CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES

 

 

ADETOKUNBO ABIOLA is a Nigerian journalist and writer. He has published Labulabu Mask, a novel (Macmillan Nigeria). He has also published in print and online magazines such as Rake Journal, BBC Focus on Africa Magazine, Flask Review, Zapata!, Liberation Lit, Sage of Consciousness Review, Africa Writer.Com, Big Pulp, the One World Global Anthology, The November 3rd Club, Mobius-Journal for Social Change, Dog Eat Crow World, 5923 Quarterly, Contemporary World Literature Journal, and the Mainstay Press Anthology. He also has stories about to be published in Bicycle Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Saraba.

MICHAEL ARKUSH, whose C. V. includes bestsellers on Phil Jackson of the Los Angeles Lakers and Rush Limbaugh, has written The Fight of the Century, which paints the background of Ali and Frazier’s first bout at Madison Square Garden, a fight that drew both sporting and sociological interest worldwide.

ERIC ARNOLD lives in Dallas, mostly. He has a few poetry publications pending in New York Quarterly and The Labletter. He's also published short fiction in the past. 

MICHELLE ASKIN's poetry has appeared in Fogged Clarity, Oyez Review, Oranges & Sardines, PANK, Plain Spoke, and elsewhere.

MICHAEL BARACH's work has been published or is forthcoming in places such as River Styx, Fifth Wednesday, Main Street Rag, Bayou, and Vallum, among others.

ALEKSANDRA BOGDANOVA is an artist and photographer working in Guadalajara, Mexico.

JEREMY D. CAMPBELL studied literature at Michigan State University and has published fiction and poetry in The Red Cedar Review, The Offbeat, Word Riot, and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Besides writing fiction, essays, poetry, and plays, he is also a cheesemonger and chocolate peddlar. Although originally from Michigan, he recently moved to Seattle, WA, where he discovered that the Emerald City is indeed a very hilly city. No one had told him. You can follow Jeremy's thoughts on hills, cheese, films, and more at www.shaggyelephant.com. Jeremy is currently at work on both a science fiction novel and a non-science fiction play.

LAURA CARTER is a native Atlantan, where she studied undergraduate music and English, and went on to receive an M.F.A. in poetry in 2007. She's published three chapbooks and two more are forthcoming. Carter also co-curates the Sun & Moon Presents poetry/music series and serves as a contributor to the online arts journal Stranger Than, both in East Atlanta.

ALEX CIGALE’s poems have appeared in  Colorado Review, Green Mountains Review, Tar River Poetry, St. Petersburg Review, and 32 Poems, and online in Drunken Boat and McSweeney’s. His translations from the Russian can be found in Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, Cardinal Points, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, and PEN America. A monthly column of translations of Russian Silver Age poets and an anthology of Silver Age miniature poems are online at Danse Macabre and OffCourse, respectively. Cigale's English translation of Serge Segay's selected poems, EXODICKERING: Compositions 1963-1985, are forthcoming from Xexoxial Editions, with a forward by Gerald Janecek. He was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine, and lives in New York City.

DAVID CODY's fiction has appeared in The Seattle Review.  His short story "April Third" was also featured in Ragazine.

WESTON CUTTER has recently published work in Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review. His first collection of stories, You'd Be a Stranger, Too, was just published by BlazeVOX. Cutter runs the book review site Corduroy Books (corduroybooks.com) and teaches at the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, IN.

MANUA DAS has two collections of poems titled Beehive and Sleepless Eyes. By profession a film maker, he became famous with his TV serial, a cultural magazine called Rainbow. He is currently engaged in documenting the life of a 19th Century rebel Oriya Poet, Bhimabhoi, who was a champion of a liberal Hindu sect called Mahima Dharma.

OKLA ELLIOTT is currently the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he works in the fields of comparative literature and trauma studies. He also holds an MFA from Ohio State University. For the academic year 2008-09, he was a visiting assistant professor at Ohio Wesleyan University. His drama, non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, A Public Space, and The Southeast Review, among others. He is the author a full-length collection of short stories, From the Crooked Timber, three poetry chapbooks—The Mutable Wheel; Lucid Bodies and Other Poems; and A Vulgar Geography—and he co-edited (with Kyle Minor) The Other Chekhov.

PATRICK FADELY is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois specializing in the English Renaissance. His poetry has been published in The Open Space, A String of Small Machines, and other organs of little consequence. He believes, with René Char, that it's good to speak of one's friends.

EMILY M. GREEN earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and another in fiction from the University of Mississippi. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in such literary journals as Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and Natural Bridge. Currently, she lives somewhere between Elseworlds and Memphis, Tennessee.

BARBARA HAMBY is the Writer-in-Residence at Florida State University and the author most recently of All-Night Lingo Tango. Her first full-length book, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Prize. Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire, won the New York University Prize for Poetry and was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the 25 best books of 1999. Her third book, Babel, was chosen by Stephen Dunn for the 2003 AWP/Donald Hall Prize. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2000, Pushcart Prizes 2001, The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review and many other magazines. She has won three fellowships from the Florida Arts Council and one from the National Endowment for the Arts. For more on her photography, go to www.barbarahamby.com.

DAVID HAWKINS is the author of the non-fiction chapbook, Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-it® Notes, selected by Michael Martone for the Cupboard’s Literary Pamphlet competition (2011). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals and periodicals, including Barrow Street, Bat City Review, Chelsea, DIAGRAM, The Huffington Post, and The Pedestal Magazine, among others. His long poems have appeared in At Length Magazine, The Seattle Review, and have been nominated for the Best New Poets Anthology (Meridian Press/UVA Press) and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. His poetry collection, Dark Adaptations, has been a finalist in the 2011 Brittingham & Pollak prizes, the 2011 New American Poetry Prize, the 2010 Blue Lynx Prize, and in each of the last three (’09, ’10, and ’11) Dorset Prize competitions (Tupelo Press). Selected by Allen Grossman as the first runner-up in the 2008 Bellday Books poetry prize, the collection is the recipient of the ’08 Utah Arts Council prize for a book of poems. He is an Assistant Professor/Lecturer at the University of Utah, where he was the Editor-in-Chief of Quarterly West  from ‘01-’05. He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and their two boys.

DANIIL KHARMS (1905-1942), along with Alexander Vvedensky, co-founded the OBERIU, the so-called Russian Absurdist group of poets during the 1920s and 30s. Kharms was not allowed to publish his work and survived for a time by writing poems for children. Having feigned insanity to avoid arrest and deportation to the Gulag, he starved to death in a psychiatric hospital in 1942, during the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

DAVID KIRBY teaches English at Florida State University. He has received many honors for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his work appears frequently in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize volumes. Kirby is the author of numerous books, including The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award in poetry. His Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll was named one of Booklist's Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010, and the Times Literary Supplement called it "a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense." Kirby's latest poetry collection is Talking About Movies With Jesus. There's more at www.davidkirby.com.

JEFF LAUGHLIN is the author of Drinking With British Architects, which you can have for free. He is the editor of the sometimes updated 10listens.com. His newest book, Alcoholics Are Sick People, will be available someday. He is currently in Greensboro, NC, watching a lot of basketball unless you read this during the lockout. Birds or something. And cannons. Twitter: @beardsinc.

ROBERT LOSS teaches at Columbus College of Art and Design. His creative non-fiction has appeared in OxMag, his music and literary criticism at PopMatters, and his short fiction in Filigree.

GEORGE MOORE's poetry has been published in The Atlantic, Poetry, North American Review, Colorado Review, and internationally in Blast (Australia), Antigonish Review (Canada), Dublin Quarterly, Semaphore (New Zealand), QRLS (Singapore), and Anastomoo (Tasmania).  He was also nominated in 2010 and 2009 for Pushcart Prizes, "Best of the Net" and "Best of the Web" awards The Rhysling Poetry Award (2009) and The Wolfson Poetry Prize 2010).  My recent collections include All Night Card Game in the Back Room of Time (Pulpbits 2007) and Headhunting  (Mellen, 2002).  When not traveling and working abroad, Moore teaches literature with the University of Colorado, Boulder. 

ALEXANDER MOTYL is a writer, painter, and professor. He is the author of four novels, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, Flippancy, and The Jew Who Was Ukrainian. His poems have appeared in Counterexample Poetics, Istanbul Literary Review, Orion Headless, The Battered Suitcase, and New York Quarterly. He has done performances of his fiction and poetry at the Cornelia Street Café and the Bowery Poetry Club. Motyl’s artwork has been exhibited in solo and group shows in New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in New York. His website is: www.AlexanderMotyl.webs.com.

CLAIRE HARLAN ORSI is a PhD student in literature and writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her first published fiction appears in the Winter 2011 issue of the Cincinnati Review.

DANIELE PANTANO is a Swiss poet, translator, critic, and editor born of Sicilian and German parentage in Langenthal (Canton of Berne). His individual poems, essays, and reviews, as well as his translations from the German by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Georg Trakl, and Robert Walser, have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Absinthe: New European Writing, The Baltimore Review, The Cortland Review, Gradiva: International Journal of Italian Poetry, Guernica Magazine, Italian Americana, Jacket, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Mailer Review, Versal, Verse Daily, and 32 Poems Magazine. Pantano’s most recent works include In an Abandoned Room: Selected Poems by Georg Trakl (Erbacce Press, 2008), The Possible Is Monstrous: Selected Poems by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and The Oldest Hands in the World (both from Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books, 2010), and Mass Graves (XIX-XXII) (The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2011). His forthcoming books include Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser and The Collected Works of Georg Trakl, both from Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books. Pantano has taught at the University of South Florida and served as the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Florida Southern College. He divides his time between Switzerland, the United States, and England, where he’s Senior Lecturer and Director of Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. For more information, please visit www.danielepantano.ch.

JORDAN A. ROTHACKER is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University
of Georgia where he also received his Masters degree in Religion. His poetry has appeared in Red River Review and two of his literary essays can be found in As It Ought To Be. Rothacker's first novel, And Wind Will Wash Away (awaiting representation), explored his interests in the New South, Aztec revival cults, sacred prostitution, and Pez dispensers. He is hard at work on a second novel involving late stage capitalism, environmental destruction, and bridges.

SERGE SEGAY, born in 1947 in Murmansk, completed his studies at the Leningrad Institute of Theater, Music, and Cinematography. From 1974 he lived in Yeysk (on the Azov sea), moving to St. Petersburg in 1997, and in 1998 to Kiel, Germany. He and his wife, the poet Rea Nikonova, have been credited with reviving the Zaum poetry of the Russian Silver Age avant-garde, editing and publishing Transponance (1979-1987), a renowned Russian underground hand-made journal, covers of which can be viewed at The Sackner Archives. In 1998, they were awarded the Andrei Bely Prize for "special services to literature" for their preservation of the history and poetry of Russian Futurism.

CARRIE SHIPER's poems have appeared in Connecticut Review, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Laurel Review, New England Review, North American Review, and other journals.  She is the author of two chapbooks, Ghost-Writing (Pudding House, 2007) and Rescue Conditions (Slipstream, 2008), and a full-length collection, Ordinary Mourning (ABZ, 2010).   

DAVID STARKEY is the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College.  Among my poetry collections are Starkey’s Book of States (Boson Books, 2007), Adventures of the Minor Poet (Artamo Press, 2007), Ways of Being Dead: New and Selected Poems (Artamo, 2006), David Starkey’s Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002) and Fear of Everything, winner of Palanquin Press’s Spring 2000 chapbook contest.  A Few Things You Should Know about the Weasel was published by Biblioasis in May--two of the poems from the book were recently featured on Garrison Keillor's A Writer's Almanac.  In addition, over the past twenty years I have published more than 400 poems in literary journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Scholar, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Greensboro Review, The Journal, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Southern Poetry Review.  I have also written two textbooks: Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008) and Poetry Writing: Theme and Variations (McGraw-Hill, 1999).  With Paul Willis, I co-edited In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (Iowa, 2005), and I am the editor of Living Blue in the Red States (Nebraska, 2007). Keywords in Creative Writing, which I co-authored with the late Wendy Bishop, was published in 2006 by Utah State University Press. 

HANNAH STEPHENSON is a poet, editor, instructor, and singer-songwriter based in Columbus, Ohio. Her writing has been featured (or is forthcoming) in various online and print publications, including the Huffington Post, The Nervous Breakdown, Stymie, Escape into Life, and qarrtsiluni. For more of her work, visit her daily poetry site, The Storialist, at www.thestorialist.com.

DAVID ALLEN SULLIVAN's first book, Strong-Armed Angels, was published by Hummingbird Press. Two of its poems were selected by Garrison Keillor and read on The Writer’s Almanac. Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a series of poems in multiple voices dealing with the Iraq war, is being published in 2012. His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Bloodroot, Bicycle Review, Ellipses, Beloit Poetry Journal, Chicago Review and other journals. He teaches literature and film at Cabrillo College, in Santa Cruz, CA, where he lives with his love, the historian Cherie Barkey, and their two children, Jules and Amina.

RABINDRA K. SWAIN's fourth book of poems is Susurrus in the Skull. His work has appeared in several journals, including The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Shenandoah, Verse, New Letters, and Quarterly West. He has translated three books of short stories and a collection of poems from his native Oriya.

JORGE VOLPI was born in the tumultuous year of 1968, in Mexico City. He studied law and literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and received a PhD in Spanish philology from The University of Salamanca in Spain. He has won many awards both in his native Mexico and in Europe. To date, two of his novels have been translated into English—In Search of Klingsor, which was an international bestseller, and Season of Ash, which appeared in 2009 to much acclaim. Volpi is equally well regarded as a nonfiction writer. He has written an as yet untranslated book on the events surrounding the Mexico City Olympics in 1968 and many widely read essays, which have appeared in both Spanish and English. His scholarly and legal background inform these essays as much as his fiction, lending his work a political and intellectual weight few authors can manage. What’s more, he achieves this gravity without overtaking the dramatic joys of a good narrative. To read more, check out Season of Ash at Amazon.

ALEXANDER VVEDENSKY (1904-1941) co-founded the OBERIU, the so-called Russian Absurdist group of poets, with Daniil Kharms in 1928. A radical poet and accomplished children's writer, Vvedensky faced repeated arrest on counterrevolutionary charges and perished in 1941 during transport to one of Stalin’s gulags.

ROBERT WALSER (1878-1956) left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence while producing poems, stories, essays, and three novels: The Tanners (1906), The Assistant (1908), and Jakob Von Gunten (1909). In 1933 he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium, where he remained for the rest of his life. “I am not here to write,” Walser said, “but to be mad.”

FRANCINE WITTE is a poet, playwright and fiction writer living in NYC. Her flash fiction chapbook, The Wind Twirls Everything, was published by MuscleHead Press. She is the winner of the Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award in fiction from Ropewalk Press, and her chapbook Cold June is forthcoming. Her poetry chapbook First Rain was published in 2009 by Pecan Grove Press. She is a high school English teacher.

DANIEL WOLFF has published poetry in The Paris Review, Partisan Review, and Three Penny Review, among others.  His latest non-fiction book is How Lincoln Learned to Read: 12 Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them.  A Grammy nominee, he’s currently working with director Jonathan Demme on a documentary about citizens returning to New Orleans. These poems are from a manuscript, The Names of Birds.

THEODORE WOROZBYT's work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Image, Mississippi Review, Ploughshares, Po&sie, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Sentence, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly Online, Verse Daily and The Best American Poetry. His first book, The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press, 2006), won the first American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and his second, Letters of Transit, is the winner of the 2007 Juniper Prize and was published in 2008. Scar Letters, a chapbook, is online at Beard of Bees Press.

 

 

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