Terrain.org is committed not only to meeting the actions of our Statement on Racial Justice, which include expanding the racial diversity of Terrain.org’s editors and editorial board, but also of enhancing our literary, scientific, cultural, environmental, and artistic expertise and guidance. Through a variety of voices and initiatives, we will continue our work to transform the marginalization of essential and diverse voices in a world where racial justice, climate justice, and environmental justice are inseparable threads.
So we are pleased to introduce our newest editor and editorial board members: assistant nonfiction editor Chandre Szafran and editorial board members Sherwin Bitsui, Joy Castro, Suzanne Frischkorn, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Lee Herrick, Sean Hill, Ever Jones, Karen An-hwei Lee, Eric Magrane, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Learn more about our new team members, or meet all our editors, editorial board members, and contributing editors on our Editors page.
Chandre Szafran
Assistant Nonfiction Editor
Chandre Szafran is grateful to call a particularly stunning area of Alaska her motherlands. She earned an MFA in Nonfiction from the Low-Residency Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She has been awarded the inaugural New Poets of Native Nations Scholarship for Women and served on the board for the Thunderbird Summer Series pop-up by IAIA MFA graduates in summer 2020.
Sherwin Bitsui
Editorial Board Member
Sherwin Bitsui (Diné) is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). He is the author of Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003), Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Dissolve (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). His honors include a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. In addition to teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he is on faculty at Northern Arizona University.
Joy Castro
Editorial Board Member
Joy Castro is the author of the memoir The Truth Book, two literary thrillers set in post-Katrina New Orleans: Hell or High Water and Nearer Home, the essay collection Island of Bones, and the short fiction collection How Winter Began. Her work has appeared in venues including Ploughshares, Senses of Cinema, Brevity, Fourth Genre, North American Review, Salon, Afro-Hispanic Review, Gulf Coast, and the New York Times Magazine. The Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, she teaches creative writing, literature, and Latinx studies.
Suzanne Frischkorn
Editorial Board Member
Poet Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Lit Windowpane, Girl on a Bridge, and five chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Indiana Review, Juked, Ms. Magazine, North American Review, Verse Daily, Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (Trinity University Press, 2020), and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer’s Center for her book Lit Windowpane, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Editorial Board Member
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke came of age working in fields, factories, and waters. Her books include The Year of the Rat, Dog Road Woman, Off-Season City Pipe, Blood Run, Burn, and Streaming as well as a memoir, Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival. She is the editor of the anthologies Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, Effigies, Effigies II, and Effigies III. She recently served in a Fulbright to Montenegro and in the Dan & Maggie Inouye Chair in Democratic Ideals, and has served as Reynolds Chair of Poetry, as an NEH Chair in Creative Writing/Critical Studies, as an artist in residence (writer) and a distinguished visiting writer. She has received several fellowships and honors and teaches for the University of California at Riverside, where she directs Writers Week and Along the Chaparral. She is the founder/organizer of the Sandhill Crane Retreat.
Lee Herrick
Editorial Board Member
Lee Herrick is the author of Scar and Flower and two other books of poems, Gardening Secrets of the Dead and This Many Miles from Desire. He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books, 2020). His poems appear widely in literary magazines, textbooks, and anthologies such as One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form; Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, with an introduction by Common; Here: Poems for the Planet, with an introduction by the Dalai Lama; California Fire and Water; and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. Born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted to the United States at ten months, he served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. He lives in Fresno, California and teaches at Fresno City College and the MFA Program at Sierra Nevada University.
Sean Hill
Editorial Board Member
Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods, awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (University of Georgia Press, 2008). He’s received numerous awards including fellowships from Cave Canem, the Region 2 Arts Council, the Bush Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, The Jerome Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and in over a dozen anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. Hill taught most recently at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks and Georgia Southern University. He is a consulting editor at Broadsided Press and has also served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference since 2012. He lives in Montana with his family and will be Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana for the 2020-2021 academic year.
Ever Jones
Editorial Board Member
Ever Jones (they/them) is a queer/trans writer, painter, and instructor living in Seattle. Their forthcoming poetry collection, nightsong (Sundress Publications), is a transliberatory lyric for identity, nature, and erasure. They have published two other poetry collections, Wilderness Lessons (futurecycle) and a chapbook, Primitive Elegy (alicebluebooks). They are a professor of creative writing at the University of Washington in Tacoma and an instructor at Richard Hugo House. Their poetry is forthcoming from POETRY and Yes, Poetry, and can be found at Tupelo Quarterly, Bellingham Review, and others. Visit their website at everjones.com.
Karen An-hwei Lee
Editorial Board Member
Karen An-hwei Lee is a poet and novelist who lives in greater Chicago. Her recent books are The Maze of Transparencies (Ellipsis Press, 2019), Sonata in K (Ellipsis Press, 2016), and Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012). She has taught in the low-residency MFA program at Seattle Pacific University and served in the administration at Point Loma Nazarene University. Currently, she is the provost at Wheaton College.
Eric Magrane
Editorial Board Member
Eric Magrane is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at New Mexico State University, where he teaches human and cultural geography. He is the co-editor of The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press, 2016) and with Linda Russo, Sarah de Leeuw, and Craig Santos Perez, of Geopoetics in Practice (Routledge, 2020). His scholarly and creative works have appeared in Ecotone, Literary Geographies, Cultural Geographies, GeoHumanities, Antipode, and the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography and in the books Counter-desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan), Big Energy Poets: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change (BlazeVOX), and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography and an MFA in Creative Writing, both from the University of Arizona.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Editorial Board Member
Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s newest book is a collection of illustrated nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (Milkweed Editions, September 2020), from which this essay is excerpted. She is also the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. She received a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and is professor of English and creative writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
Additionally, Amy Knight has transitioned from fiction editor to editorial board member, and Frederick Swanson and Dave Wann have stepped down from the editorial board. We will continue to expand our editors and editorial board, and are committed to expanding the diversity of the Terrain Publishing Board of Directors, as well.
Please join us in welcoming Chandre, Sherwin, Joy, Suzanne, Allison, Lee, Sean, Ever, Karen, Eric, and Aimee to the Terrain.org team!
Header image by Pexels, courtesy Pixabay.