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, Colorado Review, under the gum tree, Brevity, and Bring the Noise: the best pop culture essays from Barrelhouse, among others. 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. She is represented by Amanda Jain at BookEnds Literary Agency.
katie cortese assT editor | fiction editor
Katie Cortese’s fiction has earned prizes from River Styx, Silk Road, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. Other awards include a Kingsbury Fellowship, a Tennessee Williams scholarship to attend the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and a month-long residency at the Arte Studio Ginestrelle in Assisi, Italy. Her collection of flash fiction, Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories (ELJ Publications), was released in the fall of 2015, and her collection of short fiction, Make Way for Her: And Other Stories, was published by University Press of Kentucky in February 2018. Additionally, her work recently appeared in Gulf Coast, Third Coast, Carve Magazine, Passages North, and BOOTH, among other journals. From 2010-2013, she served as the editor-in-chief of The Southeast Review.
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
meghan e. giles SR.. managing editor
Meghan E. Giles is a Ph.D. student at Texas Tech. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Hayden's Ferry Review Online, South Dakota Review, Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, and elsewhere.
jacob hall managing editor
Jacob Hall is a creative writer from Decatur, Illinois. He writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry about poverty, mental illness, and the Midwest. He received his BA in English from Millikin University and his MA in English from Northern Michigan University. He is pursuing his PhD at Texas Tech University. He currently lives in Lubbock, Texas, though he still calls the Midwest home.
maeve kirk managing editor
Maeve Kirk earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and is currently thawing out while pursuing a PhD in poetry from Texas Tech University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Talking River, Permafrost, Passages North, Antipodes, The Bitter Oleander, Cream City Review, and The Cincinnati Review.
sara ryan managing editor
Sara Ryan is the author of I Thought There Would Be More Wolves, forthcoming in 2021 from University of Alaska Press, and the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press) and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet). In 2018, she won Grist's Pro Forma Contest and Cutbank's Big Sky, Small Prose Contest. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Brevity, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Prairie Schooner, Thrush Poetry Journal, and others. She is currently pursuing her PhD at Texas Tech University.
associate editors: Timilehin Alake, Emma Aylor, Caleb Braun, Emma Brousseau, William Brown, Jay Culmone, Andrew Gillis, Elizabyth Hiscox, Emerson Kurdi, Marcos Damián León, Courtney Ludwick, Brook McClurg, William Littlejohn-Oram, Zachary Ostraff, Catherine Ragsdale, Valerie Wayson, and Lauren West.