ISSUE 3: Rebellion

Contributors

We are proud to feature the following amazing contributors in this issue of Minerva Rising. Thank you for being a part of the Minerva community.     

Jennifer Collins

Rebellion is about attempting to find one’s personal voice, and then holding onto it. Too often, we as women and individuals are encouraged to blend together, to simplify our voices into what’s easily understood. Choosing to find and use our voices is in itself an act of rebellion, and one which is as worthwhile as it is difficult. Moving beyond silence is rebellion, and I only hope that my work serves to celebrate that choice.

Beth Copeland

Beth Copeland’s poem “Out of the Blue” gives voice to a child’s rebellion against the role she’s being groomed to assume. Copeland’s second poetry collection Transcendental Telemarketer (BlazeVOX books, 2012) was runner up in the North Carolina Poetry Council’s 2013 Oscar Arnold Young Award for North Carolina’s best book of poetry. Her first book Traveling through Glass received the 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. Two of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Copeland is an English instructor at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Kim Green

Kim Green is thrilled to be in the Rebellion issue of Minerva Rising. She is the author of hallucination and is busy at work on the sequel where the act of rebellion goes to new heights. “I have always been a rebel. ‘Rebel With A Pause’ has been cathartic as it allowed me to trace my rebellion and name it for what it was and why it was. Rebellion has propelled me to live without apology.”

Karen Hugg

For weeks I searched my mind for a story of my own rebellion. I wasn’t born into an oppressive situation or culture. I lived a fairly average middle-class childhood. Yet, the fact that my mother didn’t want me to be a writer created an oppressive atmosphere I felt I had to work against. That working, for over three decades, I realized, was my own small act of rebellion.

Nikki Kallio

This issue’s theme allowed me to explore the deep feelings of rebellion that come with a cancer diagnosis – rebellion against the illness, against the dehumanizing aspects of treatment, against a lifetime of compromise and fear. My essay is a celebration of a rebellious act. I have an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. I write essays and fiction and have completed a post-apocalyptic YA novel, Damage. I’m currently completing an adult paranormal novel.

Caterine Keefe

When I think of rebellion from a Minerva Rising perspective, I think of June Jordan’s poem, “In My Own Quietly Explosive Here.” Women silenced sometimes feel as if we are “dying underground,” yet we discover strength when “circles hold us together.” We find wings when we tell our stories and listen one another. Catherine Keefe is a poet, essayist, writing instructor, and editor of dirtcakes literary journal.

M.E. Kopp

We’ve all been through that age of rebellion. Some of us wear the physical scars to remind us. In this semi-memoir, a woman who’s survived that age of awareness watches her sister rebel against normalcy through self-abuse. M.E.Kopp is a mother, wife, writer, editor: published in some wonderful magazines and winner of the Jonis Agee Fiction Award. And like the rest of us, she’s not so ordinary.

Anna Leahy

Anna Leahy is the author of Constituents of Matter, which won the Wick Poetry Prize. She co-writes Lofty Ambitions blog and publishes in journals such as Crab Orchard Review, The Pinch, and The Southern Review. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Chapman University, where she directs Tabula Poetica, including its reading series and national journal.

Ann Lees

Sometimes women feel constrained by the men in their lives to do what pleases the men even if it costs the women their sense of self. These poems celebrate the freedom women can feel when they rebel against these outside pressures.

Adriana Paramo

Mom could have been my best friend, my most loyal ally. She could have pulled me out of the water and away from the fire. If I had let her. Instead, I rebelled against everything she was and I became as different from her as I could ever be: educated, fit, a Buddhist, a feminist, a writer. Last year, I had her heart inked close to my heart. My last act of rebellion. It seems.

Sally Rosen Kindred

Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of No Eden (Mayapple Press, 2011) and a chapbook, Darling Hands, Darling Tongue (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Linebreak, Quarterly West, Cave Wall, and on Verse Daily. Her second full-length collection, Book of Asters, is forthcoming from Mayapple Press in 2014.

Chelsea Smith

Chelsea Smith is a Texan author whose love of the foreign and fantastic in all forms has propelled her to pick up a pen of her own. Her work has previously been featured in Shelter of Daylight, various anthologies by Less than Three press, and the Tokyopop Rising Stars of Prose competition. Her essay, “The Hawkeye Initiative,” was born out of her simultaneous love and frustration with modern comics.

Brigit Young

My poem is about the complexities behind rebellion within a women’s issue that often falsely appears to be communally resolved. When I was getting married last year, I was more conflicted and felt more pressure about changing my name than I thought I would. This piece is a reflection on how easy it is to erase history through the loss of names, but more so it is about how the thought process of this decision, whichever choice one ends up making, can be a form of rebellion itself.