We are excited to announce the winner of the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize is Colette Cosner’s “Someone’s Lunch.” The runner-up is L. Annette Binder’s “Samothrace.”
Both pieces will appear in Hunger Mountain #27.
About
Hunger mountain is created by the faculty and students in the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
(802) 828-8844 hungermtn@vcfa.edu
36 College Street Montpelier, VT 05602
The editors share VCFA’s belief that the arts are central to the human experience and have the ability not only to reflect reality but also to create it. Our masthead changes annually, and our revolving list of faculty editors and contest judges reach into their diverse literary communities to help make them part of ours. This allows for aesthetic flexibility, guided by our steady ethics: promoting voices that have gone unheard, expanding our representation and scope,and critically examining our contemporary culture and our field.
We value vulnerability, adventure, and accessibility. Our student readers are the future of the literary world, and all of us take great pride in discovering new voices, as well as publishing the freshest work from established artists.
(802) 828-8844 hungermtn@vcfa.edu
36 College Street Montpelier, VT 05602
Past contributors to Hunger Mountain include Elizabeth Acevedo, Dilruba Ahmed, Pinckney Benedict, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Destiny O. Birdsong, Robin Black, Ron Carlson, Hayden Carruth, Lucy Corin, Kwame Dawes, Matthew Dickman, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Santee Frazier, Terrance Hayes, Robin Hemley, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, Lily Hoang, Pam Houston, Major Jackson, W. Todd Kaneko, Maxine Kumin, Dorianne Laux, Kelly Link, Robert Lopez, Sidney Lea, Michael Martone, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gregory Orr, Ann Pancake, Carl Phillips, Jordy Rosenberg, Tomaž Šalamun, Charles Simic, Jake Skeets, Patricia Smith, James Tate, Paul Tran, Jean Valentine, L. Lamar Wilson, Tiphanie Yanique, and many others.
Hunger Mountain was started in 2002 by founding editor Caroline Mercurio Spitzer through a generous donation from a Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing alumnx. The journal has since thrived with the assistance of MFA in Writing faculty and ongoing support from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, VCFA alumnx, subscribers and friends. Miciah Bay Gault served as editor in chief from 2009-2018. Erin Stalcup served as editor in chief from 2018-2021, and the journal is now run by faculty and students in VCFA’s MFA in Writing Program with faculty member Adam McOmber as editor in chief.
Adam McOmber
Editor in Chief and Fiction Editor
Adam McOmber is the author of three novels, The White Forest (Touchstone), Jesus and John (Lethe), and The Ghost Finders (JournalStone), as well as two collections of short stories: My House Gathers Desires (BOA) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA). His new collection of queer flash and experimental fiction, Fantasy Kit, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in June 2022. He is currently working on a queer erotic revision of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles that will be published by Lethe Press in digital monthly installments starting in September 2021.
His work has been included in The Year’s Best Speculative Gay Fiction and Best Microfiction and shortlisted for Best American Fantasy and Best Horror of the Year. His stories have appeared recently in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Fairy Tale Review, and Diagram. Adam is editor-in-chief of Hunger Mountain Review at VCFA.
Adam is an Ohio native, now residing in Los Angeles. He teaches in the Writing program at University of California Los Angeles and in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is on the faculty of the VCFA Novel Retreat and serves as one of its manuscript mentors.
Sue William Silverman
Creative Nonfiction Editor
Sue William Silverman is an award-winning memoirist, essayist, and poet. Her fourth work of creative nonfiction, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, was named “one of 9 essay collections feminists should read in 2020” by Bitch Media. Additionally, it won the Gold Star Forword Review’s INDIE Book of the Year Award and won the 2021 Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature sponsored by Jane’s Story Press Foundation.
Sue’s first memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs award in creative nonfiction, and her second memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, was also made into a Lifetime television original movie nominated for two PRISM Awards. Her memoir-in-essays, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew, was a finalist for Foreword Reviews’ INDIE Book of the Year Award.
She is also the author of Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir and two poetry collections, most recently If the Girl Never Learns, which won two gold medals from the Human Relations Indie Book Award. One of Sue’s personal essays appears in The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present, while six other essays won national writing contests with Hotel Amerika, Mid-American Review, Water~Stone Review, Blue Mesa Review, Los Angeles Review, and Under the Sun.
Other poems and essays have appeared in such places as The Rumpus, Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, Arts & Letters, Creative Nonfiction, brevitymag.com, and River Teeth. Sue was featured in an interview in The Writer’s Chronicle and has been the subject of several documentaries including for the Discovery Channel and WE-TV. As a professional speaker, she has appeared on national radio and television programs such as The View, Anderson Cooper-360, CNN-Headline News, and PBS Books. She holds an honorary doctorate from Aquinas College. Sue teaches in the MFA in Writing program at VCFA.
Tarfia Faizullah
Poetry Editor
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Her writing has appeared widely in the US and abroad in the Daily Star, BuzzFeed, Hindu Business Line, Huffington Post, Ms. magazine, the New Republic, the Nation, Oxford American, Poetry magazine, and the Academy of American Poets website, as well as in the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019) and the television show PBS News Hour.
The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, and other honors, Faizullah presents work at institutions and organizations worldwide, and has been featured at the the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Fulbright Conference, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, the Radcliffe Seminars, New York University, Barnard College, University of California Berkeley, the Poetry Foundation, the Clinton School of Public Service, Brac University, and elsewhere.
Faizullah’s writing has been translated into Bengali, Persian, Chinese, and Tamil, and was included in the theater production Birangona: Women of War. Her collaborations include photographers, producers, composers, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists, resulting in several interdisciplinary projects, including an EP, Eat More Mango. In 2016, Harvard Law School included Faizullah in their list of 50 Women Inspiring Change.
Allison Grimaldi Donahue
Translations Editor
Allison Grimaldi Donahue is the author of Body to Mineral (Publication Studio Vancouver, 2016), the co-author of On Endings (Delere Press, 2019) and translator of Self-portrait by Carla Lonzi (Divided Publishing, 2021). Her writing and translations have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, The Massachusetts Review, BOMB, NERO and Tripwire, and her performances have been presented in Italy at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, MAMbo, MACRO and Short Theatre. She is a 2021–22 resident of Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Bern. She teaches literary translation at Middlebury College Florence and lives in Bologna.
Montserrat Andrée Carty
Interviews Editor
Montserrat (Montse) Andrée Carty is a writer and visual artist. In addition to writing and making photos, she hosts the podcast Musings of the Artist and is the Interviews Editor for Hunger Mountain. She is currently a MFA in Writing candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working on a hybrid memoir on home and belonging.
Myrth Killingsworth
Managing Editor
Myrth Killingsworth (she/they) is a wild co-creator in an ecosystem of language. Her work recently won the tiny journal’s climate change contest and is forthcoming in Issue 84 of The Cafe Irreal. Myrth lives with her family in northern New Mexico and is currently working on a novel about electronic dance music and mushroom mycelium.