Meet Kerry James Evans, an Issue 91 Contributor

Featuring Kerry James Evans

Meet Kerry James Evans: Evans is the author of Bangalore (Copper Canyon), a Lannan Literary Selection. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Florida State University, an MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and a BA in English from Missouri State University. The recipient of a 2015 NEA Fellowship and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, his poems have appeared in Agni, Narrative, New England Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals. He lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where he teaches in the MFA program at Georgia College & State University and serves as the poetry editor for Arts & Letters.

Hear Evans read his poetry pieces "Casserole Island" and "Mississippi Snow" during the Issue 91 Release Party, Saturday, March 4th at 6pm PST!

Meet Jeffrey J. Higa, an Issue 91 Contributor

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Meet Higa: Jeffrey J. Higa is the author of Calabash Stories, which won the Robert C. Jones Prize, and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His short story, “The Shadow Artist,” was a finalist for the Italo Calvino Prize and received an honorable mention in the Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize from the North American Review. He has published widely in literary and commercial magazines, including Zyzzyva, Sonora Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Willow Springs, Bamboo Ridge, Salt Hill, LitQuarterly, Honolulu Review of Books, Honolulu Magazine, Business Today, Poets & Writers and others. He was a fiction fellow at the Sewanee Writers Conference and his full-length play, Futless, won the Hawai’i Prize from the Kumu Kahua Theatre. He lives in Honolulu with the biologist Marguerite Butler, the actor Raine Higa, and the good dog Tim Tam.

Hear Higa read his fiction piece "The Boy, the Carpenter, and the Risen" during the Issue 91 Release Party, Saturday, March 4th at 6pm PST!

Meet Emma Aylor, an Issue 91 Contributor

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Meet Emma Aylor, the author of Close Red Water (forthcoming October 2023), selected by Tina Chang as winner of the Barrow Street Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, the Yale Review Online, North American Review, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and she received Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets.
Aylor holds an MFA from the University of Seattle, Washington, and is a PhD student at Texas Tech University. Originally from Bedford County, Virginia, next to the Blue Ridge Mountains, she lives in Lubbock, Texas, and is at work on a book of poems about art, place, ekphrasis, and the responsibilities of attention.
Hear Aylor read her poem "Self-Portrait as Miniature with Mica Overlays" during the Issue 91 Release Party, Saturday, March 4th at 6pm PST!

Meet Jenny Irish, an Issue 91 Contributor

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Meet Jenny Irish: Originally from Maine, Jenny Irish has graduate degrees in creative writing from The University of Texas at Austin and Arizona State University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at ASU. She is the author of three books including Tooth Box, I Am Faithful and Common Ancestor.

Hear Irish read her poem "Lupine in Jardin des Plantes" during the Issue 91 Release Party, Saturday, March 4th at 6pm PST!

Issue 91 Release Party!

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Willow Springs magazine will be having a virtual release party this Saturday, March 4th at 6pm PST!

Join us for exclusive readings from issue 91 authors, including: Heikki Huotari, Emma Aylor, Jenny Irish, Jeffrey J. Higa, Kerry James Evans, Henrietta Goodman, Madison Jozefiak, Marc Vincenz, Gary Fincke, Paul Farwell, David Keplinger, and Bruce Bond. The readings will be followed by a live Q & A session, during which our authors will talk about craft, publishing, life, and more. Please feel free to share the following links with family and friends!

Issue 90 Virtual Release Party

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Willow Springs magazine virtual release party Friday, Oct 14th at 6:00 pm PST

 

Join us for readings from issue 90 authors Joan Murray, Denver Butson, Jason Graff, Greg Byrd, nicole v basta, Aran Donovan, Melissa Studdard, and Elizabeth Tannen. The readings will be followed by a live Q & A session, during which our authors will talk about craft, publishing, life, and more. Please feel free to share the following links with family and friends!

 

Shareable Zoom link: https://ewu.zoom.us/j/98398749146Shareable Youtube link: https://youtu.be/F7M8yVzmKyk

John Sibley Williams! TWO new books of poems?

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Exciting news! Willow Springs contributor John Sibley Williams has two new books of poems coming very soon! Winner of the 2020 Cider Press Review Book Award Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, and winner of the 2020 Elixir Press Poetry Award The Drowning House. Go check them out!

You can also check out his poems "My Heart is in the Mouth of Another Heart" and "Suture" available in Willow Springs 84, and/or his profile, here on our website.

Congratulations John!

Website Under Construction

Close up detail of a European garden spider spinning a web, taken on September 14, 2008. (Photo by Chris George/Digital Camera Magazine/Future via Getty Images)

Dear Willow Springs Magazine readers and contributors,

 

Thank you so much for visiting our site. We're busy as spiders over here! Our website’s move from an old URL to a new is still underway. You might notice that some of our content is missing, and some content has textual and/or formatting errors. We want to assure you we are working out all kinks, and all the content from the old website will eventually be uploaded to the new website, along with new content from future contributors.

Thank you all so much for your loyalty and patience, the staff at WSM greatly appreciates you.

Photo credit: https://www.livescience.com/is-every-spiderweb-unique.html

Issue 84 Poet Darren Demaree’s New Book of Poetry

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This December (2021), Darren C. Demaree's sixth book of poetry A Child Walks in the Dark will be published by Harbor Editions! For those who have not had the pleasure of reading one of his poems, or those who just love to read his works, "If There Is a River, #40 & #41" published in Issue 84 of Willow Springs Magazine has been added below. Enjoy!

 

If There is a River

#40

the affection of saints is the same as the affection of the deer in your yard it's lovely when they're in your yard but in the middle of the road in the middle of the day the deer the saint the deer the saint the deer the saint they have no place amidst our thickening i do like to see either either of them with an apple there just aren't enough apple trees in the middle of this city

#41

the whispers have no place for the innocent the tideless water is worthless another start is a remedy the same way a mountain is a tunnel

 

Willow Springs to Host Live Virtual Reading Featuring Past Contributors

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Willow Springs Magazine will host a live virtual reading featuring past contributors Kevin McIlvoy, Melissa Kwasny, and Rebecca Brown on Saturday, May 8th at 6 p.m. PST. The reading will be held over Zoom and YouTube. Attendees can join us via Zoom here, or via YouTube here. There will be a live Q & A session after the reading.

KEVIN MCILVOY lives in Asheville, North Carolina. His most recent books are At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo 2018) and 57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way 2017). His novel, One Kind Favor, will be published by WTAW Press in 2021. His poetry was featured most recently in Willow Springs 86. You can find out more about him on his website.

MELISSA KWASNY is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today  (University of Washington Press Pacific Northwest Poetry Series 2017) and Pictograph (Milkweed Editions 2015), as well as a collection of prose writings, Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision (Lynx House Press 2013). Recently published by Trinity University Press, Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear is her first book of nonfiction. Kwasny currently serves as Montana Poet Laureate, a position she shares with M.L. Smoker. Her poetry was featured in Willow Springs 65 and in Willow Springs 74, and she was interviewed in 2006.

REBECCA BROWN’s most recent book is Not Heaven, Somewhere Else (Tarpaulin Sky, 2018). Among her dozen other books are American Romances, The Haunted House, The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary, The Terrible Girls (all with City Lights), and The Gifts of the Body (HarperCollins). She’s written a play, a one-woman performance/talk, and a libretto for a dance opera. She was the first Writer in Residence at Hugo House, co-founder of the Jack Straw Writers Program and former creative director of the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Conference in Port Townsend. She taught in the low residency MFA program at Goddard College and is currently Senior-Artist-in-Residence at University of Washington, Bothell. She lives in Seattle. Her fiction was featured most recently in Willow Springs 84.

You can read each author’s work in Willow Springs Magazine by purchasing each issue at the Willow Springs store.