Authors

Thomas E. Allen

Thomas E. Allen is retired from Missouri State University, where he served for thirty-four years as vice president of finance. A CPA, one-time semi-pro ballplayer, and member of the Society for American Baseball Research, Allen spent years gathering the statistics and documentary evidence recorded in his book If They Hadn’t Gone: How World War II Affected Major League Baseball, published by Moon City Press in 2004. He is a die-hard Cardinals fan.

Purchase If They Hadn’t Gone: How World War II Affected Major League Baseball here.

Walter Bargen

Walter Bargen has published nineteen books of poetry, most recently My Other Mother’s Red Mercedes (Lamar University Press, 2018), Trouble Behind Glass Doors (BkMk Press, 2013), and Days Like This Are Necessary: New & Selected Poems (BkMk Press, 2009). Too Quick for the Living was published by Moon City Press as part of its Missouri Author Series in November 2017. His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He was appointed the first Poet Laureate of Missouri for 2008-2009.

Visit Walter Bargen’s website for more information.

Purchase Too Quick for the Living here.

Andrew Bertaina

Andrew Bertaina of Washington, D.C. won the 2020 Moon City Short Fiction Award for his collection One Person Away From You. Bertaina received his MFA in creative writing from American University. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness, Redivider, Tin House (online), and The Best American Poetry.

More of his work is available at www.andrewbertaina.com.

Purchase One Person Away From You here.

Michael Burns

Michael Burns helped found the Creative Writing Program at Missouri State University, where he taught for twenty-five years. A graduate of the University of Arkansas Creative Writing Program, he published two chapbooks, When All Else Failed and And As for Darkness, and two books of poetry, The Secret Names and It Will Be All Right in the Morning. Night of the Grizzly, Burns’ final book, was a finished manuscript at the time of his passing. He also edited two books of critical essays. Born June 3, 1953 in Egypt, Arkansas, Burns retired to Louisville, Kentucky, where he passed away on October 27, 2011.

Purchase Night of the Grizzly here.

Clayton Adam Clark

Clayton Adam Clark of St. Louis won the 2017 Moon City Poetry Award for his collection, A Finitude of Skin, which was published in Fall 2018.

Purchase A Finitude of Skin here.

Jim W. Corder

Jim W. Corder (1929-1998) was an English professor at Texas Christian University. He is the author of numerous books, including Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne, Chronicle of a Small Town, and Lost in West Texas. Texas Christian University created the Corder Fellowship in his honor.

Purchase The Heroes Have Gone: Personal Essays on Sport, Popular Culture, and the American West here.

Purchase Jim W. Corder on Living and Dying in West Texas: A Postmodern Scrapbook here.

Debra Kang Dean

Debra Kang Dean is the author of two books and two chapbooks of poetry, including Fugitive Blues, which was published by Moon City Press in 2014. She teaches in the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University and currently lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Purchase Fugitive Blues here.

Gerald Duff

Gerald Duff has published a total of eighteen books, including novels, collections of short stories and poems, and books of nonfiction. His most recent work, Nashville Burning, came out in September 2017. Blue Sabine, a tale of the generations of women of one Deep East Texas family, was published by Moon City Press in 2011. Duff’s work has won the Cohen Prize for Fiction from Ploughshares and the St. Andrews Prize for Poetry and has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Prize, an Edgar Allen Poe Award, and an International eBook Award.

Visit Gerald Duff’s website for more information.

Purchase Blue Sabine here.

Laura Hendrix Ezell

Laura Hendrix Ezell’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, and The Chapbook. Her debut collection, A Record of Our Debts, won the 2015 Moon City Short Fiction Award. Currently, she lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

Visit Laura Hendrix Ezell’s website for more information.

Purchase A Record of Our Debts here.

Sarah Freligh

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Poetry Award and the 2015 Etchings Press Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis. Among her awards are a 2009 Literature Fellowship for poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in 2006.

Purchase Sad Math here.

Kerri French

Kerri French’s book, Every Room in the Body, won the 2016 Moon City Poetry Award and was published in Fall 2017. Instruments of Summer (2013), her chapbook of poems about Amy Winehouse, is available from dancing girl press. She lives and writes outside of Nashville.

Visit Kerri French’s website for more information.

Purchase Every Room in the Body here.

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington, and is the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, and The Robot Scientist’s Daughter. Her most recent collection, Field Guide to the End of the World, won the 2015 Moon City Poetry Award. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and Prairie Schooner.

Visit Jeannine Hall Gailey’s website for more information.

Purchase Field Guide to the End of the World here.

Kathy Goodkin

Kathy Goodkin is an editor for feminist publisher Gazing Grain Press, a manuscript consultant for the North Carolina Writers’ Network, and an online teaching artist for the Loft. Her chapbook, Sleep Paralysis, was published by dancing girl press in 2017. Her work has appeared in Denver QuarterlyFieldFourteen HillsRHINORedividerThe Volta, and elsewhere. Her collection Crybaby Bridge won the 2018 Moon City Poetry Award.

Visit Kathy Goodkin’s website for more information.

Pre-order Crybaby Bridge here.

Jane Hoogestraat

Jane Hoogestraat was born in Mitchell, South Dakota, and was an English professor at Missouri State University. Border States, her first full-length poetry collection, was selected by Luis J Rodriguez for the John
Ciardi Prize for Poetry. She passed away September 2015. Her second collection, Here on This Plain, was published posthumously as part of Moon City Press’ Missouri Author Series.

Purchase Here on This Plain here.

George H. Jensen, Jr.

George H. Jensen, Jr. is professor and chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at University of Arkansas, Little Rock. His many book publications include Some of the Words are Theirs: A Memoir of an Alcoholic Family, published by Moon City Press in 2009.

Purchase Some of the Words are Theirs: A Memoir of an Alcoholic Family here.

Trudy Lewis

Trudy Lewis is the author of the novel The Empire Rolls, the first entry in Moon City Press’ Missouri Author Series. She has also published a short-story collection, The Bones of Garbo (Ohio State University Press, 2003), for which she was awarded the Sandstone Prize in Short Fiction, and the novel Private Correspondences (Northwestern University Press, 1994), winner of the William Goyen Award for Fiction. Trudy’s work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere.

Purchase The Empire Rolls here.

Kim Magowan

Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short-story collection, Undoing, won the 2017 Moon City Short Fiction Award and was published in March 2018. Her novel, The Light Source, was published by 7.13 Books in 2019. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, and many other journals.

Visit Kim Magowan’s website for more information.

Purchase Undoing here.

Amanda Marbais

Amanda Marbais’ fiction has appeared in Hobart, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Joyland, and elsewhere. She’s written reviews and cultural essays for Your Impossible Voice and Paste Magazine. Her short-story collection, Claiming a Body, won the 2018 Moon City Short Fiction Award.

Visit Amanda Marbais’ website for more information.

Purchase Claiming a Body here.

Cate McGowan

Cate McGowan is the author of the story collection True Places Never Are, winner of the 2014 Moon City Short Fiction Award and a finalist for The Lascaux Review‘s 2015 Short Fiction Collection Contest. A Georgia native whose flash has been anthologized in W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International and Descansos, she has contributed fiction and poetry to Glimmer Train, Crab Orchard Review, The Louisville Review, and the English fashion magazine Tank.

Visit Cate McGowan’s website for more information.

Purchase True Places Never Are here.

Travis Mossotti

Travis Mossotti serves as Poet-in-Residence at the Endangered Wolf Center in St. Louis. He was awarded the 2011 May Swenson Poetry Award by contest judge Garrison Keillor for his first collection of poems, About the Dead (USU Press, 2011), and his second collection, Field Study (Bona Fide Books, 2014), won the 2013 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize. His third collection, Narcissus Americana (University of Arkansas Press, 2018), was selected by Billy Collins as the winner of the 2018 Miller Williams Prize. Mossotti has also published two chapbooks, including My Life as an Island, which was published by Moon City Press. Mossotti teaches in the writing program at Webster University and works for the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at Washington University.

Visit Travis Mossotti’s website for more information.

Purchase My Life as an Island here.

Phong Nguyen


Phong Nguyen is the author of a The Adventures of Joe Harper (Outpost19, 2016, winner of the Prairie Heritage Book Award) and two story collections, Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History (Mastodon Publishing, 2016) and Memory Sickness and Other Stories (Elixir Press, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award). He co-edited the volume Nancy Hale: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master with Dan Chaon and Norah Lind. His stories have appeared in more than 50 national literary journals in print and online, including AgniBoulevardChattahoochee ReviewIowa ReviewKenyon Review OnlineMassachusetts ReviewMississippi ReviewNorth American Review, and our own Moon City Review.He is currently the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife—the artist Sarah Nguyen—and their three children.

Visit Phong Nguyen’s website for more information.

Purchase Roundabout here.

Claudia Putnam

Claudia Putnam lives in Western Colorado. She is a craniosacral therapist and an animal communicator. The Land of Stone and River is her first poetry collection; individual poems have appeared journals such as RattleSpillwayTar River PoetryBarrow Streetbosque magazine, and Poetry East. She is the author of the chapbooks Double Negative, and Wild Thing in Our Known World. Her fiction is widely published as well. She has received several residencies, including the Bennett Fellowship from Phillips Exeter Academy.

Purchase The Land of Stone and River here.

Burton Raffel

Burton Raffel published more than one hundred books over his distinguished career and is known internationally as a poet, translator, literary critic, and editor. Yankee Doric, his first novel, was published by Moon City Press in 2010.

Purchase Yankee Doric here.

Michelle Ross

Michelle Ross’ debut collection, There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, won the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award. Her fiction has also appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Common, Gulf Coast, Necessary Fiction, Smokelong Quarterly, and other venues. She has an MFA from Indiana University. Originally from Texas, she now lives in Tucson with her husband and son. She also serves as fiction editor for Atticus Review.

Visit Michelle Ross’ website for more information.

Purchase There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You here.

Bret Shepard

From Alaska, Bret Shepard has lived throughout the Pacific and Arctic coasts. He is currently an assistant professor of English at Cabrini University. His books include Negative Compass, winner of the Wells College Chapbook Prize, and The Territorial, winner of the 2020 Midwest Chapbook Award from GreenTower Press and the Laurel Review. His collection Place Where Presence Was won the 2019 Moon City Poetry Award.

Visit Bret Shepard’s website for more information.

Purchase Place Where Presence Was here.

Pablo Piñero Stillmann

A graduate of Indiana University’s MFA in creative writing program, Pablo Piñero Stillmann has been the recipient of Mexico’s two top grants for young writers: The Foundation for Mexican Literature (f,l,m) and The National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA). His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in, among other journals, Ninth LetterBennington ReviewThe Normal SchoolNotre Dame ReviewThe Rumpus, and Moon City Review. His debut novel, Temblador, was published in 2014 by Conaculta.

Purchase Our Brains and the Brains of Miniature Sharks here.

Mary Troy

Mary Troy’s novel Swimming on Hwy N was published as part of Moon City Press’ Missouri Author Series. She is also the author of three collections of short stories and one other novel:  BeautiesCookie Lily,  The Alibi Cafe and other stories, and Joe Baker Is Dead. She has won the USA Book award for literary fiction, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, a Nelson Algren award, a William Rockhill Nelson award, and more. Her sixth book (as yet untitled) of new and selected stories will be published early in 2021. For more than twenty years, Mary taught in and helped mold the MFA Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.  For ten years she was the editor of Natural Bridge. Mary has won the University of Missouri system award for leadership and the MO Governor’s award for excellence in teaching.

Visit Mary Troy’s website for more information.

Purchase Swimming on Hwy N here.

James T. Whitehead

In 1965, James T. Whitehead joined with his friend William Harrison to found the University of Arkansas’ Creative Writing Program. He taught in that nationally prestigious program for the next thirty-four years, from 1965 to 1999. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a Robert Frost Fellowship in poetry. Whitehead’s novel, Joiner, was listed among the New York Times’ Noteworthy Books of 1971. His many poetry collections include Domains (1967), Local Men (1979), and Near at Hand (1993). With his untimely passing, Whitehead left a large body of work unpublished.

Purchase For, From, About James T. Whitehead: Poems, Stories, Photographs, and Recollections here.

Purchase The Panther: Posthumous Poems here.

Steve Yates

A native of Springfield, Missouri, Steve Yates has published two historical novels set in the Ozarks through Moon City Press: Morkan’s Quarry (2010) and its sequel, The Teeth of the Souls (2015). He was the winner of the 2013 Knickerbocker Prize from Big Fiction Magazine for his novella, “Sandy and Wayne.” In April 2017, Unbridled Books published his fifth work of fiction, a novel, The Legend of the Albino Farm. Yates is associate director/marketing director at University Press of Mississippi.

Purchase Morkan’s Quarry here and The Teeth of the Souls here.