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Current Editors
Joshua Corey is Editor-in-Chief of The Fortnightly Review. A poet, critic, translator, and novelist, he received his MFA from the University of Montana in 1999, was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1999-2001, and earned a PhD in English Literature from Cornell University in 2007. His books include How Long Is Now (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), a novel; Hannah and the Master (MadHat Press, 2021), a poetic masque on the philosophical love affair of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger; The Transcendental Circuit: Otherworlds of Poetry (MadHat Press, 2017), a collection of critical prose; Partisan of Things (Kenning Editions, 2016), a new translation, with Jean-Luc Garneau, of Francis Ponge's Le parti pris des choses; The Barons (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014), a poetry collection; Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), a novel; and the Dorset-prize winning Severance Songs (Tupelo Press, 2011), a collection of post-sonnets. With G.C. Waldrep he co-edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012). He maintains a Substack, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, where he comments on movies, literature, and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series of historical novels.
Robert Archambeau is The Fortnightly Review’s Editor-at-Large and our North American Poetry Editor. He was born in Rhode Island, raised in Canada, and spent summers in Maine or at his father’s art studio on a lake in the Canadian wilderness. Currently, he is a professor of English at Lake Forest College, teaching 19th century British literature, creative writing, and literary theory. His books include two scholarly studies of poetry, Laureates and Heretics and Poetry and Uselessness, as well as two collections of literary essays, The Poet Resigns and Inventions of a Barbarous Age, and two collections of poems, Home and Variations and The Kafka Sutra. He also writes art criticism and serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review. His first novel, Alice B Toklas is Missing, came out in 2024 and his next novel, The Bloomsbury Forgery, will be published in 2026.
Paige Blackburn is the Managing Editor of The Fortnightly Review; they receive, organize, proof-read, format, and publish all of the pieces seen on this website. They studied creative writing at Lake Forest College. Several of their poems have appeared in journals, including Unbroken and Fiction Attic Press. They have been an editor for numerous other journals. A childhood passion for reading and writing spurred them on to pursue editorial work. They hope that The Fortnightly Review will become a home for many different kinds of literary work. They believe that “the role of any entity that publishes literature is the same as that of the literature itself: to be fluid and inspire change.”
Peter Robinson is the U.K. Poetry Editor, responsible for poetry from the UK, Europe, and elsewhere beyond the USA. He has published aphorisms, prose poems, stories, two novels, and volumes of literary criticism, as well as collections of poetry and translations. He has recently published three books, including Retrieved Attachments in 2023. His book, Return to Sendai: New and Selected Poems 1973-2024, will be released in 2025. A Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading, he is also a poetry editor for Two Rivers Press. The recipient of the Cheltenham Prize, he was born in 1953 and grew up in Liverpool and the north of England during the heyday of the Beatles and the British Poetry Revival. He received his doctorate at Cambridge University in 1975, where he was involved with the Cambridge International Poetry Festival. He left the UK to teach in Japan in 1989. As a poetry editor for the journal, he looks for poems “that grip the imagination” and “freshly illuminate the art.”
Fiction Editor Christina Milletti enjoys writing fiction and literary essays, but she especially loves blending fiction and critical writing in her work. Her fiction, articles, interviews and reviews have appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Best New American Voices, The Iowa Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her novel Choke Box: a Fem-Noir won the Juniper Prize for Fiction (University of Massachusetts Press). Her first book, The Religious & Other Fictions was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press and her most recent work of fiction, The Girling Season, won the Thornwillow Press Patron’s Prize. Since 2010, she has been an Associate Editor at the American Book Review. She co-curates the Exhibit X Fiction Reading Series, and is an Associate Professor of English and the Executive Director of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo. She hopes that The Fortnightly Review will provide readers with much needed audacious reflections on the tumultuous current world we’re all living in.
Sally Connolly is the Reviews Editor. As an academic, Dr. Connolly is primarily concerned with American, British and Irish verse from the modern period to the present day. Her research interests include a wide variety of contemporary and modern poetry, including the elegy, epic, and confessional. Her first book, Grief and Meter: Elegies for Poets After Auden, was the first ever critical study of the elegies that poets write for each other. Her second book, Ranches of Isolation: Transatlantic Poetry considers the sometimes vexed nature of transatlantic poetic relations in a series of wide-ranging essays. She is currently working on a book about the poetry of the AIDS epidemic for Louisiana State University Press. Dr. Connolly's reviews and articles appear in publications such as Poetry, The London Evening Standard, Literary Imagination, The Times Literary Supplement, and Yeats Annual. She has been the recipient of several prestigious honors and awards including the Kennedy Scholarship at Harvard University. She is currently the Associate Dean of Student and Faculty Success for the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Houston. She previously taught at Wake Forest University and was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University.
Marc Vincenz is our Translations Editor as well as the editor of our Odd Volumes series. He is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, and musician. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His more recent poetry collections include,The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, A Splash of Cave Paint, The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars. Marc’s work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, Colorado Review, World Literature Today, The Notre Dame Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books and many others. He lives on a farm in western Massachusetts where there are more spiny-nosed voles, tufted grey-buckle hares and Amoeba scintilla than humans.
Dispatches Editor Cassandra Atherton is responsible for short pieces or vignettes based on firsthand accounts that tap into writing communities across the world. She is an award-winning Australian prose poet and Distinguished Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Her books include, Prose Poetry: An Introduction, co-authored with Paul Hetherington (Princeton, 2020), and the anthology Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom (MadHat, 2023), co-edited with Peter Johnson. Her other interests include Japanese hibakusha poetry and Vladmir Nabokov’s novels. She’s been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Emerson College, and at Sophia University, Tokyo. She’s currently co-authoring a scholarly book on ekphrastic poetry for Princeton University Press. She is an associate editor at MadHat Press, series editor at Spineless Wonders and a commissioning editor at Westerly. As an editor, she aims to identify the kind of engaged and imaginative creative work that has always thrilled her as a reader. She believes that twenty-first century literary journals can enliven the ways readers think of literature and culture.
Editorial Associate Isabel Mantilla studies English and Gender, Women, and Sexualities studies at Lake Forest College. A few of her poems have appeared in various journals. She is at work on several graphic novel projects.
Emeritus Editors
Denis Boyles (1946-2023) was the founder of the New Series of The Fortnightly Review. A critic, university lecturer, journalist and editor, he was the author of African Lives, Design Poetics, A Man's Life and many other books. His last book was Everything Explained That Is Explainable: On the Creation of the Encyclopedia Britannica's Celebrated Eleventh Edition, 1910-1911 (Knopf). His criticism and journalism appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, National Review Online, Toronto Globe & Mail and elsewhere. His doctorate was from the Communications and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) in the University of Westminster. Editor-in-Chief Emeritus.
Alan Macfarlane is the author of more than twenty books and numerous articles covering English social history, demography in Nepal and the industrial history of England, China and Japan. A survey text, The Invention of the Modern World, has been published by Odd Volumes for subscribers to the Fortnightly, and his recent work, The Survival Manual, was a 2016-2017 Fortnightly serial. A subsequent memoir-serial, My First 30 Years, appeared in the Fortnightly in 2020. Co-Editor Emeritus.
Anthony O'Hear OBE. Former director, Royal Institute of Philosophy, London; Professor of Philosophy and lately Head, Department of Education, University of Buckingham. Editor Emeritus.
Peter Riley is the former co-editor of The English Intelligencer, the former editor of Collection, and the author of fifteen books of poetry – and some of prose. A recipient of a 2012 Cholmondeley Award for poetry, his latest book is The Glacial Stairway (Carcanet, 2011). He lives in Yorkshire. A collection of his "Poetry Notes" is published by Odd Volumes; his webpage is April Eye; the Poetry Notes archive is here. Poetry Editor Emeritus, 2009-2023
Nathaniel Tarn was a poet, translator, editor, literary and cultural critic and anthropologist. He was born in 1928 in Paris of British and French parents, educated in France, Belgium and England, obtaining degrees from Cambridge, the Sorbonne and Chicago; he emigrated to the United States in 1970, where he taught at American universities until his retirement. Best known as a poet and essayist, he was also an anthropologist, with a particular interest in in Highland Maya studies and the sociology of Buddhist institutions, and a translator of the highest order (see above all his versions of Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu and Stelae by Victor Segalen). His first collection of poetry was Old Savage/Young City (Cape, London,1964), which was followed the next year by his appearance in the seventh volume of the Penguin Modern Poets series. Three more collections followed in London, during which time he also became founding editor of the remarkable Cape Editions series of seminal modern texts: poetry, prose, anthropology, drama, many of them pioneering translations. He also founded Cape-Goliard: a Poetry Press. He emigrated to the United States in 1970, after which only two more collections — the important volume A Nowhere for Vallejo and the ambitious book-length poem Lyrics for the Bride of God — were to appear in the UK. Thereafter, with the exception of his Shearsman publications and Recollections of Being (Salt), all of his work appeared in the USA, most significantly: The House of Leaves (Black Sparrow) and Atitlan/Alashka (with Janet Rodney, Brillig Works; also Shearsman), At the Western Gates (Shearsman) and Selected Poems 1950-2000 (Wesleyan UP), Ins & Outs of the Forest Rivers, Gondwana (New Directions). There is also a significant volume of essays in Views from the Weaving Mountain (University of New Mexico). His most recent book is The Hölderliniae (New Directions, 2021), an excerpt from which is here. Contributing Editor Emeritus.
Contributing Editors
Jeffery Renard Allen is the award-winning author of six books of fiction and poetry, including the celebrated novel Song of the Shank, which was a front-page review in both The New York Times Book Review and The San Francisco Chronicle. Allen’s other accolades include The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction, The Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-First Century Award, the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, a grant from Creative Capital, a Whiting Writers; Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a NYFA grant, residencies at the Bellagio Center, Ucross, The Hermitage, VCCA, Monson Arts, and Jentel Arts, and fellowships at The Center for Scholars and Writers, the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He was a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Allen is the founder and editor of Taint Taint Taint magazine and is the Africa Editor for The Evergreen Review. His latest books are the short story collection Fat Time and the memoir An Unspeakable Hope, the latter co-authored with Leon Ford. Allen is at work on several projects, including a memoir entitled Mother-Wit and, a speculative novel called Radar Country, and the short story collection Try Me. Find out more about him at www.writerjefferyrenardallen.com.
Nicoletta Asciuto is an expert linguist and polyglot, with knowledge of eight languages. She is currently Lecturer in Modern literature at the University of York, where she teaches and researches comparative modernism, twentieth-century literature and culture, and translation. Her undergraduate module on literary translation (“Found in Translation: The Practice of Translating Literature”) promotes translation as a creative and critical practice in the English Literature degree. Aside from her academic work, she has published literary translations from Spanish into English and is currently translating a selection of early twentieth-century Italian texts on the radio for Emilie Morin’s Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in 2022.
Michael Blackburn lives in Lincolnshire. From 2005–2008 he was the Royal Literary Fund fellow at the University of Lincoln where he now teaches English Literature and Creative Writing. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies over the years, including Being Alive (Bloodaxe) and Something Happens, Sometimes Here (Five Leaves Press). His most recent collection is Spyglass Over The Lagoon. A selection of his Fortnightly Currente Calamo columns, Sucks To Your Revolution: Annoying The Politically Correct (US), is available as a Kindle ebook. His regular blog is Plunder and Salvage.
Simon Collings lives in Oxford and has published poems, stories and critical essays in a range of journals including Stride, Journal of Poetics Research, Café Irreal, Tears in the Fence, Ink Sweat and Tears, Lighthouse and PN Review. He worked for Oxfam for 16 years, where for the last six years he was Fundraising Director. After that, he was CEO of a small non-profit and worked for an organisation which advises renewable energy businesses in Africa. Out West, his first chapbook, was published by Albion Beatnik in 2017, and a second chapbook, Stella Unframed, was released by The Red Ceilings Press in 2018. An archive of his work is here.
Anthony Howell is former dancer with the Royal Ballet, founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and performed solo at the Hayward Gallery and at the Sydney Biennale. His articles on visual art, dance, performance, and poetry have appeared in Art Monthly, The London Magazine, Harpers & Queen, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. In 2001 he received a LADA bursary to study the tango in Buenos Aires and now teaches the dance at his studio/gallery, The Room in Tottenham Hale. He is the author of a seminal textbook, The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice, several collections of poetry, including The Ogre's Wife, and translations, including his work with Fawzi Karim in Plague Lands. His semi-fictional memoir Consciousness (with Mutilation) was published by Odd Volumes in 2019.
John Matthias is editor emeritus of Notre Dame Review, emeritus professor of English at Notre Dame and the author of some thirty books of poetry, translation, criticism, and scholarship. Shearsman Books published his three volumes of Collected Poems, as well as the uncollected long poem, Trigons, two more volumes of poetry, Complayntes for Doctor Neuro and Acoustic Shadows and a novel, Different Kinds of Music. Tales Tall & Short— Fictional, Factual and In Between was published by Dos Madres in 2020 and The New Yorker recently published his widely read memoir, “Living with a Visionary.” He is a former visiting Fellow and now a Life Member at Clare Hall, Cambridge. His Fortnightly archive is here.
Peter Riley | Poetry Notes.
Hoyt Rogers is a writer, editor, translator, the author of a volume of criticism, The Poetics of Inconstancy and a poetry collection, Witnesses. His essays, poems, and stories have appeared in many periodicals. He translates from the French, German, Italian, and Spanish. His translations include the Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges, a novel by Philippe Claudel, and three books by Yves Bonnefoy—The Curved Planks, Second Simplicity, and The Digamma. Openwork, an André du Bouchet reader, will be published by Yale later this year (2014). He lives in the Dominican Republic and Italy. Odd Volumes published his translations of Marco Genovesi's Telegrams from a City Under Siege in 2015.
Ian Sansom. A new series of mysteries, the "County Guides", launched in July 2013 with the publication of The Norfolk Mystery (UK) (US). Among his many books is September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem (2019). He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, is a former Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is often heard on Radio Three and Radio Four. He teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Warwick and writes frequently for The Guardian and the London Review of Books.
Ian Seed’s books of prose poems and small fictions include New York Hotel (2018); Identity Papers 2016) and Makers of Empty Dreams (2014); and two other collections containing prose poems, Shifting Registers and Anonymous Intruder, all from Shearsman; and two chapbooks, Threadbare Fables (LikeThisPress, 2012) and Distances (Red Ceilings, 2018). The Thief of Talant (2016) (the first translation into English of Pierre Reverdy’s Le Voleur de Talan) is published by Wakefield. His work also appears in a number of anthologies including The Best Small Fictions 2017 (Braddock Avenue Books), The Forward Book of Poetry 2017 (Faber & Faber), The Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt), and the critical anthology, British Prose Poetry: The Poems Without Lines, edited by Jane Monson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and has been featured on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, hosted by Ian McMillan. He lectures in the Department of English at the University of Chester.
John Taylor | Contributing editor. John Taylor is the author of the three-volume essay collection, Paths to Contemporary French Literature (Transaction Publishers, 2004, 2007, 2011) and Into the Heart of European Poetry (Transaction, 2008). He has recently translated books by Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, and Louis Calaferte. In 2013, he won the Raiziss-de Palchi Translation Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for his project to translate the Italian poet Lorenzo Calogero. His most recent personal book is If Night is Falling (Bitter Oleander Press, 2012). His translation of Philippe Jaccottet's Truinas: 21 April 2001 was published in 2018 by Odd Volumes. He has lived in France since 1977.
Alan Wall | Contributing editor. Alan Wall was born in Bradford, lives in North Wales, and studied English at Oxford. He has published six novels and three collections of poetry, including Doctor Placebo. Jacob, a book written in verse and prose, was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize. His work has been translated into ten languages. He has published essays and reviews in many different periodicals including the Guardian, Spectator, The Times, Jewish Quarterly, Leonardo, PN Review, London Magazine, The Reader and Agenda. He was Royal Literary Fund Fellow in Writing at Warwick University and Liverpool John Moores and is currently Professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Chester. His book Endtimes has just been published by Shearsman Books, and Badmouth, a novel, was published by Harbour Books in January. Two collections of his essays, Labyrinths and Clues and Walter Benjamin: An Arcade of Reflections, have been published by Odd Volumes, the publishing imprint of The Fortnightly Review, and a third is forthcoming.
Michelene Wandor | Contributing editor. Michelene Wandor is a poet, playwright, short-story writer and musician. From 1971-1982, she was Poetry Editor of Time Out, and in 1987 she was the first woman to have a play on one of the National Theatre stages: her dramatisation of Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew. She has written over a hundred hours of drama and dramatisations for BBC radio, many nominated for awards; she has also broadcast extensively, as presenter and reviewer, especially on Spirit of the Age, Radio 3’s long-running early music programme. As a performer of early music, she researched and produced the first CD in the UK of the music of Salamone Rossi, the Jewish composer who was a contemporary of Monteverdi in Mantua. She has published seven collections of poetry, of which Musica Transalpina was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Following her two collections of short stories, Guests in the Body, and False Relations, in 2021 she created a collection of bespoke stories, Four Times EightyOne, published by Odd Volumes. Alongside her fiction and non-fiction writing, she held a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship for a number of years, and for over three decades she has taught creative writing in a variety of locations. This led her to write The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else (2008), a seminal history and critique of Creative Writing’s pedagogy, followed by The Art of Writing Drama, and Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin – a Foundation Reader (2021). Her most recent poetry collection is Travellers (2021), and an archive of her Fortnightly contributions, including an account of her dramatisation of Joyce's Mrs Dalloway for the BBC, is here.
Nigel Wheale | Contributing editor is the author of Raw Skies: New and Selected Poems (Shearsman 2005) and The Six Strides of Freyfaxi (Oystercatcher 2010). His academic texts include The Postmodern Arts (Routledge 1995) and Writing & Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590-1660 (Routledge 1999). An archive of his work in the Fortnightly may be found here.
Contact us
Correspondence: Send email and queries to fortnightlyrevieweditors@gmail.com.
Postal address for catalogs, review copies, discs and other material:
The Fortnightly Review
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lake Forest College
555 N. Sheridan Road
Lake Forest, IL 60045
Poetry titles submitted for review should be directed to the attention of the appropriate poetry editor.