be published by Snowbooks in September 2016 and his horror novella, Carus & Mitch, was published by Omnium Gatherum in February 2015. His short stories have featured in Interzone, Perihelion, Every Day Fiction, and numerous anthologies. He is the Editor of the SF magazine, The Singularity, and also blogs at cosycatastrophes.wordpress.com.

Katie Manning is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman. She has received The Nassau Review Author Award for Poetry, and her writing has been published in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, PANK, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review, and she is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Find her online at katiemanningpoet.com.

Laurent McAllister is the symbionym of a duo of Canadian writers, Yves Meynard and Jean-Louis Trudel. Since 1984, they have published extensively in French and in English, penning under the McAllister identity one award-winning novel, Suprématie (2009), one collection, three young adult books, and several short stories. Writing separately, they have authored nearly 40 books, and many more short stories. Tor published Meynard’s fantasy novel Chrysanthe in 2012. Trudel’s short story “The Snows of Yesteryear” was included in the John Joseph Adams anthology Loosed Upon the World from Saga in 2015.

Martha McCollough is an artist and writer who lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Her videopoems have been exhibited at festivals and conferences internationally, and have appeared in Rattapallax, Gone Lawn, and TriQuarterly. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Small Po[r]tions, Cream City Review, and Salamander.

Marc McKee received an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. His work has appeared in several journals, among them Barn Owl Review, Boston Review, Cimarron Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, Forklift, Ohio, LIT, and Pleiades. He is the author of the chapbook What Apocalypse?, which won the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM 2008 Chapbook Contest, and two full-length collections, Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) and Bewilderness (Black Lawrence Press, 2014).

Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the Japanese folklore inspired story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (Black Lawrence Press). His work has appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, Lightspeed Magazine, Zyzzyva, The Fairy Tale Review, Tin House online, and Black Warrior Review. He is the managing editor of Psychopomp Magazine and an assistant professor of creative writing at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. More info at http://sequoianagamatsu.net.

Jerry Oltion has had over 150 short stories and 15 novels published over the last 30 years, and is still hard at it. He has become the most frequently published author in the history of Analog magazine, and has won the Nebula Award for his novella, “Abandon in Place.” He is mostly known for hard science fiction with a human, often humorous touch.

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He has a wife, Vickie and a daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in hundreds of publications including Bluestem, December Magazine, Emrys Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, Roanoke Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Louisiana Review, The Red Cedar Review, The William and Mary Review, and Two Thirds North.

Ursula Pflug is the critically acclaimed author of the novels Green Music (Edge/Tesseract), The Alphabet Stones (Blue Denim) and Motion Sickness (Inanna; illustrated by S.K. Dyment). She penned the story collections After the Fires (Tightrope) and Harvesting the Moon (PS). She edited the anthologies They Have To Take You In (Hidden Brook) and Playground of Lost Toys (Exile; with Colleen Anderson.) A YA novella, Mountain, is forthcoming from Inanna. She teaches creative writing workshops at Loyalist College, Trent University (with Derek Newman-Stille) and elsewhere. She has collaborated with filmmakers, dancers, and installation artists and her short fiction has been taught at universities in Canada and India. Find her at ursulapflug.ca.

Leonard Richardson became a programmer because paleontology involved too much outdoor work. He writes prose and open source software from his home in New York. For more about him, go to www.crummy.com.

Erica L. Satifka‘s fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Shimmer as well as URB’s anthology How to Live on Other Planets.

Weaned on fairy tales and hero adventures, G. A. Semones remembers reading his first space opera when about nine years old. He began writing in his teens and writes primarily fantasy and science fiction. He is a Liberty Hall Writers denizen. A software engineer, he has built scary things that self-heal and self-organize. He is a devoted husband, dad and granddad who, when not writing, enjoys history, antique cryptography, fossils, reading, and gardening with his wife. His work has appeared on The Drabblecast, Ray Gun Revival, and Alternate Hilarities, among others.

Matthew Sanborn Smith is a South Floridian speculative fiction author whose fiction has appeared at Tor.com, Nature, Chizine, and Diabolical Plots among others. He is an occasional contributor to the StarShipSofa, SF Signal, and SFF Audio podcasts. His collection, The Dritty Doesen: Some of the Least Reasonable Stories of Matthew Sanborn Smith, is waiting patiently for just the right reader, and his podcast, Beware the Hairy Mango, is adored by dozens.

Christina Sng is a Rhysling-nominated poet, writer, and artist. Her work has received several Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She is the author of three chapbooks and her first full-length book of poetry, A Collection of Nightmares from Raw Dog Screaming Press arrives late 2016. Visit her online at christinasng.com.

Canadian J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published sixteen books, including the short story collections Disturbing Identities (Ekstasis Editions), Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized? (Gaspereau Press), Would You Hide Me? (Gaspereau Press), A Glass Shard and Memory (Recliner Books), and Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (Ekstasis Editions), the novels Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation (Pottersfield Press) and Word Burials (Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink), and the poetry collections An Affection for Precipices (Serengeti Press), Misshapenness (Ekstasis Editions), and Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (Ekstasis Editions). His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals internationally, and over forty of his one-act plays and a handful of full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily-named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. Her work has appeared in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Interzone. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates an annual Art & Words Show, profiled in Poets & Writers. Bonnie is represented by Ann Collette at Rees Literary. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or through her website: www.bonniejostufflebeam.com.

Lucy Sussex was born in New Zealand. She has edited four anthologies, including She’s Fantastical (1995), shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her award-winning fiction includes books for younger readers and the novel The Scarlet Rider. She has five short story collections, My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, Absolute Uncertainty, Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies (a best of), and Thief of Lives. Her latest project is Blockbuster!: Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

Sonya Taaffe‘s short fiction and poetry can be found in the collections Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press), A Mayse-Bikhl (Papaveria Press), Postcards from the Province of Hyphens (Prime Books), and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books), and in various anthologies including The Humanity of Monsters, Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place, and Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror. She is currently senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons; she holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats.

Mary Turzillo‘s 1999 Nebula-winner, “Mars Is no Place for Children” and Analog novel An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl are recommended reading on the International Space Station. Her poetry collection Lovers & Killers won the 2013 Elgin Award for Best Collection, and she has been a finalist on the British SFA, Pushcart, Stoker, Dwarf Stars and Rhysling ballots. Sweet Poison, her collaboration with Marge Simon, came out from Dark Renaissance in 2014. She lives in Berea, Ohio, with her scientist-writer husband, Geoffrey A. Landis.

Deborah Walker grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London, where she now lives with her partner, Chris, and her two young children. Find Deborah in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration or on her blog, deborahwalkersbibliography.blogspot.com. Her poems have appeared in Dreams & Nightmares, Star*Line, and Enchanted Conversation.

Nick Wood is a South African clinical psychologist, with around twenty short stories previously published in Interzone, Infinity Plus, AfroSF, PostScripts, Redstone Science Fiction, Fierce Family, and How to Live On Other Planets, amongst others. His YA speculative fiction novella The stone chameleon was published in South Africa and his debut novel Azanian Bridges is due to be published in the UK in 2016 by NewCon Press. He has completed an MA in Creative Writing (SF & Fantasy) through Middlesex University, London and is currently training clinical psychologists in London, England. He can be found at @nick45wood or nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz.

K. Ceres Wright received her Master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA, and Cog was her thesis novel for the program. Wright’s science fiction poem, “Doomed,” was a nominee for the Rhysling Award, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s highest honor. Her work has appeared in Diner Stories, Hazard Yet Forward, Genesis: An Anthology of Black Science Fiction, The 2008 Rhysling Anthology, Far Worlds, The Dark God’s Gift, and Many Genres, One Craft. Find her at www.kcereswright.com or on Twitter @KCeresWright.

Ali Znaidi lives in Redeyef, Tunisia, where he teaches English. He authored four poetry chapbooks including Experimental Ruminations (Fowlpox Press, 2012), Moon’s Cloth Embroidered with Poems (Origami Poems Project, 2012), Bye, Donna Summer! (Fowlpox Press, 2014), and Taste of the Edge (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014). You can see more of his work on his blog at aliznaidi.blogspot.com.

About the Editor

Joanne Merriam is the owner and publisher of Upper Rubber Boot Books. She was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and lived thereabouts for her first three decades. In 2001, she quit her job as the Executive Assistant of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia to travel Canada by train, and then parts of the Northeastern and Southern United States. Her first book of poetry, The Glaze from Breaking, was written, in part, about those travels. In 2004, she immigrated to the USA, where she has lived in Kentucky and New Hampshire, and now resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

Joanne Merriam’s poetry and fiction has appeared in dozens of magazines and journals, including The Antigonish Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Fiddlehead, The Furnace Review, Grain, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, The Mainichi Daily News, Per Contra, Riddle Fence, Room of One’s Own, Strange Horizons and Vallum Contemporary Poetry, as well as in the anthologies Ice: new writing on hockey, To Find Us: Words and Images of Halifax and The Allotment: New Lyric Poets. She most recently edited How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens and co-edited Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good with H. L. Nelson. Visit her at www.joannemerriam.com.

Reviews:

26 July 2016

Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good

a welcome antidote to the conventional world of women’s fiction
—Best New Fiction

Print (978-1-937794-46-0)

Ebook (978-1-937794-43-9)

Out of print.

Go to: About | Goodreads | Reviews
Released 31 March 2015

ChooseWiselycover-print-front

Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good is a feminist anthology of dark fiction, co-edited by H. L. Nelson and Joanne Merriam. Containing 35 stories of “bad” women, and “good” women who just haven’t been caught yet, it features Joyce Carol Oates, Aimee Bender, Diane Cook, and 33 other fearless women writers. In January 2016, it was nominated for a This Is Horror Award. It’s the first in the Women Up To No Good series.

About this book:

Table of Contents:

  • Janet Shell Anderson, “Every Purpose Under Heaven”
  • Sidney Archer, “Woman Enough”
  • Alisha M. Attella, “Rise”
  • Gwen Beatty, “Angel Thinks She Will Die Very Soon”
  • Aimee Bender, “Broke”
  • Tina Connolly, “Hard Choices”
  • Diane Cook, “Moving On”
  • Kathy Fish, “The Hollow”
  • Amina Gautier, “A Cup of My Time”
  • Amelia Gray and Lindsay Hunter, “Sisters”
  • Tina May Hall, “Vampire”
  • Rebecca Jones-Howe, “Better Places”
  • Andrea Kneeland, “Imagination”
  • Molly Laich, “Kristen Doesn’t Like Surprise Parties”
  • Heather Lindsley, “The Angel of Death Has a Business Plan”
  • Holly Lopez, “The Head”
  • Kelly Luce, “Rooey”
  • Mesha Maren, “Eminent Domain”
  • Jessica McHugh, “In the Silt”
  • Mary Miller, “This Boy I Loved a Rock”
  • Ellen Birkett Morris, “After the Fall”
  • Joyce Carol Oates, “Spotted Hyenas: A Romance”
  • Jennifer Pelland, “The Kennel Club”
  • Cat Rambo, “Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut”
  • Joani Reese, “Good Neighbors”
  • Marytza K. Rubio, “Clap If You Believe”
  • Nisi Shawl, “Looking for Lilith”
  • Quill Shiv, “The Bitter Sea”
  • Emily Slaney, “Bear Traps”
  • Amber Sparks, “We Dressed Up Like Other People”
  • Rachel Swirsky, “The Sea of Trees”
  • Meg Tuite, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”
  • Damien Angelica Walters, “Girl, With Coin”
  • xTx, “Today I Am A Wife”
  • Bonnie ZoBell, “Tricking the Moon”

Contributor Bios:

Janet Shell Anderson has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for fiction and the Micro Prize for short fiction, published by Cease, Cows; decomP; FRIGG; Vestal Review; Gemini Magazine; Black Heart; Convergence; Grey Sparrow; and others. She likes flash fiction and is an attorney.

Sidney Archer is one of the pseudonyms of K.D. McCrite, popular author of children’s books and cozy mysteries. As Sidney Archer, she looks into the darker side of life, seeking redemptive qualities found in the shadows. She harbors passion for a well-crafted story, a unique plot twist, or a colorful phrase. Her books guide readers along narrow paths fraught with obstacles and illusion until light shines fully on what was hidden. Desolate Heart, a between-worlds novel, tells the story of a cursed painting, the man who has been trapped in it for a century, and the modern-day woman who finds him.

Alisha M. Attella lives in Long Beach, California with her two blond children and one black cat. In their tiny apartment she reads books, scratches out poems and stories, raises-up the children, and talks to the cat about writers and schedules and the wonders of publishing. She’s served as Managing Editor at Mojave River Press & Review and Cease, Cows, and her own work can be found in Lummox, East Jasmine Review, San Pedro River Review, Cadence Collective, and elsewhere.

Gwen Beatty is a sorority dropout from Iowa. She is an editor at First Stop Fiction and her website is the ridiculously convenient gwenbeatty.com.

Aimee Bender is the author of five books, including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Tina Connolly lives with her family in Portland, Oregon. Her stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her first fantasy novel, Ironskin (Tor 2012), was nominated for a Nebula, and the sequels Copperhead and Silverblind are now out. She narrates for Podcastle and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, runs the Parsec-winning flash fiction podcast Toasted Cake, and her website is tinaconnolly.com.

Diane Cook is the author of the story collection Man V. Nature (Harper, 2014). Her fiction has been published in Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on This American Life, where she worked as a radio producer for six years. She won the 2012 Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, and earned an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a teaching fellow. She lives in Oakland, California.

Kathy Fish’s short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Lineup: 25 Provocative Women Writers (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), Guernica, Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She served as guest editor of Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2010. She is the author of three collections of short fiction: a chapbook of flash fiction in the chapbook collective, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women (Rose Metal Press, 2008), Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011), and Together We Can Bury It (The Lit Pub, 2012).

Amina Gautier is the author of two short story collections: At-Risk, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award (University of Georgia Press, 2011) and Now We Will Be Happy, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). More than eighty of her short stories have been published, appearing in Antioch Review, Best African American Fiction, Callaloo, Crazyhorse, Glimmer Train Stories, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, and Southern Review among other places. Her stories have been honored with the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, the Danahy Prize, the Jack Dyer Prize, the Lamar York Prize, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, and the William Richey Award as well as fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, MacDowell Colony, Prairie Center of the Arts, the Retreat for Writers at Hawthornden Castle, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Writers in the Heartland, as well as artist grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Amelia Gray is the author of four books: AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, THREATS, and Gutshot. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on a novel.

Tina May Hall lives in upstate New York where she teaches creative writing at Hamilton College. Her collection The Physics of Imaginary Objects won the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her stories have appeared in Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, The Collagist, Fourth River, and other literary magazines.

Lindsay Hunter is the author of the story collections Daddy’s and Don’t Kiss Me and the novel, Ugly Girls. Find her at lindsayhunter.com.

Rebecca Jones-Howe lives and writes in Kamloops, British Columbia. Her work has appeared in [PANK], Pulp Modern, and Punchnel’s, among others. Her first collection of short fiction, Vile Men, will be released by Dark House Press in summer of 2015. She can be found online at rebeccajoneshowe.com.

Andrea Kneeland is the author of How to Pose for Hustler (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015). Her stories and poems have appeared in more than 50 journals and anthologies. More work can be found at andreakneeland.com.

Molly Laich is a writer in Seattle. Her work has appeared in Hobart, [PANK], Midwestern Gothic, and beyond. You can read her blog at mollylaich.com.

Heather Lindsley’s work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and Strange Horizons. Her fiction has also been in John Joseph Adams’s dystopian anthology Brave New Worlds, in Year’s Best SF 12, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and in Talking Back, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp. She has been featured on Escape Pod as a writer and on Podcastle as a reader, and her stories have appeared in Polish, Romanian, Russian, and French translations.

Holly Lopez lives in Charlotte, NC with her husband, pampered Doberman, and the growing number of offbeat characters mulling about in her head. Her work has appeared in Plots With Guns and Charlotte Viewpoint.

Kelly Luce’s story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, won the 2013 Foreword Review’s Editors Choice Prize in Fiction. Her work has been honored by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Jentel Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Kerouac House, and Michener Center for Writers, and has appeared in Salon, O Magazine, Crazyhorse, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, and other magazines. She’s the editorial assistant for the O. Henry Prize anthology and editor-in-chief of Bat City Review. She grew up in Illinois and currently lives in Austin, TX.

Mesha Maren is a fiction writer from southern West Virginia whose work appears or is forthcoming in Tin House, The Oxford American, Hobart, The Barcelona Review, and other literary journals as well as the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial.

Jessica McHugh is an author of speculative fiction spanning the genre from horror and alternate history to young adult. She has had seventeen books published in six years, including her bestselling Post Mortem Press thriller, Rabbits in the Garden, and the first two books in her edgy YA series from Evolved Publishing, The Darla Decker Diaries. More info on her speculations and publications can be found at JessicaMcHughBooks.com.

Mary Miller is the author of two books, Big World and The Last Days of California. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies including McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, the Oxford American, and New Stories from the South.

Ellen Birkett Morris is a writer and poet based in Louisville, Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in journals including The Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, South Carolina Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, wigleaf, and Paradigm. Her story “The Cycle of Life and Other Incidentals” was a finalist in the Glimmer Train Press Family Matters short story competition. Morris is a recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Her acclaimed fiction includes We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Jennifer Pelland is a two-time Nebula nominee for short fiction, and has a short story collection (Unwelcome Bodies) and novel (Machine) available from Apex Publications. Nowadays, she mostly belly dances. Find her at www.jenniferpelland.com.

Although currently on the road, Cat Rambo usually lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” from her story collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. She is the current Vice President of SFWA. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction, see kittywumpus.net.

Joani Reese is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Final Notes and Dead Letters, and the poetry collection Night Chorus, forthcoming from Lit Fest Press. Reese’s poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and featured in over seventy print and online venues. She has been poetry editor for THIS Magazine and senior poetry editor for Connotation Press—An Online Artifact and was fiction guest editor for Scissors and Spackle in 2013 & 2014. Reese is currently Editor-in-Chief of the online magazine MadHat Lit, the quarterly online presence of MadHat Publishing. Reese won the first Patricia McFarland Memorial Prize for her flash fiction and The Graduate School Creative Writing Award from The University of Memphis for her poetry, where she earned her MFA. Reese won the 15th Glass Woman Prize in 2014 for her flash fiction and currently lives in Texas with six fine cats and some men. She also has a real job.

Marytza K. Rubio is a writer from Santa Ana, CA.

Nisi Shawl’s acclaimed story collection Filter House was one of two winners of the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award and a nominee for the World Fantasy Award. She was WisCon 35’s Guest of Honor. She edited WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity and with Dr. Rebecca J. Holden she co-edited Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction, Feminism, and African American Voices. With classmate Cynthia Ward she co-authored Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. Shawl is a cofounder of the Carl Brandon Society and serves on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Tor books will publish her Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair in Fall 2015. Her website is www.nisishawl.com.

Quill Shiv is a genre-blending writer living in Saugus, MA. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Haikus for Lovers (ed. Laura Roberts) and 1 Photo, 50 Authors, 100 Words: Flash Fiction (ed. Madison Woods), and in literary magazines such as Metazen and The Watermark. When not cross-stitching or blogging at www.QuillShiv.com, Quill spends her time perfecting the nap-to-coffee ratio.

Emily Slaney is 70% no confidence, with dark humor and a crooked smile. She describes her writing as nihilistic emotional satire because she likes to make you laugh before she pulls it all away from you. She lives in England with her husband and kids in a semi-detached madhouse where sarcasm is what passes for everyday speech. She has been published in Menacing Hedge, Revolt Daily, Solarcide, Parable Press, Thunderdome Magazine, and Cease, Cows. You can find more about Emily at: emilyslaney.com.

Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collection May We Shed These Human Bodies, and co-author (with Robert Kloss and illustrator Matt Kish) of the hybrid novella The Desert Places. Her second short story collection, The Unfinished World and Other Stories, is forthcoming in 2016. You can follow her on Twitter @ambernoelle, or at ambernoellesparks.com.

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including Tor.com, Subterranean Magazine, and Clarkesworld Magazine. It’s also been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the World Fantasy Award, among others, and twice won the Nebula Award. Her second collection, How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present and Future, came out from Subterranean Press in 2013.

Meg Tuite’s writing has appeared in numerous literary journals. She is the author of two short story collections, Bound By Blue (Sententia Books, 2013) and Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011), and three chapbooks, the latest titled Her Skin is a Costume (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from Artistically Declined Press for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging (2014) written with Heather Fowler and Michelle Reale. She teaches at the Santa Fe Community College, is an editor for Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press, and has a column up at JMWW. She lives in Santa Fe with her husband and menagerie of pets. Her blog: megtuite.com.

Damien Angelica Walters’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in various magazines and anthologies, including Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume One, The Best of Electric Velocipede, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, Glitter & Mayhem, Not Our Kind, and What Fates Impose. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of her short fiction, will be released in early 2015 from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers, a novel, will be released later that same year from Dark House Press.

xTx is a writer living in Southern California. Her work has been published in places like The Collagist, [PANK], Hobart, The Rumpus, The Chicago Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf. Her short story collection Normally Special is available from Tiny Hardcore Press and her chapbook Billie the Bull is available from Dzanc Books. Her story “The Mill Pond” won the 2012 storySouth Million Writers Award. She says nothing at www.notimetosayit.blogspot.com.

Bonnie ZoBell’s new linked collection from Press 53, What Happened Here: a novella and stories, was released in 2014. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, the Capricorn Novel Award, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She has held resident fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, and Dorland, received an MFA from Columbia University on fellowship, and currently teaches at San Diego Mesa College. Visit her at www.bonniezobell.com.

Susan Perabo is Writer in Residence and Professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Who I Was Supposed to Be, and a novel, The Broken Places (both with Simon and Schuster). Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, and New Stories from the South, and has appeared in numerous magazines, including One Story, Glimmer Train, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and The Sun. Her new collection of short stories is upcoming from Simon and Schuster in 2016.

In addition to co-editing Choose Wisely, Joanne Merriam has edited How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens and 140 And Counting: an anthology of writing from 7×20. In 2001, she quit her job as the Executive Assistant of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia to travel Canada and write The Glaze from Breaking. Her writing has also appeared in The Fiddlehead, [PANK], Per Contra, Strange Horizons, and The Journal of Unlikely Entomology. In 2004, she immigrated to the USA, and now resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

In addition to co-editing Choose Wisely, H. L. Nelson is head of the online magazine Cease, Cows and Co-CEO of LitDemon.com. Her publications include Writer’s Digest, Nightmare, Lunch Ticket, [PANK], plus over 50 others in the last few years. H. L.’s poem “Absolution” was nominated for Best of the Net 2013. Her fiction chapbook, The Sea is Only Meat, will come out this summer from Sundress Publications.

Stories from the book available online:

Reviews:

Composed of 35 gleefully dark short stories by and about women, this anthology is a welcome antidote to the conventional world of women’s fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Alice Monroe and agree that the minutely observed world of everyday life is just as viable a form of literature as the more adventurous fiction dominated by men, but, still, there’s something so energizing about girls who kill, or chase ghosts, or bide their time in strange worlds of the future. If there’s a mother daughter story in here, it’s likely to involve a little serial kidnapping as well. If dad was a sexual predator, then his little girl is going to be one too. Super heroes, with costumes, terrifying weapons, and all too human foibles abound. And the strange passage of time as a wife and mother? Tina May Hall describes it beautifully: “You remember the first six weeks of your firstborn’s life were the longest you’d ever known. Time slowed down into a milky trickle, stretched out, thinned. Then the rubber band snapped, and everything accelerated. An entire lacrosse season took place over the course of one rainy afternoon. Your knees sagged, wrinkled, tightened up again, grew bulbous as wormy apples in the time it took to walk to the ATM.” But this is the memory of a vampire crawling from her mausoleum in search or blood, not some elderly lady whiling away her last days in a nursing home. I don’t know how anyone can read this book and not feel energized.

—Vickie Fang, “Choose Wisely: 35 women up to no good,” Best New Fiction, 5 May 2015

What I enjoyed the most about this anthology was the range of characters: from doddering old attention seeking women, to women chased by their own demons (literally), to female serial killers and housewives striving to be perfect for their husbands. Every story showed a different type of woman facing situations that are both conceivable and inconceivable. . . This anthology is full of wonderful stories about women facing the roles they’ve chosen for themselves or had chosen for them – with glee, with sadness, with rebellion.

—Sharra Rosichan, “Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good: A Book Review,” Odds and Ends, 5 May 2015

After all, in a perfect world I’d just talk about how the anthology is all the things I mentioned above: strong, well written, and intriguing. Inside are a number of writers I downright worship. . . a stellar collection of high caliber writing.

—David S. Atkinson, “InReview: Choose Wisely,” InDigest, 30 April 2015

31 March 2015


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