storySouth / southern editors

storySouth masthead

assistant fiction editors
A. M. Garner
Ray L. Murray
Cara Seitchek
Paul A. Toth

associate & assistant poetry editors
Julie Funderburk
Terry L. Kennedy
Jeremy Aufrance
Angie DeCola
William Ashley Johnson
Toy O'Ferrall
Melissa Roth Tarleton
Adam Tarleton
Jennifer Whitaker

For contact information regarding submissions, please see the guidelines page. For issues not related to submissions, please contact .

staff biographies

Jason Sanford (editor):
To quote Jason: "I was born and raised in the American south—a location where many of my stories still reside. In writing my stories and in editing this magazine, I am attempting to reach an understanding between who I am as a person, who we all are as a people, and how history, present, and possible future events interact with the lives we all lead."

Jason is a former senior editor with Meadowbrook Press, a commercial publishing company distributed by Simon & Schuster. He's also worked as the director of programs at SASE: The Write Place, a non-profit literary organization in Minneapolis. He is the winner of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and his stories have been published in magazines such as the Mississippi Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Ache Magazine, and Pindeldyboz. He also writes children's stories and has published them in the book anthologies Girls to the Rescue and Newfangled Fairy Tales, in Youthline USA, and in READ, a reading magazine for kids published by Weekly Reader.

Learn more about Jason Sanford at his website.

Jake Adam York (editor)

Jake Adam York, originally from Alabama, is now a resident of Denver, Colorado, and an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center where he directs the undergraduate Creative Writing program and edits Copper Nickel with his students. His first book of poems, Murder Ballads was published in 2005 by Elixir Press, and a new chapbook is forthcoming from Poetry West. His poems have appeared in Southern Review, New Orleans Review, Greensboro Review, Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Third Coast, DIAGRAM, Octopus, H_NGM_N, and other journals. Jake is also a contributing editor for Shenandoah.

To learn more about Jake, go to his website at http://www.jakeadamyork.com

Scott Yarbrough (fiction editor)
Scott grew up in the part of North Florida that is mostly South Georgia. According to him, "We were short on pastels, thongs, and flip flops, and long on hunting, fishing, big trucks, big hair, and big churches." Scott went through the creative writing program at Florida State and the Ph.D. at the University of Alabama. He now lives in Charleston, and although he loves the local cuisine (see Dan's bio), he says he can't get the kind of barbeque here you can get in Alabama.

Scott has published fiction in Blackbird, Flyway, here in storySouth (before his editing days), Apalachee Quarterly, The Clackamas Literary Review, New Orleans Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and a number of other places. He has co-authored a textbook on literary studies; he lives with his wife and two daughters in Charleston, South Carolina, where he teaches at a small college.

Dan Albergotti (poetry editor)
Dan Albergotti's poems have appeared in Ascent, Meridian, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. His chapbook, Charon's Manifest, won the 2005 Randall Jarrell/Harperprints Poetry Chapbook Competition. Dan has received scholarships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf writers' conferences, as well as fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, he teaches creative writing and literature at Coastal Carolina University.

A. M. Garner (assistant fiction editor)
A. M. Garner's fiction has won The Hackney Award, the Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and runner-up for The Virginia Prize. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Intro, The Black Warrior Review, and Thicket. While on the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University , she served as poetry editor of The New Virginia Review. Currently she teaches creative writing at the University of North Alabama . She was published in storySouth previous to her work as editor.

Ray L. Murray (assistant fiction editor)
Ray L. Murray holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Alabama, his work there fueled by a steady diet of meat-and-threes, washed down with unsweet. Since leaving Tuscaloosa, he has published short stories, book reviews and non-fiction. He resides in the whistlestop town of Odenton, Maryland.

Cara Seitchek (assistant fiction editor)
Cara Seitchek is a freelance writer and editor, and holds an MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University. She teaches for UCLA Extension and the Writer’s Center, and has served as a reviewer for Small Spiral Notebook and fiction editor of the Potomac Review.

Paul A. Toth (assistant fiction editor)
Paul A. Toth lives in Sanibel, Florida. His first novel Fizz and its successor Fishnet are available now. Short fiction credits include The Barcelona Review, Night Train and The Mississippi Review Online. His poetry has been featured by The Potomac, Nth Position, Piker Press, Arabesques Review, and others. See www.netpt.tv for more information.

Julie Funderburk (associate poetry editor)
Julie Funderburk is a native North Carolinian. She has poems appearing or forthcoming in Ploughshares, Third Coast, 32 Poems, Verse Daily, roger: an art & literary magazine, and elsewhere. Her work is included in the anthology Best New Poets 2005. She has been a Howard Nemerov Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference and teaches at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina.

Terry L. Kennedy (associate poetry editor)
Terry L. Kennedy is the Assistant Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an Assistant Editor for The Greensboro Review. His poems appear in a variety of journals and magazines including from The Fishouse, The Mississippi Review, The Poetry Miscellany, The South Carolina Review, and The Southern Humanities Review. His work has been recognized with a Randall Jarrell Fellowship and a residency from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Jeremy Aufrance (assistant poetry editor)
Jeremy Aufrance received his B.A. from Denison University and his M.F.A. from UNCG, where he now teaches. He has had poetry published in Backwards City Review and Red Rock Review. He lives with his beautiful wife, their son and soon-to-be daughter on a plot of land this side of the Mason-Dixon.

Angie DeCola (assistant poetry editor)
Angie DeCola is a pastry chef, poet, and mother, whose work has been published in journals including The Iowa Review, The Greensboro Review, Crazyhorse, and Diagram. Recipient of the Lynda Hull Memorial and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prizes for her writing, Angie lives in a green house in Greensboro, North Carolina, with her husband, their daughter, their dog, and a couple of Volkswagens.

William Ashley Johnson (assistant poetry editor)
William Ashley Johnson is an English Instructor at Guilford College in NC. A native of Lexington, KY, his poetry has previously appeared in Poem, The Greensboro Review, storySouth, The Raleigh News and Observer, The Southeast Review, Cairn, DIAGRAM, The Southern Poetry Review and was recently selected for Meridian's "Best New Poets." He and his wife live in Greensboro with seven dogs and three cats.

Toy O'Ferrall (assistant poetry editor)
An Alabama native, Toy O'Ferrall now lives in New Orleans, Louisiana and works as an Assistant Editor for the Historic New Orleans Collection. She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best American Poets 2006.

Melissa Roth Tarleton (assistant poetry editor)
Melissa Tarleton is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro's MFA program. While there, she served as an associate editor of The Greensboro Review and was the recipient of the Noel Callow prize. She is currently a Montessori Early Childhood teacher in Durham, NC.

Adam Tarleton (assistant poetry editor)
Adam Tarleton received his M.F.A. in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is currently a J.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he serves as Editor in Chief of the North Carolina Law Review. He lives in Durham, N.C., with his wife, Melissa.

Jennifer Whitaker (assistant poetry editor)
Jennifer Whitaker teaches English at University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and serves as an editor for Backwards City Review. She has recently had poems in Mid-American Review and New England Review, and is currently trying to find a way to make it to Wales.