About Blue Mesa Review

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Amy Dotson

Co-Editor-in-Chief

Amy Dotson is a writer from eastern Kentucky, though she has also lived in central Kentucky. She is in her third year of her MFA and is working on a sci-fi novel that’s not not about sea lions. Her work tends to deal with class, places affected by political neglect, and sea lions. Like many twenty-somethings, she has recently gotten really into rock climbing. Like many twenty-somethings, she has hurt herself while rock climbing.

Gwyneth Henke headshot.

Gwyneth Henke

Co-Editor-in-Chief

Gwyneth Henke (she/her) is a writer from Saint Louis, Missouri. A third-year fiction student in the MFA at the University of New Mexico, she graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in religious studies and creative writing. In her reading life, she loves Haruki Murakami, Elena Ferrante, Mieko Kawakami, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joan Didion, and Susan Choi.

Headshot of Paris Baldante

Paris Baldante

Nonfiction Editor

Paris Baldante is a writer from Philadelphia and a second-year MFA student at UNM. Her fiction and nonfiction explore strange weather, ghostly locations, liminal identities, and cold intimacies. She loves to read Karen Russell, Jorge Luis Borges, bell hooks, Jennifer Egan, and Jia Tolentino.

Photo of John Hardberger as a child, with an alien

John Hardberger

Fiction Editor

John Hardberger is a fiction writer from Lubbock, Texas. As a journalist, John wrote about music, comedy, art, and amateur wrestling for Chicago magazine, and briefly covered the hot dog beat for the Chicago Tribune. His fiction explores the liminal spaces between identities, cultures, landscapes, and religions.

Headshot of Lucas Garcia in the mountains

Lucas Garcia

Poetry Editor

Lucas Garcia (they/them) has come home to Albuquerque. They are a second-year MFA candidate in poetry at UNM whose work in many genres explores queerness, resistance, failure, religion, survival and the discipline of hope. Incidentally, they are drawn as a reader to the work of writers with similar foci. They have a noted lack of chill.

 

Áine McCarthy

Associate Editor

Áine McCarthy (she/her) is a witch from New England who loves Buddhist chaplaincy, contemplative Christianity, and queer tarot. She has published poems and thoughts on labyrinths with Arsenic Lobster and Bitch Magazine. At UNM she is the Director of the Women’s Resource Center and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her favorite writer is John O’Donohue.

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Marisa P. Clark

Faculty Advisor

Marisa P. Clark (she/her) grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, came out in Atlanta, Georgia, and relocated to beautiful New Mexico in 1998. She holds a PhD in fiction-writing from Georgia State University and an MA in American literature and a BS in psychology from the University of Southern Mississippi. A lecturer for more than two decades at UNM, she has taught all genres of undergraduate creative writing, queer texts and other literature courses, first- and second-year composition courses, and ESL, along with taking on various roles with Blue Mesa Review. She is the author of the poetry collection BIRD, and her prose and poetry appear in numerous literary publications journals.

Graduate Readers

Undergraduate Readers

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Prof. Rudolfo Anaya

History

Blue Mesa Review was founded by Rudolfo Anaya in 1989. Anaya, a Creative Writing instructor at the University of New Mexico at the time, wanted a space for New Mexican and Southwestern writers to publish their work. As a landscape of intersectionality and diversity, the Southwest is the perfect place for beautiful intersectional art to grow, and Anaya, a Creative Writing instructor at the time, charged Blue Mesa Review with tending those roots in our community. Today, we strive to continue to support and publish voices of the Southwest and the world at large, and to foster connections between our academic circle and the rich literary traditions of Albuquerque and New Mexico.

Blue Mesa Review is run by graduate students at University of New Mexico’s MFA program and assisted in our work by a faculty advisor and a team of graduate and undergraduate readers. In our thirty-four years and 40+ issues, our contributors have included Jimmy Santiago Baca, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, Sherwin Bitsui, and countless other exceptional writers. We are grateful to the diverse voices who have brought their identities, cultures, and creativity to an international arena.

We are proud to be approaching our 50th anniversary issue in Fall 2024. Since our founding, we’ve been committed to the craft of storytelling and the uplifting of unique voices and traditions through language and art. We invite you to join us. See our Submission Guidelines to learn how.

Thanks

Genre graphics were created by Amy Dotson, with inspiration from the Friends of the Orphan Signs project. Banner photograph by Gwyneth Henke; graphic by Amy Dotson.

The thumbnail images used throughout our site that are not credited artist works are taken from publications curated by the Public Domain Review, including Adam Ludwig Marsing’s 1776 Marmora et adfines aliquos lapides coloribus suis exprimi (Illustrations of marble types and some related stones), Orra White Hitchcock’s Scientific Illustrations for the Classroom (1828-1840), and Eugène Grasset’s 1896 Plants and Their Application to Ornament. They are accessible under public domain.

Our website was designed by University Communications & Marketing’s Vincent Narducci.