Authors


Ellery Akers

Ellery Akers is a writer, artist, and naturalist living on the Northern California coast. Her previous collection, Knocking on the Earth, was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Jose Mercury News. She is also the author of a children’s novel, Sarah’s Waterfall. Akers has won eleven national awards, including the Poetry International Prize, the John Masefield Award, the Paumanok Poetry Award, and Sierra magazine’s Nature Writing Award. Her poetry has been featured on National Public Radio and on American Life in Poetry, and has appeared in such journals as The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Sun. Among her honors are fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She has taught writing at Cabrillo College and at conferences and currently teaches private poetry workshops. An award-winning artist as well, Akers exhibits her artwork in museums and galleries nationally.

  • Practicing the Truth

Kathy Anderson

Kathy Anderson was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project, the Permafrost Book Prize, and the 2013 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize. Her short story collection, BULL AND OTHER STORIES, winner of the 2015 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, is her first book. Her short stories have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Tahoma Literary Review, Barcelona Review, and Apple Valley Review, among others. Awards include a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in prose and two Pushcart Prize nominations. A playwright and Dramatists Guild member, her plays have been produced and staged nationally and internationally. She has worked as a public librarian in South Jersey and now lives in Philadelphia.

  • Bull and Other Stories 

Katherine Ayres

Katherine Ayres lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she writes and teaches writing to graduate students in Chatham University’s MFA Program. She also lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts where she writes, gardens, hikes, kayaks, and watches for bears. She is the author of ten books for children and teens, as well as three chapbooks of poetry. She has been honored as a Champion of Literacy, as Outstanding Writer for Children by the Pennsylvania School Library Association. Her picture book, Up, Down, and Around was chosen as the Pennsylvania One Book, Every Young Child, and as the Kansas Reads to Preschool selection. Bear Season is her first collection of essays.

  • Bear Season

Jacqueline Berger

Jacqueline Berger’s The Gift that Arrives Broken is the winner of the 2009 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by Alicia Ostriker. Berger is also the author of two previous books of poetry, Things That Burn, winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize, University of Utah Press, and The Mythologies of Danger, winner of the Bluestem Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including The Iowa Review, River Styx, and New Millennium Writings. She teaches creative writing and directs the graduate program in English at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. She was born and raised in Los Angeles and now lives in San Francisco with her husband.

  • The Gift That Arrives Broken

George Bilgere

George Bilgere’s recent books include Haywire (winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award in 2006) and The Good Kiss, selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins as the winner of the 2001 University of Akron Poetry Prize. “In the house of American poetry,” said Collins, “The Good Kiss is a breath of fresh American air.” Bilgere has received grants, fellowships, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the Society of Midland Authors, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. In 2009, he won a Pushcart Prize. Bilgere teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

  • The White Museum

Peter Blair

Peter Blair’s most recent book is Farang, published by Autumn House Press. His first full-length book, Last Heat, won the Washington Prize in 1999 and was published by Word Works Press. Born in Pittsburgh, he has worked in a psychiatric ward, a steel mill, and served three years in the Peace Corps in Thailand. Currently, he teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and lives there with his wife and son.

  • The Divine Salt
  • Farang

Chana Bloch

Chana Bloch, the author of award-winning books of poetry, translation, and scholarship, is Professor Emerita of English at Mills College, where she taught for over thirty years and directed the Creative Writing Program. Bloch is co-translator of The Song of Songs, and of poets, Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch.  www.chanabloch.com/

  • Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems 1980-2015
  • Blood Honey

Mark Brazaitis

Mark Brazaitis is the author of six books of fiction, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and a book of poems, The Other Language, which won the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize. His writing has been featured on The Diane Rehm Show as well as on public radio in Cleveland, Iowa City, New York City, and Pittsburgh. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, Brazaitis is a professor of English and directs the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop at West Virginia University.

  • Truth Poker

Brian Brodeur

Brian Brodeur’s Natural Causes is the winner of the 2012 Autumn House Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize, and the chapbook So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 2007). Brian maintains the blog “How a Poem Happens,” an online anthology of over one hundred and fifty interviews with poets. He lives with his wife in Cincinnati where he is the Elliston Fellow in Poetry in the PhD in English and Comparative Literature program at University of Cincinnati.

  • Natural Causes: Poems

Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown’s six collections of poems have won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and have twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. A new collection of poems, No Need of Sympathy, will be out from BOA Editions, Ltd, in October 2013. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. She now lives in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.

  • Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives

Rick Campbell

Rick Campbell is the author of The Traveler’s Companion, Setting The World In Order which won the Walt McDonald Prize, and Dixmont published by Autumn House Press. Campbell has won an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and two fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. He is the director of Anhinga Press and the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and he teaches English at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida. He lives with his wife and daughter in Gadsden County, Florida.

  • Dixmont

Jay Carson

A seventh generation Pittsburgher, Jay Carson teaches creative writing, literature, and rhetoric at Robert Morris University, where he is a University Professor and a faculty advisor to the student literary journal Rune. Jay regularly presents, reads, and publishes in local and national venues. More than 60 of his poems have appeared in national literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. He also co-edited with Judith Robinson The Snow Falls Up, a collection of Margaret Menamin’s poetry. The Cinnamon of Desire, a full-length collection, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag in the fall of 2012. Jay considers his poetry Appalachian, Irish, accessible, and the derived spiritual survival of a raging, misspent youth and just what you might need.

  • Irish Coffee 

Sean and Karen Conley

Sean and Karen Conley have been teaching power vinyasa yoga for more than 10 years. The Amazing Yoga style allows people to find true health by creating a deep spiritual connection. Sean and Karen lead teacher training programs in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Pittsburgh, where they are the yoga teachers for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Before discovering yoga, Sean spent four years in the NFL and Karen had an extensive career in dance. Sean and Karen live in Pittsburgh with their four children.

  • Amazing Yoga: A Practical Guide to Strength, Wellness, and Spirit

Ashley Cowger

Ashley Cowger’s Peter Never Came won the 2011 Autumn House Fiction Prize. Ashley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a BA in English from Northern Arizona University. Her short fiction has appeared in several literary journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She teaches college English and is the editor and cofounder of the online journal, MFA/MFYou (www.mfamfyou.com). She has divided her life fairly evenly between Alaska, Arizona, and California, and has driven the historic Al-Can Highway twice. She currently lives in southeast Ohio with her husband, cat, and collection of overweight stuffed animals.

  • Peter Never Came

Sharon Dilworth

Sharon Dilworth, the fiction editor of Autumn House Press, is the author of two short story collections, Women Drinking Benedictine and The Long White (Iowa Award for Short Fiction, 1988). Her new novel, On the Street Where We Live, will be released in the Fall of 2010. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, and for ten years she served as fiction editor for CMU Press.

  • Keeping the Wolves at Bay: Stories by Emerging American Writers

Patricia Dobler

Patricia Dobler was born in Middletown, Ohio, in 1939. She is the author of UXB (Mill Hunk Books, 1991) and Talking to Strangers (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) which won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. She also completed a third full-length collection, titled Now. Dobler’s poetry has been widely anthologized including in Garrison Keillor’s nationally syndicated radio show Writer’s Almanac. She lived in Pittsburgh, PA, where she taught at Carlow College and directed the Women’s Creative Writing Center. She died on July 24, 2004.

  • Collected Poems

Marilyn Donnelly

Marilyn Donnelly has always lived, spoken, and written, with a stunning, indelible, original voice. Her poems, while often brief, plumb great depths of wisdom and wit. Her style of humor sweeps cobwebs and confusion far far away. She reminds me of those haiku masters of the 13th century whom any of us would have been grateful to meet on a trail. Her voice would have saved us then, as she inspires and saves us now. Do not miss her beauty!

–Naomi Shihab Nye

  • Coda

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is an assistant professor in the MFA in Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. His first book, Descanso For My Father: Fragments Of A Life (Bison Books, 2012), won the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and International Book Award for Best New Nonfiction, and has been taught in classrooms throughout the country. His essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies including New Letters, Fourth Genre, The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction and Brief Encounters (Norton, 2015). His honors include a New Letters Literary Award, a Sonora Review Nonfiction Award, a High Desert Journal Obsidian Prize, a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and fellowships from the Arizona Poetry Center and Vermont Studio Center. A native New Mexican, he lives with his wife and two children in Richmond, Virginia. 

  • Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams

Frank X. Gaspar

Frank X. Gaspar was born and raised in the old Portuguese West End of Provincetown, Massachusetts. He is the author of five collections of poetry and two novels. Among his many awards are the Morse, Anhinga, and Brittingham Prizes for poetry, multiple inclusions in Best American Poetry, four Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and a California Arts Council Fellowship in poetry. He most recently held the Helio and Amelia Pedrosa/Luso-American Foundation Endowed Chair at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

  • Late Rapturous: Poems

Sarah Gerkensmeyer

Sarah Gerkensmeyer was named a finalist for the 2011 Italo Calvino Prize for Fabulist Fiction, judged by Aimee Bender. She has received scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Ragdale, and the Grub Street Launch Lab. Short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including: Guernica, The New Guard, The Massachusetts Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cream City Review, The Nebraska Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Sarah is the current 2012-13 Pen Parentis Fellow. She received her MFA in fiction from Cornell University and now teaches creative writing at SUNY Fredonia, where she co-directs the Mary Louise White Visiting Writers Series.

  • What You Are Now Enjoying: Stories

Robert Gibb

Robert Gibb was born and still lives in Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of seven books of poetry. Among his awards are the National Poetry Series, two Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, seven Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants, The Wildwood Poetry Prize, and the Devil’s Millhopper Chapbook Prize.

  • Sheet Music
  • What the Heart Can Bear: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1979-1993

Leonard Gontarek

A native of Philadelphia, Leonard Gontarek has been a cabdriver, movie projectionist, teacher, and bookseller. He coordinates Peace/Works: Poets and Writers for Peace. His poetry has been widely published including in American Poetry Review and The Best American Poetry: 2005 edited by David Lehman and Paul Muldoon. Deja Vu Diner is his second full-length book.

  • Deja Vu Diner

Diane Goodman

Diane Goodman is a writer and caterer/personal chef in Miami Beach. She is author of two collections of short stories, The Genius of Hunger and The Plated Heart, both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She has published articles and stories in national magazines. Her work often incorporates the waiters, chefs, cooks, and restaurant aficionados of her catering world.

  • Party Girls: Stories

Derek Green

Derek Green has spent more than a decade as a professional journalist, as well as a contract consultant for several multinational corporations. His work has taken him to twenty-two countries on six continents. Green was educated at the University of Michigan, where he was a three-time winner of the prestigious Avery and Jule Hopwood Award in creative writing. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in national magazines and literary journals, and he has taught creative writing and journalism at the university level. The son of an Irish father and Puerto Rican mother, Green is a fluent speaker of Spanish. He lives in Michigan with his wife and son and is currently at work on a novel. New World Order is his first book.

  • New World Order: Stories

Corrinne Clegg Hales

Corrinne Clegg Hales was born in Tooele, Utah, and grew up in Salt Lake City. To Make it Right won the 2011 Autumn House Poetry Prize selected by Claudia Emerson. Her previous full-length books include Separate Escapes (Ashland Poetry Press, winner of the Richard Snyder Prize), Underground (Ahsahta Press), as well as two chapbooks. Awards include two NEA Fellowship Grants and the River Styx International Poetry Prize. She lives in Fresno, California where she coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno.

  • To Make It Right

Raza Ali Hasan

Raza Ali Hasan is the author of one previous collection of poems Grieving Shias (Sheep Meadow Press, 2006). He was born in Chittagong, Bangladesh and grew up in Indonesia and Islamabad, Pakistan. He received an MFA from Syracuse University. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Blackbird, and Shenandoah. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

  • 67 Mogul Miniatures

Samuel Hazo

The author of books of poetry, fiction, essays and plays, Samuel Hazo is the Director of the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he also is McAnulty Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Duquesne University.

  • The Song of the Horse: Selected Poems 1958-2008
  • Just Once: New and Previous Poems
  • A Flight to Elsewhere

Mary Crockett Hill

Mary Crockett Hill has worked as a factory slug, staggeringly bad waitress, incompetent secretary, the person who irons name tags in industrial uniforms, toilet-seat hand model, fundraising spy, freelance writer, history museum director, and college English teacher. Her first book, If You Return Home With Food, was a nominee for the Virginia Book of the Year in Poetry and the winner of the Bluestem Award. Mary Crockett Hill’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines, as well as on Poetry Daily and in American Poetry: The Next Generation. She is a co-author of the history A Town by the Name of Salem and is currently working on a novel for young adults. A Theory of Everything was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the 2008 Autumn House Poetry Prize. Mary lives along the old Great Road in Virginia with her husband and children.

  • A Theory of Everything

John Hoerr

John Hoerr grew up in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, the setting for Monongahela Dusk. He worked for several news organizations, including Business Week and WQED-TV in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, and New York. Hoerr specialized in national labor reporting in the 1960s when the steel, auto, coal mining and other unions were large and strong enough to conduct nationwide strikes in support of wage demands. Out of this experience, he wrote three nonfiction books including And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry. He and his wife live in Massachusetts.

  • Monongahela Dusk: a Novel

Andrea Hollander

Andrea Hollander (formerly Andrea Hollander Budy) is the author of three chapbooks and four full-length poetry collections. Her honors include the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. For twenty-two years Hollander was the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she received the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Now a resident of Portland, Oregon, she is the recipient of a 2013 Oregon Literary Fellowship and a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award.

  • Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012
  • Woman in the Painting
  • When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women

Robert Isenberg

Robert Isenberg is an award-winning journalist, playwright, and stage-performer. He is the creator of the Pittsburgh Monologue Project and co-founder of the Hodgepodge Society comedy lecture series. Isenberg serves as the first ever Whitford Fellow at Chatham University and teaches at Duquesne University. Originally from Vermont, he lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

  • The Archipelago: A Balkan Passage

Richard Jackson

Richard Jackson is the author of seven books of poems, including Heartwall which won the 2000 Juniper Prize. A professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, he has won Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA, Witter-Bynner and NEH Fellowships, as well as the Slovene Order of Freedom Medal for his literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans.

  • Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems

Jill Kandel

Jill Kandel grew up in North Dakota, riding her Appaloosa bareback across the prairie. She has lived and worked in Zambia, Indonesia, England, and in the Netherlands. She now lives with her husband and children in Minnesota where she teaches creative writing and essay. Every Friday she goes to a county jail where she teaches journal writing to female inmates. Kandel’s work has been anthologized in Best Spiritual Writing 2012 and in Becoming: What Makes a Woman. Her essays have been published in The Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, River Teeth, Pinch, Image, and Brevity.

  • So Many Africas: Six Years in a Zambian Village

Victoria Kelly

Victoria Kelly received her B.A. Summa Cum Laude from Harvard University, her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her M.Phil. in Creative Writing from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, where she was a U.S. Mitchell Scholar. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in dozens of anthologies and journals including The Best American Poetry series, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and North American Review, among others. Her chapbook, Prayers of an American Wife, was the co-winner of the 2012 Coal Hill Prize and was published by Autumn House Press in 2013.

  • Prayers of an American Wife

Maxwell King

Maxwell King is the former Editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and President of The Heinz Endowments. He and his wife, Peggy, live on a farm in Westmoreland County, PA, with their two dogs, Finn and Cora, and spend time in New England with their two sons and three grandsons. He has written articles for numerous magazines and newspapers, and has published poetry in about a dozen literary periodicals.

  • Crossing Laurel Run

Elizabeth Kirschner

Elizabeth Kirschner has published three previous books of poetry, Twenty Colors, Postal Routes and Slow Risen Among the Smoke Trees all by Carnegie Mellon University Press. In addition, she has a CD released by Albany Records wherein her own poetry, not a translation, has been set to Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe. Now titled The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons, it premiered in Vienna in the fall of 2005, followed by an American debut in Boston featuring soprano Jean Danton accompanied by pianist Thomas Stumpf. She collaborates with many composers and has taught at Boston College since 1990. She lives in Kittery, Maine.  elizabethkirschner.com/

  • My Life as a Doll

Danusha Laméris

Danusha Laméris was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to a Dutch father and a mother from the island of Barbados. Her family lived, briefly, in Beirut, Lebanon during the outbreak of the 1975 Civil War. Otherwise, she was raised in Mill Valley and Berkeley, California. After studying painting and graduating from U.C.S.C. with a B.A. in Fine Arts, she began to dedicate herself to writing poems. She now lives in Santa Cruz, California with her husband, Armando, and teaches ongoing, private poetry workshops.

  • The Moons of August

Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea is Poet Laureate of Vermont. His eleventh collection of poems, I Was Thinking of Beauty, is available from Four Way Books. His third collection of personal essays, A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters, and Wildlife, appeared from Skyhorse Publishing earlier this year. Founder and for thirteen years editor of New England Review, he lives in northern Vermont.

  • Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives

Miriam Levine

Miriam Levine is the author of three previous poetry collections. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and grants from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. The Dark Opens was selected by Mark Doty as the winner of the 2007 Autumn House Poetry Prize. Levine lives in Massachusetts and Florida.

  • The Dark Opens

Samuel Ligon

Samuel Ligon is the author of Safe in Heaven Dead, a novel (HarperCollins, 2003), as well as the winner of the 2008 Autumn House Fiction Prize for his collection of stories Drift and Swerve. His stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, Post Road, New Orleans Review, Keyhole, Sleepingfish, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, and elsewhere. He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers, and is the editor of Willow Springs. He lives in Spokane with his wife and two children.

  • Drift and Swerve: Stories

Ada Limón

Ada Limón is originally from Sonoma, California. She received her MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from New York University. A two-time Pushcart Nominee and a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, she received a grant for Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Lucky Wreck, selected by Jean Valentine as the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Prize, is Ada’s first book.

  • lucky wreck

Anne Marie Macari

Anne Marie Macari is the author of two previous books, Gloryland (Alice James, 2005), and Ivory Cradle, which won the APR/Honickman first book prize in 2000, chosen by Robert Creeley. Macari was the recipient of the James Dickey prize for poetry from Five Points Magazine and her poems have appeared in numerous journals such as: The Iowa Review, The American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Field, and others. Macari is the director of the Drew University Low-Residency MFA Program. She lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.