The Spring 2023 edition of the Santa Monica Review.

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Complete contents of the Spring 2023 issue

Judith Aller – Elegy
Gregory Tower – Riding in Cars with Joy
Dylan Landis – The List of All Possible Desires, 1959
Paul Kareem Tayyar – Gulzar
Jeffrey Moskowitz  – Waves of Grain
Leslie Daniels – A Fallacy of Drakes
Dwight Yates – Lobster
Matthew Pitt – The Richland View Monday Edition: A Note to Our Readers
Kristen Leigh Schwarz – Breaking Ground
Shelby Kinney-Lang – Heart
Allan Martín Nava Sosa – Invisible || Instructions for Suriving a County Hospital
Christopher Buckley – Fat Chance  — Monte Carlo Fallacy, Casablanca, & Belief
Barrington Smith-Seetachitt – Girl, Wolf, Woodsman
Perry Genovesi – Therapist Scarab
Peter LaSalle – Ophelia Traveling

Contributors

Judith Aller is an American-born virtuoso violinist and writer who comes from a distinguished family of musicians. She has played all over and recorded the CD Archangel! on the USA Music Group label. In Los Angeles, where she lives, Aller gives concerts featuring “Secrets of the Classical Music Golden Age.” She has published pieces in the Chicago Quarterly Review and is writing a memoir.

Christopher Buckely’s One Sky to the Next, winner of the Long Leaf Prize contest, is out now.His collection of new and selected nonfiction, Imperfect Contrition: Catholic School, Poetry, Surfing, & Eternity, will be published by Sandhills Press next year. He edited Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets — Interviews and Essays, from Stephen F. Austin State University Press, published in 2021.

Leslie Daniels’ first novel, Cleaning Nabokov’s House (Simon & Schuster) is under option for film and has been published in translation in four languages. Her stories and essays have appeared in multiple publications. Her career includes a long stint as a literary agent and five years as the fiction editor of Green Mountains Review. She has the pleasure of occasionally teaching writing.

Perry Genovesi (he/him) works as a librarian in Philadelphia, USA. He serves his fellow workers in AFSCME District Council 47 and plays in the empty-arena rock band Canid. You can read his published fiction forthcoming in Dream Pop, Home Planet News, and Conceit, and collected on tiny.cc/PerryGenovesi. He dreams of directing an Old West movie shootout scene where, instead of drawing pistols, the first cowboy to shout “I’m sorry” wins. Twitter: unionlibrarian

Gronk is a Chicano painter, printmaker, and performance artist. His work is collected by museums around the country, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Dylan Landis is the author of the novel Rainey Royal and the collection Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Her fiction has appeared in the O.Henry Prize Stories, and in Bomb, Tin House and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and she is a frequent contributor to the Santa Monica Review.

Maggie Love is a biracial Black writer from Charlotte, North Carolina. She earned her MFA in fiction from UC Irvine, and is a 2023 Kweli Writing Fellow. Her work also appears in Mississippi Review. She is working on a novel-in-stories.

Shelby Kinney-Lang's work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Bellevue Literary Review, Witness, Joyland, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and is working on his debut novel. He lives with his wife and daughter in New England.

Peter LaSalle is the author of several books, most recently the short story collection Sleeping Mask: Fictions (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017) and a collection of essays on literary travel, The World Is a Book, Indeed (LSU Press 2020). His fiction is widely anthologized, appearing in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Fantasy, Best of the West, Sports Best Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and others. He has taught at universities in this country and in France, and is currently a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jeffrey Moskowitz attended public schools in Rosemead, California. “Waves of Grain” is excerpted from a longer project with the same title.

Matthew Pitt, a St. Louis native, previously worked in Los Angeles on a sitcom, in New York as an editor, and Massachusetts as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. These days he is an Associate Professor and Director of English Undergraduate Studies at Texas Christian University, in Ft. Worth. His prior books are These Are Our Demands, a Midwest Book Award-winner; and Attention Please Now, winner of the Autumn House Prize. Recent fiction can be found in Story, Blackbird, Conjunctions, Hobart, and Michigan Quarterly Review. His work has received many honors, awards, and aching rejections.

Kristen Leigh Schwarz grew up in Newhall, California, and holds an MFA from UC Irvine, where she received the MacDonald Harris Award for Fiction and a travel award from the International Center for Writing and Translation to work in Mexico. Previous stories have appeared in One Story, the Santa Monica Review, The American Literary Review, and Collateral, among others. Her story “Emperor of Umbrellas” reps Santa Ana in Orange County: A Literary Field Guide.

Allan Martín Nava Sosa is from Stockton, CA. He has an MFA from UC Irvine, where he was awarded the 2022 Henfield Prize. His debut fiction appeared in ZYZZYVA.

Barrington Smith-Seetachitt lives in Los Angeles, where she does typical L.A. things like write screenplays, work side hustles, and try to eat fewer carbs. She’s a former Midwesterner, cancer survivor, and meditator who is super-fun at parties as long as they don’t start too late. Her work has appeared in literary journals like Sycamore Review, Colorado Review, Chariton Review, and The Drum, and on the television anthology series Creepshow. You can find her at barringtonsmith.net.

Kareen Tayyar's most recent book, Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems, was recently released by Lily Poetry Review Books.

Andrew Tonkovich edits the Santa Monica Review and is the founding editor of Citric Acid: An Online Orange County Literary Arts Quarterly of Imagination and Reimagination. He hosts Biliocracy, a weekly literary arts show on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California.

Gregory Tower earned an MFA from UCR Palm Desert. This is his first published short story.

Dwight Yates has managed two prize-winning collections of stories and was twice a recipient of NEA fiction fellowships. He considers his options in Redlands, California. Come to think of it, one lovely option would be a small press getting excited about his third gathering of stories, all dressed up and ready to go.

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