Author Archives: Qu Literary Magazine

Lessons in Work/Life Balance

Monday morning, make the lists; divide them by church and state, by job: bookselling, bookmaking, bookteaching. Start with the list for bookselling because it is made of tasks that can be completed, instead of ethereal images, snips of song, effluvia, menu items, instead of Mandy’s problem with POV, Ben’s novel outline he sent you though you did not ask for it. Even though the list for the bookstore is made of tasks that can be completed, add so many of them (order 7 Year Pens, order LePens, order pens from the photos you took from that stationery shop in Asheville where the pens were German and beautiful and still cheap enough you bought one) that the list will lap into next week. Find last week’s list that has lapped into this week and copy it over anew.

This week the fall cookbooks will get their table. The distributed frontlist from Penguin Random House will be ordered. This week there will be enough copies of Coleen Hoover in stock, even as you don’t know how high that number could go. Find your copy of Publisher’s Weekly where you see how many copies each book on the New York Times bestseller list has sold; add up her sales across her five novels. Open your calculator, estimate her royalties. Per week, she earns more than your house is worth. Not what you bought it for five years ago when you sold your last novel; what it’s worth now. There’s no way to care about this, and that is a good lesson to learn.

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Karl Michael Iglesias

Originally from Milwaukee, WI, and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Karl Michael Iglesias’ work can be read on Apogee, The Acentos Review, The Breakwater Review, The Florida Review, RHINO Poetry, Kweli Journal, The Breakbeat Poets Vol 4. LatiNext, The Westchester Review, Third Coast, The Brooklyn Review, Voicemail Poems, Pigeon Pages NYC, The Hong Kong Review, and Up The Staircase Quarterly. He was recently named a 2022 finalist for the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook prize for his new work, The Vagrant Bounce. His debut chapbook, CATCH A GLOW, is available now on Finishing Line Press. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

D. Keali‘i MacKenzie

D. Keali‘i MacKenzie is the author of the chapbook From Hunger to Prayer (Silver Needle Press). A queer poet of Kanaka Maoli, European, and Chinese descent; his work appears in or is forthcoming from: Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures, homology lit, Fahmidan Journal, foglifter, and The Operating System Experimental Speculative Poetics. A past member of the Worcester Poetry Slam Team. He received an MA in Pacific Islands Studies, and an MLISc, from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

Amie Whittemore

Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collections Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books, 2023), and Nest of Matches (Autumn House, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University, where she directs MTSU Write, a from-home creative writing mentorship program.

Clayton Adam Clark

Clayton Adam Clark lives in St. Louis, his hometown, where he works as a mental health counselor. His debut poetry collection, A Finitude of Skin, won the Moon City Poetry Award and was published by Moon City Press. He earned the MFA in poetry at Ohio State University and a master’s in clinical mental health counseling at University of Missouri–St. Louis.

Adrian Matias Bell

Adrian Matias Bell is a writer and musician living on Chochenyo Ohlone land (Oakland, CA). His work has appeared in Winter Tangerine and is forthcoming in Qwerty. He also makes music as Nightjars.

Joel Fishbane

Joel Fishbane’s novel, The Thunder of Giants, is now available from St. Martin’s Press. His short fiction has been published in a variety of magazines, including Ploughshares, Witness, New England Review, and the Saturday Evening Post. For more information, you are welcome to visit www.joelfishbane.net

Katherine Joshi

Katherine Joshi teaches academic writing at the University of Maryland, where she received her MFA in fiction writing in 2014. Her fiction has previously appeared in Big Muddy, Glasschord, and Journey, under her maiden name Kipp. Originally from Tennessee, she now live in Northern Virginia with her husband, son, and nearly toothless cat.

Cristina Legarda

Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to Bethesda, Maryland. She is now a practicing physician in Boston. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in America magazine, The Dewdrop, Plainsongs, FOLIO, HeartWood, Ruminate, Smartish Pace, The Good Life Review, and others.