
The editors of Iron Horse.

The editors of Iron Horse.

The editors of Iron Horse.

The editors of Iron Horse.
masthead
leslie jill patterson editor
Leslie Jill Patterson founded IHLR in 1999. Her prose has appeared in Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, Hotel Amerika, under the gum tree, and A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays. Her awards include two Kimmel-Harding Nelson residencies; a Texas Commission on the Arts fellowship; an Embrey Human Rights Fellowship; the Everett Southwest Literary Award (judged by Lee K. Abbott); a Soros Justice Fellowship, funded by the Open Society Foundations; the Prime Number Magazine Prize for Fiction (judged by David Jauss); the Richard J. Margolis Award for Social Justice Writing; and a Pushcart Prize. Since 2009, she has also worked as the case storyteller for public defenders representing indigent men and women charged with capital murder and facing the death penalty in Texas.
marcus burke fiction editor
Marcus Burke’s debut novel, Team Seven, was published in 2014 by Doubleday Books. Team Seven received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, was long-listed for the 2015 PEN Open Book Award, and was one of the “10 Titles to Pick Up Now,” in O, The Oprah Magazine. Burke was featured in The NY Times as part of a cohort of thirty two “Black Male Authors of our Time." He is currently at work on his next novel.
geffrey davis poetry editor
Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler (BOA), recent winner of the 2018 James Laughlin Award. His first collection, Revising the Storm (BOA, 2014), won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. Davis’s honors include the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the NEA, and The Whiting Foundation. He has recent work published in The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, The New York Times Magazine, PBS NewsHour, and Ploughshares. Davis is currently a faculty member in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas, and in the summer of 2018, he joined the low-res MFA faculty at The Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.
elena passarello nonfiction editor
Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been published in Oxford American, Slate, Creative Nonfiction, and The Iowa Review, among other publications, as well as in the 2015 anthologies Cat is Art Spelled Wrong and After Montaigne. Her first essay collection, Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande), won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards and was a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award. Sarabande will publish her second collection, Animals Strike Curious Poses, in February 2017. Passarello is a faculty member in the MFA program at Oregon State University.
Photo Credit: Wendy Madar

emma aylor Managing editor
Emma Aylor is the author of Close Red Water (2023), winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, the Yale Review Online, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington and is currently a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University.

jennessa hester managing editor
Jennessa Hester is an artist and scholar working out of Lubbock, Texas. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Kissing Dynamite, Corporeal, and Moon Cola, while her academic work can be found in venues like QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. She has previously served in a variety of programs designed to bring literature, poetry, and international cinema to local communities.
josh luckenbach managing editor
Josh Luckenbach received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas and a BA from the University of Virginia. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Nimrod, Birmingham Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere.
bibiana ossai managing editor
Bibiana Ossai has an MFA from Long Island University, Brooklyn, where she received the Marilyn Boutwell Graduate Award in Fiction. She is the winner of the 2019 Equinox Journal Poetry Contest. Her works have been supported by the Hatty Fitts Walker Scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center, The Poetry Project, Anaphora Arts Writing Residency Fellowship, and an Idyllwild Arts Writers Week fellowship. Her prose and poetry have appeared in The Dark Magazine, African Writer Magazine, The Poetry Project Footnotes, Flash Fiction Magazine, and The Dillydoun Review, among others.
associate editors: Timilehin Alake, Nana Boateng, Caleb Braun, William Brown, Collin Callahan, Jackie Chicalese, Will Dennis, Will Durham, Jo Anna Gaona, Meghan Giles, Victoria Hudson, Amelie Langland, Nikki Lyssy, Linda Masi, Kamryn Pitcher, Brody Shappell, Dusti K. Smith, Grayson Treat, and Bria Winfree.