Alan Soldofsky directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at San Jose State University. His most recent collection of poems is <a href="https://tsup.truman.edu/product/in-the-buddha-factory/">In the Buddha Factory</a> (Truman State University Press, 2013). With David Koehn, he is coeditor of <a href="https://www.omnidawn.com/product/compendium-a-collection-of-thoughts-on-prosody/">Compendium: A Collection of Thoughts About Prosody</a>, by Donald Justice (Omnidawn, 2017). His poetry has four times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His latest collection of poems Charts (For the End of Days) is a finalist for the 2020 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Prize. He has also published&nbsp;Kenora Station&nbsp;and&nbsp;Staying Home, both originally published as limited-edition artist's books by Steam Press of Berkeley, intaglio prints by Lyman Piersma, book design by Alistair Johnston. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he joined the San Jose State faculty in 1985 and directed first the <a href="http://www.pcsj.org/">San Jose Poetry Center</a>, then the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.litart.org/">SJSU Center for Literary Arts</a>, before being appointed director of the university’s Creative Writing Program.

Alan Soldofsky

Ted Geltner is in the midst of writing a Denis Johnson biography. His previous books include Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews. He is an associate professor at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia, where he teaches reporting, literary journalism, magazine journalism, and photojournalism.&nbsp;

Ted Geltner

Doug Unger is the author of four novels, including&nbsp;Leaving the Land, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and a short-fiction collection,&nbsp;Looking for War and Other Stories. He serves on the executive boards of <a href="http://wordswithoutborders.org/">Words Without Borders</a> and other arts organizations, and is co-founder of the Creative Writing International program at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches.

Doug Unger

James L. Magnuson has published nine well-received novels, including Famous Writers I Have Known. He has won awards while writing for the movies and for television, and so many of his plays have been produced that he has lost count.&nbsp;He has recently retired as director of the James A. Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin.

James L. Magnuson

<div class="x_gmail_default">Lee Montgomery is the author of&nbsp;The Things Between Us,&nbsp;Whose World Is This?, and&nbsp;Searching for Emily: Illustrated.&nbsp;The Things Between Us&nbsp;received the 2007 Oregon Book Award and was a four-star critic’s choice for&nbsp;People&nbsp;magazine.&nbsp;Whose World Is This?&nbsp;received&nbsp;the 2007 John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award and was&nbsp;a finalist&nbsp;for the 2008 Ken Kesey Award in Fiction.&nbsp; Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications including most recently The&nbsp;New York Times Magazine, Oprah, Story, Glimmer Train,&nbsp;Antioch Review, Iowa Review,&nbsp;and&nbsp;Tin House, among others.&nbsp;</div>

Lee Montgomery

John Freeman is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, which includes Denis Johnson’s “Emergency.”

John Freeman

Sean San José is a San Francisco Bay Area theater maker, performer, and director. Over the years, he has directed new works by Luis Alfaro, Jessica Hagedorn, Octavio Solis, and many more. He is a co-founder and the current program director of the new performances group Campo Santo, for whom he produced and directed 10 of Denis Johnson’s plays. He was recently appointed the new artistic director of San Francisco’s Magic Theater.

Sean San José

Tobias Wolff is the author of the novels&nbsp;The Barracks Thief&nbsp;and&nbsp;Old School,&nbsp;the memoirs&nbsp;This Boy’s Life&nbsp;and&nbsp;In Pharaoh’s Army,&nbsp;and the short-story collections&nbsp;In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,&nbsp;Back in the World, and&nbsp;The Night in Question. He included Denis Johnson’s story “Emergency” in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories.

Tobias Wolff

For DJ: Remembering Denis Johnson

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

<div>Born in Fowler, California — learned corridos and rhymes from his mother, Lucha, on the farm working roads and small towns. His father, Felipe, played harmonica telling tales&nbsp;of work in early 1900’s Wyoming. He graduated from UCLA, Stanford and the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. His awards include the Guggenheim Poetry Fellowship,&nbsp;the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, LA Times &nbsp;Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award and recently, the International Latino Book Award. He is Emeritus Professor from Fresno State’s Chicano and Latin American Studies program and UC-Riverside’s Department of Creative Writing. In the last decade he has served as a Chancellor of the Board of the Academy of American Poets, California’s&nbsp;Poet Laureate, and the Poet Laureate of the United States. Recent book is&nbsp;Every Day We Get More Illegal.</div>

Juan Felipe Herrera

<div>Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s books include (poetry) The Year of the Rat, Dog Road Woman,&nbsp;Off-Season City Pipe,&nbsp;Blood&nbsp;Run,&nbsp;Burn,&nbsp;and&nbsp;Streaming,&nbsp;as well as a memoir,&nbsp;Rock,&nbsp;Ghost, Willow, Deer. Her latest release is a National Book Award finalist,&nbsp;Look at This Blue, a book-length love poem/letter/song for what is at stake in California, forming a taxonomy of threatened lives — human, plant, and animal — marked by climate emergency and detrimental colonialism of statehood.&nbsp;She is the editor of the anthologies&nbsp;Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas,&nbsp;Effigies,&nbsp;and&nbsp;Effigies II&nbsp;and is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside. Hedge Coke came of age working fields, factories, and waters and is currently at work on a film,&nbsp;Red Dust: resiliency in the dirty thirties, a new CD, and new poems.</div>
<div>&nbsp;</div>
<div>Her work can also be found in the summer 2022 issue of&nbsp;<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/edition/the-larb-quarterly-no-34-do-you-love-me/">The LARB Quarterly, no. 34: Do you love me?</a></div>

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

<h4>Matthew Lippman’s collection Mesmerizing Sadly Beautiful won the 2018 Levis Prize and is published by Four Way Books.&nbsp;He has published 5 other collections of poems including,&nbsp;The New Year of Yellow&nbsp;(winner of Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Sarabande Books), Salami Jew, American Chew&nbsp;(winner of Burnside Books Prize), Monkey Bars, and&nbsp;A Little Gut Magic. He is the Editor and Founder of the web-based project Love’s Executive Order (<a href="http://www.lovesexecutiveorder.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.lovesexecutiveorder.com&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1601395510388000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEgx_rPm71lumtolLxgAs4q5yO3ZQ">www.lovesexecutiveorder.com</a>).&nbsp;</h4>

Matthew Lippman

Photo&nbsp;by Danielle Vermette

Tess Gallagher’s eleventh volume of poetry, Is, Is Not, was published May 2019 by Graywolf Press.&nbsp;Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, also from Graywolf, is the most comprehensive offering of her poems to date.

Other poetry includes Dear Ghosts, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Amplitude. Gallagher’s The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories was published fall 2009 and these stories are the basis for film episodes under development. Barnacle Soup—Stories from the West of Ireland, collaboration with the Sligo storyteller Josie Gray, is available in the US from Carnegie Mellon.

Gallagher spearheaded the publication of Raymond Carver’s Beginners as a stand-alone volume in 2015.

During her friendship with the Oscar-winning director Alejandro Inarritu she encouraged his work with Raymond Carver’s poem and story in the Oscar-winning film Birdman, directed by Inarritu. She has spent regular time in a cottage on Lough Arrow in Co. Sligo in the West of Ireland where many of her new poems are set, and also lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington.

Tess Gallagher

Lia Purpura

David Hamilton is the author of two prose collections, A Certain Arc (2019) and Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm (2001), as well as Ossabaw (2006) and The Least Hinge (2002), a volume and a chapbook of poems. A graduate of Amherst College and the University of Virginia, he spent most of his career at the University of Iowa where he taught medieval and modern literature, edited The Iowa Review, and helped develop Iowa’s MFA program in nonfiction. Photo by Heather Fowler.

David Hamilton

Michael Morse lives in New York City and teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. His book&nbsp;Void and Compensation&nbsp;was published by Canarium Books and&nbsp;was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2016.&nbsp;

Michael Morse

Jackleg Press, out of Chicago, publishedD.C. Gonzales-Prieto's book, Hallucinogenesis, in 2012.&nbsp; His work has also appeared in the Bennington Review, Hollins Critic, Sonora Review, and Quarterly West, among other publications.&nbsp; He lives in New Jersey.&nbsp;&nbsp;

D.C. Gonzales-Prieto

<h4>Tom Lutz is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His latest book is&nbsp;<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Born-Slippy-Tom-Lutz/dp/1912248646/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=born+slippy&amp;qid=1574435254&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1">Born Slippy: A Novel.</a></h4>
For more, go to <a href="https://www.tomlutzwriter.com/">tomlutzwriter.com</a>

&nbsp;

Tom Lutz

For Marvin Bell

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

Alan Soldofsky directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at San Jose State University. His most recent collection of poems is <a href="https://tsup.truman.edu/product/in-the-buddha-factory/">In the Buddha Factory</a> (Truman State University Press, 2013). With David Koehn, he is coeditor of <a href="https://www.omnidawn.com/product/compendium-a-collection-of-thoughts-on-prosody/">Compendium: A Collection of Thoughts About Prosody</a>, by Donald Justice (Omnidawn, 2017). His poetry has four times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His latest collection of poems Charts (For the End of Days) is a finalist for the 2020 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Prize. He has also published&nbsp;Kenora Station&nbsp;and&nbsp;Staying Home, both originally published as limited-edition artist's books by Steam Press of Berkeley, intaglio prints by Lyman Piersma, book design by Alistair Johnston. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he joined the San Jose State faculty in 1985 and directed first the <a href="http://www.pcsj.org/">San Jose Poetry Center</a>, then the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.litart.org/">SJSU Center for Literary Arts</a>, before being appointed director of the university’s Creative Writing Program.

Alan Soldofsky

Articles

For DJ: Remembering Denis Johnson

For Marvin Bell