The Editors
Kevin Morgan Watson, Publisher & Editor in Chief (email Kevin)
Kevin Morgan Watson founded Press 53 in October 2005. In 2010, with award-winning author Clifford Garstang, he co-founded Prime Number Magazine, a Press 53 online journal of distinctive poetry and short fiction. As a publisher, hKevin has worked with writers ranging from first-time published authors to winners of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. Kevin has earned awards for his own writing in both short fiction and poetry, but he no longer writes for publication. He also serves as a student advisor on adaptation of short fiction to screenplays for the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking, in Winston-Salem.
Christopher Forrest, Poetry Editor
Christopher Forrest graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a degree in economics and worked in the financial sector for nearly a decade before returning to his hometown of Winston-Salem and shifting his career path toward his passion: the arts. He received his MFA from Queens University of Charlotte in 2017 and his poetry has appeared in a wide range of publications. When not at Press 53, you’ll find him with his lovely, supportive wife and two young boys and baby daughter, playing blocks and trains, or hovering over a puzzle, with a pen never far away.
Claire V. Foxx, Short Fiction Editor & Cover Designer
Claire Foxx is a writer, editor, award-winning book cover designer, and North Carolina native who has enjoyed working in editing and publishing in her home state since 2018. She holds a BA in English (Creative Writing) and an MA in English (Literature) and is Associate Editor at a North Carolina-based nonprofit serving women across the U.S. and the world. Additionally, Claire has the privilege of working with authors as the Short Fiction Editor and Cover Designer at Press 53 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; she judges the annual Press 53 Award for Short Fiction manuscript competition and has contributed to the publication of more than thirty poetry and short story collections. She drinks far too much coffee, listens to too many podcasts, and apologizes for neither.
Tom Lombardo: Poetry Series Editor
Tom Lombardo, of Atlanta, Georgia, is editor of Tom Lombardo Poetry Selections, a Press 53 imprint. Tom actively reads journals, magazines, ezines, and anthologies in search of poets to bring to Press 53 by way of his poetry series. Tom is a widely published and respected poet, and is a graduate of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. His mission is to bring 2-4 poetry collections to Press 53 each year. He has published two collections of his own poetry: What Bends Us Blue (WordTech, 2013) and The Name of This Game (Kattywompus Press, 2014). In 2008, Tom edited and published After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, which features 152 poems by 115 poets from fifteen countries.
Pamela Uschuk and William Pitt Root: Poetry Series Editors
The Silver Concho Poetry Series is edited by wife/husband team Pamela Uschuk and William Pitt Root, who are also the founding editors of Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.
Pamela Uschuk's literary prizes include the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the American League of PEN Women, Simi Valley, the King's English Poetry Prize, the New Millennium Poetry Prize, the Iris Poetry Prize, The Ronald H. Bayes Poetry Prize, the Tucson/Pima Literature Prize, and Struga Poetry Prize for a theme poem. She has also won awards and honors from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, Wildwood Journal, and Amnesty International. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages, and appears in more than three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide. She won the 2010 American Book Award, for Crazy Love: New Poems.
William Pitt Root served as Tucson Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2002. He taught at Hunter College in New York City and was a US/UK Exchange Artist, Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and an NEA Fellow. He is the author of numerous books and his work has appeared in hundreds of publications.
Clifford Garstang: Prime Number Magazine co-founder and former managing editor
Clifford Garstang is the author of three collections of short stories from Press 53: House of the Ancients and Other Stories; In an Uncharted Country; and What the Zhang Boys Know, winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction. He is the editor of the three-volume anthology series, Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, also published by Press 53. He has two novels: The Shaman of Turtle Valley (Braddock Avenue Books), and Oliver’s Travels (Regal House Publishing). He holds a BA in Philosophy from Northwestern University, an MA in English and a JD from Indiana University, an MPA from Harvard University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina. His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Bellevue Literary Review, Blackbird, The Hopkins Review, Cream City Review, and Whitefish Review. His book reviews have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Rain Taxi, Washington Independent Review of Books, and elsewhere.