Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Ohio Journal, Adirondack Review, South Carolina Review, Florida Review, Santa Barbara Review, South Dakota Review, and many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (now at press). He has taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.
Jeffrey Calhoun is a graduate student at the University of Michigan. His writing credits include Eclectica, iota, Mannequin Envy, Mimesis, Stirring, and Triplopia. Jeff’s second digital chapbook was joint-winner of the 2008 Mimesis Chapbook Initiative. He doesn’t talk to the cells he cultures in lab. Unless they get unruly.
R.T. Castleberry is a widely published poet and social critic. An active participant in Houston poetry since the mid-70’s, he was a co-founder of the Flying Dutchman Writers Troupe and co-editor/publisher of the monthly magazine Curbside Review. His work has appeared most recently in Comstock Review, The Alembic, Paterson Literary Review, Caveat Lector, Silk Road and Argestes. He was a finalist for the 2008 Arts & Letters/Rumi Prize for Poetry. His chapbook, Arriving At The Riverside, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
photo credit: Charles Tatum
C.E. Chaffin, M.D., FAAFP, edited The Melic Review www.melicreview.com for eight years prior to its hiatus. Widely published, he has written literary criticism, fiction, personal essays, and has been the featured poet in over twenty magazines. In the last ten years he’s had over 500 pieces published. Credits include: The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Pedestal, The Philadelphia Inquirer Book Review and Rattle. His new volume, “Unexpected Light: Selected Poems and Love Poems 1998-2008,” published by Diminuendo Press, can be ordered at: http://cechaffin.com/light.html Website: www.cechaffin.com Blog: www.cechaffin.blogspot.com
Douglas Cole has a B.A. in English Literature and an M.A. in Creative Writing. He won the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry (judged by T.R. Hummer) for a selection of work called, “The Open Ward.” He has had work appear in The Connecticut River Review, Louisiana Literature, Cumberland Poetry Review, and Midwest Quarterly. He lives in Seattle, Washington, and he teaches writing and literature at Seattle Central College, where he is also the advisor for the literary journal, Corridors.
Glauco Dattini was born in Rome, where he lives, in 1962 .He got his diploma in Photography at Maldoror School in Rome ( http://www.scuola-cinema-recitazione.com/ ). Before the introduction of digital photography, he worked as professional photographer for special events; later on he started a creative search using different techniques for digital elaborations. He is a member of Photo.net, one of the largest community of photographers in the world with 600,000 members. His photos, there, are visited by thousands of viewers ( http://photo.net/photos/glauco.dattini ). Prints of his works can be bought at the site Milleniumart specialized in reproductions of Works of Art. He contributes to the monthly “ Fotografare” ( http://www.fotografare.com/ ).
Recently Paul Dickey’s poetry and fiction has appeared in Sentence, The Crab Orchard Review, Free Lunch, Linebreak, Rattle, Swink Online, Our Stories, The Mid-American Review, and other online and print journals. His first chapbook What Wisconsin Took was published by The Parallel Press of the University of Wisconsin – Madison in July, 2006. Biographical information and additional notes on previous publishing activity can be found at http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/dickey.htm.
Erika Donald lives in Berkeley, California. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She is currently working on a collection of essays.
Trace Estes, the Managing Editor of Alsop Review, lives in the Shadows and likes the view. For thirty-five years, he has been forced to write by a pissed-off demon with a trident. Recent publications include Tilt, WORM #34, kaleidowhirl, five poems in the premiere of Centrifugal Eye and the print anthologies Mind Mutations and Slow Dancing to Invisible Music.
M. T. Fallon lives in Colorado. Recent fiction appears in elimae, Lamination Colony, Unsaid, and Wigleaf.
Brian Foley has poems forthcoming in Sixth Finch, LIT, The Raleigh Quarterly, Strange Machine, Puerto Del Sol, Keyhole and Anti. He’s the author of a chapbook The Tornado is not a Surrealist (Greying Ghost Press, 2008). He edits the online schism, SIR! (http://www.sir-magazine.org), is poetry editor of Brave Men Press (http://www.bravemenpress.com), and runs The Deep Moat Reading Series (http://www.thedeepmoatreadingseries.blogspot.com) in Cambridge, MA. He lives in Boston and plans to attend UMass Amherst in the fall for an MFA.
Don Fredd has had fiction and poetry published in over one hundred literary journals and reviews including the Boston Literary Magazine, Connecticut Review, The Pedestal, Storyglossia, SNReview, eclectica and Menda City. Poetry has appeared in the Paumanok and Paris Reviews. He received the Theodore Hoepfner Award given by the Southern Humanities Review for the best short fiction of 2005 and was a 2006 Ontario Award Finalist. He won the 2006 Black River Chapbook Competition and received a 2007 Pushcart Special Mention Award. He has been included in the Million Writers Award of Notable Stories for 2005, 2006 and 2007.
Rebecca Guyon holds an MFA in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California. Her poems are either published or forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, 6×6, Octopus, Strange Machine, cold-drill, Parcel, Press 1, and more.
Anne Hasenstab is a native of Lake Oswego, OR and currently resides with her husband in St. Louis, MO. She is a poet and MFA candidate at Fairfield University. Her work has been published in Flutter Poetry Journal and In The Mist Magazine. In addition to her creative writing endeavors, Anne is the Editor of The Honey Land Review, an online journal of poetry and photography – www.thehoneylandreview.com. In her spare time, Anne volunteers with Studio STL, a nonprofit literary arts center for children ages 6 to 18.
Todd Heldt is a poet/librarian in Chicago. His first full-length collection of poetry, Card Tricks for the Starving, is forthcoming from Ghost Road Press in September 2009. He finds strange comfort in gradually acquiescing to the universe.
Aaron Hellem lives with his wife in Leverett, Massachusetts where he serves as managing editor of the Massachusetts Review. His short stories have recently appeared in New Ohio Review, Blueline, Roger, Crate, Paradigm, and Existere; also, works of his are forthcoming in Eclipse, Cottonwood, Salamander, Epicenter, and Massachusetts Review.
Fernand Hick is a very personal and original photographer, whose working-method aims at transferring in his images the feeling he experienced while shooting. He is above all an atmosphere photographer, and he wishes to share them with those who view his pictures.
His main themes are notably:
– The landscape with its magic and fleeting lights.
– The carnival and its fair ambience.
– The cemetery, witness of civilizations, sometime full of poetry and serenity.
– The city where the walls decorated by street artists give life to an environment often depressing.
– The city with its mood, lines, shapes, and men.
– The fairground where youth bursts free.
– The graphisme, fine blending between form, colours, and lights.
His atmosphere capture results from a subtle mixture between fuzzy zones and perfectly sharp zones. In his landscapes, for example, he uses the defocalisation technique that allows him to grasp the ambience. In his approach of carnival, he combines additional flashlight with long shutter speed in order to express the atmosphere of the happening.
His photoworks have appeared in numerous expositions and have been published internationaly.
Madalina Iordache‐Levay was born in Romania in 1982. She grew up painting and drawing, and then she betrayed images for words when she went to university to study Journalism. However, she is grateful to that time, as she came to discover photography and digital art.
Madalina moved to South Florida in October 2006. Her surreal and conceptual imagery has been awarded numerous times in prestigious international competitions, has been published in photography magazines and books all over the world, and has been exhibited in galleries from Romania and USA.
In USA, she is represented by James Schot gallery. You can visit her online gallery at www.madyiordache.com. Madalina is also a freelance graphic designer running a small but successful studio called BrightPink (http://www.BrightPinkStudio.com).
James Iredell’s book Prose: Poems, a Novel, has been published as the chapbooks Before I Moved to Nevada, When I Moved to Nevada, and Atlanta. The full-length book is due out this fall. His writing has appeared in many literary magazines, including The Chattahoochee Review, Zone 3, Descant, The Literary Review, and Weber: The Contemporary West. He lives in Atlanta, and blogs at jamieiredell.blogspot.com.
Brad Johnson is an associate professor at Palm Beach Community College, FL, and has two chapbooks Void Where Prohibited and The Happiness Theory available at puddinghouse.com.
Amy Beth Kirsten most recently held a 2009 Creative Arts Residency at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy to compose a new opera. She was a finalist for the 2009 Rome Prize in Musical Composition. She participated in the American Composers Orchestra’s 16th Annual Underwood New Music Readings and was the winner of the 2006-7 Volti Choral Arts Lab Commissioning and Residency competition. Ms. Kirsten earned a BA in Vocal Jazz Studies from Illinois’ Benedictine University and holds a Master’s Degree in Composition from Chicago College of Performing Arts. Currently, she is a post-graduate composition student at Peabody Conservatory and lives and works in New Haven, CT. Before moving to the east coast, Ms. Kirsten was a regular fixture in the Chicago singer/songwriter scene performing at such venues as Fitzgerald’s Nightclub, Quenchers Saloon, The Subterranean, Katerina’s, and Uncommon Ground.
Website: www.amybethkirsten.com
Paula Koneazny lives in Sebastopol, California with numerous rosebushes and four cameras. She has degrees in Political Science and English and earns her living as a tax consultant. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Volt: The War Issue and Pool and is forthcoming in Aufgabe and New American Writing. Her reviews have been published in American Book Review, Verse, Rain Taxi and Tarpaulin Sky. She has a chapbook, The Year I Was Alive, out from dpress and her e-chapbook, Installation, was a finalist in Firewheel Editions’ 2009 chapbook contest. Paula is currently an assistant editor of Volt. She can be contacted at paulagraphpress@gmail.com or through her web page: http://paulagraphpress.googlepages.com/home.
Jennifer Lee has a MA in literature from the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she worked as an adjunct instructor until her recent acceptance into the doctoral program at the University of Rhode Island where she now teaches. As a side salad to the ivory tower, she has clerk and clerical experience, she has been a cold-caller and receptionist, entered data and served food all with only two aims in mind: to make money, and to observe the human race. Her poetry has been published in Alpha Beat Press, Children, Churches, and Daddies, Cosmic Trend, Fortunate Fall, Ibbetson Street, Joey and the Black Boots, Literary Passions, Main Street Rag, Monkey’s Fist, Nerve Cowboy, No Exit, Nomad’s Choir, Offerings, Opossum Holler Tarot, Pitchfork, Small Brushes, The Storyteller, Through Spiders Eyes, Thumbprints, True Romance, Urban Graffiti, and Writer, among others.
Charles Lennox lives in California with his wife Teresa. He has fiction published or forthcoming in Robot Melon, Yippee, Mud Luscious, Sir!, and Monkeybicycle. For more information, visit his blog at otherbeasts.blogspot.com.
Michele Lesko has published poetry and short stories in journals such as Storyglossia, The Avatar Review, Soundzine, The Yalobousha Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Tiferet, & Literary Mama. Her poem, “Interlude: Claridge’s London,” won a Reader’s Choice Award from Pedestal Magazine. Michele has an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She is a poetry editor for The Broome Review, a print journal which offers a $1,000 prize to the winner of the Stephen Dunn Poetry contest. Please take a look: thebroomereview.com. Michele also enjoys spending time with her three sons, playing tennis, running, hiking and traveling.
Stephanie Manuzak is a native of Maryland and a 2002 graduate of Oberlin College. A year of volunteer work brought her to Denver, where she has lived since 2004 and writes around her day job as an administrative assistant at a Head Start program. Her work has appeared in Perigee and the Wilderness House Literary Review.
Matt Maxwell is a schizophrenic writer, a haphazard photographer, an obsequious malcontent—tripping and sprinting and moshing to his own multi-limbed drummer. Some of his fiction has found its way into Mad Hatters’ Review, Noo Journal, Sein und Werden, The Salt River Review, Flashquake, Eyeshot, Cezanne’s Carrot, Defenestration, and others.
Tim Mayo’s poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Arbutus, Babel Fruit, Big Toe Review, The Chrysalis Reader, Del Sol Review, 5 AM, Inertia Magazine, Mannequin Envy, Poet Lore, and The Rose & Thorn, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac (Dec. 5, 2008). In 2000 he was a semi-finalist in the “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Contest. His chapbook The Loneliness of Dogs (Pudding House Publications, 2008) was a finalist in the WCDR 2008 Chapbook Challenge in Ajax, Ontario, Canada, and his first full length collection The Kingdom of Possibilities was a semi-finalist for the 2009 Brittingham and Pollock Awards, a finalist for the 2007 Main Street Rag Award and, lastly, a finalist for 2009 May Swenson Award before being accepted by Mayapple Press and is now available at http://www.mayapplepress.com or through Amazon.com. When not writing he studies circus arts at The New England Center for Circus Arts, http://www.necenterforcircusarts.org .
M.E. McMullen’s work has appeared in Antioch Review, Amazing Stories, Kansas Quarterly, Chicago Quarterly Review, The New Renaissance (tnr), cafeirreal.com, and Editor’s Choice, among others. His story “Gladys Simeon” (tnr) was cited as Distinguished Fiction, 2004 Pushcart Prize. A new story, “The Garden,” has recently appeared on the Dana Literary Society website.
George Moore has published poems in The Atlantic, Poetry, North American Review, Orion, Chelsea, Colorado Review, Nimrod, Meridian, Southern Review and other journals. His third collection is Headhunting (Edwin Mellen, 2002), and he has recent electronic works, including an e-Book, All Night Card Game in the Back Room of Time (DPP Publishing, 2007) and a CD, Tree in the Wall (CDchapbooks.com, 2006). His manuscript, The Way Things Are, was a finalist for the 2007 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and earlier for The National Poetry Series, The Brittingham Poetry Award, and the Anhinga Poetry Prize. He teaches literature and writing with the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Sherry O’Keefe, a descendent of one of the first Montana pioneers, a mother of two, sister to four, cousin to dozens, credits/blames her Irish upbringing for her story-telling ways and her collection of pocket rocks. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tipton Poetry Journal, The Sow’s Ear Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Two Review, Soundzine, and Main Street Rag. A short story was a finalist with Glimmer Train. Her chapbook, Making Good Use of August, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She likes peanut butter/dill pickle sandwiches. You may contact her for the recipe: redmittengirl (at) yahoo (dot) com.
A former U.S. Army interrogator, Martin Ott currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children, and still finds himself asking a lot of questions. He has published stories in over a dozen magazines and optioned three screenplays.
Randy Parker earned his M.A. from the University of Memphis, with concentrations in creative writing and American lit. He is a freelance advertising copywriter, husband, father, sailor, paddler, kayakfisherman, blogger and poet who, for years, thought he was a fiction writer but now knows better.
Jennifer Reeser is the author of An Alabaster Flask, winner of the Word Press First Book Prize, and Winterproof. Her poems, essays, and translations of Russian and French literature appear internationally in such journals as POETRY, Botteghe Oscure, The National Review, Salt, The Formalist, Louisiana Literature, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and The Dark Horse. Her work is gathered in numerous print and online anthologies, including Longman’s Introduction to Poetry, edited by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, and Phoenix Rising: The Next Generation of American Formal Poets, The Alsop Review (which also produces her CD as part of its Spoken Word series), and Famous Poets and Poems Online. Her verse and vocals have been set to music by art song composer Lori Laitman, and the American recording artist Briareus. She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and received awards from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets and The Lyric magazine. Jennifer has given lectures, readings and seminars at the high school and junior high levels, as well as on college campuses and community venues from New York City to the US Gulf Coast. She lives in southern Louisiana.
Edgar Rider was a script supervisor for a feature film in Zambia, South Africa called Bad Timing. He is also an actor appearing in a local Phoenix film, Remember Me. He has published articles under the alter ego Bob Eager.
J. D. Riso is the author of Blue (Murphy’s Law Press, 2006). Her short fiction and travel writing have appeared in Superstition Review, The Nautilus Engine, flashquake, Identity Theory, and many other diverse publications. She leads a nomadic life and was last seen traveling through Eastern Europe in the company of a Frenchman and the March Hare.
Paul Silverman has worked as a newspaper reporter, olive packer, sandwich man and advertising creative director. His stories have appeared in The South Dakota Review, Tampa Review, Eureka Literary Magazine, Minnetonka Review, Worcester Review, Alimentum, Coe Review, Jabberwock Review, Eclectica, Hobart Online, Pindeldyboz, The King’s English, Smokelong Quarterly, Laura Hird, The Pedestal, Adirondack Review, Dogmatika, Summerset Review, VerbSap, JMWW, Word Riot, Thieves Jargon, and many others. He has three Pushcart nominations, a Best of the Net nomination, and was shortlisted twice for The Million Writers Award .
For forty-four years, Ron Singer (www.ronsinger.net) was a teacher and writer. Since he became a half-time teacher in 2001, then retired from teaching (after 44 years) in January 2008, he has published about 150 pieces in several genres and numerous magazines, e-zines, and newspapers. For instance, fiction/satire has appeared in big bridge, The Brooklyn Rail, diagram, elimae, Ellipses, ghoti, Oregon Literary Review, Willow Review, and Word Riot; journalism (about Africa), in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Georgia Review, open democracy, Poets & Writers, and The Wall Street Journal; and poetry in Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review, Gander Press Review, Poetry Midwest, Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream, The Windsor Review, and (also) Word Riot. Singer wrote the Introduction to Vanity Fair (Bantam Books) and two librettos for performed operas, Rimshot (about Pete Best, of the Beatles) and Deeds (real-estate swindles in Maine).
Recent highlights: A Voice for My Grandmother (Ten Penny Players/ bardpress, chapbook, second printing October 2007, ten reviews); Featured Poet, New Works Review (Fall 2008); three poems, Poetic Voices Without Borders-2 (2009, anthology); more writing up, out, or forthcoming at The Brooklyn Rail, Cantaraville, Defenestration, Gander Press Review, Great Works (UK), Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and Paper Street; The Second Kingdom (Cantarabooks LLC, March 2009, an e-book of three long stories, two reviews).
Singer is currently working on a book of interviews with pro-democratic activists in Africa.
Kevin Stack lives in Los Angeles and works with teens in East LA by day. By night he caters for the extremely moneyed. He has written poetry for 15 years but has just recently sought publication. He has a forthcoming poem out this month in Hanging Moss Journal as well.
Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis.
R.L. Swihart currently lives in Long Beach, CA and teaches mathematics in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in various print and online journals, including Mimesis, Blue Fifth Review, and Barnwood.
Janusz Taras was born 1950, in Warmia and Mazury (northern part of Poland) and spent his childhood surrounded by beautiful nature: forests and lakes. It has been influencing all the choices and decisions he has made in his life. That’s how his sensibility to the beauty of nature has been born. His studies, Landscape Architecture have confirmed his interests. In order to document and take stock of his works as an architect, he started taking pictures. This is how he became a photographer. He has been practicing all kinds of photography but nature, landscape and Fine Art are his favorites. Being an architect, he always looks for the detail. He often makes his own interpretation but always according to the rules of rhythm and harmony. His latest photographs have been influenced by his reflections about the art of the XX’ century.
Jason de Caires Taylor was born in 1974 to an English father and Guyanese mother, spending the earlier part of his life growing up in Europe, Asia and the Caribbean. Educated in South East England, he graduated in 1998 from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Art London, with a B.A.Honours in Sculpture and Ceramics. He is also a fully qualified diving instructor and underwater naturalist with over 14 years of diving experience in a variety of countries.
In May 2006 he gained international recognition for creating the world’s first underwater sculpture park in Grenada, West Indies. His underwater sculptures, designed to create artificial reefs for marine life to colonise and inhabit, embrace the transformations wrought by ecological processes. The works engage with a vision of the possibilities of a sustainable future, portraying human intervention as positive and affirmative. Drawing on the tradition of figurative imagery, the aim of Jason de Caires Taylor’s work is to address a wide-ranging audience crucial for highlighting environmental issues beyond the confines of the art world. However, fundamental to understanding his work is that it embodies the hope and optimism of a regenerative, transformative Nature.
J. A. Tyler is the author of the forthcoming novella Someone, Somewhere (ghost road press) and the chapbooks The Girl in the Black Sweater (Trainwreck Press) and Everyone In This Is Either Dying Or Will Die Or Is Thinking Of Death (Achilles Chapbook Series). He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press and was recently nominated for a Pushcart. Find more info here: www.aboutjatyler.blogspot.com.
Robert Vivian is the author of Cold Snap As Yearning, a collection of meditative essays, and The Mover Of Bones, part I of The Tall Grass Trilogy. Part II, Lamb Bright Saviors, will be published in early 2010. He teaches at Alma College and the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College.
Kevin Wilson is the author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009). His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Melinda Wilson’s poems have appeared in Arsenic Lobster, Diner Magazine, The Lumberyard, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Amplexus will be available in the fall from Dancing Girl Press.
Joseph P. Wood’s first book of poems, I & We (CustomWord Editions), is forthcoming in Fall 2010. He is also the author of two chapbooks, Travel Writing (Scantily Clad Press) and In What I Have Done & Failed to Do (Elixir Press). New poems can be found in BOMB, Poetry London, Drunken Boat, H_NGM_N, among others. He serves as editor for Slash Pine Press and the Slash Pine Poetry Festival.
Slash Pine Website: www.slashpinepress.blogspot.com