The best way to start your Friday is with these three talented poets.
KMA Sullivan is the author of two poetry collections: Inclined to Riot (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019) and Necessary Fire, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). Her poems and essays have appeared in Boston Review, The Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review, Forklift, Ohio, The Nervous Breakdown, The Offing, diode, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies in creative nonfiction and poetry at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Summer Literary Seminars and she is the coeditor-in-chief of Vinyl and the publisher at YesYes Books.
KMA received an MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech; in earlier years she earned degrees in philosophy from Trinity College and Boston College and raised five children with her partner of 35 years. She is the cofounder of YesYes Healing Garden, an acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine in Portland, OR.
KMA believes in the power of art and literature to improve the lives they engage.
Hastings Hensel is the author of the poetry collections
Ballyhoo (forthcoming, March 2019, Johns Hopkins University Press),
Winter Inlet, which won the 2014-2015 Unicorn Press First Book Contest, and the chapbook
Control Burn, which won the 2011 Iron Horse Literary Review Single-Author Competition.
He is from Columbia, South Carolina, and he graduated from Sewanee: The University of the South before earning his M.F.A. from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He is currently serving as the Tennessee Williams Fellow in Creative Writing at Sewanee.
His writing has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including
Gray's Sporting Journal, The Greensboro Review, New South, storySouth, The Hopkins Review, PLEIADES, Valley Voices, Cave Wall, 32 Poems, and many others. He has been awarded the
South Carolina Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry and been named
Grand Strand Artist of the Month. His magazine articles appear frequently in
South Carolina Living, Grand Strand, South Carolina Wildlife and other magazines.
Alexandra Teague's first book of poetry, Mortal Geography, (Persea 2010) won the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award Gold Medal for Poetry. Her second book, The Wise and Foolish Builders, was written and researched in part thanks to a 2011 NEA fellowship, and published by Persea in 2015. Her first novel, The Principles Behind Flotation, was published by Skyhorse in 2017, and came out in paperback in 2019. She is also, with Brian Clements and Dean Rader, editor of the anthology Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon 2017). Her third book of poetry, Or What We'll Call Desire, is forthcoming from Persea in August 2019.
Alexandra was awarded a 2019 Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellowship. She was previously the recipient of the 2014 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize, a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a 2006-2008 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. After living, studying, and teaching in states including Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, and California, she is currently an Associate Professor in University of Idaho's MFA program, faculty advisor for Fugue, and an editor for
Broadsided Press. She is also a founding member of the interdisciplinary arts BASK Collective. She lives in Moscow, Idaho, with her husband, the musician and composer Dylan Champagne, and is currently on sabbatical in Cardiff, Wales.
