In addition to the poems featured in our chapbook, we are pleased to present these pieces from Indiana writers on the Human/Nature theme.
Read more about the chapbook here.
Julie Stewart earned her MFA in Fiction Writing in 2010. She writes short stories and creates narrative textiles art. She has been published in PoemMemoirStory, Tishman Review and Fourth and Sycamore. She co-directed a community theater production of Four Spirits: The Play. In her blog Sophie Speaks, Julie writes about learning to balance her creative work and family life as she recopies Anna Karenina by hand, as Sophia Tolstoy did for her husband. She is currently at work on a hybrid essay/story collection.
Read Crow by Julie Stewart, here.
Greg Schwipps was born and raised on a working farm in Milan, Indiana. He graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, before attending Southern Illinois University at Carbondale for his MFA in creative writing.
His essays and short fiction can be found in the collections Not Like the Rest of Us: An Anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers and Winesburg, Indiana: A Fork River Anthology. He co-authored Fishing For Dummies, 2nd Edition, which was published in May 2010, and his first novel, What This River Keeps, was rereleased with Indiana University Press in 2012. In 2010 he won the Eugene & Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award in the Emerging Writer category. What This River Keeps was one of thirteen titles named to the Next Indiana Bookshelf, an honor celebrating Indiana’s bicentennial. Currently a Professor of English at DePauw, Greg and his wife Alissa live with their two sons, Milan and Arlo, in Greencastle.
Read But Why Would You Take Us Someplace That Could Kill Us? by Greg Schwipps, here.
Kirby Lee Hammel is a musician, songwriter, teacher, and self-professed "Nature Freak." Born and raised in Indiana, he spent the last 12 years based in the San Francisco Bay Area trying to make as much music as he could while finding time to hike, backpack, row, ski, and camp as often as possible. After having a daughter, and a traumatic experience with the now annual California wildfires, he made the tough decision to leave the land of John Muir and Gary Snyder and move back to the land of Wendell Berry and Jim Harrison. He is currently at work on a new solo record, a collection of poetry and essays, and a children’s story. He lives in Bloomington, IN with his wife, daughter, and two huge Siberian cats.
Read Kirby Lee Hammel's poems Honeymoon in the Marble Mountain Wilderness, and The Pull of Big Sur, here.