Editors
Executive Editor | Mary François Rockcastle
Creative Nonfiction Editor | Barrie Jean Borich
Fiction Editor | Sheila O'Connor
Poetry Editor | Patricia Kirkpatrick
Managing Editor of Production & Marketing | Meghan Maloney-Vinz
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Mary François Rockcastle is the author of the novels In Caddis Wood and Rainy Lake, both published by Graywolf Press. Rainy Lake was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award and earned a Best Book for the Teen Age from the New York Public Library. She is the recipient of a Bush Foundation Fellowship, a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction, and a Loft Mentor Award, all in fiction.
After completing an M.A. with a double emphasis in English and creative writing from the University of Minnesota, Rockcastle joined the adjunct faculty in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Hamline University. She and her colleagues worked together to develop and launch the MFA in Creative Writing program at Hamline, where she also began teaching. In 1997 she founded Water~Stone Review, for which she was awarded the W. Lindberg Award for Excellence in Literary Editing in 2009. She remains the executive editor. In 1999 Rockcastle became Director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Programs at Hamline and in 2004 was made founding dean of the Graduate School of Liberal Studies (GLS). During this time she received an award for outstanding teaching and service. As Dean of GLS, she launched a low-residency MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults in 2007 and a BFA in creative writing in 2010. When GLS merged with the College of Liberal Arts in 2011, she became Director of The Creative Writing Programs and Head of the Office of Graduate and Interdisciplinary Programs.
She served for six years on the board of directors of the national Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, three of them on the executive committee, and led the effort to create Confluence, The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies. She is currently on the board of the Kerlan Collection of Children's Literature at the University of Minnesota.
She is married to architect Garth Rockcastle and lives in Minneapolis. Her older daughter, Maura Rockcastle, is a landscape architect and lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. Her younger daughter, Siobhan Rockcastle, is an architect living and working in Boston.
CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITOR
Barrie Jean Borich is the author of Body Geographic, forthcoming in the
American Lives Series of the University of Nebraska Press. Her previous
book, My Lesbian Husband: Landscapes of a Marriage (Graywolf) won the
American Library Association Stonewall Book Award and was finalist for
both the Minnesota Book and Lambda Literary awards. Restoring the Color
of Roses (Firebrand), her first book, is a memoir set in the Calumet
region of Chicago, where she grew up.
Two recent essays, both from
Body Geographic, received national literary magazine awards; "American
Doll" won the 2010 Florida Review Editor's Prize in the Essay, and "On a
Clear Day, Catalina" won the 2010 Crab Orchard Review John Guyon
Literary Nonfiction Prize.
Her essays also appear in recent issues of
Ecotone, Seneca Review, Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review,
South Loop Review, Seattle Review and others, as well as in the New
Village Press anthology American Tensions— Literature of Identity and
the Search for Social Justice and the Borealis Press anthology Riding
Shotgun–Women Write About their Mothers. Her work has been named Notable
in Best American Essays and Best American Non-Required Reading and has
twice received Special Mention in the annual Pushcart Prize Best of the
Small Presses.
Borich holds an MFA from the Rainier Writer's Workshop
at Pacific Lutheran University and is the recipient of many literary
prizes including a Bush Artist Fellowship, two Minnesota State Arts
Board Fellowships, a Loft McKnight Award in Creative Prose, and a Loft
Mentor Award in Poetry. She was one of two writers chosen by Rosellen
Brown to receive a Loft McKnight Award of Distinction, and was among
those chosen by both Scott Russell Sanders and Gloria Anzaldúa to
receive Loft Creative Nonfiction Mentor Series awards.
About her work
Rosellen Brown has written, "She writes with a rare deftness, clarity
and sense of humor, never strident or defensive, as if she herself were
curious to discover what she is thinking." Ms. Magazine described her as
"an empathetic writer who can do justice to simple happiness and
complicated love."
The nonfiction editor of Water~Stone Review,
Borich is an assistant professor in the BFA and MFA creative writing
programs at Hamline, where she has received the award for outstanding
teaching and service. She serves on the national board of VIDA: Women in
Literary Arts (vidaweb.org) where she chairs the Creative Nonfiction
and Editorial Committees, she is a contributing editor of AWP's Writer's
Chronicle and was a Loft Mentor Series featured author and mentor for
the third time in 2008. She's taught at the Loft, the University of
Minnesota, the Minnesota College of Art and Design and St. Olaf College
and lives in South Minneapolis with her spouse Linnea Stenson.
FICTION EDITOR
Sheila O’Connor is the author of three novels: Sparrow Road, Tokens of Grace and Where No Gods Came. Where No Gods Came won the Michigan Literary Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.
Her work has been anthologized in Riding Shotgun; Women Writers Write about Their Mothers, The Next Parish Over, Mothers and Daughters, Best of Helicon Nine. Her short stories and poems have been published in magazines and anthologies including: Minnesota Monthly, Alaska Quarterly, Great River Review, Helicon Nine and others. Her short story, “Just Say the Word”, won the Tamarack Award for Fiction.
She is the fiction editor for Water~Stone Review. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Sheila O’Connor has been awarded two Bush Fellowships, a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, and a Loft McKnight Fellowship. She has also received the award for outstanding teaching and service in the MFA/MALS program at Hamline University. In addition to her work as an assistant professor and faculty advisor at Hamline,
Sheila O’Connor has worked extensively with educators and young people as a Writer-in-the-Schools. An active advocate for arts education, Sheila has developed writing curriculum for students of all ages. She has also created writing programs for art museums. She is the editor of two collections of writing by young people Come Home Before Dark and In My Hand Forever. She has taught at the University of Minnesota, the Split Rock Arts Program, and the Loft Literary Center.
Email Sheila O'Connor | www.sheilaoconnor.com
POETRY EDITOR
Patricia Kirkpatrick has published a poetry book, Century's Road (Holy Cow! Press), two letterpress chapbooks, Orioles and Learning to Read, and books for young readers, including Plowie: A Story from the Prairie (Harcourt), illustrated by her sister, artist Joey Kirkpatrick. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies What Have You Lost? (Simon and Schuster), The Writing Path (University of Iowa), Minnesota Writes: Poetry (Milkweed), and To Sing Along the Way (New Rivers). Poetry is forthcoming in The Poets Guide to the Birds, edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, Prairie Schooner,
and on Saint Paul sidewalks through the Everyday Poetry Project. Her
awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts,
Bush Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, and in
2006 the McKnight Fellowship Loft Award in Poetry. She received degrees
from the University of Iowa and San Francisco State University.
Currently she teaches in the MFA program at Hamline University where she is Poetry Editor for Water-Stone Review. She also has taught at Macalester College, the University of Texas (Extension), and San Francisco State University, and has conducted workshops and residencies at the Princeton Theological Seminary in addition to many schools, libraries, and associations. She received a Hamline Distinguished Teaching & Service Award and was a 2002 Shannon Institute for Community Leadership Fellow.
Her interviews with notable poets, including Adrienne Rich, Brenda Hillman, Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee, Eavan Boland, and Sharon Olds, are published widely; in 2001 she interviewed W. S. Merwin onstage at the University of Minnesota. Her essay on Minnesota literature, "Where Dakota Drifts Wild in the Universe", appeared in a 1999 Hungry Mind Review issue. She has read and performed her work and work by other writers in Minneapolis (the Loft, Walker Art Center, Patrick's Cabaret), Saint Paul, San Francisco, Seattle, Iowa City, and Texas. As a founding member of the Minnesota Arts Alliance, she initiated creation of the "Silent Witness" figures commemorating women killed by domestic violence which were exhibited in the United States Senate and throughout the country.
MANAGING EDITOR OF PRODUCTION & MARKETING
Meghan Maloney-Vinz worked as the Design Coordinator with The Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University student literary magazine rock, paper, scissors (a journal she helped create) for two years before coming on board with Water~Stone Review.
As a student in the MFA program at Hamline, she served on the poetry
editorial board for two issues including 2007 when she was Poetry
Assistant Editor. Maloney-Vinz also created and managed the branding and
design for the Hamline graduate student group, West Egg Literati during
her time in the program. In addition to her duties as Managing Editor,
she also works as special projects coordinator for the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Hamline.
Maloney-Vinz
hails from Lake Mills, Wisconsin, a small town near Madison. She
received her B.A. from the University of St. Thomas and taught high
school English for eight years at St. Paul Central before leaving the
profession to pursue her MFA in poetry. Her poetry manuscript, World,
was one of the finalists for consideration of Outstanding Thesis in its
genre for 2007. She lives in St. Paul, MN with her partner, Lisa, their daughter, Maeve, and son, Hughes.
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