Relief News Archives | Page 2 of 14 | Relief: A Christian Literary Expression

Tell your friends and family: Relief needs your poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, images, graphic narrative, etc.!

Dear readers,

As many of you know, we had some trouble with Asian hackers back in July. While we have happily recovered our blog, one exceptionally sad consequence of this is that we have lost our old submission system. I’m not a computer guy, but my people who are can only sigh and tell me, over and again, that it’s lost.

Let me assure you that no information, to our knowledge, has been compromised; the system has simply been corrupted beyond the reach of modern medicine, and at least one of us may have heard God say, “Look, my child, it’s lost. Let it go.”

That means we need to get back as many of the submissions as we can ASAP. If you or someone you love submitted to us since May 1, we need you/them to resubmit your work!

We have a new submission system that should be more hacker-proof. Click the Submit option in the menu above or right here.

Poetry editor Tania Runyan hit up some of her friends for this issue, proving she has good taste in friends and poetry, and making us quite grateful to have her on board. If you were at Calvin’s Festival, you may recognize some of these names. Others are new discoveries for us, and still others are new friends.

	Kristin George Bagdanov "At the Shelter Checking the Children for Lice", "After the Flood", "During the Drought" Kristin George Bagdanov received her B.A. in English Literature from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA. This fall, she and her husband will be moving to Fort Collins, CO where she will be an M.F.A candidate in Poetry at Colorado State University. Her chapbook, We Are Mostly Water, was a finalist in the 2011 New Women's Voices Contest and was published this spring by Finishing Line Press. Her poems can also be found in recent or forthcoming issues of RATTLE, The Cresset, and Rock & Sling. She is a 2012-2015 Lilly Graduate Fellow and a 2012-2013 Phi Kappa Phi Graduate Fellow.
	Lachlan Brown "Lent3" Lachlan Brown is a lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at Charles Sturt University Australia. His poems have appeared in journals including Southerly, Heat, Mascara, and Antipodes. Lachlan is currently working on his first volume of poetry as well as collaborating on an album of church music. Lachlan lives with his wife Corinne and his son Hamish in Wagga Wagga where they attend St Aidan’s Presbyterian Church.
	Barbara Crooker "Aubade", "Peeps" Barbara Crooker’s poems appear in a variety of literary journals, including The Christian Science Monitor, The Christian Century, Christianity and Literature, Sojourners, Seminary Ridge Review, Rock & Sling, Assisi, Ruminate, Perspectives, Literature and Belief, The Cresset, Tiferet, America and anthologies, including Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature, Good Poems American Places (Garrison Keillor, editor), Looking for God in All the Right Places, and the Bedford Introduction to Literature. She has won a number of awards, including the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Prize (Stanley Kunitz, judge) and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Literature.
	Dave Harrity "" Dave Harrity is an author and teacher living in Kentucky. His next book, due out this fall from Seedbed, is Making Manifest, a book of devotional meditations and writing exercises for personal and communal creative writing practice. The founder of Antler, he travels the country conducting workshops about the intersection of faith and imagination. He lives in Louisville with his wife Amanda, and their children Emmalynne and Elias. Connect with him directly at thisisantler.com.
	Marci Rae Johnson "Music of the Spheres", "Conversion" Marci Rae Johnson holds an MFA in Poetry Writing from Spalding University. She currently teaches at Valparaiso University, where she serves as Poetry Editor for The Cresset and on the English department reading series committee (Wordfest). She is also the Poetry Editor for WordFarm press. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Valparaiso Poetry Review, Perihelion, The Louisville Review, Phoebe, The Christian Century, Strange Horizons, and 32 Poems, among others. Her first collection of poetry won the Powder Horn Prize and will be published by Sage Hill Press later this year.
	Aaron Michael Kline "Baptism: 11-10-1997" Aaron Michael Kline was raised in rural Texas, but has grown to enjoy urban life. He received a B.A. in Theatre and English from Stephen F. Austin State University, where he was an undergraduate intern for REAL: Regarding Arts and Letters, a national literary journal. His poetry has been featured in the inaugural issue of Mad Rush Magazine. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Poetry at Rutgers-Newark, and Jersey City, New Jersey—though he wishes he was in Brooklyn.
	Marjorie Maddox Hafer "The JCPenney Advertisement", "My Son Draws a Picture of the Twin Towers Moments Before a New York Yankee Pitcher Crashes His Plane" Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Weeknights at the Cathedral (WordTech Editions); When the Wood Clacks Out Your Name: Baseball Poems (Redgreene Prize); six chapbooks, and over 400 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies. She is the co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and author of two children’s books from Boyds Mills Press. The recipient of numerous awards, she has Pushcart Prize nominations in both fiction and poetry. For more info, please see http://www.lhup.edu/mmaddoxh/biography.htm.
	Nick McRae "Pessimist's Guide to Miracles", "Nicholas Copernicus" Nick McRae is the author of Mountain Redemption (Black Lawrence Press, 2013) and Moravia (Folded Word Press, 2013). Recent poems have appeared or will soon appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Linebreak, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and raised in the northwest Georgia foothills, Nick now lives in Columbus, OH.
	Angela Alaimo O’Donnell "Ash Thursday", "Good Friday 1965" Angela Alaimo O’Donnell teaches English and is associate director of The Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City. Her recent book, Saint Sinatra & Other Poems (2011), has been nominated for the Arlin G. Meyer Prize in Imaginative Writing. Previous books include a full-length collection, Moving House (2009), and two chapbooks, Mine (2007) and Waiting for Ecstasy (2009). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including America, First Things, Mezzo Cammin, RUNES, St. Katherine Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. A finalist for the Foley Poetry Award and the Mulberry Poets Award, O’Donnell has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Web prizes.
	Jill A. Reid "Of yellow", "To Jochebed" Jill Reid lives among the pines and bayous of central Louisiana with her four year old daughter, Ellie, and too many books to count. Though she lived in Texas while completing her MA in literature at Baylor and spent a semester abroad in England, her roots are in rural Louisiana, a place that flavors many of her poems. Jill teaches English at Louisiana College and recently began an MFA in poetry at Seattle Pacific University's low residency program. Though her poetry has only recently begun to appear in journals like Ruminate, The Fourth River, Big Muddy, and The Penwood Review, she has been writing as long as she can remember—a fact that can be affirmed by the volume of childhood stories and poems her parents are patiently waiting for her to reclaim from their attic.
	David Wright "If You Knew the Hour", "Along I-72, Early October, I Consider My Debt to James Wright and Steve Jobs (among others)", "After David Hooker", "Tracing the Ginkgo Leaf" David Wright's poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Ecotone, Image, The Artful Dodge, Wunderkammer, and Books & Culture, among others. His most recent poetry collection is A Liturgy for Stones (Cascadia, 2003). He lives with his family and teaches in Champaign, IL.