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Editorial Staff

Cherry Tree Editorial Masthead

Editorial Staff

We are teachers and mentors and working writers. Our job is to usher new work into print while helping Washington College undergraduates enter the larger literary community.


Jehanne DubrowFOUNDING EDITOR: JEHANNE DUBROW

Jehanne Dubrow founded Cherry Tree in 2014. She is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently, Wild Kingdom, and a book of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes. Her previous poetry collections are Simple Machines, American Samizdat, Dots & Dashes, The Arranged Marriage, Red Army Red, Stateside, From the Fever-World, and The Hardship Post. She has co-edited two anthologies, The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume and Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse. Her poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, New England Review, Colorado Review, and Southern Review. She is currently completing work on a new book of poetry, Civilians, and two books of creative nonfiction, Exhibitions and Taste: A Book of Small Bites.

James HallEDITOR IN CHIEF: JAMES ALLEN HALL

James Allen Hall’s first book of poems, Now You’re the Enemy, won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Their second book of poems, Romantic Comedy, was chosen for the Levis Reading Prize by Diane Seuss and will be published by Four Way Books in 2023. Their book of lyric personal essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, won the 2016 Cleveland State University Poetry Center Essay Collection Award, judged by Chris Kraus. Recent poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Georgia Review, A Public Space, New England Review, Bennington Review, and in Best American Poetry 2012. They are the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. They teach creative writing and literature at Washington College, where they serve as an associate professor of English and director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House.

Roy KeseyASSOCIATE EDITOR: ROY KESEY

Roy Kesey’s latest books are the short story collection Any Deadly Thing (Dzanc Books), the novel Pacazo (Dzanc Books/Jonathan Cape), and his translations of Pola Oloixarac’s novels Savage Theories and Dark Constellations (Soho Press). He is the winner of an NEA grant for fiction and a PEN/Heim grant for translation. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in over a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and New Sudden Fiction.

Roy currently serves as Associate Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House, Associate Editor of Cherry Tree, Director of the Cherry Tree Young Writers' Conference, and Lecturer in English and Creative Writing.


Sufiya 2021CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITOR: SUFIYA ABDUR-RAHMAN

Sufiya Abdur-Rahman’s debut memoir, Heir to the Crescent Moon, won the Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction and will be published by University of Iowa Press in November 2021. Her writing investigates questions of family, identity, race, and religion and, often, how they intersect. Her essays, articles, and criticism have appeared in publications including Catapult, The Common Online, Gay Mag, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and NPR. She has earned Notable distinction in Best American Essays, received fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and is a two-time alumnus of VONA writing workshops. She teaches creative writing and journalism at Washington College.

Kimbery Quiogue AndrewsLITERARY SHADE EDITOR: KIMBERLY QUIOGUE ANDREWS

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is the author of A Brief History of Fruit, winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry from the University of Akron Press, and BETWEEN, winner of the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Prize from Finishing Line Press. Her writing in various genres appears in Poetry Northwest, Redivider, Denver Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Ottawa, and you can find her on Twitter at @kqandrews.  


Alyse BenselPOETRY EDITOR: ALYSE BENSEL 

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks, most recently Lies to Tell the Body (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018). Her poems have recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, Ruminate, Southern Indiana Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her writing has also been featured at The Boiler, Entropy, MAYDAY Magazine, and Pithead Chapel. Her reviews have appeared widely in journals including AGNI, Colorado Review, EcoTheo Review, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. In addition to her work at Cherry Tree, she serves as section editor for Theory, Culture, and Craft for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies (JCWS), an open access, peer reviewed journal. She is an assistant professor of English at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers' Conference.
 
 

Sarah BlackmanFICTION EDITOR: SARAH BLACKMAN

Sarah Blackman is a poet, fiction and creative non-fiction author originally from the Washington D.C. area. Her poetry and prose has been published in a number of journals and magazines, including The Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Oxford American Magazine and The Missouri Review among others. She has been featured on the Poetry Daily website and anthologized in the Poets Against the War Anthology, Best New American Voices, 2006, Metawritings; Toward a Theory of Nonfiction, and xoOrpheus: Fifty New Myths.

 

 

AMBER TALIANCICHMANAGING EDITOR: AMBER TALIANCICH

Amber Amber Taliancich is from the Mississippi Gulf Coast and earned her MFA from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Cleveland, Ohio. She's the winner of the Leonard Trawick Prize for fiction, as well as a two-time recipient of the Golden Apple Award for Teaching Excellence. Her essays and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Ninth Letter, The Pinch, Entropy, Hobart, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She lives in Chestertown, Maryland.

NIC ANSTETTSENIOR FICTION READER:  NIC ANSTETT

Nic Anstett is a Maryland raised writer with a love for the queer and strange. She is a member of the Washington College class of 2016 and a Sophie Kerr finalist for that year. As a previous student reader and design intern for Cherry Tree, Nic is delighted to be returning to the Literary House Press family. Her work is published and forthcoming in Witness Magazine, North American Review, Lightspeed, Bat City Review, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, University of Oregon’s MFA program, and the Tin House Summer Workshop, where she was a 2021 Scholar.

Elise GallagherSENIOR FICTION READER: ELISE GALLAGHER

Elise Gallagher graduated from Washington College in 2010 with a BA in English. After graduation, she moved to Massachusetts where she spent five years working in Boston with two major publishing companies, such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as an Associate Production Editor in their Adult Trade Manuscript Editorial Department. She received her MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore. Currently, Elise is a freelance editor and Adjunct English Professor. Her short stories have appeared in various literary magazines and she is currently seeking representation for her family saga novel. 

Lindsay LusbySENIOR POETRY READER: LINDSAY LUSBY

Lindsay Lusby is the author of the poetry collection Catechesis: a postpastoral (University of Utah Press, 2019), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, judged by Kimiko Hahn. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Blackbird Whitetail Redhand (Porkbelly Press, 2018) and Imago (dancing girl press, 2014), and the recipiend of the 2015 Fairy Tale Review Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared most recently in New South, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, and Plume. Her visual poems have appeared in Dream Pop Press and Duende. Her first lyric essay, "You Never Think It Could Happen To You: A Reckoning with True Crime," was published in the Fall 2020 issue of Waxwing. Lindsay is a Senior Poetry Reader for Cherry Tree and edits poems at Tell Tell Poetry.

Justin NashSENIOR POETRY   READER: JUSTIN NASH

Justin Nash is a recent graduate of Washington College, where he won the Sophie Kerr Prize and completed a senior thesis on the relationship between apostrophe and futurity in contemporary queer poetry. He has held summer internships with Copper Canyon Press and the Fine Arts Work Center and was previously a nonfiction screener for Cherry Tree. Before those things, he had a Shetland pony named Reba McEntire.

SENIOR POETRY READER: Megan Walsh

Megan Walsh graduated from Washington College and is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University.

 

Tamia WilliamsSENIOR POETRY READER: Tamia Williams

Tamia Williams is a graduate from Washington College, where she studied English and Communications with minors in Editing & Publishing and Black Studies. As an undergrad, she interned for the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and some media start-ups. She now works at Goucher College as a digital content marketing specialist.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:  

Eric Lorberer, Robert Mooney, Erin Murphy, Peter Turchi, Katherine Wagner, and Laura Maylene Walter.