The Staff

Raleigh Review
501(c)(3) Nonprofit
EIN: 27-2644341
ISSN: 2169-3943
—Subscribe here!

Raleigh Review Staff

Publisher
Rob Greene (North Carolina)

Editor-in-Chief
Landon Houle (South Carolina)

Editors
Jessica Pitchford | Fiction Editor (South Carolina)
Leah Poole Osowski | Poetry Editor (Pennsylvania)
Shel Senai | Assistant Fiction Editor (Massachusetts)
Erin Osborne | Assistant Fiction Editor (Oregon)
Garrett Davis | Copyeditor (New York)
Elaina Ellis | Senior Copyeditor (Washington)

Editorial Staff
Dailihana Alfonseca | Fiction (South Carolina)
Chas Carey | Fiction (Massachusetts)
Madison Cyr | Fiction (Indiana)
Susan Finch | Fiction (Tennessee)
Chelsea Harlan | Poetry (Virginia)
Robert McCready | Fiction (South Carolina)
Jeff McLaughlin | Fiction (Minnesota & France)
D. Eric Parkison | Poetry (Massachusetts)
Sam Piccone | Poetry (Iowa)
Allison Frase Reavis | Fiction (Arkansas)
Melanie Tafejian | Poetry (North Carolina)
Annie Woodford | Poetry (North Carolina)

Other Staff
Al Olson | Layout Designer (South Dakota)
Nora Beers Kelly | Illustrator (Montréal, Quebec)
Tyree Daye | Poetry Workshop Instructor (North Carolina)
Leila Chatti | Poetry Team Affiliate (Massachusetts)
Bryce Emley | co-Editor emeritus (New Mexico)
Christopher Ingram, Jr. | Saint Augustine's Magazine Alumni Team

Printing & Binding
AlphaGraphics | Downtown Raleigh, NC USA

Elaina Ellis (Senior Copyeditor at Raleigh Review) is a literary editor, writer, and curator. She spent a decade at Copper Canyon Press, an independent book publisher dedicated to poetry, where she served as Editor. Elaina is the author of the poetry collection Write About an Empty Birdcage, and has earned fellowships and awards from Jack Straw, Vermont Studio Center, Lambda Literary, Mineral School, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. She works as a freelance book editor and lives in Bellingham, Washington.

Nora Beers Kelly (Illustrator at Raleigh Review) is from Montréal, Quebec. Her notable clients include Concordia University, Plateau Astro, Temps Libres, The Tyee, The New York Times, and many other establishments.

Christopher Ingram Jr (Saint Augustine's Magazine Alumni Team) completed his BA from Saint Augustine's University in spring of 2022, where he served as the SGA president and the editor for Saint Augustine's Magazine. Chris is currently attending St. John's University in New York, in addition to serving as a commissioned officer in the US Army Reserves.

Dailihana Alfonseca (Fiction Team Member) is currently working on her Masters in Latino/a Studies with a focus on the cultural legacy of the African Diaspora and the marginalization of Caribbean Immigrants. She resides in South Carolina with her family and is a member of South Carolina Writers Association. Her writing reflects on the immigrant experience within America and the cultural trauma that is a result of what W.E.B. Dubois calls “Double Consciousness.” Her poetry has previously appeared in The Bangalore Review, and her fiction recently appeared in Driftwood.

Melanie Tafejian (Poetry Team Member) is a poet and educator from Olympia, WA. She holds an MFA in Poetry from North Carolina State University, where she won the 2020 North Carolina State Poetry Contest. She was awarded first place in the 2021 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest and has work in or forthcoming in The Georgia Review, The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Northwest, and Willow Springs among other journals. She teaches high school and lives in Raleigh.

Allison Frase Reavis (Fiction Team Member) holds an MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and currently resides with her family in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Her favorite recent book is A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet.

Al Olson (she/they) (Layout Designer) has an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. They enjoy making zines including, Women in Horror (essays using film theory to examine how women function in horror movies), Bachwatch (a collaborative zine about all things bachelor nation), Pickle Spirit Guide (interactive with magic dill, tarot card, and stickers) and Bummer Time (two-color risograph printed illustrations depicting summer depression.) Al also works as a content creator for indie publishers Black Ocean and Not A Cult. You can find their poetry in The Racket.

Will Badger (Board Member) holds an MFA from NC State and a doctorate in English literature from the University of Oxford. He was named Artist-in-Residence at the University of Utah's Rio Mesa Center in support of his novel-in-progress. In 2018-19 he was a fellow of the Writers Guild Foundation's Veterans Writing Project.

Garrett Davis is a graduate from Saint Augustine’s University in Raleigh, North Carolina where he participated on their newspaper, The Falcon Forum, and their writing center. He was born and raised in Rochester, New York. Garrett serves as the copyeditor of Raleigh Review.

Leah Poole Osowski is the author of hover over her (Kent State University Press 2016), winner of the Wick Poetry Prize, and Exceeds Us, forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in 2023. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She was a former emerging writer in residence at Penn State Altoona and is the poetry editor of Raleigh Review.

Bryce Emley is the author of the prose chapbooks A Brief Family History of Drowning (winner of the 2018 Sonder Press Chapbook Prize) and Smoke and Glass (Folded Word, 2018). A Narrative 30 Below 30 poet and a recipient of awards and residencies from Aspen Autumn Words, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Glen Workshop, the Wesleyan Summer Writers Conference, Sixfold, and the Pablo Neruda Prize, Bryce works as a content writer and is Co-Editor emeritus of Raleigh Review having served on the magazine from 2014-2023.

Landon Houle's novel, Living Things, won the Red Hen Fiction Prize judged by Charles Yu. Other writing has won contests at Black Warrior Review, Crab Creek Review, and Permafrost. Her essay "The Plains We Cross" was listed as a notable in The Best American Essays, and her story "Travelers" was listed as a Pushcart Prize honorable mention. Other work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Crazyhorse, River Styx, Harpur Palate, The Long Story, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. Landon holds a Ph.D. in English from Texas Tech University. She is the co-editor of Raleigh Review and an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC.

Jessica Pitchford’s fiction has appeared in Prime Number Magazine, Extract(s), Gris-Gris, storySouth, and elsewhere. Her novel, Can’t Walk Out, was recently longlisted for the Regal House Publishing Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and shortlisted for the 2022 Howling Bird Press Fiction Prize. The former Editor-in-Chief of Pembroke Magazine, she now teaches writing and literature to high schoolers at the South Carolina Governor's School for Science and Mathematics as well as serves as Raleigh Review Fiction Editor.

Tyree Daye (Board Member) is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of two poetry collections River Hymns 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner and Cardinal forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press 2020. Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly Finalist and Cave Canem fellow. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, New York Times, Nashville Review. Daye won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship, 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at UC Santa Barbara and is a 2019 Kate Tufts Finalist. Daye most recently was awarded a 2019 Whiting Writers Award.

Shel Senai is queer, non-binary writer, creative and parent of two residing in Massachusetts. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and their stories have appeared in The Keep Things, LEON Literary Review, Citron Review and Reservoir. Shel has received awards and residencies from Aspen Words, Tin House’s Winter Workshop, the St. Botolph Club Foundation and, most recently, an artist fellowship from the Mass Cultural Council. They are currently at work on a short story collection as well as a speculative epic in three parts. Shel has been on the editorial staff at Raleigh Review since 2016 and presently serves as Assistant Fiction Editor.

Samuel Piccone is the author of the chapbook Pupa (Anhinga Press, 2018). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including, Sycamore Review, Frontier Poetry, Washington Square Review, and RHINO. He received an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University, serves on the poetry staff at Raleigh Review, and is a lecturer at Iowa State University.

D. Eric Parkison (Poetry Team Member) received his MA in English from the University of Rochester and his MFA in Poetry from Boston University. His chapbook, No Arcadia, was released by Jane's Boy Press in August of 2020. He is a 2022 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship in poetry. He lives in Lynn, MA.

Robert McCready (Fiction Team Member) lives in Florence, South Carolina. His stories appear in Muu Muu House and elsewhere.

Jeff McLaughlin (Fiction Team Member) was born in Nebraska, grew up in the Carolinas, went to college in Minnesota, and now lives in Paris with his family. He is revising his first novel, from which Burning is drawn. Other segments have appeared in december magazine, Kenyon Review Online, and The Olive Press.

Erin Osborne (Assistant Fiction Editor) is a writer and Library Media Assistant living in Beaverton, Oregon. Her fiction explores themes of stasis and imagination and has appeared in NOON Annual, Elohi Gadugi, M Review, and Habit. She holds a B.A. in English Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing from Marylhurst University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. In 2009, she received the first Jackie Mosier Emerging Writer Award, and in 2017 received her first Pushcart Special Mention. She lives with her daughter.

Susan Finch (Fiction Team Member) is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Crab Orchard Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Beloit Fiction Journal, and elsewhere. Her fiction has received several awards, and most recently, she was selected as the winner of New Ohio Review’s Editors Prize in fiction. Currently, she is working on a novel and a story collection.

Chas Carey (Fiction Team Member) works primarily in disaster management. A member of the "narrative technologist" collective Wolf 359, his writing has been or will soon be featured in outlets such as NPR's Live From Here, the American Public Media children's podcast Smash Boom Best, and the Hearth Gods reading series in New York City. He holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College and lives in Massachusetts with his wife and their two children. His website is www.chascarey.com and he tweets under the handle @imitationsun.

Madison Cyr (Fiction Team Member) is an MFA candidate in fiction at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She's been published previously in The Printer's Devil Review, Cape Rock, and Leon Literary Review (forthcoming). When not writing, Madison can be found either running, eating, or watching The Office on repeat ad Infinitum. She lives in Southern Indiana with her husband, Bobby. Together they share a rag-tag group of fur-babies that includes two dogs, and one very bossy cat. She is at work on her first novel.

Chelsea Harlan (Poetry Team Member) is the author of Bright Shade, selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2022 American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize. She holds a BA from Bennington College, as well as an MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She lives in Appalachian Virginia, where she was born and raised, and where she works at a small public library.

Annie Woodford (Poetry Team Member) is the author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019), which was a runner-up for the Weatherford Award for Appalachian poetry. Her second book is the winner of Mercer University’s 2020 Adrienne Bond Prize and will be published in 2022. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, and Prairie Schooner. She has been awarded scholarships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf writers’ conferences as well as Barbara Deming Fund and Jean Ritchie fellowships. Originally from Bassett, Virginia—a mill town near the North Carolina border—she now teaches community college English in Wilkesboro, North Carolina.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020, and the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors' Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Dorianne Laux's most recent collection is Only As The Day Is Long: New and Selected, W.W. Norton. She is also author of The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award. She teaches poetry at North Carolina State and Pacific University, and she serves as Board Vice Chair for Raleigh Review.

Joseph Millar's most recent poetry collection is Dark Harvest, and he teaches in the MFA programs at Pacific University as well as NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Millar is the chairman of Raleigh Review.

Rob Greene is the founder and the publisher of Raleigh Review. Born in Mississippi County on the former Air Force Base in Blytheville, Arkansas on November 25, 1973, Greene fished and shrimped along the Mississippi Gulf Coast as a child. Greene received his Ph.D. from University of Birmingham in England, and he received both his BSc in Microbiology and his MFA in Creative Writing from NC State University, where he taught poetry writing as a graduate student. Greene also received his Associates of Arts & Sciences from Danville Community College, where he took one class at a time while working swing shifts. He has relocated over forty-six times and Greene has traveled extensively throughout Central Asia among other places, though he has spent most of the last two decades in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he and his wife are raising their nine-year-old twins and their teenager.

Click here
for our Significant Contributor Team Member List