The Spring 2025 edition of the Santa Monica Review.
Santa Monica Review is sold at the SMR website, SMC’s Campus Store, Beyond Baroque and Small World Books in Venice, and other local booksellers. Copies may also be ordered by mail and subscription. For more information, visit our website and “Like” us on Facebook.
Complete contents of the Spring issue
Dawna Kemper – HarmonyL. Annette Binder – Cathedral
Amy Dawson Robertson – Gig Line
Jeffrey Bills-Solomon – Submatriculation
J.M. Hollwig – Ariadne
Miles Parnegg from – Private Lessons
Jake Zucker – Sweetheart’s Effort
Sean Bernard – Big Sur
Stephen D. GutierRez – The Sacred Grotto
Abby Walthausen – Better Choices
Michael Guista – The Fishing Trip
Seth Gannon – Walt by Walt
Gary Amdahl – King of the Barn
Contributors
Gary Amdahl's books are The Creative Writers (2024 Galleon Books), Much Ado About Everything: Oration on the Dignity of the Novelist (2016 Massachusetts Review Working Titles), The Daredevils (2016 Soft Skull), Across My Big Brass Bed (2014 Artistically Declined Press, reissued 2024 corona\samizdat), The Intimidator Still Lives in Our Hearts (2013 ADP), I Am Death (2008 Milkweed Editions), Visigoth (2006 Milkweed), and A Motel of the Mind, with Leslie Brody (2001 Philos Press). His work has appeared many times here, and in Fiction, The Quarterly, Agni, A Public Space, Gettysburg Review (winning a Pushcart Prize for an essay there), Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. He has reviewed and/or been reviewed in NYTBR, LATBR, LARB, The Nation, Bookforum, Washington Post, Boston Globe, ZYZZYVA, The Millions, Necessary Fiction, Rain Taxi, Bookslut, and elsewhere.
Sean Bernard is the author of the novel Studies in the Hereafter (Red Hen) and the story collection Desert sonorous (UMass). His work has been published widely, and he's received grants and fellowships from groups including the National Endowment for the Arts and Jentel Artists Foundation. He teaches in and directs the Creative Writing program at the University of La Verne.
Jeffrey Bills-Solomon is the author of So Famous and So Gay: The Fabulous Potency of Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein (University of Minnesota Press), which was selected for the American Library Association’s list of the best LGBTQ Books of the year. His articles have appeared in Journal of Lesbian Studies, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Twentieth-Century Literature, which awarded him the Andrew J. Kappel Prize. His fiction has appeared in the Santa Monica Review, SPECS, and Best Gay Stories. He lives on Mt. Washington, in Los Angeles.
L. Annette Binder’s fiction has appeared in the Pushcart and O. Henry Prize anthologies. Her story collection, Rise (Sarabande), received the Mary McCarthy Prize, and her novel, The Vanishing Sky (Bloomsbury), was a New York Times Book Review Selection for Summer. Her memoir, Child of Earth and Starry Heaven (Wandering Aengus), is forthcoming in 2025. She holds an MFA from the Programs in Writing at UC Irvine.
Peter Carr (1925-1981) was an artist, writer, and peace activist who cofounded and taught in the Department of Comparative Literature at California State University Long Beach. His paintings, drawings, and seven self-published books were recently the subject of a gallery show at Cerritos College, “Peter Carr: Artist for Survival.”
Seth Gannon lives, reads, and writes in Portland, OR. His stories and essays have appeared in Hobart, Meridian, Slate, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. His only Southern California bona fides are a Culver City birth certificate and an aversion to winters.
Michael Guista grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and now lives on the Central Coast of California. He has published several times in American Short Fiction and the Santa Monica Review, along with other journals. His first book, Brain Work, was awarded the Katherine Bakeless Nason award and was published by Houghton/Mariner. This story is from his new collection, Man Oh Man, still looking for a publisher, about rural masculinity, for better and mostly for worse. He especially enjoys reading dialog.
Stephen D. Gutierrez is the author of Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand, A Novella, recently published by University of Tampa Press. He has written three collections of stories and essays, and won an American Book Award for Live from Fresno y Los. He is well published in magazines and anthologies, including appearances in early issues of the Santa Monica Review, and has received two Notable Essay citations in The Best American Essays. Though he makes the Bay Area his home, he considers himself a Los Angeles writer. He grew up in the City of Commerce, off the 5, before the Citadel Outlets Mall and the Commerce Casino Hotel rose up and partially obstructed the view of the San Gabriel Mountains on clear, sunny days. He is a retired professor of English at California State University, East Bay.
J.M. Hollwig attended Brown University. He currently lives in a small town in the San Bernardino Mountains. His work has appeared in Commuter Lit, Danse Macabre, Litbreak Magazine, and the Santa Monica Review. His passion is the short story.
Dawna Kemper’s short fiction has appeared in Ecotone, ZYZZYVA, The Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Shenandoah, The Idaho Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and previously in the Santa Monica Review. Among other recognitions, her work was a finalist for the annual ASME Ellie/National Magazine Awards in fiction, and twice listed as “Notable” in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. A native Midwesterner, she’s lived in Los Angeles long enough to remember the spiral-bound Thomas Guide.
Miles Parnegg is a graduate of the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The MacGuffin, Blue Mesa Review, and Citric Acid. A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, he now lives in Los Angeles.
Amy Dawson Robertson has published short fiction in Orca: A Literary Journal and Cagibi. She is the author of two novels, Miles to Go and Scapegoat, and two novellas, Midnight in Orlando and Midnight on a Mountaintop. She works in an academic library in Washington, DC.
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.
Abby Walthausen is a writer and teacher living in Los Angeles. She hosts a poetry podcast called A Lovely Wallpaper, which is part interview and part memory work. Her debut poetry collection, A Swale a Sort of Swaddle, arrives in 2025.
Jake Zucker’s short stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Story, West Branch, Sonora Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review, and he’s received residencies and awards from the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Keller Estate, and the Purdue University Libraries and College of Liberal Arts. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and he’s at work on a novel about distance running and white-collar crime.
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