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“The Conium Review: Vol. 7” now available for order!

The wait is over. This year’s issue has been sent to the printer and is ready to order. Orders will ship in early January, 2019. This year’s issue features work from Suzanne Burns, Chelsea Harris, Emily Wortman-Wunder, Sonal Sher, Matt Kolbet, Bridget Apfeld, Anita Goveas, Alison Closter, and Christopher James. Readers will find a mermaid addicted to over-the-counter supplements, a never-ending race, disappearing limbs, and other wildly imaginative tales. With deft prose, these stories reflect on obsession, longing, and loss.

This volume includes “The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River,” by Emily Wortman-Wunder, winner of The Conium Review‘s 2018 Innovative Short Fiction Contest. The contest was judged by Maryse Meijer, author of Heartbreaker and Northwood. Maryse says “‘The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River’ is a moving meditation on parental and ecological grief, an exceptionally accomplished examination of losses big and small. Restrained, precise, and wise, the author shows us how, in the attempt to save something, we risk losing everything.”

Get a copy of the issue directly from our website, and keep an eye out for it at your local bookstore or through your favorite online retailer. For large quantity orders, we use Ingram Book Group for distribution.

About the Contributors

A native of Wisconsin, Bridget Apfeld holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and a BA from the University of Notre Dame. She lives in Austin, TX and work as a production assistant at the University of Texas at Austin. Her previous and forthcoming work is featured in various journals, including So to Speak, The Fem, Dislocate, Midwestern Gothic, Dappled Things, Newfound, Brevity, and Verse Wisconsin. She is currently editing her second novel.

Suzanne Burns writes both fiction and poetry in Bend, Oregon and Paris, France. The Chicago Tribune recently published her short fiction.

Alison Closter teaches high school students literature and writing near Boston. She has previously published a short story in Flying South Magazine, and she has a flash fiction piece forthcoming in Monkey Bicycle.

Anita Goveas is British-Asian, based in London, and fueled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. She lurks in libraries and her local independent bookshop, Bookseller Crow. She was first published in the 2016 London Short Story Prize anthology, most recently in Pocket Change, Haverthorn, Moonchild Magazine, Riggwelter Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, former cactus mag, and Litro. She tweets erratically @coffeeandpaneer

Chelsea Harris has appeared in Literary Orphans, Smokelong Quarterly, Minola Review, The Fem, The Portland Review, and Grimoire, among others. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago.

Christopher James lives, works and writes in Jakarta, Indonesia. He has previously been published online in many venues, including Tin House, Fanzine, McSweeney’s, SmokeLong, and Wigleaf. He is the editor of Jellyfish Review.

Matt Kolbet teaches and writes in Oregon.

Sonal Sher was born in Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir and did her education in Delhi, pursuing a bachelors in Physics from Hindu College. She worked for a not-for-profit organization Hippocampus Reading Foundation and as a journalist for Deccan Herald and Hindustan Times. Recently she wrote her first feature film, Chidiakhana produced by Children’s Film Society of India. She is an alum of the UEA Creative Writing Course organized by University of East Anglia and was part of the first edition of New Writers’ Mentorship Programme in Jaipur Literature festival 2017.

Emily Wortman-Wunder lives in Denver, Colorado. Her work has appeared in Vela, Nimrod, Terrain, High Country News, and many other places.

Introducing our new fiction editors

We’re pleased to formally announce our four newest staff members: Holly Lopez, Meredith Maltby, Marina Petrova, and William VanDenBerg! They’ve already begun reading submissions and have proven themselves valuable members of The Conium Review team.

Holly Lopez is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. Her work has appeared in Plots With Guns, Charlotte Viewpoint, and Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good. She is also the recipient of the 2012 Marjorie Blankenship Melton Award in Fiction. As an editor, she appreciates when writers subvert expectations and produce stories that are fresh and unconventional. She’s most interested in strange stories that also have dimension, red-blooded characters, and effectively tap into the human condition. Some of her favorite authors include George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell.

Meredith Maltby is the poetry editor for the Tulane Review and was a featured poet at Design Cloud Chicago’s HERE / NOW event. Meredith has previously published her work in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Chicago Tribune, ROAR: a literary journal for women of the arts, and Gravel Journal, among others. She appreciates interesting and strange writing from underrepresented voices. She admires and is influenced by Amelia Gray’s Gutshot, Lincoln Michel’s Upright Beasts, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, Bonnie Campell’s Mothers Tell Your Daughters, and anything by Ariana Reines or Melissa Broder.

Marina Petrova was published in The Conium Review: Vol. 4, and when we posted our call for editors, she was eager to get more involved with our small press. She graduated from the MFA program at The New School in May 2014, where she had previously served as a reader for LIT. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Underwater New York, and Calliope Anthology. She’s currently working on a collection of short stories. In her non-writing life, she also works as a Business Analyst for a Media Tech company. Marina is a native Russian speaker, and growing up she was influenced by Chekhov, Nabokov, and Bulgakov. More recently, she’s become a huge fan of Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Ben Marcus, Junot Díaz, and George Saunders.

William VanDenBerg is a first year MFA student at Brown University. He is the author of two chapbooks: Lake of Earth from Caketrain Press and Apostle Islands from Solar Luxuriance—he’ll be signing copies of these chapbooks at our AWP Conference table in Los Angeles (table #1238). He loves the work of Donald Barthelme, Ann Quin, Lindsay Hunter, Amelia Gray, and Steven Millhauser.

Visit masthead page to learn more about these editors and the rest of our staff.