Contributors

Harry Newman‘s poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Ecotone, Asheville Poetry Review, Rattle, and Borderlands. His poems have been nominated twice for Pushcart Prizes and shortlisted twice for the Bridport Prize in England. He recently completed the manuscript of his first collection, Breathing in the Night. He is also the author of several plays, translations and performance pieces that have been presented at theaters around the U.S. as well as in the Netherlands and Germany.

Anne Coray’s poetry collections include A Measure’s Hush, Violet Transparent, and Bone Strings. She is coauthor of Lake Clark National Park and Preserve and coeditor of Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment. Twice nominated for the Pushcart and the recipient of grants and a fellowship from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and an Individual Artist Project Award from the Rasmuson Foundation, she lives at her birthplace on remote Qizhjeh Vena (Lake Clark) in southwest Alaska.

Michael Meyerhofer’s second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was published by Steel Toe Books.  His first, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award.  He has also won the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Laureate Prize, the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry, and five chapbook prizes.  His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

Martin Ott: 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.

His poetry and fiction has appeared in nearly 100 publications, including Confrontation Magazine, Harvard Review, The Literary Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner and Zyzzyva.

He has been nominated for two Pushcart prizes and his manuscript “Children of Interrogation” has been a finalist or semi-finalist the past few years in more than a dozen poetry prizes. www.martinott.org

KC Trommer’s poems have appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Blackbird, Fugue, MARGIE, Octopus, Poetry East, The Sycamore Review and other journals. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, KC has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize, as well as fellowships from the Maine Summer Arts Program, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Prague Summer Program. She lives in New York City with her husband, the novelist and poet Justin Courter.

Roberta Whitman Hoff is a poet.  She lives in Enfield, Connecticut.  She is a mom and has a wonderful son, Bohrs, and has four wonderful cats, Nova, Scottie, Bebe, and Marie.  She is a cat whisperer, fiddler, loves music and painting, in additon to writing poetry.  She had the pleasure of meeting W.S. Merwin in Chicago in autumn 2008 at his reading.  Roberta also takes poetry classes and workshops at Asnuntuck Community College and is currently a working editor on Freshwater Poetry magazine.  She will be working on her MFA this coming autumn.

Jennifer Luebbers a first year student of poetry in Indiana University’s MFA program, and works as a part-time copy editor and occasional blogger for an online clothing company. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Albion Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Brevity, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Naugatuck River Review.

Dylan Barmmer is a writer, poet and performer living in the stunning San Diego surf enclave of Cardiff-by-the-Sea, CA. Dylan is also the founder and raconteur of Word Is Born, a creative copywriting consortium that crafts powerful communications in a variety of mediums. You can learn more about Word Is Born and its newest brainchild, Random Acts of Poetry, here.

Beau Blue lives in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains. He is a reclusive cartoonist with a long gray beard. An animator with a poetry habit. His Cruzio Cafe presents animated avatars of contemporary poets performing.

John L. Stanizzi has poems in New York Quarterly, Tar River Poetry, Rattle, Hawk and Handsaw. He is an adjunct professor of English at Manchester Community College. Stanizzi has received two Pushcart Prize nominations and was named Poet of the Year by the New England Association of Teachers of English in 1998.

Christina Olson was born in Cincinnati in 1981. Her first book of poems is Before I Came Home Naked (Spire Press, 2010). New work also ­­appears in Barn Owl Review, Passages North, Water~Stone Review, The Ledge, Anti-, and Wake. She lives online at www.thedrevlow-olsonshow.com.

Shalonda Jemison is currently working towards communicating issues that relate low income communities that have been ignored. She is pursuing a degree in Nutrition Science with focus on Holistic Wellness Education. Shalonda is concerned daughter, sister, and friend towards the development of young black women and hopes to bring awareness to the world on subjects related to the psychological impact of trying to conform to social standards without regard to self acceptance.

Sheldon Lee Compton survives in Kentucky.  He scratches out this life in a Bent Country. Despite these hard days and nights, he has still seen work published in several journals and anthologies.

Brigita Orel’s short stories and poems have been published or are forthcoming in Rose & Thorn Journal, Cantaraville, BluePrintReview, Autumn Sky Poetry, Frostwriting, The Foundling Review, Negative Suck, The Storm at Galesburg collection, and other print and online magazines. She lives in Slovenia where she works as a literary translator. She is finishing her MA degree in writing at Swinburne , Australia. Her blog: bsoulflowers.blogspot.com.

Pui Ying Wong is a native of Hong Kong and is bilingual in English and Chinese. She is the author of two chapbooks: Mementos (Finishing Line Press, 2007), Sonnet for a New Country (Pudding House Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Asian Pacific American Journal, Blue Fifth Review, Cavalier Literary Couture, Chiron Review, decomP, DMQ Review, 5 AM, New York Quarterly, Poetz. Her poems in Chinese have appeared in China Press and New World Poetry. She has read her work on Talk Back, WBAI, Writers on War and Peace, Hudson Valley Writers and at the Queens Library in New York. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. An interview with her at Southern Bookman can be read at www.louismayeux.typepad.com Yellow Plum Season, her full length collection of poems, is forthcoming from The New York Quarterly Books. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.

Amanda Mitchell Dutton is 20 years old, an Appalachian native, and an undergraduate at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. Her poem “the spider, its bite” first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Damselfly Press.

Rachel Inez Lane moved from Los Angeles, CA to the middle of nowhere in Tallahassee Florida where she is finishing her last year of her MFA at Florida State University. Her non-fiction has appeared in Orlando Sentinel, Los Angeles Times, and poetry in Boxcar Poetry, Los Angeles  Review, and Rattle. She is currently working on a book of poetry entitled, This Heart Goes Bang Bang. Check her out at Rachelinezlane.com

Mary Meriam’s book of poems, The Countess of Flatbroke (afterword by Lillian Faderman), was published by Modern Metrics/Exot Books in 2006. “The Romance of Middle Age” was first published in Rattle, and subsequently published by American Life in Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, and The New York Times.

Rachel Bunting lives and writes in New Jersey, somewhere between the Delaware River and the Pine Barrens. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, included in both Best of the Net and Best of the Web anthologies, and can be found in journals such as Boxcar Poetry Review, Weave Magazine, Wicked Alice and Apparatus Magazine. She has two chapbooks available (Ripe Again, through Finishing Line Press, and Imprimatur, a limited edition, handcrafted collection, through her website), and she is currently at work on her first full-length manuscript.

Joseph Fasano‘s poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Tin House, Boston Review, Western Humanities Review, RATTLE, and other publications.  He won the 2008 RATTLE Poetry Prize, and he was a finalist for both the 2008 TLS Poetry Competition and the 2009 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize.  He has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Robert Peake studied poetry at U.C. Berkeley and in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Pacific University, Oregon. His poems have appeared in North American Review and Poetry International. Robert writes about poetry on his website at www.robertpeake.com. Photo of Robert by John J. Campbell.

Joe Clifford‘s work has appeared in Big Bridge, Bryant Literary Review, the Connecticut Review, Dark Sky, Fringe, Hobart, Opium, Thuglit, and Word Riot, among others. He’s the producer of Lip Service West, a reading series in Oakland, CA.  His memoir, Junkie Love, is represented by MDM Management, New York. He has been to jail but never prison. His work can be found at www.joeclifford.com

Christine Klocek-Lim received the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry. In 2010, her manuscript “Dark matter” was a semi-finalist for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry and her manuscript “The Quantum Archives” was a semi-finalist at Black Lawrence Press’ Black River Chapbook Competition. She has two chapbooks: How to photograph the heart (The Lives You Touch Publications, November 2009) and The book of small treasures (Seven Kitchens Press, March 2010). Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, OCHO, Poets and Artists (O&S), The Pedestal Magazine, Diode, the anthology Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory and elsewhere. She is editor of Autumn Sky Poetry and her website is www.novembersky.com.

Joanna Grant currently teaches as a Wandering Scholar for the University of Maryland University College. As of this writing, she is assigned to Japan. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Southern Women’s Review, The Southern Humanities Review, and other journals.

Lisa Molinelli is a librarian, poet/writer, and all-around lover of words. You can see more of her poems at http://lisamol1.tumblr.com/ and follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Lisamol1

About her haikus, she writes: “These were written for National Poetry Month throughout April 2010. I wrote one a day so the numbers correspond exactly to the day of the month on which they were written. Though out of sequence number-wise, when grouped this way, these Haikus tell a commuter’s tale in snapshot form.”

Julie Jordan Scott is a Writer, Life Coach, Poet, Speaker, Actor, Director and Mom Extraordinaire
whose deepest passion is helping people – like you – discover and live with passion.
http://juliejordanscott.typepad.com/ Follow her on twitter: http://twitter.com/juliejordanscot

About her poem, Julie writes: “This poem was written after spending the first day of April at the Homestead where Emily Dickinson lived for most of her life. There was a stately Oak I sat under and listened to audio of Emily’s words about shadow and light.

“I took photos of the tree and its shadow and it haunted me until I took the time to write this poem.”

Gabriel Gadfly is a weblit poet and blogger from central Alabama, self-publishing his creative efforts for you to read, absolutely free, on his website GabrielGadfly.com, and elsewhere around the web.

Paul Badger is a poet living in the United Kingdom. He has had two verse
dramas broadcast by the BBC – Uncle Harry and the Melting Moon, and Wedding Rings and Space Suits. You can check out his poetry on his website, and you can listen to his free poetry readings on iTunes.

April Ossmann is the author of Anxious Music (Four Way Books, 2007) and has published her poetry widely in journals including Colorado Review and Harvard Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse (Persea Books, 2009). Her several poetry awards include the 2000 Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award. Former executive director of Alice James Books (2000 – 2008), she owns a poetry consulting business (www.aprilossmann.com), offering manuscript editing and publishing advice to poets; and teaches poetry workshops using a method she developed to teach poets to revise their work objectively. She has taught courses at the University of Maine – Farmington, and seminars for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing, and lives in Post Mills, Vermont.

Chloé Yelena Miller has poems  forthcoming or published in Narrative,
The Cortland Review, Alimentum Journal, Lumina, South Mountain Poets
Chapbook, Spiralbridge.org, and Sink Review, among others. Her
manuscript, Permission to Stay, was a finalist for the Philip Levine
Prize in Poetry. She teaches writing online for Fairleigh Dickinson
University and works privately with authors. She received an M.F.A.
from Sarah Lawrence College. You can learn more about Chloé at her website.

Ray Brown: learn more about Ray and his poetry at http://raybrown.wordpress.com

Chris Sullivan is  a writer, publisher, and visual artist living in New Orleans. Check out his site, “a compendium of songs composed while driving, in many cases, a Corolla (93 188,000 39 mpg at 68 mph) but also Toyota Van, Tercel and Nissan Pickup, sung aCapella at my kitchen table in 2009.”

MaryAnn McCarra-Fitzpatrick is a wife and mother living in Mount Vernon, New York.  Her work has appeared in Make Room for Dada, MoonLit, The Mount Vernon Inquirer, The Mount Vernon Independent, and The Mount Vernon Times.  She has performed her work at ABC No Rio, The Back Fence, and Centerfold Coffeehouse. Video and audio files of her work appear on her blog McCarra/Poetry http://mccarra–poetry.blogspot.com/.

Jesse Foss is 18 years old and currently living in Columbia, Missouri.
He says, “Most of my poetry is abstract in nature and tries to work with the hidden bonds between things in life.
Hourglass was inspired by a passing train with many sad faces on board.”

Rebecca O. is currently twenty-one years old and an undergraduate student of English. She is also this year’s winner of the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize for Connecticut State University students. You can look for her work in the upcoming 2010 edition of the Connecticut Review.

Bhupen Thakker won the NSW Poetry sprint in 2001. He performs “L’poetry” – Art, food and poetry in red, orange, yellow, pink, green, blue, purple, gold and white. He has also written a ballet with words. From Kenya of Indian descent, Bhupen moved to Australia from London in 1993. Trained in International Finance, he started creative writing in 1990.

Jean-Paul L. Garnier Born in 1981 in Southern California, he now lives in Seattle where he has just finished his first novel dealing with erotic surrealism.  He has also written several volumes of poetry “Collection of Dis Ease” and “the Spiraling Pearls” excerpts of which have been published in magazines and online.  As well as writing Jean-Paul performs regularly in the gothic rock band Stabbings ( www.stabbings.net ).

Max Merckenschlager‘s poem “Channelled Energy” took first place for open poetry at the 2007 Bundaberg Festival Of Arts, and is included in the 2008 Max Harris poetry anthology “Perspex.” He writes freeform and rhyming poems, and is the current (Australian) National Written Bush Poetry Champion.

Richard Taylor writes about himself: “Born 1948. Live in Auckland, New Zealand. I am divorced. Three children and one grandson. I was interested in science (as well as reading) and art etc when young but didn’t do well at it. I worked in many manual labouring jobs until I became a (telecom) Lineman. I passed an NZCE (Eng.Cert. in Electronics and Communications) & in 1989 returned to University. Hence BA (English Lit.) 1995. Published in locally in Poetry Live’s mag, Poetry NZ, BRIEF. I performed live with the ‘Poetry Brats’ 1993 to 1994. Performed myself a “show” (‘The Tin Drum’) at the Little Maidment” (theatre) in 1991, 1992. Have given a number of readings. Three books. Last were ‘RED’ 1996, and ‘Conversation with a Stone’ (Titus Books) 2007. EYELIGHT my Blog is a kind of ongoing “art” or textual” project which can be seen to be one constantly changing poem itself.”

You can find more of Richard’s work on his blog and at Titus Books.

Charles Manley is an independent radio producer living in Ann Arbor, MI. He reports for Michigan Radio, an NPR affiliate at the University of Michigan. His latest work was completed for the PRX documentary “Finding Our Bootstraps: Americans Deal with the Recession.”

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of the poetry book Repulsion Thrust, the novel Sleep Before Evening, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment: How to Review Anything and three other poetry chapbooks Quark Soup, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Cherished Pulse and She Wore Emerald Then. She also runs a radio show, The Compulsive Reader Talks.

Ernest Dempsey is the pen name of Karim Khan, who has authored four books and works as a freelance writer and editor. Dempsey is currently the editor of the print quarterly Recovering the Self (www.recoveringself.com), a journal of hope and healing published by the Loving Healing Press in Michigan.

Ben Nardollili is a twenty four year old writer currently living in Arlington, Virginia. His work has appeared in Houston Literary Review, Perigee Magazine, Canopic Jar, Lachryma: Modern Songs of Lament, Baker’s Dozen, Thieves Jargon, Farmhouse Magazine, Elimae, Poems Niederngasse, Gold Dust, The Delmarva Review, Underground Voices Magazine, SoMa Literary Review, Heroin Love Songs, Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue, Cantaraville, and Perspectives Magazine. He was also the poetry editor for West 10th Magazine at NYU and maintains a blog at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com.

Seth Graves Seth Graves is an MFA candidate in poetry at The New School. His poetry is available or forthcoming in Verbal Pyrotechnics; Short, Fast, and Deadly; and the anthology Why I am Not a Painter from Argos Books. He has worked as a reporter, an editor, and a researcher and has published scholarship on media history, ethnography, and American “writing cultures.” He lives in Brooklyn.

E.D. Faulkin: learn more about him at his website