Wendy J. Fox is a book review editor for Buzzfeed and a contributor to Ms. Magazine, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Business Insider, among others. In 2015, her collection The Seven Stages of Anger received the Press 53 Award, and in 2020, she was a finalist in literary fiction for If the Ice Had Held from the Colorado Book Awards.
Elizabeth Colen
In Fall 2018 Black Lawrence Press published Elizabeth Colen’s sixth book, a fiction collaboration entitled True Ash. This spring she entered her third year as an editor at Tupelo Press. This summer she hopes to spend a lot of time returning to a novel project, as well as preparing for several new courses she’s developing for next year, including AIDS Literature and Black Feminist Dystopian Narratives, which was inspired by the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M Archive.
Dayna Patterson
Dayna Patterson’s chapbook, Titania in Yellow, is forthcoming in 2019 (Porkbelly Press), and her full-length collection of lyric essays and poetry, If Mother Braids a Waterfall, will meet the world in 2020 (Signature Books). She recently gave a reading in Salt Lake City sponsored by the Sunstone Foundation. This past year, she received three Pushcart nominations and was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won second place in the Eugene England Memorial Essay Contest for her piece “Fledge.” Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, North American Review, Cave Wall, and others. She was awarded a 2019 SAF Mineral School Fellowship, and she continues her work as Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal that makes its home at the intersection of faith and doubt.
Christopher Loar
Chris Loar’s unhealthy obsession with Daniel Defoe continues. His essay on Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year will appear in Eighteenth-Century Fiction this fall, and he is currently working on a book chapter about Defoe’s responses to scientific developments in the early eighteenth century. He’s also still co-editing the online journal Digital Defoe (digitaldefoe.org). And this summer he’ll travel to York in the UK to present some of his research on Defoe and deism. His students this year have mostly been spared from this obsession, though; instead, his teaching has focused on the sibling novelists Henry and Sarah Fielding; on ecological writing in the past, present, and future tenses; and on literary animals.