We are excited to announce the winner of the Katherine Paterson Prize for Writing for Children and Young Adults—Jess Rinker’s “The Girl in the Window.” The runner-up is Adrianna Gordey’s “Don’t Call a Wolf from the Woods.” Both pieces will appear in Hunger Mountain #29.
About
Hunger Mountain is created by the faculty and students in the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
hungermtn@vcfa.edu
36 College Street Montpelier, VT 05602
The editors share VCFA’s belief that the arts are central to the human experience and have the ability not only to reflect reality but also to create it. Our masthead changes annually, and our revolving list of faculty editors and contest judges reach into their diverse literary communities to help make them part of ours. This allows for aesthetic flexibility, guided by our steady ethics: promoting voices that have gone unheard, expanding our representation and scope,and critically examining our contemporary culture and our field.
We value vulnerability, adventure, and accessibility. Our student readers are the future of the literary world, and all of us take great pride in discovering new voices, as well as publishing the freshest work from established artists.
hungermtn@vcfa.edu
36 College Street Montpelier, VT 05602
Past contributors to Hunger Mountain include Elizabeth Acevedo, Dilruba Ahmed, Pinckney Benedict, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Destiny O. Birdsong, Robin Black, Ron Carlson, Hayden Carruth, Lucy Corin, Kwame Dawes, Matthew Dickman, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Santee Frazier, Terrance Hayes, Robin Hemley, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, Lily Hoang, Pam Houston, Major Jackson, W. Todd Kaneko, Maxine Kumin, Dorianne Laux, Kelly Link, Robert Lopez, Sidney Lea, Michael Martone, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gregory Orr, Ann Pancake, Carl Phillips, Jordy Rosenberg, Tomaž Šalamun, Charles Simic, Jake Skeets, Patricia Smith, James Tate, Paul Tran, Jean Valentine, L. Lamar Wilson, Tiphanie Yanique, and many others.
Hunger Mountain was started in 2002 by founding editor Caroline Mercurio Spitzer through a generous donation from a Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing alumnx. The journal has since thrived with the assistance of MFA in Writing faculty and ongoing support from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, VCFA alumnx, subscribers and friends. Miciah Bay Gault served as editor in chief from 2009-2018. Erin Stalcup served as editor in chief from 2018-2021, and the journal is now run by faculty and students in VCFA’s MFA in Writing Program with faculty member Adam McOmber as editor in chief.
Adam McOmber
Editor in Chief & Fiction Editor
Adam McOmber is the author of three novels, The White Forest (Touchstone), Jesus and John (Lethe), and The Ghost Finders (JournalStone), as well as two collections of short stories: My House Gathers Desires (BOA) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA). His new collection of queer flash and experimental fiction, Fantasy Kit, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in June 2022. He is currently working on a queer erotic revision of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles that will be published by Lethe Press in digital monthly installments starting in September 2021.
His work has been included in The Year’s Best Speculative Gay Fiction and Best Microfiction and shortlisted for Best American Fantasy and Best Horror of the Year. His stories have appeared recently in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Fairy Tale Review, and Diagram. Adam is editor-in-chief of Hunger Mountain Review at VCFA.
Adam is an Ohio native, now residing in Los Angeles. He teaches in the Writing program at University of California Los Angeles and in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is on the faculty of the VCFA Novel Retreat and serves as one of its manuscript mentors.
Brian Leung
Fiction Editor
Brian Leung, author of All I Should Not Tell, World Famous Love Acts, Lost men, and Take me Home, is a past recipient of the Lambda Literary outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. Other honors include the Asian-American Literary Award, Willa Award, and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Brian’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Story, Ocean State Review, Numero Cinq, Crazyhorse, Grain, Gulf Coast, Kinesis, The Barcelona Review, Mid-American Review, Salt Hill, Gulf Stream, River City, Runes, The Bellingham Review, Hyphen, Velocity, The Connecticut Review, Blithe House Quarterly, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Crowd. He is Core Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Artes and a Professor of Creative Writing at Purdue University. His forthcoming title is A Terrifying Brush with Optimism: New and Selected (Sarabande, Nov. 2024).
Chachi D. Hauser
Nonfiction Editor
Chachi D. Hauser (she/they) is a writer and filmmaker. Chachi’s debut book, It’s fun to be a person I don’t know was published in March 2023 by the University of Nebraska Press in their American Lives Series. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her essays have appeared in Lit Hub, Prairie Schooner, swamp pink (formerly Crazyhorse), Hobart, The Writer’s Chronicle, among others.
Chachi is one of the producers of Hollow Tree, a feature documentary about three young women coming of age into a new climate reality in Louisiana, which premiered at the 2022 New Orleans Film Festival (Jury Award, Audience Award). Chachi was selected for the 2019 Sundance Talent Forum, 2019 Southern Producers Lab, 2020 The Gotham Documentary Lab, among others. She graduated with honors in film studies from Wesleyan University and completed her MFA in creative writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Chachi was born in NYC and is now based between New Orleans and Paris. Her writing and filmmaking explore topics of gender, environment, identity, family, and the imagination (personal and collective) with a passion for exploring the wild // fluid // in-between places.
Tarfia Faizullah
Poetry Editor
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Her writing has appeared widely in the US and abroad in the Daily Star, BuzzFeed, Hindu Business Line, Huffington Post, Ms. magazine, the New Republic, the Nation, Oxford American, Poetry magazine, and the Academy of American Poets website, as well as in the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019) and the television show PBS News Hour.
The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, and other honors, Faizullah presents work at institutions and organizations worldwide, and has been featured at the the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Fulbright Conference, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, the Radcliffe Seminars, New York University, Barnard College, University of California Berkeley, the Poetry Foundation, the Clinton School of Public Service, Brac University, and elsewhere.
Faizullah’s writing has been translated into Bengali, Persian, Chinese, and Tamil, and was included in the theater production Birangona: Women of War. Her collaborations include photographers, producers, composers, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists, resulting in several interdisciplinary projects, including an EP, Eat More Mango. In 2016, Harvard Law School included Faizullah in their list of 50 Women Inspiring Change.
Nance Van Winckel
Ruth Stone Poetry Contest Judge 2024
Nance Van Winckel is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently The Many Beds of Martha Washington (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series/Lynx House Press, 2021). She's also published a book of visual poems (Book of No Ledge) with Pleiades Press (2016), five books of fiction, including Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014), and a memoir entitled Sister Zero (Slant Books, 2022). The recipient of two NEA fellowships, the Washington State Book Award, a Paterson Fiction Prize, Poetry Society of America's Gordon Barber Poetry Award, a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes, Nance teaches in Vermont College’s MFA Program and lives in Spokane, Washington. Her author website is beloe. Her visual poetry website is http://photoemsbynancevanwinckel.zenfolio.com
Myrth Killingsworth
Hybrid Editor
Myrth Killingsworth (she/they) is a queer writer based in northern New Mexico. Her work has appeared in the tiny journal, The Cafe Irreal, Tupelo Quarterly, and Sunspot Lit. Myrth is currently working on a hybrid novel about the dance between freedom and care in the realms of parenthood, bodies, and art.
Montserrat Andrée Carty
Interviews Editor
Montserrat Andrée Carty is a Spanish-American writer, photographer, and the Interviews Editor for Hunger Mountain. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working on her first book. Find her online at www.montseandree.com.
Yetta Rose Stein
Managing Editor & Associate Poetry Editor
Yetta Rose Stein reads and writes in Livingston, Montana. She is a graduate of Hellgate High School. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the Associate Poetry Editor & Managing Editor for the Hunger Mountain Review and is a board member of Opera Montana. She is pursuing her MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Stephen Welter
Associate Editor At-Large
Stephen Welter is a writer based in Taos, New Mexico. He holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BS in Environmental Geochemical Science from the State University of New York. His work has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, and he has served as senior proofreader for Hunger Mountain. Stephen is currently working on a metaphysical autobiography about love and transfinite spaces.
Brie Goumaz
Associate Managing Editor
Brie is a writer currently calling Missoula, Montana home. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, focusing on her memoir detailing her travels as a vanlifer. Brie is serving as an Associate Managing Editor for the Hunger Mountain Review.
It would be remiss if we didn't mention the inspiration for most of her writing: Remi, Jaxon, Beans, and Oliver. Without whom, life would be entirely void of meaning.
Jamie Li
Associate Managing Editor
Jamie Li (she/her) is a San Diego-based fiction writer, product marketer in the technology industry, and MFA candidate at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A VONA/Voices alum, her writing has been published in Slant’d Magazine, Mangoprism, Lit Mag News and other publications.