CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES

 

ALYSE BENSEL is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at Penn State. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, The Summerset Review, and Foothill Poetry, among others. When not engaged in her teaching and studies, she volunteers for a cat rescue and participates in a work-share program at a local CSA farm.

NEIL CARPATHIOS is the author of three poetry collections—Playground of Flesh (MSR Press), At the Axis of Imponderables (winner of the Quercus Review Book Award), and Beyond the Bones (finalist for the 2009 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize)—as well as several award-winning chapbooks and limited edition works. He is an English professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio.

LAURA CHALAR is a Uruguayan lawyer, writer, and translator, currently dividing her time between Buenos Aires and her hometown of Montevideo. She has published two poetry collections and two volumes of short stories, one of which received an honorable mention in the Uruguayan Ministry of Culture's Annual Literary Awards 2009. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Magma, The London Magazine, Frogmore Papers, Rising, Iota, Rain Dog, Versal, Legal Studies Forum, Louisville Review, Coal City Review, and the Rio Grande Review. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart in 2011.

HELEN DEGEN COHEN’s (Halina Degenfisz’s) awards include a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowship in poetry, First Prize in British Stand Magazine's fiction competition, and three Illinois Arts Council Literary awards. Once an Artist-in-Education and instructor for Roosevelt University, she co-edits Rhino Magazine and coordinates its Poetry Forum workshop. Widely published in periodicals, she was twice "featured poet" in The Spoon River Poetry Review, and her work has been the subject of essays such as "Rootlessness and Alienation in the Poetry of Helen Degen Cohen" (Shofar) and "This Dark Poland" (Something of My Very Own to Say, Columbia University, Press). In 2009 she had two poetry collections published—Habry and On A Good Day One Discovers Another Poet—as well as an excerpt from her novel, The Edge of the Field (in Where We Find Ourselves—SUNY). A new chapbook, Neruda Nights, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

THOM DAWKINS serves as the Reviews Editor for Weave Magazine and contributes regularly to the Los Angeles Review. His recent work as a poet and critic has also appeared in Pleiades, New Orleans Review, DMQ Review, and Puerto del Sol. He earned his MFA at Chatham University and became a master of theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

HELEN DEWITT was mainly brought up in South America, as her parents worked for the U.S. diplomatic service. She attended Smith College in 1975, but dropped out from Smith twice. After that, she studied Classics at Oxford University, where she was later awarded a PhD. Her debut novel, The Last Samurai, received widespread acclaim upon its publication in 2001. About the novel, Jonathan Safran Foer said, "I think it is the best book, for my money, published in the last five years or so....It's so humane and so ambitious. She says all sorts of things in ways that have never been said and yet are so much more familiar than the way that you have seen a million times. It's a wonderful book." More information about DeWitt's work is available at www.helendewitt.co.

OKLA ELLIOTT is currently the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he studies comparative literature and cultural theory. He also holds an MFA from Ohio State University. His non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, North Dakota Quarterly, A Public Space, and The Southeast Review,among others. He is the author of a full-length collection of short fiction, 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.

RICHARD FEIN has been published in numerous print and web journals, including Southern Humanities Review, Birmingham  Poetry Review, Touchstone, Windsor Review,  Mississippi Review,  Blue Unicorn, among others.

ANDREW GALAN is an Australian writer with works in The Best Australian Poems 2011, BLOCK, The Delinquent, Eve’s Harvest, REM Magazine, Streetcake and Verity La. He co-founded and runs poetry slam BAD!SLAM!NO!BISCUIT! at the Phoenix pub in Australia’s capital, Canberra, and has performed as part of the Corinbank, Canberra Fringe, and This is Not Art festivals. He also co-hosts the poetry slam and midnight poetry feast at the Australian National Folk Festival, regularly growls poetry with spoken word band The Tragic Troubadours and has a blog: Huitzilihuitl’s Reign of Death.

BRANDI GEORGE's work, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Ruth Lilly 2010, has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2010, Cimarron Review, Fugue, Harpur Palate, Quercus, The Southeast Review, The Dirty Napkin, Entasis, Main Street Rag, and Vallum.

PETER GOLUB is a writer whose work has not appeared in Conjunctions, Poetry, Chicago Review, Granta, or The Paris Review. He has not received letters of rejection from The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, or Harper's. All his books are unpublished, except for a little pamphlet concerning his own death; none have been nominated for a Pushcart let alone a National Book Award or a Pulitzer. His latest translation can be found in the April 2012 issue of Playboy. He does not live in New York City.

ALAN HEATHCOCK's fiction has been published in many of America’s top magazines and journals, including Zoetrope: All-Story, Kenyon Review, VQR, Five Chapters, Storyville, and The Harvard Review. His stories have won the National Magazine Award in fiction, and have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories anthology. VOLT, a collection of stories published by Graywolf Press, was a "Best Book 2011" selection from numerous newspapers and magazines, including GQ, Publishers Weekly, Salon, the Chicago Tribune, and Cleveland Plain Dealer, was named as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, selected as a Barnes and Noble Best Book of the Month, as well as for inclusion in the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers series. Heathcock has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is currently a Literature Fellow for the state of Idaho. A Native of Chicago, he teaches fiction writing at Boise State University.

AMY HOLWERDA is a fulltime writer living the dream of traveling the world with a pencil behind her ear. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Sycamore Review, The Collagist, Quick Fiction, Flash International, and The Fourth River, among many others. In her free time, she acts as the nonfiction editor for shady side review and is hard at work on a collection of essays that explore food and culture. She blogs about her travels at www.amyholwerda.com.

LIAM HYSJULIEN is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. His work has been published in Salon, the Minnetonka Review, CounterPunch, Truthout, and Teaching Sociology.

DANA KROOS received an MFA in fiction writing from New Mexico State University. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Superstition Review, The Florida Review, and others. She also holds an MFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MA in fine art from Purdue University. During the 2011-2012 academic year she is living in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she is conducting research through a Fulbright grant for an illustrated novel to be set in the area.

WINLO333 tells us that, though he was born to this world, he is endeavoring to become as virtual as It will allow—a nameless faceless ageless placeless 9-ball hustler and aspiring writer.

S. P. MACINTYRE is an MFA student at the University of Illinois.

GERARD MARCONI is a teacher and writer who lives in Baltimore, where he earned a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University. He studied fiction writing in seminars and workshops with such well known authors as Lee K. Abbott, Roxana Robinson, Jennifer Haigh, and T. Greenwood. His short stories have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Tuscarora Review, and The Summerset Review, an online literary journal. His novel entitled Gods and Heroes: Baltimore Stories is available as an e-book or in paperback. You can read more of his work  and contact him at www.baltimorewriter.com.

SARAH MARSHALL is a student in the MFA program at Portland State University, and currently serves as editor-in-chief for the Portland Review.

ALEJANDRO MENDEZ, a lawyer and poet, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1965. His poem "Gift for Languages" belongs to an unpublished collection entitled Cosmorama, while "Under the Linden Trees" belongs to another unpublished collection entitled Pólder.

DEENA METZGER is a nationally celebrated poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over forty years. She is the author of many books, including most recently, Feral; La Negra y Blanca; Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems; From Grief into Vision; A Council; Doors: A fiction for Jazz Horn; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing; The Other Hand; Tree: Essays and Pieces; A Sabbath Among the Ruins; Looking for the Faces of God; and Writing For Your Life.

CHRISTOPHER MUNDE completed his MFA at the University of Houston in 2008, and received an Academy of American Poets Prize that same year. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Georgetown Review, Harpur Palate, The Hollins Critic, Hunger Mountain, Pebble Lake Review, and elsewhere.  He currently lives and teaches in western New York. 

MARK NEELY's first book, Beasts of the Hill, won the FIELD Poetry Prize and was published by Oberlin College Press. His poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Barrow Street and elsewhere. He teaches at Ball State University and is the editor of The Broken Plate.

ALEKSEY PORVIN is a Russian poet born in 1982. His poems can be found in World Literature Today, Cyphers, Saint-Petersburg Review, Ryga Journal, SUSS, Words Without Borders, Fogged Clarity, The Straddler, The Dirty Goat, Action Yes, Barnwood International Poetry Mag, among others. Porvin is author of two collections of poems in Russian—Darkness Is White (Argo-Risk Press, Moscow, 2009) and Poems (New Literature Observer Press, Moscow 2011). His first book of poems translated into English, Live by Fire, was published by Cold Hub Press in 2011. Poems by Porvin have been recently short-listed for the Andrey Bely Prize (2011) and The Russian Debut Prize (2011).

SHENG QI has been creating work in diverse media for more than twenty years. He graduated from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London and returned to Beijing in 1998. Since his return, he has been selected to participate in the Nippon International Performance Festival and the recent International Center of Photography show, "Between Past and Future," where his photographic work was selected for the cover of the exhibition catalog. Sheng Qi is represented by Wiegersma Fine Art (Belgium), F2 Gallery (China), Galerie Daniel Besseiche (Switzerland) and Hua Gallery (UK). To see more work, please visit www.sheng-qi.com.

SUZANNE RICHARDSON was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina, where she received an alternative education at Carolina Friends School K-12. She graduated from Bard College in 2005 with a degree in English and Creative Writing. Suzanne currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is an MFA candidate at the University of New Mexico, and teaches English and creative writing. Suzanne has been editor-in-chief of Blue Mesa Reviewsince 2010. Her nonfiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, issue 11. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blood Orange Review, The Smoking Poet, and PANK Magazine. Her fiction is forthcoming in Front Porch. You can email her at: suzanneroserich@gmail.com.

LIZ ROBBINS' poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Greensboro Review, Harpur Palate, Margie, New Ohio Review, Puerto del Sol, and Rattle; she has poems forthcoming in Barn Owl Review, Bayou, and Poet Lore. Poems from her first book, Hope, As the World Is a Scorpion Fish (Backwaters P), were featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac and Verse Daily; another poem was a finalist for the 2010 Best of the Net. She's an assistant professor of creative writing at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL, and presented her poems this past April at a New York Institute of Technology conference in Nanjing, China.

WILLIAM B. ROBISON is a Professor of History at Southeastern Louisiana University specializing in Tudor-Stuart England, co-author of The Tudors in Film and Television (forthcoming), co-editor of Historical Dictionary of Late Medieval England 1272-1483 and Historical Dictionary of Stuart England 1603-1689, and author of essays in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as well as articles and reviews in a number of journals.  I also am a musician and a maker of short films.  Poetry is a newer form of expression for me.  Recently I have had poems accepted by Asinine Poetry, decomP magazinE, and Paddlefish.

LAUREN SCHMIDT’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Progressive, Alaska Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, Rattle, Nimrod, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Ekphrasis Journal, Wicked Alice, and other journals. Her poems have been selected as finalists for the 2008 and 2009 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, Intro to Journals Project, and the Dancing Girl Press Chapbook Contest. Her awards include the 2009 So to Speak Poetry Prize, the 2011 Neil Postman Prize for Metaphor, and the 2012 Bellevue Literary Review’s Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for Poetry. Her chapbook, The Voodoo Doll Parade (Main Street Rag), was selected as part of the 2011 Author’s Choice Chapbooks Series. She is the author of Psalms of The Dining Room (Wipf & Stock) and her second collection, Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing (Main Street Rag), is forthcoming.

SHELBY STEPHENSON's Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl, won the 2008 Bellday Poetry Prize. Allen Grossman judged.

SCOTT TUCKER was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and raised in Montana. He has a journalism degree from Northwestern University and a law degree from the University of Michigan. His short stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blood Orange Review, Main Street Rag, The Meadow, Narrative Magazine, Pif, The Portland Review, and Prick of the Spindle. He lives in Seattle with his wife and son.

JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS is a poet and book publicist residing in Portland, OR. He has a MA in Writing and presently studies Book Publishing at Portland State University, where he serves as Acquisitions Manager of Ooligan Press and publicist for Three Muses Press. His poetry was nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Prize, and his debut chapbook, A Pure River, was published in 2010 by The Last Automat Press. Some of his over 100 previous or upcoming publications include: The Evansville Review, Rosebud, Ellipsis, Flint Hills Review, Euphony, Open Letters, Cadillac Cicatrix, Juked, The Journal, Hawaii Review, Cutthroat, The Furnace Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Aries, and River Oak Review.

MICHAEL T. YOUNG has published three collections of poetry, most recently Living in the Counterpoint. He received a 2007 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and received a 2008 William Stafford Award. He was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received the 2005 Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, Barrow Street, Iodine Poetry Journal, The Same, Upstreet and many other journals. His work is also in the anthologies Phoenix Rising and Chance of a Ghost. He currently lives with his wife and two children in Jersey City, New Jersey.

 

 

Return to table of contents.