Masthead

Editor: Jonathan Fink

Jonathan Fink is the author of two poetry collections: The Crossing (Dzanc, 2015)  and Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad (Dzanc, 2016). His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Slate, The Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He has received the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review and fellowships or scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the St. Botolph Club Foundation, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.  From 2003-2006 he was the Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

In addition to writing poetry, Jonathan also writes immersive, place-based, and personal essays that have appeared in Witness, The Missouri Review, Shenandoah, and Southwest Review, among other publications. He received the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction/Essay from Southwest Review, and he has had an essay named as one of 100 notable essays of the year in multiple editions of the Best American Essays series.

He currently lives in Pensacola and is Professor and Director of Creative Writing at the University of West Florida.

Art Editor: Valerie George

Valerie George is a sculptor who uses expanded media to explore sonic, social, environmental, and cultural phenomena. She is particularly interested in the complex place where the following concepts merge: popular culture and sub-culture, sonic performance and musical entertainment, public and private space, place and non-place, urban and rural environments, and lastly, the archival document and the art object.

She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally including at Locust Projects (Miami, FL), Public Address (Brooklyn, NY), Cinders Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Worksound Gallery (Portland, OR), Coop Gallery (Nashville, TN), Norton Museum (West Palm, FL), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago IL), Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle, WA), Sonoma County Museum (Santa Rosa, CA), Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Robert Miller Gallery (NY, NY), Adobe Backroom Gallery (San Francisco), Sarai Media Lab (New Delhi, India), FemArt Mostra D’Art De Dones (Barcelona, Spain), and the Horse Hospital (London, England).

She has been invited to participate in several national fine art festivals and events including the RCA Street Festival (Richmond, VA), {Re-Happening} at Lake Eden (former site of Black Mountain College) (Black Mountain, NC), Art in the Open (Philadelphia, PA), and South by Southwest (SXSW) at Okay Mountain Gallery (Austin, TX). She was also a Visiting Artist & Lecturer at the Hangar Residency (Barcelona, Spain) and at Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA).

Her work is in the collection of the Norton Museum of Art and was purchased for the museum by curator Tim Wride (formerly the curator of Photography at LACMA). Her work has been reviewed by NPR, Tom Tom Magazine: A Magazine for Female Drummers, Tape Op: The Creative Music Recording Magazine, Amp Magazine, and Drain Magazine: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture. Most recently, she was awarded the 2015 Artist in Residence at the Everglades Fellowship (AIRE), where she will begin her sabbatical in May of 2016.

She received a Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art from University of California, Davis. She currently is an Associate Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Art at the University of West Florida. She is also the Arts Editor for Panhandler Magazine: A Journal of Art and Literature published by the Department of English at the University of West Florida.