CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES

 

 

JOY AL-SOFI currently teaches English in Hong Kong. She has worked in the high-tech industry and before that practiced law in both Oregon and Texas. Her work includes poetry, fiction and non-fiction and she has been published in the USA and Hong Kong. She has done theater reviews for community radio KNON, in Dallas, and hosted a regular program of classical music and opera on KBOO in Portland. In 2010, she won first prize in the Hong Kong Writer’s Circle’s Winter Monologue Competition.

RAY DE ANGELO HARRIS SR., a former chemist for Miami-Dade County, received his MFA in poetry at Florida State University. He is one of the founders of the Black Tarp Movement.

VANESSA BLAKESEE received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been recognized by grants and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and the United Arts of Central Florida, and has appeared in The Southern Review, Harpur Palate, The Bellingham Review, The New York Quarterly, and Southern Poetry Review, among other journals. She is completing a novel set in Colombia and Costa Rica. Find Vanessa online at www.vanessablakeslee.com.

SHANE E. BONDI is a graduate of Colorado State University's MFA program in Creative Writing. She has been published in High Country News, Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers, and in several other print and on-line publications. Just back from a year teaching English in South Korea, she's looking between the tree branches and in other fragrant places for possible employment.

DUFF BRENNA is the author of six novels, including The Book of Mamie, which won the AWP Award for Best Novel; Too Cool, a New York Times Noteworthy Book; The Altar of the Body, which was awarded the Favorite Book of the Year Award by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel as well as a San Diego Writers Association Award in 2002. Brenna is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Award, a Milwaukee Magazine’s Best Short Story of the Year Award, and a Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention. His work has been translated into Japanese, Hebrew, Danish, Dutch, Finnish & German.

TONY BRINKLEY teaches in the English Department at the University of Maine. His poetry has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Review of Literature, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Otoliths, and Poetry Salzburg Review. His translations (with Raina Kostova, Leonore Hildebrandt, and Fiona Sze-Lorrain) of Russian, French, and German poetry have appeared in Shofar, Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Review of Literature, Cerise Press, Otoliths, World Literature Today, and Hungarian Review. He is a member of the Flat Bay Collective, the author of Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press), and the co-editor with Keith Hanley of Romantic Revisions (Cambridge University Press).

SIVAN BUTLER-ROTHOLZ is the editor of the weekly Saturday Poetry Series on As It Ought to Be and a regular contributor and copy editor for iPinion. A proud “recovering attorney,” Sivan recently left a career in the law to pursue her MFA in creative writing, and she currently works at Demos, a progressive policy institute in Manhattan.  A small selection of her poetry can be found at her online poetry project, Stranger Ocean.

GAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS was a Latin poet of the Republican period.

YU-HAN (EUGENIA) CHAO was born and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her MFA from Penn State and currently lives in northern California. The Backwaters Press published her poetry book, We Grow Old, in 2008. To see more of her writing and artwork, please visit www.yuhanchao.com.

RAUL CLEMENT lives in Urbana, Illinois. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Blue Mesa Review, Coe Review, Chaffey Review, Troika Moonshine 300 and Main Street Rag. A short story he co-authored with Okla Elliott appears in Surreal South ’09.

KELLY DANIELS teaches creative writing at Augustana College, in Rock Island, Illinois. His stories and essays have appeared in many literary journals, such as Cimarron Review, Sonora Review, Puerto Del Sol, and others. "Dope" is a chapter from a book-in-progress.

MARK DECARTERET's work has appeared in the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press), Brevity & Echo: Short Short Stories by Emerson College Alums (Rose Metal Press), New Pony: Collaborations & Responses (Horse Less Press), Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader (Black Sparrow Press) and Under the Legislature of Stars—62 New Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press), which he also co-edited. Last year he was selected as the seventh Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  You can check out his Postcard Project at pplp.org. 

SCOTT ELLIOTT is the author of the novel Coiled in the Heart (Bluehen/Putnam, 2003). His stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times; the Antioch Review; Forklift, Ohio; Juked; and elsewhere. He teaches writing and literature at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

NENA GIORGADZE was born in the Soviet state of Georgia. She received her MA in Georgian Literature from Ilya University (Tbilisi, Georgia). She moved from the Republic of Georgia to the US in 1999, and now resides in Atlanta, Georgia. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Rhino, Cider Press Review, Nashville Review, Raleigh Review, and others.

MAGGIE GLOVER is originally from Pittsburgh, PA. Her work has appeared in Verse Daily, Smartish Pace, failbetter, The Journal, 32 Poems, Connotation Press, and other literary journals. She lives in San Francisco.

ÓLAFUR GUNNARSSON was a medical emergency driver before publishing his first novel, Milljón-prósent menn (Million-Percent Men), in 1978. He has since published novels, short stories and children‘s books. His novel, Tröllakirkja (Troll‘s Cathedral, 1996) was nominated for the Icelandic Literature Award in 1992 and the English translation was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literature Award in 1997. An adaptation for the stage premiered at The National Theatre in 1996. In 2003, he received the Icelandic Literature Prize and the Icelandic Bookseller’s Prize for his novel Öxin og jörðin (The Axe and the Earth). His children‘s book Fallegi flughvalurinn (The Beautiful Flying Whale, 1999) has been published in Britain, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and The Faeroe Islands, and was nominated for the Nordic Children‘s Literature Award in 1990. Gunnarsson has also translated various works of fiction into Icelandic, including Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. He lives and works on a small farm a few miles out of Reykjavík, Iceland.

JOHN GUZLOWSKI is the author of Lightning and Ashes, a book of poems about his parents’ experiences in Nazi concentration camps. His stories and poems also appeared in such national journals as Ontario Review, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, and Marge, and in the anthology Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust. Garrison Keillor read Guzlowski’s poem “What My Father Believed” on his program, The Writers’ Almanac. He blogs about his parents’ experiences at http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com.

CHRIS D. HARVEY recently received her MFA in Fiction Writing from Indiana University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Artful Dodge, LIT, Third Coast, Fourteen Hills, and Glossolalia, as well as on National Public Radio’s Berlin Stories. She divides her time between Indiana and California.

KATHLEEN HELLEN’s work has appeared in Barrow Street; Cimarron Review; The Cortland Review; the Hollins Critic; Nimrod; Prairie Schooner; Salamander; Southern Poetry Review; Subtropics; Witness; among others. Awards include the Washington Square Review, James Still and Thomas Merton poetry prizes, as well as individual artist grants from Maryland and the city of Baltimore. Her chapbook The Girl Who Loved Mothra from Finishing Line Press is listed on amazon.com. She is a contributing editor for the Baltimore Review.

CHRISTOPHER HIGGS ruminates and theorizes on literature and aesthetics, while educating the youth at Florida State University. In addition to authoring The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney (Sator Press, 2010), he is currently in the process of authoring other such belletristic wonders. Should you find yourself in the mood for pleasure, visit his curatorial project at Bright Stupid Confetti.

SEAN KARNS His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review, Folio, Ninth Letter, Mayday Magazine (1), and elsewhere. His poems have also been reposted on asitoughttobe.com.

TIMOTHY KERCHER lives in Kyiv, Ukraine, after living in the Republic of Georgia for the past four years, where he has been editing and translating an anthology of contemporary Georgian poetry. Originally from Colorado, he teaches high school English and is working in his fifth country overseas—Mongolia, Mexico, and Bosnia being the others. His manuscript, “Nobody’s Odyssey” was recently selected as a finalist for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of literary publications, including Atlanta Review, The Dirty Goat, Poetry International Journal, The Evansville Review, Upstreet, Guernica, The Minnesota Review and others.

HEATHER KIRN's poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. A Rona Jaffe-Bread Loaf Scholar in Nonfiction, she has had essays noted in The Best American Essays Series and published in such places as San Francisco Chronicle, Colorado Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is a Visiting Professor of English at Miami University in Hamilton, Ohio.

STEVEN KLEPETAR teaches literature and writing at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota. His chapbook, Thirty-Six Crows, was recently published by erbacce press.

JAN KOCHANOWSKI was a Polish Renaissance poet. Treny, his best-known masterpiece, is a series of nineteen elegies devoted to his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Urszula.

ANI KOPALIANI holds a MA in the theory of translation. She is now working towards a PhD in the same subject at Tbilisi State University, Republic of Georgia. She was named Best Young Georgian Translator in 2005 and again in 2010. She has published a translation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women, and is currently translating William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust into Georgian.

RAINA KOSTOVA teaches at Jacksonville State University and is completing a comparative study of  the poetry and poetics of Osip Mandelshtam and Wallace Stevens. Her translations and articles on Mandelshtam have appeared in Shofar, Modernism/Modernity, Beloit Poetry Journal, New Review of Literature, Cerise Press, Hungarian Review, and the Wallace Stevens Journal.

MIRIAM N. KOTZIN writes both poetry and fiction that has appeared in more than 100 print and online publications; her poetry received three nominations for a Pushcart Prize. She writes both formal poetry and free verse; her fiction ranges from flash fiction to a blognovel. She has been a contributing editor of Boulevard since its inception. A teacher of creative writing and literature, she directs Drexel University’s Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing and is a former director of the Literature Program. She is the author of A History of Drexel University and the poetry collection Reclaiming the Dead. Her book reviews appeared in numerous publications ranging from College Literature to The Daily Planet. From 1973-1982 she was a juror for the American Film Festival and has also judged competitions in poetry, the literary short story and the popular short story for the Mad Poets Review and the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference. She received her BA in English, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Pennsylvania, and her Ph.D. in English with distinction from New York University.

LEONARD KRESS was born in Toledo, Ohio. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University. He has written three books of poetry—The Centralia Mine Fire, Sappho’s Apples, and Orphics—and translates Polish poetry. His poetry has been included in numerous journals, and he was one of the featured poets in Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Pennsylvania. Kress is currently an Associate Professor at Owens Community College in Ohio. He and his wife run HarrowGate Press and live in Perrysburg, Ohio, with their children.

J. PATRICK LEWIS's first book of poems—Gulls Hold Up the Sky—has just been published by Laughing Fire Press. His poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review, New England Review, New Letters, Southern Humanities Review, new renaissance, Kansas Quarterly, Fine Madness, Light Quarterly, and many others.

DANIEL LIEBERT grew up in St. Louis in what he describes as “a very verbal Jewish family.” The table talk of his childhood was filled with proverbial expressions and Yiddishisms, echoes of which can be heard in his own aphorisms. Instead of going to college, Liebert embarked on a Whitmanesque wandering through Europe, Africa and the Middle East, eventually settling in Cairo for several years during the 1970s. He’s been a stand-up comedian and joke-writer; now, he writes poems.

ROBERT MACCREADY splits his time between Houston and Austin and, in addition to photography, has returned to his first love: filmmaking. He is the lead producer on a recently completed independent feature, Billy Bates, starring James Wirt and Margherita Missoni, directed by Jennifer DeLia, and co-produced by Julie Pacino. The film is aimed to premiere in Berlin in February and Cannes in May. MacCready's production company, Clayhead Pictures, is currently developing two documentaries and a feature film.

DAVID MACEY rides the roughest rocking horse in any three United States. His essay about mastodon bones is forthcoming in Third Coast. He currenctly teaches English as a Second Language in Columbus, Ohio.

ADITI MACHADO’s work has appeared in journals such as qarrtsiluni, Eclectica and Mimesis and is forthcoming in The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians. In 2009 she received the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and the TFA Award for Creative Writing. Aditi is from Bangalore, India, but currently resides in St Louis, Missouri, where she is an MFA candidate at Washington University.

OSIP MANDELSHTAM was a Russian poet and essayist who lived through the Russian Revolution and was arrested by the Stalinist regime twice, eventually dying in prison. He is generally considered one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century.

COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published four novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010) and Following Richard Brautigan (2010), a full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), and a book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written “Ode to Billy Joe.” With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

STEVEN MEYERS is an editor and filmmaker based in Reykjavik. He grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has been educated at the University of Michigan, FAMU in Prague, and the Columbia University School of the Arts in New York. He is currently the director of the Icelandic Film School's international program.

ALISTAIR NOON ’s most recent chapbook is Some Questions on the Cultural Revolution (Gratton Street Irregulars). A full-length collection of his translations of Osip Mandelshtam are forthcoming from Leafe Press in 2011. He lives in Berlin.

M. LYNX QUALEY lives in Cairo, Egypt. She writes about literature for various publications and blogs daily at ArabLit (arablit.wordpress.com).

ADAM NOVY is the author of a novel, The Avian Gospels. Adam’s work has been published in Dossier, The Believer, The Collagist, The Denver Quarterly, and American Letters and Commentary. He lives in southern California and teaches for at least two colleges.

MAYA SARISHVILI is one of the most prominent women poets writing in the Republic of Georgia today. In 2008, she won the SABA Prize for Poetry, Georgia’s top poetry prize. She is the author of two collections of poetry—Microscope (2008) and Covering Reality (2001)—as well as three radio plays. She lives in Tbilisi, Georgia, where she is a third-grade teacher and the mother of four children.

TRAVIS SCHNEIDER moves about the country in his spare time, and is preoccupied about where he really should be the rest of the time.

PIOTR SIWECKI is the author of two novels and two collections of poetry written in Polish and two novels written originally in English (Minimal Bios; In Residual Shape). He is also a critic, translator (English, Russian) and performer. His point of interest is autobiographical creation, metatext, and language itself. Piotr has published his short stories and essays in Polish literary magazines, such as Borussia, Portret, Pracownia, Twórczość. His novel was broadcast by Polish Radio in 2000.

EMILIA SNYDER is a writer and artist from Elko, Nevada, currently residing, writing, drawing and living a wild life in London, England. She attended Hollins University and The Ohio State University. "A Quick Love Story of Slight Proportions" is her first published story.

SANNA STEGMAIER lives in Vienna, Austria, where she studies Comparative Literature. She holds degrees in English, German and Theater.  She has written for and acted in several theater productions in Germany, Austria, and the United States. This is her first English-language publication.

GABRIEL WELSCH is the author of two collections of poems, Dirt and All Its Dense Labor and the chapbook An Eye Fluent in Gray. Current fiction and poetry appear in Southern Review, PANK, West Branch, American Literary Review, Right Hand Pointing, Whiskey Island, White Whale Review, and elsewhere. He is vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA, where he lives with his wife and daughters.

JOE WILKINS is the author of Killing the Murnion Dogs and Ragged Point Road. His poems, essays, and stories appear in the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, the Sun, Orion, Slate, and Best American Magazine Writing 2010. He lives with his wife and son in north Iowa, where he teaches writing at Waldorf College.

 

 

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