The Fall 2024 edition of the Santa Monica Review.

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Complete contents of the Fall 2024 issue

Alice Mattison – The River
Monona Wali – Love Thy Monster: A Novel in Six Short Chapters
Daniel Davis-Williams – Pedagogy
Alisa Slaughter – The Sacrifice Blur
Josef Kuhn – The Illustrated Anarchist Cookbook for Kids
Thomas Heise – Mother of Pearl
Michelle Latiolais – Miss Donuts
Daniel Lawless – from Marginalia: Scenes from Louisville, 1960-1975
Christopher Buckley – Out of the Spin Cycle – Physics, Cosmology, Cars, and Luck
Korey Lewis – Deshawn
Ben Roth – Strawberry Fields Forever
Reid Sharpless – PanoptiGolf
Ismet Prcic – Why People Hate Mimes

Cover by elin o’Hara slavick

Contributors

Christopher Buckley is the author of three books of nonfiction; recent essays in PLUME, Catamaran, I-70 Review, Ravens Perch, Talking River Review, Sangam Literary Magazine, Iconoclast, and Redactions. His most recent book of poetry is One Sky to the Next, winner of the Longleaf Press Book Prize. Imperfect Contrition: New & Selected Nonfiction is due early 2025.

Daniel Davis-Williams received an MFA from San Francisco State University and attended the Disquiet International Literary Program. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, The Rupture, The Sun, and Witness. He lives in El Cerrito, CA.

Thomas Heise is the author of the lyrical narrative Moth, the poetry collection Horror Vacui, and the scholarly monographs The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel, and Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture. His writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Oxonian Review, and elsewhere. He is an Associate Professor of English at Penn State University (Abington) and lives in New York City.

Josef Kuhn’s writing has appeared in Hobart, Berkeley Fiction Review, The Columbia Review, Superstition Review, The Rumpus, and other venues. He currently makes his home in Pittsburgh, though he has lived in six U.S. states, including two very formative years as a middle-schooler in San Diego. He’s working on a novel.

Michelle Latiolais is author of the short story collection Widow and the novels She, A Proper Knowledge, and Even Now, which received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she directs the Programs in Writing.

Daniel Lawless is the author most recently of The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With; his current book, I Tell You This Now, was released in March 2024. Recent poems appear in FIELD, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Los Angeles Review, upsteet, SOLSTICE, Manhattan Review, Massachusetts Review, JAMA, and Dreaming Awake: New Prose Poetry from the U.S., Australia, and the U.K., among others. A recipient of a continuing Shifting Foundation grant, he is the founder and editor of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, Plume Editions, and the annual Plume Poetry anthologies.

Korey Lewis is from Rochester, New York. He received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine. His thesis was runner-up for the Henfield Award. His work has been supported by the Community of Writers and The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and appeared in ZYZZYVA with an honorable mention in Narrative.

Alice Mattison’s most recent novel is Conscience, published in 2018. She is the author of six other novels, four collections of stories, a book of poems, and The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control — and Live to Tell the Tale. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.

Ismet Prcic (Izzy) was born in Bosnia-Herzegovina and immigrated to the U.S. in 1996, after the war. His debut novel, Shards, was published in 2011 by Grove Press to critical acclaim, winning numerous awards. His second novel, Unspeakable Home, is out from Avid Reader Press. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the film Imperial Dreams. Prcic lives in an Airstream in San Fernando Valley, CA.

Ben Roth has published short fiction in Bodega Magazine (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), North Dakota Quarterly, Drunken Boat (after being a finalist in Cutbank’s flash contest), Gargoyle, The Bookends Review, Quibble, Your Impossible Voice, Euphony, Sensitive Skin, Gambling the Aisle, decomp journal, 101 Words, Cuento Magazine, Aesthetics for Birds, Sci Phi Journal, Blink-Ink, Flash, and Nanoism, as well as criticism with Chicago Review, AGNI Online, 3:AM Magazine, The Millions, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. After teaching writing at Harvard and philosophy at Tufts, he is now an assistant professor at Emerson College.

Reid Sharpless is a writer from Texas. He received his MFA from Columbia, and his short fiction has appeared in The Baffler, X-R-A-Y, and Bridge Eight.

elin o’Hara slavick is an Artist-in-Residence at the University of California, Irvine. She has exhibited her work internationally, and it is held in many collections, including the Queens Museum, The National Library of France, The Library of Congress, The Nasher Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. She was represented by Cohen Gallery in LA. Slavick is the author of two monographs — Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography (with a foreword by Howard Zinn) and After Hiroshima (with an essay by James Elkins); a chapbook of surrealist poetry, Cameramouth; and Holding History in Our Hand for the seventy-fifth commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She has held artist residencies in Canada, France, the United States, and Japan, most recently at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Images Magazine, FOAM, San Francisco Chronicle, and Asia-Pacific Journal, among other publications. She is currently working on a book, Dark Archive.

Alisa Slaughter’s essays, short fiction, and translations have appeared most recently in Flyway, terrain.org, and Santa Monica Review. She co-translated A Spy for an Unknown Country, lectures and essays by Merab Mamardashvili (2021, ibidemVerlag), and her collection of short fiction, Bad Habitats, was published in 2013 by Gold Line Press. During the summer of 2023, she co-organized an international colloquium, “Both Sides Face East,” in Lviv and Travneve, Ukraine, which included writers, artists, and academics from around the world. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA in comparative literature from the University of Arizona, and teaches at the University of Redlands.

Andrew Tonkovich has edited the Santa Monica Review since 1998. He’s the author of two fiction collections and co-edited the anthology Orange County: A Literary Field Guide (Heyday) with Lisa Alvarez. He hosts a radio show and podcast, Bibliocracy, aired on KPFK in Southern California and produced by the Community of Writers.

Monona Wali’s novel Sutra Americana was selected as a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press 2024 Immigrant Writing Series. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, won the 2015 Independent Book Publishers Gold award for multicultural fiction. She was born in Benares, India, and lives in Los Angeles where she teaches writing and literature to older adults at Santa Monica College. She is a longtime contributor to the Santa Monica Review.

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