Setting up The Last Press for The Last Time
C. Mikal Oness
C. Mikal Oness is a homesteader, poet and printer, living in rural Minnesota. He is the founding editor and director of Sutton Hoo Press, a literary fine press producing hand-made limited editions of poetry and prose. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Missouri, Oness has received the Toi Shan Fellowship from the Taoist Center in Washington, D.C. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, The Colorado Review, Third Coast, The Bloomsbury Review, Fence, Puerto del Sol, and other magazines. His work has been awarded the Mahan Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award from George Mason University, and a Wisconsin Arts Board Grant. His book of poems, Water Becomes Bone, was published by New Issues Press in 2000 and was awarded the Posner Prize in Poetry by the Council of Wisconsin Writers. He has a limited edition chapbook, Runian, from Bergamot Press, and another limited edition, Privilege, from Cut Away Books. His manuscript, Oracle Bones, was selected for the Lewis & Clark Expedition Prize and was published in 2007.
Elizabeth Oness
Ph.D. University of Missouri-Columbia
MFA in Poetry University of Maryland
Elizabeth Oness grew up in Chappaqua, New York, and did her undergraduate work at James Madison University in Virginia. Her work has appeared in The Hudson Review, Crazyhorse, Glimmer Train, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review and other literary magazines. Her stories have received an O. Henry Prize, a Nelson Algren Award and other notices. Her story collection, Articles of Faith, won the 2000 Iowa Short Fiction Prize and was published by the University of Iowa Press.
Her first novel, Departures, was published by Penguin in 2004. Twelve Rivers of the Body won the Gival Press Novel Award and was published in October 2008. A collection of poems, Fallibility, was released from New Rivers Press in the Fall of 2009. She is a professor of English at Winona State University, where she teaches composition, literature and fiction writing. She directs marketing and development for Sutton Hoo Press, a literary fine press, and lives in rural Minnesota with her husband, the poet C. Mikal Oness, and their son.
Elizabeth’s latest novel, Leaving Milan, was published in May 2015. It was the winner of the Brighthorse Press Novel Award.
Harper, the hero of Elizabeth Oness’s new novel, Leaving Milan, hopes for a life far from the small Ohio town where she has grown up, a place where distances are measured not by blocks or even miles, but by chain restaurants—“past Chi Chi’s, Outback Steak House, Taco Bell,” a place where the air smells of fast food and car exhaust. Her hopes haven’t died; they were never born. “She was preparing for something without knowing what it was. Each day, she hoped for an adventure, and each day, it didn’t happen. Like the horizon, it was always there, before her.” And yet somehow Harper does forge a new life for herself. Elizabeth Oness writes with subtle power and compassion about courage, strength and the unshakeable bonds of love.