Letter from the Editor
By Anthony Yarbrough
Squash Blossoms
Merridawn Duckler
Merridawn Duckler
Art
Issue 49
Spring 2024
Fiction
Poetry
طین (Mud)
By Noor Al-Samarrai
A Dog Named Lily
By Nancy Beauregard
![[SUNDAY] and [MONDAY MORNING]](https://bmr.unm.edu/wp-content/uploads/Young-Artwork-627x376.jpg)
[SUNDAY] and [MONDAY MORNING]
By Harley Tonelli
Nonfiction
Malum Malus
By Camille Louise Goering
Can You Hear Me?
By Monika Dziamka
When It’s Okay to Say Shit
By J.C. Graham
Authors
Noor Al-Samarrai
Noor Al-Samarrai is the author of El Cerrito (Inside the Castle, 2018), winner of a 2019 Arab American Book Awards honorable mention and named “about the best piece of literature I have read in a long time” by late poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Born and raised in California to accidental-immigrants from Iraq, these days she resides in Dearborn, where she’s pursuing her MFA at the University of Michigan and working on a poetry collection documenting the emotional cartography of mid-20th century Baghdad. This work was a first place winner of The Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award in 2024 from the Hopwood Awards Program at the University of Michigan.
Nancy Beauregard
Nancy Beauregard, MFA, is a legally blind poet from the high desert of New Mexico. She teaches Creative Writing to incarcerated students through correspondence whilst exploring nature and disability in her own poetry. Beauregard’s works have appeared in several publications including Sky Island Journal, The MacGuffin, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and The Normal School among others, as well as in her chapbook, I Heard a Train. Her most recent achievement is First Place National Winner in the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest 2024. Find her on Instagram @murderedinanovel.
Monika Dziamka
Monika Dziamka is a writer and editor from Albuquerque. She has an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, a Master’s in publishing from Columbia, and a BA in journalism from UNM. As an editor, she has helped hundreds of authors publish their novels, memoirs, mysteries, academic textbooks, and more. Her own creative writing has appeared in New Mexico Magazine, the Chicago Review of Books, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Monika is also a volunteer with the Read to Me! ABQ Network, which promotes childhood literacy and distributes gently used books to kids around Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. Connect with Monika through www.monikadziamka.com.
Camille Louise Goering
Camille Louise Goering is a French-American writer and journalist. She is currently an MFA candidate and graduate instructor at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. You can find more of her work at the New Limestone Review, SixFold, Big Easy Magazine, the Tallahassee Democrat, and other publications.
J.C. Graham
J.C. Graham is an undergraduate pursuing a degree in Creative Writing at Brigham Young University. While this is her first publication, she has big dreams for a career in writing. While she hopes to someday write novels full-time, she currently works as a screenwriter for BYUtv. In addition to writing, J.C. also loves playing Scott Joplin, acting in her local theatre troupe, and spending time with her husband.
Olivia Martinez
Olivia Martinez is a Latinx writer and artist born and raised in the New Mexico. Her education in anthropology and psychology has informed the way she views the world, and in turn her art and writing. With the main goal of storytelling through multimedia pathways, she is driven by personal experience and how it ties into the greater themes of human nature, identity, life and death, environment, culture, spirituality, inequality, and health.
Claire Robbins
Claire Robbins teaches at Kalamazoo Valley Community College and serves on the board of a youth arts collaborative. They have published short fiction, essays, and poetry in Nimrod, American Short Fiction, Passages North, River River, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere.
Aaron Tillman
Aaron Tillman lives in Boston and teaches writing at UMass Amherst. His short story collection, Consolation Miracles, was published by Gateway Literary Press in 2022; his book of critical nonfiction, Magical American Jew, was published by Lexington Books in 2018, and his short story collection, Every Single Bone in My Brain, was published by Braddock Avenue Books in 2017. His stories and essays have appeared in a variety of different journals, and several works of fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He can be found online at aarontillmanfiction.com.
Harley Tonelli
Harley Tonelli is a poet, musician, and lawyer from Seattle, Washington. Harley is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Washington Bothell in the Creative Writing and Poetics program, and has previously studied at the University of Washington School of Law and Berklee College of Music. Harley is passionate about birds, the ocean, and everybody getting free.
Artists
Mary Amato
Mary Amato is a multidisciplinary artist currently teaching at The Montclair Art Museum. Her work has appeared in publications, including Quarter Press, Pulse, Peatsmoke Journal, 100 Word Story, New Note Poetry, SoFloPoJo, Viewless Wings, Sheepshead Review, HeartWood Literary Magazine, Unsung Hero, and more. She is also an award-winning novelist, poet, songwriter, and the co-founder of Firefly Shadow Theater, a company that explores storytelling with cut paper, light, and the human body. In her teaching, she specializes in working with adults who have cognitive disabilities or a fear of creative expression.
Anna Rotty
Anna Rotty lives on Tiwa land in Albuquerque where she is an MFA candidate and instructor of photography at the University of New Mexico. Anna investigates water, light and infrastructure, informing her understanding of orientation and place. Her work has been published by Southwest Contemporary, Humble Arts Foundation, and Lenscratch, where she earned 3rd place in the Student Portfolio Prize in 2023. Anna is part of Collective Constructs, a collaborative group of artists and art historians engaging with public visual scholarship to works from the permanent collection at the UNM Art Museum.
Merridawn Duckler
Merridawn Duckler, a poet, curator and text-based installation artist at Blackfish Gallery, curated the first land art show in Oregon. Exhibitions include wall-sized reproduction of Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “Circulation” a pop-up forest library, “Roboyat” on Khayyam’s Rubaiyat and “Guarded”, installation of the unknown art guard. Art-based performance at LACMA, LACE, Phoenix Art Museum. Author of Interstate (dancing girl press) Idiom (Harbor Review) Misspent Youth (rinky dink press) and Arrangement (forthcoming Southern Most Press). Recent artwork in Poetry Society of New York, Barcopsa Literary Review, and an art play in the Ekphrastic Issue of Gasher.
Don Swartzentruber
Don Swartzentruber grew up in an Amish Mennonite community in Sussex County, Delaware. He left his Old Order tradition to attend art school. After earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at Vermont College of Norwich University he decided to revisit his roots with a collection of paintings and drawings called “Pop-Mennonite.” The work created a stir among Mennonites, especially in Canada. Mennonite Weekly newspaper called it “Weird”. Disturbing. Bizarre.” Canadian Mennonite journal called it a “jarring juxtaposition of the sacred and the secular.” The work was exhibited at college galleries and museums. The original oil paintings are represented by Saatchi Art.
Matthew Fertel
Matthew Fertel is an abstract photographer who seeks out beauty in the mundane. Small details get framed in ways that draw attention away from the actual object and focus on the shapes, textures, and colors, transforming them into abstract landscapes, figures, and faces. His goal is to use these out-ofcontext images to create compositions that encourage an implied narrative that is easily influenced by the viewer and is open to multiple interpretations.
Bill Wolak
Bill Wolak has just published his eighteenth book of poetry entitled All the Wind’s Unfinished Kisses with Ekstasis Editions. His collages have appeared as cover art for such magazines as Phoebe, Harbinger Asylum, Baldhip Magazine, and Barfly Poetry Magazine.
Lorri Frisbee
Lorri Frisbee grew up in Bozeman, Montana, where her mother managed the local bowling alley. Since then she’s lived in both South Korea and Mexico, and currently resides in Colorado, where her artwork has shown at the Lakewood Cultural Center, the Arvada Cultural Center, The Spark, and the Anam Cara Gallery. Her art and poetry have appeared in print and online at La Piccioletta Barca, Gasher, and High Shelf Press. Visit her at lorrifrisbee.com or on Instagram @lorrifrisbee.
Robin Young
Based in Borrego Springs California, artist Robin Young currently works in mixed media focusing mostly on collage and contemporary art making. Her focus on collage art using magazine clippings, masking tape, wallpaper, jewelry, feathers, foil etc. allows her to develop deep into the whimsical and intuitive. From large, life-sized pieces, 3D sculptures, to small postcard-sized arrangements, Robin’s keen eye and gripping esthetic guide her viewers into her own semi-readymade world. Repurposing nostalgic images for lighthearted and sometimes disquieting messages; Robin’s artistic universe is strange, funky, sometimes perverse and always alluring.
Benjamin Green
Benjamin Green is a writer (11 published books, including THE SOUND OF FISH DREAMING) and a visual artist. He displays his work at Jemez Fine Art Gallery in Jemez Springs. At the age of 67 he hopes his work articulates a mature vision of the world.
Issue 49 Masthead
Anthony Yarbrough
Editor-In-Chief
Anthony Yarbrough is a writer from Los Angeles and a third-year MFA student at the University of New Mexico. His fiction and nonfiction explore memory, sexuality, substance abuse, introspection, weather and cottagecore. He’s excited to rejoin the Blue Mesa Review team as its Editor-In-Chief.
Gwyneth Henke
Managing Editor
Gwyneth Henke (she/her) is a second-year MFA candidate in fiction at UNM. She graduated with a degree in religious studies at Washington University in St. Louis and worked in interfaith relations before joining the MFA. Her fiction explores conversion, doubt, faith, ritual, and desire. She loves to read Haruki Murakami, Michael Ondaatje, Elena Ferrante, Mieko Kawakami, and Zadie Smith.
Kyndall Benning
Associate Editor
Kyndall Benning is a writer from Edmond, Oklahoma. She is a third year MFA candidate in Nonfiction at the University of New Mexico. Her essays focus mainly on complex relationships, especially familial, in addition to topics on class and place. In addition to nonfiction, she likes working in fiction and poetry. When she isn’t writing, she likes spending time with her loved ones, including her cat, Feathers. She also enjoys oil painting and scuba diving when she has time.
Amy Dotson
Poetry Editor
Amy Dotson is a writer from all over Kentucky. She is a second-year MFA student working on fiction, but she also writes creative nonfiction and poetry. Her work tends to deal with class, places affected by political neglect, and the strangeness of the quotidian. Like many twenty-somethings, she has recently gotten really into rock climbing.
Kani Aniegboka
Creative Nonfiction Editor
Kani Aniegboka is an MFA student at the University of New Mexico, a TinHouse summer camp participant and is currently working on his first memoir. A few years ago, he engaged in both occupational and geographical changes that he’s yet to recover from, but which have left him viewing the world with infant-like fascination once again. Kani enjoys reading culturally rich stories that question normativity.
Joe Byrne
Fiction Editor
Joe Byrne was born in Colorado Springs but grew up in New Mexico. He is a second year MFA student at UNM and the incoming fiction editor for BMR. When he’s not reading or writing, he enjoys launching projectiles and listening to death metal.
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. Now in her 24th year of working 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.
Her prose and poetry appear in numerous print and online journals. Best American Essays 2011 recognized her creative nonfiction among its Notable Essays, and she serves as a senior fiction reader for New England Review. She has also worked as a librarian at the Centers for Disease Control, a copy designer and proofreader in graphics and advertising, a bookshop clerk, and a clerical assistant at a law office.
Graduate Readers
Robin Babb
Paris Baldante
Kyndall Benning
Jasmine Colorado
Lucas Garcia
John Hardberger
Julie Peterman
Undergraduate Readers
Theo Bloyd
Isabella Clarke
Miriah Constant
Shelley Corral
Alexandra Dark
Robert “Wes” Dyer
Syd Freland
Carter Gage
Renata Gonzales
Alex Longo
Emilia Madrid
Ty Miller
Sophia Puglia-Henry
Gareth Ripol
Electra Schroeder
Tanya Tyler