Welcome to Ninth Letter's Winter 2014 web edition, our second in a series of online issues dedicated to student writing. Featured here are our favorite poetry and fiction by creative writing students across the country.

Web Edition, Winter 2014

Contributors' Notes

Leslie Marie Aguilar was born and raised in Abilene, Texas. She has served as the Poetry Editor of Harbinger Journal of Literature and Art and is the current Web Editor of Indiana Review. She is also the recipient of a National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Rattle, Spillway, and The Más Tequila Review, among others. She is currently an MFA candidate at Indiana University.

C. Dylan Bassett currently attends the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He is the author of five forthcoming chapbooks, Some Futuristic Afternoons (Strange Cage), Lake Story (Thrush Press), No Audience (alice blue press), One Continuous Window (Mouthfeel Press), and The Invention of Monsters, co-written with Summer Ellison (iO Books). His recent poems are published/forthcoming in journals such as Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Diagram, Inter/rupture, Pleiades, and Verse Daily. He's received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Stadler Center for Poetry, the Morrie Moss Foundation and the University of Iowa. He co-edits likewise folio / likewise books.

Anders Carlson-Wee was a professional rollerblader before he studied wilderness survival and started hopping freight trains to see the country. He has traveled through the forests of the South, the cornfields of the Midwest, the prairies of the West, and the blue-hued mountains of Alaska, eating food out of dumpsters and trashcans to avoid having to stop and get a job. Anders is an MFA candidate in poetry at Vanderbilt University, where he has received the graduate Topping Up Award. He is the winner of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared in Best New Poets, New Delta Review, Bluestem Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Justin Carter is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University and co-editor of Banango Street. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Collagist, Hobart, Jellyfish, and Whiskey Island. He blogs sometimes at justinrcarter.tumblr.com.

Doug Paul Case lives in Bloomington, where he's an MFA candidate at Indiana University and editor of Gabby, a new journal dedicated to the talky poem. His poems have appeared in Salt Hill, Court Green, Redivider, and Barrow Street.

Tagert Ellis is an MFA candidate in Fiction at UC Irvine, where he edits the literary journal Faultline. Tagert is the undisputed leader of his local Regret Club. His work has been featured in elimae and ABJECTIVE.

Sarah Giragosian is a PhD candidate at the University at Albany-SUNY, where she specializes in twentieth-century North American Poetries and Poetics. Her poems are forthcoming or have been published in such journals as Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, and Canary: A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis, among others.

J.P. Grasser is originally from Maryland. His work explores the diverse regions he has called home, most insistently his family's fish hatchery in Brady, Nebraska. He studied English and Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South and is currently an MFA student in poetry at Johns Hopkins University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal, Cream City Review, The Collagist, and Nashville Review, among others.

Gabrielle Hovendon is an MFA candidate in fiction at Bowling Green State University, where she teaches creative writing and composition. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Tin House's Open Bar, the Baltimore Review, Necessary Fiction, and wigleaf. She is currently at work on a novel about the lives of two nineteenth-century mathematicians.

Allegra Hyde is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University, where she also serves as prose editor for Hayden's Ferry Review. Her short stories and essays have appeared in North American Review, LUMINA, Southwestern American Literature, Bellevue Literary Review, Grist Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a vegetable garden.

Hannah Loeb is a first-year poet at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She graduated from Yale University in 2012 and received the Frederick Mortimer Clapp Fellowship for poetry.

Caitlin McGuire is a founding editor at Cartagena Journal and the online content editor at Fjords Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Redivider, and Hobart, and she will be the writer-in-residence at Zvona i Nari and Balkankult this spring. You can find her at caitlinmcguire.tumblr.com.

Katie Moulton's recent work appears in Quarterly West, Post Road, and Devil's Lake, which awarded her the 2013 Driftless Prize in Fiction. Previously a music critic in St. Louis, she now lives in Bloomington where she edits the Indiana Review and deejays for independent community radio.

Amy Rossi is an MFA candidate in fiction at Louisiana State University. You can find her work online, currently or forthcoming, in journals such as Monkeybicycle, Hobart, and the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and you can find her in a room by quoting Road House.

James Yu grew up in Beaverton, Oregon. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador. At the age of nine he immigrated to the United States. He is a CantoMundo fellow and a Breadloaf scholarship recipient whose work was selected for inclusion in Best New Poets 2013. His chapbook, Nine Immigrant Years, is the winner of the 2011 Organic Weapon Arts Contest. Zamora's poems appear or are forthcoming in Connotation Press, FourWay Review, New Border, OmniVerse, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate at NYU.

Credits

Editor: Jensen Beach

Assistant Editors: Alyssa Davison, Ammie Hoppenrath, Chase Reed, Deborah Newcomb, Hillary Waldstein, Dee Modrowski, Maggie Su, Jessie Knoles, Katie Newport, Katie O'Shea, Kayla Smith, Kelsey Wiora, Maribel Castro, Micaela McLennand, Rachel Williamson, Rebecca Kaplan, Samantha Tallarico, Sophia Ege