Contributors

David Gwilym Anthony was born in Wales and educated at Hull Grammar School and St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he studied modern history. He lives now in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, a stone's throw from the churchyard where Thomas Gray is buried, and works in London, in financial services.

He is the author of the poetry collections Words to Say and Talking to Lord Newborough.

Website:
http://www.davidgwilymanthony.co.uk/

David Arthur-Simons is a self-taught New York painter who holds a Masters Degree in visual arts from the Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney, Australia.

David's paintings are visual manifestations of Western and Eastern philosophy, mythology, dreams, psychological self explorations and visions of realms beyond the visible and tangible. David is influenced by Rene Magritte, the Pre-Raphaelites and the music of Marc Bolan and Roxy Music.

For the last 3 1/2 years David has been working on a series of 365 paintings (one for each day of the year) that explore the spiritual dimensions of life. He expects to finish the series in 3-4 years.

Nicolette Bethel was born and raised in Nassau, Bahamas, where she currently resides. She has lived, studied and worked in the UK and Canada, and is now apprenticed to the Government for her sins and others'. She is a playwright, a poet, a fiction writer and an anthropologist, and her work has been published in a variety of places, including The Caribbean Writer, Calabash, Eclectica, Trespass Magazine, The American Poetry Journal (forthcoming), and numerous local and regional collections.

Bob Bennett grew up in Maine and New Hampshire, graduated from St Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1969... and then spent 20+ years in the Washington, D.C. area, before moving to California in 1992.

He's been an advertising art director ('76-'81), and was working as a freelance architectural photographer ('81-'91), when he opened the pandora's box of photomontage in the early '80's.

Since then, his work has been seen in a number of national publications, both 'on assignment' and as 'stock', and in galleries and competitive exhibits on both coasts.

He currently divides his time between shooting film, gathering pixels, & photomontage printing (still done exclusively in a simple 'traditional'/chemical darkroom), and various digital work - including digital photo-illustration & montage, web graphics development, and high-end digital printing - in Marin County, California.

When he's not doing that? ... he's definitely at the beach, or in the desert, somewhere...

Hari Bhajan Khalsa's time is split between the fast lane of Los Angeles and the mule deer and red-tailed hawks outside the little town of Sisters, Oregon. She is a Life Coach, workshop facilitator and writer of poems and personal essays, married, with one son. She graduated from Vermont College with a B. A. in Creative Writing in 2005 after a hiatus from school for 30 years.  Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming in Fulcrum, HazMat Review, New York Quarterly, Red Rock Review, Snow Monkey, Wild Violet, Roanoke Review, Tiger's Eye, Schuylkill Valley Journal and Phantasmagoria. In poetry and in life she's always looking for the word, the inspiration, the connection.

George Bishop was raised on the Jersey Shore and attended Rutgers University where he studied English/Creative Writing. He relocated to Florida in 1985 where he now lives and writes. His work has appeared in Comstock Review, Boston Literary Review and White Pelican Review and will be forthcoming in SOFTBLOW and Poems Niederngasse.

Carmelinda Blagg received her MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University. She has published numerous poetry reviews with the publication Poet Lore and is presently working on a collection of short stories. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Ben Bostick is an independent film producer. He has also been a roofer, a babysitter, a cowboy (yes, a real cowboy), a magazine reporter, and briefly a student. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island ("home is where the suitcase is" -BB), where he and his Chickentown Productions staff are in pre-production for the upcoming feature film, The Blind.

Haleh Bryan's passion for mixed media has allowed her to experiment with textures, graphics, and visualization of imagery which should enhance the viewer's imagination. While accomplishing a unique presentation, she often experiments with blending of multiple images with a common theme by creating various textures from all the objects available to her. Although the object is central to her theme it is just a vehicle that allows her to communicate a specific feeling, emotion, fantasy or memory and collaborates to result in what she envisions her art to become. Often her photography and art reflects her personal fantasies and emotions but also provides an insight into her view of the object's soul.

Graham Burchell was born in 1950 in Canterbury, England. He is the winner of the 2005 Chapter One Promotions Open Poetry Competition and the 2006 Hazel Street Productions Poetry Contest. He was also nominated for a 2006 Pushcart Prize. His poetry has appeared in many print and online literary magazines. Author of two poetry books, Vermeer's Corner (Foothills Publishing) and Ladies of Divided Twins (Erbacce Press), he has also written two children's novels, Chester and the Green Pig and Chester and the Spell Breaker (Calderwood Books). He is the editor of the online poetry journal, Words-Myth, voted favourite internet-based magazine for 2007 by readers and visitors to Poetry Kit.

Katie Cappello is a graduate of the MFA program at Arizona State University and teaches at a private school in Sacramento. Her work has been published by journals such as Burnside Review, Harpur Palate, and Southern Hum.

Julie Carter was born in 1971 in Appalachian Ohio and lives there still. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame with unused degrees in English and History but regrets not becoming a chemist the way her teachers wanted. She is vice-president of a manufacturing company, which sounds very grand, but still goes to work in jeans and t-shirts most days. She has a passion for baseball and genre fiction and is a political junkie. He favorite food is cauliflower, but she understands the freakishness of that and apologizes for it profusely. Her work has appeared or will appear in Mimesis, Umbrella, Snakeskin, OCHO, and Raintown Review.

Over 100 of Dane Cervine's poems have appeared in various journals, including The Hudson Review, The Sun, and the Atlanta Review. Adrienne Rich chose Dane's poem "The Jeweled Net of Indra" as the winning entry in the 2005 National Writers Union competition, and his poem "Holography" for honorable mention. Dane's poem "Accordions & Shotguns" was chosen by Tony Hoagland as a finalist for the Wabash Prize for Poetry.

Dane's new book The Jeweled Net of Indra was published in 2007 by Plain View Press. He is a member of the Emerald Street Writers in Santa Cruz, California, where he serves as Chief of Children's Mental Health for the county. His web-site can be viewed at www.DaneCervine.typepad.com

Kim Chinquee is the author of the flash fiction collection, Oh Baby (Ravenna Press) and the forthcoming prose poetry collection, Big Cages (White Pine Press). Her work has been published widely, in journals and anthologies including Noon, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, Fiction, elimae, Willow Springs, The South Carolina Review, Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, and other places. She is the recipient of a 2007 Pushcart Prize.

Michael Dennison lives in Beirut, Lebanon, where he teaches Creative Writing and literature as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department. He moved to the Middle East two years ago, and before then lived all over the U.S. earning a BFA at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and an MFA and a PhD in Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University. His poetry has appeared in magazines and journals such as Frank, Van Gogh's Ear, The Journal, Appalachee Review, etc.

Jennifer Dorr is an MFA candidate at City College/CUNY. Her poetry has appeared in The One Three Eight (www.138journal.com). Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times. She worked in literary publicity for the 92nd Street Y, and in publishing, for many years. She moved home from New Delhi to New York in 2007 and lives there now with her husband and daughter.

Ethan Elgin's poems have been published in The Galaxy, Pulp City, Jaberwoky, SHARDS, Short Cuts, EXIsT Magazine, The Furnace Review, and The Sound. He graduated with a Major in English Lit from UMASS Amherst and spent the last five years working in various psychiatric units in Western Massachusetts. Currently, he sells antique books in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Vladimir Fedokto is a Russian artist. He lives and works in St. Petersburg.

Brent Fisk recently won an honorable mention in Boulevard's Emerging Poets contest, and he has had three Pushcart Nominations over the last few years. His work is in recent issues of Fugue, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, and Diner, among other places.

Robert Gibbons has published 3 full-length books of prose poems. In his review of Body of Time, Jim Feast wrote in Evergreen Review: "In his verse, Gibbons sees things others miss, extracting gains from the ruins of powerlessness in which the average citizen lives, offering, then, a therapeutics for the public sphere."

Prose poems are currently up in 42opus, Ars Interpres (Sweden), Counterpunch, Istanbul Literature Review (Turkey), Jacket, Tattoo Highway, & Wheelhouse, & forthcoming in 5_Trope, Deep South (New Zealand), E.ratio, Evergreen Review, & The Literary Review. A fourth book, Beyond Time: New & Selected Work, 1977-2007, is due out in December from Trivium Publications http://www.janushead.org/Trivium/

Jody Helfand's poems and stories have appeared in over 30 journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Pedestal Magazine, Illuminations, The Rio Grande Review, Ghoti, The DMQ Review, Memorious, The Georgetown Review, and Visions International. His work is forthcoming in Trans People In Love, an anthology of stories, that will be published by The Haworth Press early next year.

Cheryl Hicks has prose published in The First Line and Southern Hum, and one of her memoirs "The Goat Story" is to be included in The Remembrance Project at Howard University. Her poems have been published in Urban Spaghetti, Blue Fifth Review, Heliotrope, Makar, Snakeskin, Her Circle, Creative Soup, The Orphan Leaf Review, the delinquent, Autumn Sky Poetry and 103: The Journal of the Image Warehouse. She has been a featured poet at C/Oasis, is a previous recipient of the Paddock Poetry Award and presented poems from her series titled Conversations with the Virgin at the 2006 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Conference in Tucson, Arizona. She currently teaches photography and creative writing at the secondary level and is also a visual artist. Her mixed media canvases have been shown across Texas and in New York, and her work is showcased at the Image Warehouse in Athens, Texas.

Jennifer Hill-Kaucher's poetry has appeared in the MOM EGG, In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare, Right Hand Pointing, Curious Rooms and various other journals. She is the author of four books of poetry: Questioning Walls Open, from FootHills Publishing in 2001, Nightcrown, a crown of sonnets in a limited edition lotus book in 2003, Book of Days, from FootHills Publishing, 2005, and A Proper Dress, 2006. A Pennsylvania Council on the Arts roster poet for the past nine years, Jennifer conducts poetry residencies in schools and community centers all over the state and abroad. She is editor and co- founder of Paper Kite Press. http://www.wordpainting.com

B.J. Hollars was awarded first prize in Backwards City Review's 2007 Fiction Prize, as well as named a finalist in Mid-American Review's 2006 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize judged by Aimee Bender. He has been published or has work forthcoming in Quick Fiction, Flashquake, Backwards City Review, The Summerset Review, The Evansville Review, Ballyhoo, Southern Indiana Review, among others. In 2005, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and twice, he has been nominated for the story South Million Writer's Award. Currently, he is a book reviewer for bookslut.com

Daniel Hudon, originally from Canada, teaches natural science at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. His first book, The Bluffer's Guide to the Cosmos, will be published in 2008 by Oval Books (UK). He has published more than two dozen travel stories in literary magazines, including, most recently, in Eclectica, Pology and Bayou Magazine. His story about string theory is appearing in the anthology, Riffing on Strings (Scriblerus Press). A list of his recent writing links can be found at people.bu.edu/hudon. He is working on a series of short stories like the one published here. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Patricia Wallace Jones is an artist and retired disability advocate. She began writing poetry after retiring on the northern California coast. Her poems and/or art have appeared in Avatar Review, PDQ, MindFire, Confused Muse, Tilt, Shit Creek Review, The Chimaera, 14 by 14, Lucid Rhythms, The Guardian Poetry Workshop and in various regional art shows and galleries. When time allows, she tries to post daily on: http://imagineii.typepad.com/imagineii/

Born in in New Jersey in 1974, Kirstin Kestner has also lived in Colorado, California, and Virginia. She recently returned home to New Jersey where she owns and runs a small craft business.

Mindi Kirchner is currently a professor of composition and creative writing at Youngstown State University. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Perigee, The Onion Union, and The Penguin Review. She was a finalist in The Best of Ohio Writers and winner of The Robert Hare Award in poetry in 2006.

Rauan Klassnik lives in Mexico. His poems have been published in The Mississippi Review, The Kennessaw Review, The North American Review, No Tell Motel, Sentence, Caesura, Sleepingfish, MiPoesias and others. His first book, The Holy Land, is out from Black Ocean Press this spring.

Dorothee Lang edits the BluePrintReview, an experimental online journal, and is the author of Masala Moments, a travel novel about India. She lives in the South of Germany and takes regular trips through the real as well as the virtual world. Her work has appeared in Pindeldyboz, Hobart, Eclectica, The Mississippi Review, Juked, NoTellMotel, Subtletea and numerous other places. For more about her, visit her at blueprint21.de.

Karen Lillis is currently based in Pittsburgh, after over a decade in New York City. She is the author of the experimental novels i, scorpion and Magenta's Adventures Underground (both on Words Like Kudzu Press) and of the forthcoming novel, The Second Elizabeth (Six Gallery Press, Spring 2008). Her writing (prose as well as poems) has been included in such journals as Long Shot, nthposition.com, anderbo.com, Arabesques Review, New York Nights, and Pulse Berlin. A work of hers will appear in an anthology on Spuyten Duyvil Press in 2008, Wreckage of Reason, celebrating women writing experimental prose in the 21st century.

Peter Markus is the author of three short books of short-short fiction, Good, Brother, The Moon is a Lighthouse, and The Singing Fish. His stories have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, 3rd Bed, Quarterly West, Willow Springs, Third Coast, Another Chicago Magazine, New Orleans Review, Unsaid, Post Road, Sleeping Fish, New York Tyrant, among elsewhere, and have appeared in the anthologies New Sudden Fiction, Fiction Gallery, Sudden Stories, PP: FF, The Best of the Prose Poem, as well as online at 5_Trope, failbetter, taint, elimae and in a previous issue of Avatar Review. Bob, or Man on Boat, just out from Dzanc Books, is his first novel.

M.E. McMullen's recent credits include Shank, (2006), a shocking account of prison life and autobiographical film making in Dublin, and Louise Berchine (2005), a memoir of things lost both from The New Renaissance (tnr), Arlington, MA. Gladys Simeon, (tnr) a reminiscence of the 20th century, was cited as Distinguished Fiction in the 2004 Pushcart Prize awards. Number Cruncher Suite (tnr) was included in Spirit Press's Editor's Choice III Collection. Other recent credits include "The Garden" on the Dana Literary Society's web site (2007); "Carolina in the Morning" in Café Irreal on line (2006), originally published in Antioch Review; "Ernesto Falls; a parable", Chicago Quarterly Review (2001). Marty lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Steve Meador has appeared in Loch Raven Review, Word Riot, Umbrella, Foliate Oak, Clapboard House & numerous others. He has two chapbooks by Pudding House Publications. His book Throwing Percy From The Cherry Tree won the D-N Publishing 2008 National Book Competition and was released in April. It is available from www.amazon.com , Barnes and Noble or www.d-npublishing.com

Jen Michalski's collection of short fiction, Close Encounters (2007), is available from So New Media. Her work has appeared in more than 30 publications, including McSweeney's, Failbetter, storySouth, Hobart, and Thieves Jargon. She is the editor in chief of the literary e-zine JMWW and lives in Baltimore.

Sally Molini is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming in LIT, Beloit Poetry Journal, Stirring, 32 Poems, Gargoyle, Boxcar Poetry Review, Calyx, among others. She lives in Nebraska and is currently working on her first book.

S. Allen Moore is a full time writer, currently living in Paris, France. Although he grew up in Los Angeles, he calls Fairbanks, Alaska home when he returns to the U.S. He has been published in the literary journal Rectangle and IceBox.

Mil Norman-Risch is the winner of American Poetry Journal's 2007 American Poet's Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Willow Springs, White Pelican Review, Sojourners, Common Ground Review, and Valparaiso Review (forthcoming). A poem of hers is featured in Agha Shahid Ali's 2001 anthology, Ravishing DisUnities, (Wesleyan University Press). She is the winner of New Millennium's 2008 Creative Nonfiction contest.

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published by Story Line Press. Other of his poems and essays have appeared in Hudson Review, Southern Review, Fulcrum, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich), Representations and elsewhere. Poems have most recently appeared in the print journals Iota (UK), Orbis (UK), Naked Punch (UK), Magma (UK), and The Hat. Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Snorkel, Hamilton Stone Review, Diagram, Words-Myth, BlazeVox, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, The New Hampshire Review, elimae, nthposition, Mudlark and elsewhere. Pollack is an adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

Talia Reed is in her final year at Indiana University South Bend, where she writes book and art reviews for the student paper The Preface and edited the 2007 literary magazine Analecta. She will soon begin writing reviews for MiPoesias Magazine. Her work has appeared in Wicked Alice, Main Street Rag, and The Tusculum Review.

Gerard Sarnat splits time between his San Francisco Bay Area forest home and Southern California's beaches. He is a seeker and Jewbu, married forty years/father of three/grandfather, physician to the disenfranchised, past CEO and Stanford professor, and virginal poet at the tender age of sixty-two. Gerry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Aha!Poetry, AscentAspirations, Atavar, AutumnLeaves, BathysphericReview, Bird&Moon, BlackZinnias, BlueJewYorker, ChicagoPoetry, CRITJournal, Defenestration, Etude, EZAAPP, Flutter, FurnaceReview, HissQuarterly, Jack, Juked, LanguageandCulture, LoudPoet, NewWorksReview, Nthposition, OrigamiCondom, PensonFire, PoetsAgainstWar, Rambler, RiverWalkJournal, SoMa, Spindle, StonetableReview, SubtleTea, SugarMule, ThePotomac, ThievesJargon, UndergroundVoices, UnlikelyStories, and WildernessHouseReview among others. Just Like the Jones', about his experience caring for Jonestown survivors, was solicited by JonestownAnnual Report and will appear later this year. He is currently working on an epic prose poem, The Homeless Chronicles. The California Institute of Arts and Letters' Pessoa Press will publish his first book. Gerry is a member of Poets and Writers, qualifying in both Creative Nonfiction and Poetry.

Nic Sebastian hails from Arlington, Virginia. She has two sons and travels widely. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lily, The Adroitly Placed Word, The Dead Mule, Mannequin Envy, Poems Niederngasse, Blue Fifth Review and elsewhere. Nic blogs at Very Like A Whale ( http://verylikeawhale.wordpress.com ).

As well as writing for the UK's premier sustainability journal, Green Futures, twice Pushcart-nominated Kay Sexton has recently completed Green Thought in an Urban Shade, a words and pictures exhibition with Irish painter Fion Gunn that explored parks and green space in four cities around the world. Green Thought was shown at two London galleries, Dublin's National Botanic Gardens and the Tsinghua University, Beijing. In the four years she has been writing, Kay's fiction has been chosen for over twenty anthologies ranging from Mexico, a Love Story to Tales of the Decongested and recent magazine publications include Ambit, Frogmore Papers, Lichen (Canada), and Mindprints (USA). She has just been commissioned to write a story for national radio broadcast and was a finalist in the 2007 University of Hertfordshire Writing Award and was runner-up in the 2004 Guardian short fiction contest judged by Dave Eggers. Her novel, Gatekeeper, is currently with an agent and she is working on a second novel about pornography and rivers in 1920s Hampshire.

Tom Sheehan's Epic Cures, short stories from Press 53, won a 2006 IPPY Award. A Collection of Friends, Pocol Press, was nominated for the Albrend Memoir Award. He has nine Pushcart and two Million Writer nominations, and one for Dzanc Best of the Web. He has a Silver Rose Award from American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART) and the Georges Simenon Award for Excellence in Fiction. Coming from Press 53 this year is Brief Cases, Short Spans, a short story collection, and at Pocol Press is From the Quickening, more short stories. He served in 31st Infantry Regiment, Korea, 1951. He attended Saugus High School, Marianapolis Prep School and graduated from Boston College in 1956. He was a quarterback on three undefeated teams. He meets again soon for a lunch/gab session with pals, the ROMEOs, Retired Old Men Eating Out, 92/80/79/78. They've co-edited two books on their hometown of Saugus, MA, sold 3500 to date of 4500 printed and he can hardly wait to see them. His pals will each have one martini, he'll have three beers, and the waitress will shine on them.

Anakin Sk's artwork can be seen at photo.net.

William Walsh's stories and derived texts have appeared in New York Tyrant, Juked, Caketrain, Keyhole, Elimae, Rosebud, LIT, Crescent Review, Quarterly West, Exquisite Corpse, Word Riot, Fringe, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and other journals. His novel, Without Wax, was published this spring by Casperian Books.