Volume 9 Contributors

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and glitter enthusiast living mostly at a Starbucks somewhere in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture, and her work has been widely published in magazines. She is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, Fire in the Sky, 17 seventeen XVII, and Behind, All You've Got (forthcoming). Kristin is an assistant poetry editor at The Boiler and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked nights at The New Yorker.

Angela Apte is a writer and educator from Houston, Texas. She has an MFA in Poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry, Devil's Lake, Failbetter, and Mason's Road.

Chelsea Margaret Bodnar / 1990 / not even faintly like a rose. She is the author of Basement Gemini (Hyacinth Girl Press) and dead people's bedrooms (Ghost City Press). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in: The Bennington Review, Wyvern Lit, Sad Girl Review, Rogue Agent, Thirteen Myna Birds, Freezeray, and others. She is Very Happy to Be Here with all of you Fine People.

Poet and photographer, Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press, 2015). Ronda is a finalist for the Four Way Books Prize, and her poems have been nominated several times for the Pushcart prize. Her journal publications include Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, and Public Radio KUOW’s All Things Considered, among others.

Jennifer Bullis is author of the chapbook Impossible Lessons (MoonPath Press). Her poems and essays appear in Gulf Coast, Tinderbox, Water~Stone Review, Terrain.org, Bellingham Review, and Under a Warm Green Linden. She is a Pushcart nominee and an Artsmith Residency fellow, and her manuscript of resistance poems, “The Tongue of Narcissus,” was a finalist for the Brittingham & Pollak Prizes. Currently she is librettist for a cantata reinterpreting the mythical Sirens, to be performed by Seattle Baroque Orchestra and Burning River Baroque of Cleveland.

Maialise Carney (@maialisec) is a writer from the Boston area. When she isn’t staring at blank word documents, she is working on her application to become a professional hermit. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in The Bridge and Sagebrush Review. Read more of her work at maialisecarney.wordpress.com.

Kelle Schillaci Clarke is a Seattle-based writer and art journalist with work appearing in Barren Magazine, The Citron Review, Ghost Parachute, and several now-defunct alt-weeklies. She once earned an MFA from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, a place where cockroaches do, in fact, gather on porches like puddles. Find her @kelle224.

Chris Cleary is a native of southeastern Pennsylvania, in which many of his stories are set. He is the author of four novels: The Vagaries of Butterflies, The Ring of Middletown, At the Brown Brink Eastward, and The Vitality of Illusion. His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Belle Ombre, Easy Street, The Brasilia Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and other publications. His story "An Idea of the Journey" is anthologized in the award-winning collection Everywhere Stories.

Juliet Cook's poetry has appeared in a small multitude of magazines. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, recently including From One Ruined Human to Another (Cringe-Worthy Poets Collective/Dark Particle Press, 2018) and Another Set of Ripped-Out Bloody Pigtails (The Poet's Haven, 2019). She also has another new chapbook, the rabbits with red eyes forthcoming from ethel.

Cook's first full-length individual poetry book, Horrific Confection, was published by BlazeVOX. Her more recent full-length poetry book, A Red Witch, Every Which Way, is a collaboration with j/j hastain published by Hysterical Books in 2016. Her most recent full-length individual poetry book, Malformed Confetti was published by Crisis Chronicles Press in late 2018.

The poems appearing within the Summer 2019 Issue of Menacing Hedge also appear within a new May 2019 chapbook, DARK PURPLE INTERSECTIONS (inside my Black Doll Head Irises), published by Cook's own Blood Pudding Press for Dusie Kollektiv 9. (See more HERE).

Cook also sometimes creates abstract painting collage art hybrid creatures.

Cook's tiny independent press, Blood Pudding Press, sometimes publishes hand-designed poetry chapbooks and sometimes creates other art.

Find out more at JulietCook.weebly.com.

Shome Dasgupta is the author of i am here And You Are Gone (Winner Of The 2010 OW Press Fiction Chapbook Contest), The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India, 2013) which has been republished in the UK by Accent Press as The Sea Singer (2016), Anklet And Other Stories (Golden Antelope Press, 2017), Pretend I Am Someone You Like (University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press, 2018), and Mute (Tolsun Books, 2018). He currently serves as the Series Editor for the Wigleaf Top 50 and lives in Lafayette, LA. He can be found at shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.

Dez Deshaies is a writer, game designer, and multimedia artist currently based in Chicago. Recently, his work has appeared in the Adler Planetarium. He is on Instagram and Twitter @dezfjh. For more information, please visit www.deshaies.org.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Best American Poetry 2018, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. Along with María Isabel Àlvarez, he co-edited the anthology, Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018).

Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing. She is also an award-winning poet, and her books include, In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer, (2011), This Too (2017), Fearn (2019) and the scholarly collection of essays, Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain (2000). Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She lives with her human family, two Jack Russell terriers, and two backyard chickens in the foothills east of Los Angeles, where she serves as the faculty editor of MORIA Literary Magazine at Woodbury University.

Katherine Fallon's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Juked, Apple Valley Review, Colorado Review, Meridian, Foundry, and others, and her work will be featured in Best New Poets 2019. Her chapbook, The Toothmakers' Daughters, is available through Finishing Line Press. She teaches at Georgia Southern University, and shares domestic square footage with two cats and her favorite human, who helps her zip her dresses.

Kari A. Flickinger was a 2019 nominee for the Rhysling Award, and a finalist in the IHLR 2018 Photo Finish. She is an alumna of UC Berkeley. Find her: kariflickinger.com @kariflickinger legendcitycollective.wordpress.com.

Beth Gilstrap is the author of I AM BARBARELLA: STORIES (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and NO MAN’S WILD LAURA (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. She serves as Fiction Editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths and a reader at Creative Nonfiction. Her work has been selected as Longform.org’s Fiction Pick of the Week and recently chosen by Dan Chaon for inclusion in the Best Microfiction Anthology. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, The Minnesota Review, Hot Metal Bridge, and Wigleaf, among others.

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet from New York City. He is the author of Hijito (Platypus Press, 2019), selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the winner of the 2018 Broken River Prize, and the memoir Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood (Penguin Random House, 2012). Winner of the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, Fischer National Poetry Prize, Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry, Gómez’s writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in the New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Yale Review, BuzzFeed Reader, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and elsewhere. Carlos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. For more, please visit: www.CarlosLive.com.

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother, currently landlocked in St. Louis, MO. Her poems have been published in numerous journals including Into the Void, Noble/Gas, Five:2:One, SWWIM, Verity La, Califragile, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Yes Poetry. Her chapbook, Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe was published in May 2019 by Animal Heart Press. She is also Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.

Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of Fabulous Beast (Texas Review Press), runner-up for the 2018 X.J. Kennedy Prize, and Fabulous Beast: The Sow, a chapbook (Hyacinth Girl Press). She keeps a record of her writing life, experience in academia, and motherhood at mimsyandoutgrabe.blogspot.com.

Julia Hands is an editor and organizer from Seattle and Works with a variety of organizations, including Write Our Democracy, Crab Creek Review, and Lit Crawl Seattle. You can find her work currently or forthcoming in 5x5, Blink-Ink, Evansville Review, Dime Show Review, Menacing Hedge, and Cream City Review.

Jeffrey Hecker is the author of Rumble Seat (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011) & the chapbooks Hornbook (Horse Less Press, 2012), Instructions for the Orgy (Sunnyoutside Press, 2013), & Before He Let Them Guide Sleigh (ShirtPocket Press, 2013). Recent work has appeared in Mascara Literary Review, La Fovea, LEVELER, Spittoon, decomP, Entropy, BOAAT, Dream Pop Journal, & DELUGE. He holds a degree from Old Dominion University. He’s a fourth-generation Hawaiian American and he currently resides in Norfolk, Virginia, where he teaches at The Muse Writers Center.

Emily Huang is an east coast novelist-in-progress who also enjoys writing short stories and poems. Her work is being published for the first time in Menacing Hedge in the fall of 2019. In her spare time, she is a poi rave dancer and tiramisu enthusiast.

E. Thomas Jones is a queer poet from Ellijay, GA and a current MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. She was the recipient of the 2018 Lily Peter fellowship and is an assistant poetry editor for The Arkansas International. She has remained humble thanks to her mother, who, when told which poems were taken by a journal, grimaced and asked: “Why those?”

Eli Karren is a storyteller, poet, and second grade teacher currently residing in Austin, TX. He was the 2017 recipient of the Benjamin C. Wainwright poetry prize and has had his works appear in Redlands Review, Geometry Magazine, and In Layman's Terms. His work is also forthcoming in Turn it Up: Poetry in Music from Jazz to Hip Hop.

Jack King has been published in Sanscrit, Sand Hill Review, Blue Lake Review, Forge, Oklahoma Review, Gemini, Epiphany, SENSIAC, ISSA, Info World, and The Home of the Brave Anthology. His work in fiction has garnered him first-place finishes in the Maryland Writer’s Association’s Novel and Short Story Contests in 2006 and 2012, respectively. King was also awarded third place in the 2014 Sand Hills Writer’s Series short fiction contest, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has attended AWP, the Tinker Mountain Writer’s Workshop, and the Maryland Writer’s Association Conference, and has studied with such writers as Pinckney Benedict, Fred G. Leebron, and Naeem Murr. King received his MFA from Queen’s University, and has worked for over twenty-five years in the IT industry. When not writing, you can find often find him fixing his wife’s laptop.

Catherine Kyle is the author of Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), along with six shorter collections, most recently Coronations (Ghost City Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Mid-American Review, Bombay Gin, and other journals, and has been honored by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and other organizations. She works as an assistant professor at the College of Western Idaho, where she teaches creative writing and composition. Her website is www.catherinebaileykyle.com.

Suzanne Langlois’s poems have appeared in The Maine Review, NAILED Magazine, Cider Press Review, The Fourth River, Off The Coast, Rattle, and on the Button Poetry channel. She teaches high school English in Portland, Maine and is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.

Kelsi Long is an MFA candidate in Writing & Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She serves as a Co-Managing Editor at Hunger Mountain, the annual literary journal of VCFA. She’s also a Poetry Co-Editor at Mud Season Review, the online literary magazine of the Burlington Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Corvid Queen, Memoir Mixtapes, Sad Girl Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, she now lives in Montpelier, Vermont. Find her on Twitter @tweetsbykelsi.

Nancy Chen Long is the author of Wider Than the Sky (Diode Editions, 2020) and Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Poetry Prize. She is the grateful recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing fellowship. Her work was selected as the winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award and has been featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Indiana Humanities. Recent poems can be found in Poet Lore, Copper Nickel, Tar River Poetry, The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She works in the Research Technologies division at Indiana University.

Veronica Mattaboni is a poet and writer living in West Chester, Pennsylvania. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Writing and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has been featured on The Offing, The Feminine Collective, and Penn and Anvil Press. She is the Editor in Chief of Peach Velvet Mag, a theme-based zine press based in the West Chester/Philadelphia area.

Marilyn McCabe's work has garnered her an Orlando Prize from A Room of Her Own, the Hilary Tham Capital Collection contest award from The Word Works resulting in publication of her book of poems Perpetual Motion, and two artist grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. Her second book of poems, Glass Factory, was published in 2016. Her poems and videopoetry have been published in a variety of print and online literary magazines. She blogs about writing and reading at marilynonaroll.wordpress.com.

Don McLellan has worked as a journalist in Canada, South Korea, and Hong Kong. He has been shortlisted (in 2016) and longlisted (in 2018) for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and has published two story collections, In the Quiet After Slaughter (Libros Libertad, a 2009 ReLit Award finalist) and Brunch with the Jackals (Thistledown, 2015). More at donmclellan.com.

James Miller is a native of Houston, Texas. Recent publications include Cold Mountain Review, The Maine Review, Lunch Ticket, Gravel, Main Street Rag, Verdad, and Juked. Upcoming publications include 2 Bridge, The Write Launch, The Shore, Plainsongs, and The Atlanta Review.

Oak Morse is a poet, and theatre teacher who has traveled across the Southeast as a performance poet as well as a teacher of literary poetry. He has a Bachelor of Journalism from Georgia State University. He is the winner of the 2017 Magpie Award for Poetry for the poem “Garbage Disposal” in Issue 16 of Pulp Literature. Other work of his has appeared in the Strange Horizons, Underground, Page and Spine, Fourth & Sycamore, Dryland, and Patch. Oak currently lives in Houston, Texas, where he works on his poetry collection titled When the Tongue Goes Bad, a themed set of work aimed to bring attention to a contemporary speech disorder diagnosis known as “cluttering,” a diagnosis which Oak has worked tirelessly to overcome. You can find more of his work at www.oakmorse.com.

Jori O'Grady is a current junior at Grandview High school in Aurora, Colorado, where she is both the editor and chief for her school's newspaper and her school's literary and art publication. She was a finalist for the 2018 Virgina B. Ball Scholarship. Menacing Hedge is her first publication. Her Instagram is @joriogrady and her Twitter is @ogreatyy.

Gavin Pate is the author of the novel The Way To Get Here (Bootstrap Press) and short fiction found at Nightmare Magazine, The Collagist, & Barrelhouse, among others. His collection of short-fiction, Notes from the Coming War, is forthcoming from Bootstrap. He lives in Norfolk, VA, where he husbands and fathers, while teaching at Virginia Wesleyan University.

Annie Percik lives in London with her husband, Dave, where she is revising her first novel, whilst working as a University Complaints Officer. She writes a blog about writing and posts short fiction on her website. She also publishes a photo-story blog, recording the adventures of her teddy bear. He is much more popular online than she is. She likes to run away from zombies in her spare time.

Daniel Priest's poems have appeared in Image, The Southern Review, Concho River Review, Star*Line, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and online at The Rumpus. He lives in Austin where he works as an arborist.

Justin Runge is the author of Plainsight (New Michigan Press, 2012) and Hum Decode (Greying Ghost Press, 2014). His criticism has been featured by Black Warrior Review and Pleiades, and his poetry has been published in Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, DIAGRAM, Colorado Review, and other journals.

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of six books, most recently Border Crossings, a poetry collection. His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s members’ choice award, and his memoir Guess and Check won the Electronic Literature bronze award for multicultural fiction. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Nikki Saltz is a writer from South Africa, now residing in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been published by The Puritan, (parenthetical) magazine, the Toronto Star, & Chatelaine Magazine. Niki's short story, Louise Tomorrow, was the winner of the Ontario Book Publisher's Organization's 2018 short story competition. Nikki is working on her first novel, also titled Louise Tomorrow, with support from The Toronto Arts Council. She is currently the Screenwriter in Residence at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Rikki Santer’s poetry has appeared in numerous publications both nationally and abroad including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Margie, The Journal of American Poetry, Hotel Amerika, Crab Orchard Review, Grimm, Slipstream, and The Main Street Rag. Her work has received many honors including five Pushcart and three Ohioana book award nominations. These poems are from her up-coming collection, Drop Jaw, inspired by ventriloquism. Please contact her through her website: www.rikkisanter.com.

Ravibala Shenoy following her retirement as a professional librarian has published award-winning short stories (India Currents), short stories (Best Asian Speculative Fiction 2018, Chicago Quarterly Review, Copperfield Review, Cooper Street Journal, Rivulets), flash fiction and flash nonfiction (Jellyfish Review), memoir (Sugar Mule) and op-ed pieces (Chicago Tribune, India Currents). She was a former book review editor for Jaggery and has reviewed books for Library Journal since 1997. She lives in Naperville, Illinois.

Catherine Sinow lives in San Diego. Her stories have appeared in publications such as Reservoir, The Summerset Review, and FRiGG; one of her small lit zines was shortlisted for a 2017 Broken Pencil Zine Award. She’s a graduate of the writing program at Colorado College and today she lives in San Diego and works in literary publicity. Find her other work at catherinesinow.com.

Jack Somers' work has appeared in WhiskeyPaper, Jellyfish Review, Coffin Bell, The Molotov Cocktail, and a number of other publications. He lives in Ohio with his wife and three children. You can find him on Twitter @jsomers530.

SM Stubbs is co-owner of a bar in Brooklyn. He is the recipient of a scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. He is winner of the 2019 Rose Warner Poetry Prize from The Freshwater Review and was runner-up in both the Atticus Review Poetry Contest 2019 and the Cagibi 2019 Macaron Prize in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Pinch, The Normal School, Jabberwock Review, Cherry Tree, Poetry Northwest, Opossum, Glassworks, The Bookends Review, Puerto del Sol, Carolina Quarterly, and others.

Annie Q. Syed is a reader and writer who teaches full time. Her stories, Collection of Auguries, were published in 2013. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, Fictive Dream, Burning House Press, Tahoma Literary Review, Ellipses Zine, Blue Fifth Review, The Bangor Literary Journal, Afreada, and in Reflex Fiction Anthology. You can find more of her writings and thoughts at www.annieqsyed.com.

Tara Tamburello’s fiction and essays have appeared in The First Line, Vestal Review’s Condensed to Flash: World Classics anthology, Tikkun.org, and others. Her short plays have been produced in Philadelphia and the surrounding metro, where she lives with her husband, children, and an elegant black cat.

Caitlin Thomson is the co-founder of The Poetry Marathon, an international writing event. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including: The Adroit Journal, Rust + Moth, Barrow Street, and Radar. You can learn more about her writing at www.caitlinthomson.com.

Elizabeth Vignali is an optician and writer in the Pacific Northwest, where she coproduces the Bellingham Kitchen Sessions reading series. She is the author of Object Permanence (Finishing Line Press) and the forthcoming Endangered [Animal] (Floating Bridge Press), and coauthor of Your Body A Bullet (Unsolicited Press). Her work has appeared in Willow Springs, Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Tinderbox, The Literary Review, and others. Find her at www.elizabethvignali.com.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress, 2013) as well as eight chapbooks, most recently The Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2018).

Miranda Williams is a writer and student from New Mexico who now resides in Phoenix, Arizona. Her work appears in Sixfold, Alluvian magazine, Passages, and West Trade Review. Additionally, her awards include the Paulette Schlosser Writing Award, the Arizona State University Homecoming Writing Award, and the Glendon Swarthout Award in fiction. She is currently working on her first novel and a short story collection tentatively titled "Decay." Find her on Instagram @mirandaiswriting.