Avatar Review

Gregorio Ames lives in Sveti Gregor, Slovenia. He has an MFA from the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

Poet, painter, filmmaker, playwright and publisher David Avidan (1934-1995) was born in Tel Aviv, where he lived and worked. A major force in contemporary Hebrew poetry and a leading innovator and artist, Avidan published nineteen books of poetry, as well as plays and children’s books. His work has been translated into twenty languages, and collections of his poems have been published in French, Russian and Arabic. He wrote and directed four short films (his film, Sex, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971), and translated Chekhov and Brecht, among others, into Hebrew. The first volume (of scheduled four) of his Collected Poems, appeared in Israel in 2009. Among his awards: the Abraham Woursell Award from the University of Vienna, the Bialik Award, and the Prime Minister award. Most recently, his work, as translated by Tsipi Keller, has appeared in Drunken Boat, in the anthology Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry (SUNY  Press), and is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review (Fall Issue, 2010).

Abdennabi Benchehda is a world travler, writer, poet, and social commentator. Recently, some of his poems were published in Stories from the Other Side, 5E. He is currently in Iraq doing research for his upcoming novel, and also working on a poetry manuscript.

Eric Bennett lives in New York with his wife and four children. He loves trees without leaves and the silence between songs on vinyl records. His work appears in numerous literary and art journals including Writer’s Bloc, LITnIMAGE, Prick of the Spindle, Ghoti Magazine, and PANK.

Jenn Blair is from Winterville, GA. Her chapbook All Things are Ordered is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published throughout the small and literary presses. His work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, After Hours, Free Lunch, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review and others. He has been featured in a number of on-line journals including chicagopoetry.com, Milk, Muse Apprentice Guild and poetrysuperhighway.com. In addition he has won a number of awards including the Ommation Press Best Chapbook Award and Triton College’s International Poetry Prize. He published The Paper Bag and WYMBS Broadside, wrote for the Chicago Reader and other area newspapers and has an educational column in the SouthStreet Journal and is the elementary school teacher editor for Substance. Brownstein has eight poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004) and What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005). Presently he performs original one-man performance pieces throughout the Chicago area. Two of these are Ten Times People Attempted to Rob Me and Let’s Eat Grasshoppers Cause Everything Else Tastes Like Chicken.

Brownstein taught elementary school in Chicago’s inner city, but now he studies authentic African instruments, conducts grant-writing workshops for educators and the State of Illinois Title 1 Convention, and records performance and music pieces with grants from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the Oppenheimer Foundation, BP Leadership Grants, and others.

Ceridwen Christensen lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two small children, where she works as a house painter. She is an avid reader and reviewer.

Claire Contreras was born in Mexico and grew up in South Africa, Israel and Miami. She recently graduated from Boston University with a degree in International Relations and Religion. She lives in Cambridge now; she’s 23 and waits tables to pay her bills.

Chella Courington teaches fiction, poetry and writing at Santa Barbara City College. Her recent poetry and flash fiction appear or are forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, Opium Magazine, DMQ Review, Pirene’s Fountain, and Moria. Her first chapbook is entitled Southern Girl Gone Wrong.

Lara Crombie holds a B.A. in Studio Art from St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Besides love poem-ing, she occasionally writes merciless, self-indulgent music reviews at www.weheartmusic.com.

Erica Dawson was born and raised in Columbia, Maryland. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and is a graduate of the MFA program at Ohio State University, where she won the college’s Academy of American Poets Prize.

Dawson’s debut collection Big-Eyed Afraid received the 2006 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and was subsequently published by Waywiser Press. X.J. Kennedy has called Dawson “the most exciting younger poet I’ve seen in years,” and said “I can’t recall finding this much energy between two covers since (Sylvia Plath’s) Ariel.” Alan Shapiro has written that Big-Eyed Afraid is “one of the most compelling and entertaining books of poetry I’ve read in I don’t know how long.”

Dawson’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2008, Southwest Review, Harvard Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Raintown Review, among other journals and anthologies. She will receive her PhD in English from University of Cincinnati this month; and, in the fall, she will be Assistant Professor of English and Writing at The University of Tampa and Poetry Editor of The Tampa Review.

Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding editor of the Baltimore Review and a Master of Arts in Writing student at Johns Hopkins University. She works for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her short stories and poetry have been published in journals including Antietam Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Eureka Literary Magazine, MacGuffin, Confrontation, Rosebud, Thema, Crescent Review, JMWW, Potomac Review, American Poetry Journal, Measure, and Gargoyle.

Daniel Dominowski is an undergraduate student attending Augusta State University in Georgia. His work has appeared in Origami Condom, The Denver Syntax, The Dream People, Mississippi Crow Magazine, and Sand Hills Magazine.

Eva Eliav grew up in Toronto, Canada and now lives in Israel. Her poems and short fiction have been published in a number of literary magazines, including Room of One’s Own, Natural Bridge, Stand, Quality Women’s Fiction and ARC Israel. Her work also appears in “Tel Aviv Stories”, a new anthology of English writing in Israel. She was a winner in the Glimmertrain June 2009 “Best Start” competition. Her other interests include painting, films, and finding the perfect frappuccino. Eva Eliav is married and has a daughter.

William Fenton is an English graduate student at Fordham University. His work has been featured in Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, Writer’s Bloc, The Monongahela Review, and The Boston Literary Magazine.

Avital Gad-Cykman’s work has been published in Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, Prism International, Other Voices, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sex for America, Politically Inspired Fiction (Harper/Collins 01/2008), Happy, Stand Magazine, Stumbling and Raging, Politically Inspired Fiction Anthology (McAdam/Cage), You Have Time for This Anthology (Ooligan Press), The Flash (Disease Press), AIM Quarterly, The Bridge, Gargoyle Magazine, Descant, Imago and many other publications. She is a three-time Pushcart prize nominee. Her story collections Light Reflection over Blues and Perfect for This World were finalists for the Iowa Fiction award.

Having grown up on the banks of the Mississippi River in Destrehan, Louisiana, Ronnie Gaubert was exposed at a young age to the vast diversity and abundance of the flora and fauna that flourishes in the swamps and bottomland hardwood forest. His interest in photography was sparked by his father who was an architectural and studio photographer. He has been capturing nature images for over 40 years. His concept of what constitutes good nature photography has gone through much evolution over the years. Ronnie strongly believes in capturing nature in a realistic manner with an emphasis on light. The true beauty of nature is best captured during the early warm light of the morning. After a night of rest nature awakens rejuvenated and reveals itself in its most pure form. During that magical time is when you will find Ronnie somewhere in the vast wetlands of South Louisiana.

Greg Gerke lives in Buffalo. His work has or will appear in Gargoyle, Rosebud, Fourteen Hills, Night Train, Flash Forward Press 2009 Anthology and others. There’s Something Wrong With Sven, a book of short fiction has been published by Blaze Vox Books. His website is www.greggerke.com

Hannah Gersen’s fiction has been published on Granta.com as part of their “New Voices” series and she has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. She recently completed her first novel, Roosevelt Island.

Peter Golub is a Moscow born poet and translator. He has published original work and translations in various journals, including ARC Poetry, Cimarron, and World Literature Today. In 2008 he edited an anthology of contemporary Russian poetry, which was published by Jacket Magazine. In 2007 a bilingual edition of his poems, My Imagined Funeral, was published by Argo-Risk Press in Moscow, Russia. He is currently the translation editor for the St. Petersburg Review, and is pursuing his PhD at Columbia University. He is the recipient of a PEN Translation Grant for a collection of flash fiction by Linor Goralik and a BILTC Fellowship for the poems of Anrei Sen-Senkov (Zephyr Press).

Michael Graber is excited to appear in Avatar Review a second time. Graber is the author of the Last Real Medicine Show. Since 9/11, he has only written love poems as a form of civil disobedience. Michael runs the Southern Growth Studio and plays mandolin with the Bluff City Backsliders. He lives with his wife and many children in both Oxford, MS and Memphis TN.

Meg Hamill received her MFA from Mills College in 2005. Her acclaimed first book, Death Notices, was published in 2007 by Factory School Press. Her second book, Trillions & Trillions of Heartbeats was published in 2008. Meg grew up in Maine but currently lives in Santa Rosa, California, where she works as a writer and teaches with California Poets in the Schools.

Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher, and writer/editor. He earned degrees from UC Santa Cruz and the U of Montana and received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and a citation in its Joseph Henry Jackson competition. His stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Long Story, Short Story, South Dakota Review, Starry Night Review, The Offcourse Journal, Atomjack, Zahir, Word Riot, Ruminate Magazine, The Write Place at the Write Time, Caveat Lector, The Dead Mule, Genre Fixation, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Emprise Review, Connotation Press, The Iconoclast, Splash of Red, Prick of the Spindle, Xenith, Danse Macabre, Sixers Review, The 3rd of November Club, and other journals. Stories are currently in press at Porchlight, Monongahela Review, River Poets Journal, and the Overtime Chapbook Series at Blue Cubicle Press.

Sørina Higgins might at any time be found teaching courses in literature, writing, music, philosophy, Shakespeare, or The Inklings. Her debut poetry chapbook, The Significance of Swans (Finishing Line Press) was nominated for a Conference on Christianity and Literature 2008 book-of-the-year award. Her writing has appeared in several journals, including Sehnsucht, Radix, Stillpoint, Relief, Studio, and Windhover. She is the author of the entry on Charles Williams in The Encyclopedia of Christian Literature (Scarecrow Press, 2010). She holds an M.A. from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. Sørina and her husband live in Kutztown, PA, in a home they built themselves.

After 15 years as a reporter and editor, Amorak Huey recently left the newspaper business to teach writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His poetry has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The Oxford American, Crab Orchard Review, Subtropics, Nimrod, Gargoyle, and other journals. He lives in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his wife and their two children. More information can be found at his website, www.amorakhuey.net.

Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review and many more. He published a three-volume series of the best of Northwest writing as well as an anthology of contemporary German poetry titled Evidence of Fire. He has published a limited edition collection of his own poetry and translated Yesterday I Was Leaving by Johannes Bobrowski. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. His story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking, was one of five finalists for the 2009 Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize.

Tim Kahl (http://www.timkahl.com) is the author of Possessing Yourself (Word Tech Press, 2009) He has published work in Prairie Schooner, American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley Poetry Review, Fourteen Hills, George Washington Review, Illuminations, Indiana Review, Limestone, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, South Dakota Quarterly, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Texas Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He has translated German poet Rolf Haufs, Austrian avant-gardist Friederike Mayröcker, Brazilian poets Lêdo Ivo and Marly de Oliveira, and the poems of the Portuguese language’s only Nobel Laureate, José Saramago. He also appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the video, poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup (http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/). He is also the editor for Bald Trickster Press, which is dedicated to works of poetry in translation into English.

The author of eight books, Tsipi Keller was born in Prague, raised in Israel, and has been living in the U.S. since 1974. She is the recipient of several literary awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and an Armand G. Erpf award from Columbia University. Her most recent translation collections are: Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of  Contemporary Hebrew Poetry (SUNY Press); and The Hymns of Job & Other Poems, a Lannan Translation Selection (BOA Editions).

Caroline Kim is a writer living in Berkeley, California. She has published previously in Spinning Jenny, Manoa, the Green Mountains Review, and the Michigan Review, among others. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.

Bill Kirby is a teacher of English and creative writing in South Mississippi and a teacher/consultant with the Writing Project. He is a founding member of the 365th Writers’ Avoidance/Support Group. He won the 1995 Eudora Film and Fiction Festival Award for Poetry; he has had poems published in the Saturday Afternoon Journal and a short story in 14 Hills. His novel The Lulu Journals: The Somewhat Life of the Reluctant Roughneck was a semi-finalist in the 2009 Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

Alyse Knorr is an alum of Elon University and is currently pursuing her MFA at George Mason University, where she also serves as an English faculty member.  Her work has been published in the Albion Review, the North Central Review, Colonnades, Vision Magazine, and more than a dozen newspapers across the country.

Philip Kobylarz’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Connecticut Review, The Iconoclast, Visions International, New American Writing, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Salzburg Review and has appeared in Best American Poetry.

Joseph Koehl’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Foliate Oak, The Houston Literary Review and Proper Gander.  While an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, he received an Adele Steiner Burleson Award For Fiction, honorable mention.  He lives with his turtles in Austin, Texas.

Noreen Lace has an MFA and teaches at California State University. Her poetry was awarded a prize from Directions, while her fiction and poetry have appeared in Poetry Motel, Daybreak, ROAR as well as The Northridge Review and others.

Carol Levin’s chapbook Red Rooms and Others was released from Pecan Grove Press, April 2009. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Verse Wisconsin, The Massachusetts Review, Third Coast, The Seattle Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Cortland Review, Centrifugal Eye, The Comstock Review, Junctures Journal, Gander Press Review, Umbrella, Stringtown, and others. She is an Editorial Assistant for The Crab Creek Review and teaches the Alexander Technique in Seattle.

Christoph Lieven is a photographer and painter. For more information, visit his page at photo.net.

Artist’s statement: I’ve always dreamed of landscapes. However, although their photographic representation has been very well achieved by a number of artists, it eventually hits a limit. A landscape goes well beyond its strict representation. It is an invitation. I think it’s an invitation to dream, to reach poetry where each detail holds its own meaning, each element its usefulness, every scene tells a story.

Who’s the person who’s never dreamed of lying on fluffy clouds or frolicking among the stars? Those are a child’s simple emotions somehow reduced within the constraint of traditional photography. I’ve yearned to bring those yet again to the fore in absolute simplicity. When my children came into my playground, it became obvious I had to put them in the frame. Their apparent naivity, added to their spontaneity, allow to make believe in reality for a brief magic instant.

By almost systematically and deliberately putting into those compositions an observer, who is still a child, that impression is enhanced. This series is a delicate mixture of pathos and surrealism as expressed, at least in part, by André Breton: ‘Surrealism rests upon believing in the higher reality of certain forms of associations, up to then neglected, in the almighty power of dreams, in thought’s free play.’

I now live in the south of France.

Clare L. Martin is a poet/mother/wife and graduate of the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Clare’s creative writing has appeared in Inch, Eclectica Magazine, The Dead Mule, Wheelhouse Magazine, Blue Fifth Review, Clean Sheets, Press1, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others. She has work forthcoming in Literary Mama. Her poem “4-Way Stop at Dusk” appears in the anthology Best of Farmhouse Magazine Vol. 1. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets.

Daniel McCann was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1970.  He grew up in Granby, Connecticut.  He is currently on “extended sabbatical” and living in Montana.  Educated at the University of Montana and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his poems have appeared in Reed, Hoboeye, Cutbank, Caveat Lector, Red Herring and the Missoula Independent, among others.  He has taught English and Creative Writing at San Jose State University, Foothill College and Kirkwood College.  He spends his time writing, painting, cooking, hiking, skiing, and traveling between North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Montana and California. He lived for six months in Thailand, and has traveled to Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.

Jim McGarrah’s poems, essays, and stories have appeared in many literary magazines over the past decade, most recently in After Shocks: Poems of Recovery, Bayou Magazine, Connecticut Review, Elixir Magazine, and North American Review. His play, Split Second Timing, received a Kennedy Center ACTF Award in 2001. He is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down and When the Stars Go Dark, and the novel Going Postal. He has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and a finalist twice in the James Hearst Poetry Contest. His memoir, A Temporary Sort of Peace, received the Legacy Nonfiction Award for 2010 from the Eric Hoffer Foundation. He is also co-editor of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana and an editor at RopeWalk Press. He teaches writing at Jefferson College in Louisville.

Scott Miles is from Downriver Detroit and lives in Chicago. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in LIT, The Summerset Review, Storyglossia, Beloit Fiction Journal, Cimarron Review, The MacGuffin, Thieves Journal, and Pebble Lake Review. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007 and has just finished a novel.

Emily D. Morris lives outside of Washington, D.C. with her husband and cat. She received her undergraduate degree from Centre College in Kentucky, where she was fortunate to get paid to assist the talented photographers and graphic designers in the college’s publications office. She works as a government attorney to fund her passion for travel, food, curling, and photography.

Kirsten Ogden grew up in Hawaii, Louisiana, and the Bay Area. She currently writes from Los Angeles where she teaches at Pasadena City College. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in Slipstream, A.I.M., Phoebe, Radical Teacher, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Teaching Tolerance, and Fringe. You can find her on the web at www.eatthepaper.com.

Artist’s statement: There is nothing more remarkable to me than the power of nature. It is both cataclysmic and subtle. Slow and continuous erosion by water and wind can create landscapes every bit as astonishing as those shaped by catastrophic earthquakes or volcanic eruption. Nature is incredibly diverse – quiet streams and roaring waterfalls, burning desert sands and mossy riverbanks, silent snowfall and raging summer storms… this fantastic variety ensures that I can never photograph the same scene twice in the same way.

Landscape photography is demanding. It is not unusual to climb a steep trail and wait several hours for sunset – despite intense heat or numbing cold – only to climb back down in the dark without getting the shot because the light wasn’t right. I am more than willing to return to a location many times if necessary. I don’t mind cold hands, wet feet, muddy clothes, or aching muscles – if in the end, the photograph makes an impression. I love hiking long trails through wilderness, crossing rivers on slippery stones, and climbing sand dunes by the light of the moon. I thrive on rising before the sun in order to capture those first rays of sun on the mountain. I am irresistibly drawn to the challenge of finding the right light, in the right place, at the right time.

Allison Leigh Peters won an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2010 and is the recipient of various other awards for her poetry. She has been published in numerous literary magazines and journals, including The American Library of Poetry, Café Shapiro Anthology, Fortnight Literary Press, Angelic Dynamo, and two Northern Michigan annual chapbooks as well as an anniversary anthology from the Poets’ Night Out series. She is studying English Language & Literature, Creative Writing, Global Media Studies, and Medieval & Early Modern Studies at the University of Michigan. She currently works as an editorial assistant at the university’s publishing company and college of architecture and lives in downtown Ann Arbor.

Philip Quinlan has lived half his life in the North of England (Manchester, Lancashire and Yorkshire) and the other half in the London area. Philip has two print publications to his credit: True North, and Leaves and Limnings, both made in collaboration with the English landscape artist Annie Ovenden–formerly of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. He has only very recently submitted any poems for journal publication but has two online credits at Rose Kelleher’s Lilt web anthology, 5 acceptances from Numinous, l from The Flea as well as 2 acceptances from The Chimaera. His poetical interests are largely spiritual, natural and musical. He occasionally writes both jazz and orchestral music as well as dabbling with mathematics.

Paige Riehl is a faculty member in the English Department at Anoka Ramsey Community College, located just north of Minneapolis. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in such publications as Words-Myth; The Honey Land Review; Rock, Paper, Scissors; Plum Ruby Review; Prairie Poetry; Tryst Magazine, and more.

Eugenia Ritz lives in Nizhny Novgorod, where she completed her doctorate work in philosophy at the Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University. She has published two books of poetry, Return to Ease, and City Large. City Pained. Her work can be found in many Russian journals. In English, translations of her work can be found in Jacket Magazine’s “New Russian Poetry” feature.

Brooke Sheridan is currently completing her MFA in creative writing at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

Sarah J. Sloat is an American poet living in Germany, where she works in the news. Her poems have been published in print and online journals, including Court Green, Juked, Wicked Alice and Bateau, among other magazines.

Mattie Quesenberry Smith is the director of the Fine Arts in Rockbridge Writers’ Roundtable as well as adjunct English instructor for Dabney S. Lancaster Community College in Clifton Forge, Virginia. Finishing Line Press recently nominated Mother Chaos: Under Electric Light, a chapbook of Smith’s poems, for a 12th Library of Virginia Literary Award, and her poem, “To a Fishing Father,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize this year by Ruminate. She lives at the foot of Little House Mountain in Lexington, Virginia, with her husband and children.

Rodney Smith is a 1970 graduate of the University of Virginia and received a Master of Divinity in Theology from Yale University in 1973. While at Yale he studied photography under Walker Evans. Mr. Smith regularly teaches at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops in New Mexico. His teaching experience also includes an adjunct professorship at Yale. Clients such as The New York Stock Exchange, American Express, BMW, MCI Worldcom, The New York City Ballet, Starbucks, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Visa have commissioned Mr. Smith. His editorial clients include The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, W Magazine, Esquire, New York Magazine, Elegant Bride, and Conde Nast Portfolio and his fashion clients include Ralph Lauren, Neiman Marcus, Ellen Tracy, Bergdorf Goodman, and Saks Fifth Avenue. He has won multiple awards and photography contests.

Galleries such as Gallerie Zur Stockeregg, The Witkin Gallery, Robert Klein Galley, Fahey Klein Gallery, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Jackson Fine Art, and John Cleary Gallery have represented Mr. Smith. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Yale University Art Gallery, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (among others), have collected Mr. Smith’s work. He received a Jerusalem Foundation Fellowship in 1975, enabling him to live in Jerusalem for three months and resulted in his first book, In the Land of Light, published by Houghton-Mifflin Company in 1983. Doubleday published his second book, The Hat Book in 1993. In 2005, Mr. Smith published his third book, The Book of Books. His fourth book, The End, is due for publication in the fall of 2009. He lives with his wife and daughter in Snedens Landing, on the Hudson River near New York City.

Known mainly as a poet/teacher, Barry Spacks has brought out various novels, stories, three poetry-reading CDs and ten poetry collections while teaching literature and writing for years at M.I.T. & U C Santa Barbara. His most recent book of poems, Food for the Journey, appeared from Cherry Grove in August, 2008.

Charles Springer has degrees in anthropology and is an award-winning painter, having lived much of his life in Cincinnati, Philadelphia and New York. He currently eats, sleeps, bicycles and writes from the family homestead in the mountains of north central Pennsylvania where he earns a living in advertising and is constantly trying to keep his barn from falling down. Over the years Charles has enjoyed publishing in Apalachee Review, The Cincinnati Review, Faultline, Heliotrope, and Oxford Magazine among others. New poems appear or will appear in The Coe Review, Sawbuck, Forge, The Lumberyard and Edison Literary Review. A recent Pushcart nominee, Charles is currently working on a manuscript for his first collection.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore is an award-winning graduate of the Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars, a Pushcart nominee, and author of the digital chapbook Enough Light on the Dogwood; her work is also available at her facebook site. She has been published in Antioch, Stirring, Mimesis, and the antiwar anthology Cost of Freedom. She is a member of the Hudson Valley Writers’ Guild, and her reading at Snoest January 16 2010 is available on YouTube. Carolyn lives in Upstate New York with her husband and daughter.

Lee Stern lives in Los Angeles. He’s got over a hundred twenty poems published.  Many on the internet. He tries his best to write one a day.

Terry Ann Thaxton holds an MFA from Vermont College, and has published poetry in Connecticut Review, flyway, Hollins Critic, and many other journals. Her first collection of poetry, Getaway Girl, is forthcoming from Salt Publishing (UK) next summer, 2011. She teaches at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Karen J. Weyant’s first chapbook, Stealing Dust, has just been published by Finishing Line Press. Her most recent work can be seen or is forthcoming in 5 AM, Anti-, Barn Owl Review, Coal Hill Review and Copper Nickel. In 2007, she was awarded a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives and writes in rural Pennsylvania, but teaches in western New York.