Mary Stone graduated from Missouri Western State University in 2009 where she received a BA in English Literature. Then, in 2012, she graduated from the University of Kansas with an MFA.
    In addition to writing, Stone isa practiced editor. She is the co-editor of Stone Highway Review and Blue Island Review. She serves as a reader for Gemini Magazine, Echo Ink Review, and for A Capella Zoo. She has also written short reviews for Portal del Sol. She currently lives in St. Joseph, Missouri.

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Full-Length Collections:

• Honey & Bandages (Folded Word, 2015)
  
• One Last Cigarette (Honest Publishing, 2013)
  
• Mythology of Touch (Woodley Press, 2012)

Chapbooks:

• Blink Finch (Kattywompus Press, 2013)
• Aching Buttons (Dancing Girl Press, 2013)

Individual Works

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We reclined in paint, wishing venus could look at us now.
Flower stems wilted and we stuck them to the walls.
Here There are silences that crease like fallen leaves.
Your hands are the color of satin.
We watch how glass breaks apart like longing, splatters on linoleum like frozen paint.
---From Blink Finch

This is What Pain Looks Like

A wet petal flung against a wall. It sticks there, dries. Presses itself into the wall like a fossil. When you try to scratch it off with your fingernail, it has become part of the wall. No matter how hard you try, the petal, though once thin and blowing in wind, has turned itself into drywall and it prefers synthetic, hard. It cannot imagine being pressed in a book and crumbling in soft hands.

Or this is what pain can look like when you forget what flowers are. When we forget where to look for the scents we crave and instead vinegar fills the room. Or pain is only a white piece of paper or the paper cutting you or you crumbling paper because you have nothing to say, and the flowers have never even existed.

It is nothing, not even the hospital room cabinets filled with cards. The cards in black trash bags are not in pain. Pain acts like a chair. It sits there. You sit on it. We all move it around the room to make more space.

A question in your throat when you haven't head enough sleep. It's a repeat, a movie you've seen too many times, the sound of pennies shaking in an aluminum can. Your ears are. Listening. You are busy pressing more wet petals into the wall. Talking about painting over them. How what pain looks like is the new interior fashion. Dead flowers and black paint and your fingernail bleeding splinters.
---From Mythology of Touch

• Pushcart Nomination for poem “Overflow” nominated by San Pedro River Review. (2012)
• Pushcart Nomination for “When Momma Left Me” nominated by Coal City Review (2012)
• Pushcart Nomination for “The Most Striking Thing” nominated by Connotation Press (2012)
• Pushcart Nomination for “Winter Myths” nominated by Menacing Hedge. (2012)
• Best of the Net Nomination for “A Night Without Stars”, Nominated by Flutter Poetry Journal (2012)
• Best of the Net Nomination for “Pisces Elegy,” Nominated by Blood Lotus (2012)
• AWP Intro Journals Award for poem “Autopsy of Me” (2012)
• Fourth Place Vic Contoski Creative Writing Award in Poetry (2012)
• First Place Vic Contoski Creative Writing Award in Fiction (2012)
• StorySouth Million Writers Award Notable Story for “Smoking” first published in Blue Print Review. (2011)
• Pushcart Nomination for my poem “Pisces Elegy.” Nominated by Blood Lotus Issue 21 (2011)
• Pushcart Nomination for my nonfiction piece “Smoking” Nominated by Blue Print Review (2011)
• Finalist in the Mary Ballard Poetry Chapbook Prize (2011)
• Honorable Mention, New Millennium Writings 31st contest, Nonfiction “No Results Were Found,” winners and other honorable mentions (2011)
• Thomas Odonnel Award in Creative Nonfiction for “No Results Were Found” (2011)
• Honorable Mention in Fiction, Vic Contoski Award (2011)
• Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in Poetry Recipient (2011)
• Louise Lacy Award for Outstanding Graduate in English
• Best Poem, Awarded to “Wine Again” in 2009 issue of Canvas
• Second Place Winner for poem “When He Died,” Scribes and Muses poetry contest, (2006)

Poets & Writers

The Adroit Journal

Thrush Poetry Journal

Lawrence Journal World (2012)

The Bookends Review

Honest Publishing interview

Mary's Facebook page

Architrave

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