Contributors

2014 Contributors

AKaiser is a translator of French, Spanish, and Catalan and is currently working on a project of the first translations into those languages of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. She is also rounding the bend on her MFA from Carlow University (Pittsburgh/Dublin).

Ruth Gila Berger is a writer living in Minneapolis at work on a memoir. Now with ROAR, five pieces of that memoir have been published or accepted for publication by The Dr. TJ Eckleburg Review (December 2013), Permafrost, (Spring 2014), Frequencies (April 2014); a different iteration of which was a finalist for the Arts & Letters 2012 Nonfiction Award, and The Writing Disorder (Summer 2014). She also has another piece forthcoming in Slice and over a dozen other finalist commendations. She has had work in Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, and other magazines.

Angela Bolling is a working artist in Southern Illinois. She is interested in all mediums of painting, but focuses solely on the human figure. In her art, she depicts emotion through composition, style, and medium. Angela graduated from Southern Illinois University Carbondale with a Bachelor degree in Fine Art with a focus in painting and Art History.

Marri Champié has an MA in Writing, with minors in photography and Earth Science. She won three Dell Awards (Asimov Awards) for Fantasy/Science Fiction, and is a published poet and novelist, photographer and journalist. Winner of the 2013 Boise State University President’s Writing Award, 1st place fiction, and 2nd place poetry, she is presently working on a series of stories about women who live in rural, contemporary Idaho. Her Asimov/Dell Award winning story, “The White Seal,” was published in Cicada Magazine in March 2012, and “Roadwork,” the first story in her short story collection Women Who Sleep With Dogs, was published in Tales of the Concrete Highway by Blue Cubicle Press in March 2013. She lives on a small ranch overlooking the Great Basin of Idaho with her horses and Jack Russell terriers. Website: writeIdahoWriter.com

Kirsten Clodfelter’s writing has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and StorySouth. Her chapbook, Casualties, was published last year by RopeWalk Press. A regular contributor to As it Ought to Be and Series Editor of the small-press review series, At the Margins, Clodfelter lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and young daughter.

Caitlin Cowan’s poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in Nimrod, Faultline, The Mississippi Review, Poet Lore, Fugue, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of the Mississippi Review Prize, the Ron McFarland Prize for Poetry, and an Avery Hopwood Award. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan, an MFA from The New School, and will complete a PhD at The University of North Texas, where she is currently a Teaching Fellow and serves as the Managing Editor of the American Literary Review.

Andrea England is a teacher, a poet, and a mother of dogs, children, and chickens. A finalist for the Four Way Books Levis Prize and the Kore Press Open Subs Period, her work has been published in Harpur Palate, Passages North, the DMQ Review, the Atticus Review, and others.

Elizabeth Fogle has an MFA in Creative Writing from Georgia College and lives in Erie, Pennsylvania where she teaches writing and literature at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Harpur Palate, Limestone, Nimrod International Journal, Tidal Basin Review, and The Tusculum Review. She is currently completing her first full-length poetry manuscript.

Laura Grothaus is a writer and artist from the deep recesses of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been shown in SOHO20 Gallery and has been featured in So to Speak, Scintilla, Portable Homes, and Attention: People with Body Parts.

Krysten Hill is originally from Kansas City, MO, and currently lives and teaches in Boston, MA. She received her MFA from UMass Boston. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Muzzle, PANK, apt, Amethyst Arsenic, and Write on the DOT.

Faith S. Holsaert has published fiction in journals since the 1980s and has begun to also publish poetry. She co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (University of Illinois). She received her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. After many years in West Virginia, she lives in Durham, NC with her partner, with whom she shares seven grandchildren.

Susanna Lang’s newest collection of poems, Tracing the Lines, was published in 2013 by the Brick Road Poetry Press. Her first collection, Even Now, was published in 2008 by The Backwaters Press, followed by a chapbook, Two by Two 86 (2011, Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in journals including december, Little Star, New Letters, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Green Mountains Review, The Baltimore Review, Kalliope, and jubilat. She lives in Chicago, and teaches in the Chicago Public Schools.

Sarah Marcus is the author of BACKCOUNTRY (2013, Finishing Line Press) and Every Bird, To You (2013, Crisis Chronicles Press). Her other work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Cimarron Review, CALYX Journal, Spork, Nashville Review, Slipstream, Tidal Basin Review,Cold Mountain Review, among others. She is a guest blogger for So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language & Art and a Count Coordinator for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. She holds an MFA in poetry from George Mason University and currently teaches and writes in Cleveland, OH.

Anna Carolyn McCormally currently manages a small used bookstore in Washington, D.C and blogs about YA fiction at www.giantsquidbooks.com. In September she will begin her MFA in Fiction at University of Maryland in College Park. Her work has appeared previously in The Blue Route, Quantum Fairy Tales, and pacificREVIEW. She is on twitter @mccormallie.

Megeen R. Mulholland received her PhD in English from the University at Albany where she worked as an editor on 13th Moon with Judith Johnson; she is also a graduate of the Master of Arts program in English and Creative Writing at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Dr. Mulholland teaches writing at Hudson Valley Community College where she serves on the Visiting Writers Committee. On this committee, she recently hosted a poetry reading and engaged in a public conversation about creative writing with former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Her work has been published in Adanna, Phoebe: Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined edited by Andrea J. Buchanan and Amy Hudock, and other journals and anthologies.

Alison Murphy is a Boston-based freelance writer who has had many careers other than canvassing for Greenpeace, including stints as a documentarian, commercial production coordinator, and fundraiser. She now serves as the Program Manager at GrubStreet, one of the nation’s leading creative writing centers, and teaches creative writing for inmates at the Bay State Correctional Center. She is currently working on her first novel. Follow her on Twitter @amurph11.

Emily Shearer lives, writes, and teaches yoga in Prague with her husband and three children. Before moving abroad, she was an MFA candidate at George Mason University. Her work has been published on-line and in-print at literarymama.com, sol(e) literary journal, writing the whirlwind, Mercury Retrograde from Kattywhompus Press, Visual Verse, and Minerva Rising, where she currently serves as Poetry Editor. She is working on a poetic travelogue of her experiences in Europe, specifically the post-Communist Czech Republic. You can read her work and see photos on her website, lineupyourducks.com.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Fear of Being Found (2008, Three Candles Press) and The Naming of Strays (2011, Gold Wake Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and Stirring.

Jamie Wendt is a student at the University of Nebraska Omaha low-residency MFA program. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Drake University. Her poetry has been published in Theodate Magazine, The Jewish Literary Journal, After Hours, and is forthcoming in Open To Interpretation and Lilith Magazine. Her essay, “American Jewish Women Poets,” was published in Green Mountains Review online. She is a book reviewer for Jewish Book World. Wendt lives in Chicago with her husband and teaches Middle School Language Arts.

2013 Contributors

Heather Frankland graduated with her MFA from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, NM where she taught composition and creative writing. She has been published recently in damselfly press, Lingerpost, and the New Purlieu Review. Shortly after graduating from her MFA, she headed back to a land of inspiration, Peru, to serve as a Peace Corps Response Volunteer. She finds her work to be motivated by images, advocacy, music, and landscape. She is originally from the land of John Mellencamp and Kurt Vonnegut, otherwise known as Indiana.

A German born in South Africa, Ronja Vieth just finished her Ph.D. in American Gothic Literature in Texas and is looking for a life which fruitfully combines teaching, traveling, and writing. She has presented several pieces of poetry and nonfiction at conferences in Wales (UK) and the US, as well as published in national and international journals, such as the Linden Avenue Literary Journal, the Brooklyn Review, the Bohemia Journal, the Sugar Mule, the Taj Mahal Review (India), The Southwestern Review, and Life is but a Verse – well-rhymed and bold (Germany). Her activities as the manager of and participant in Lubbock’s poetry group Jak’s Line can be found on her Facebook page www.facebook.com/englobe.me.

Stefania Irene Marthakis received her BA in Poetry & Theater from Columbia College Chicago and her MFA in Poetry & Poetics from Naropa University. From 2005-2007, she interned at The Poetry Project in NYC. Some of her poems can be found in Columbia Poetry Review, New American Writing, Bombay Gin, The Recluse and Lungfull!.  simarthakis.tumblr.com 

Quinn White is a MFA poetry student at Virginia Tech. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from journals such as Sixth Finch, Bayou Magazine, Word Riot, Weave Magazine, Hot Metal Bridge, and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her chapbook, My Moustache, will be published in spring 2013 by Dancing Girl Press.

Evelyn Sharenov is a writer and editor whose work has been published in the NYTimes, Glimmer Train, Fugue, Mediphors, Etude. Her story in Glimmer Train was chosen as a notable for Best American short stories. She writes personal essays for Psychology Today. Her journalism has appeared in Bitch Magazine, The Oregonian newspaper, the New York Times and Willamette Week. Website: www.redroom.com/author/evelyn-sharenov. You can find her on facebook.

Julie Manon has written and performed several one act and full length plays, which were produced Off-Broadway in New York City. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Stonecoast writing program and is currently working on a novel. She lives in Massachusetts

Marci Vogel attends USC’s PhD Program in Literature and Creative Writing as a Provost’s Fellow. Her poetry has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the AWP Intro Journals Award.  Recent work appears in FIELD, Grist, Puerto del Sol, ZYZZYVA, Anti-, and the Seneca, Colorado, and Atlas reviews.

Monica Koenig is an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado at Boulder where she teaches Creative Writing courses.  She also works on the staff of the literary journal, Timber.  Her work has appeared in the Tulane Review and Bloodlotus Literary Journal.

Emily Wilson, born and raised in North Carolina, is currently a senior at Oberlin College, where she studies Creative Writing, Religious Studies, and Latin. She is a Bonner Scholar and serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Oberlin’s literary magazine, the Plum Creek Review. Her poetry has been featured in RHINO Poetry, is forthcoming in the Raleigh Review, and has been awarded the 2012 Emma Howell Memorial Poetry Prize. Some of Emily’s favorite things include: tobacco fields, Stevie Nicks, and the color of mangoes.

Sharon Charde, a retired psychotherapist who has been a writing teacher since 1992, has won numerous poetry awards, the latest being first prize in the 2011 New Hampshire Poetry Contest 2nd and 3rd prizes in the 2012 contest. She is published over fifty times in journals and anthologies of poetry and prose, including Calyx, The Paterson Review, Rattle, Poet Lore and The Comstock Review, and has had six Pushcart nominations. She has also edited and published I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, containing the work of the adjudicated teenaged females she has volunteered with since 1999 at a residential treatment center in Litchfield Ct. She has two first prize-winning chapbooks, Bad Girl At The Altar Rail and Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto and a full-length collection, Branch In His Hand, published by Backwaters Press in November 2008, which was adapted as a radio play by the BBC and broadcast on June 29, 2012

Brianna Flavin is a current student in the MFA program for Poetry at the University of Virginia. She grew up in Minnesota where she earned her BA in creative writing at Northwestern College of Roseville.

Colleen Michaels directs the Writing Studio at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, where she hosts The Improbable Places Poetry Tour. Her poetry has appeared in The Paterson Literary Review, Blue Collar Review, The Mom Egg, Stoneboat, and the anthology Here Come the Brides: Reflections on Love and Lesbian Marriage. She was a finalist for the Split This Rock Poetry Competition and the recipient of an honorable mention in the 2011 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize.

Anna Leahy’s Constituents of Matter won the Wick Poetry Prize, and she is the editor of Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom. She teaches in the BFA and MFA program at Chapman University and directs Tabula Poetica, including its annual reading series and TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics. With Douglas Dechow, she blogs at Lofty Ambitions <loftyambitions.wordpress.com> and is writing a book about the end of the space shuttle program.

Marion de Booy Wentzien was a recipient of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award (twice). The New Letters Literary Award. The Chicago Humanities for the Arts presented one of her stories in their Stories on Stage. Her stories have appeared in Seventeen Magazine, Blue Penny Quarterly, The San Francisco Chronicle, Scholastic Books, Story Magazine, On the Page, Big Ugly Review, The Quotable, Prime Number, The Sonora Review, The Stone Hobo, Tattoo Highway, Red Fez, Cossack Review, Citron Review, Extract(s) and other literary journals.
Avalon Books published her novel, Desert Shadows. She has been nominated by Extract(s) for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Saratoga, CA with her husband and some formerly stray animals.”

Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry. She is now mostly retired and living in California. More than 80 of her poems appear in public online and in anthologies, including recently in Blue Hour Magazine, Dressing Room Poetry Journal, Penumbra Magazine, Misfits’ Miscellany, You Are Here, and Forge Journal.

Born in Seattle in 1979, Julie Marie Wade completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University in 2003, a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of Louisville in 2012.  She is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010), winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir, Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010), selected for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series, Small Fires; Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011), selected for the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series, and the forthcoming Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Press, 2013), winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize.  Wade is the newest member of the graduate teaching faculty in creative writing at Florida International University in Miami.

Bernadette Ulsamer received a BA and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Carlow University. She is an active member of Carlow Univesity’s Madwomen in the Attic writing group. Ulsamer’s poetry has appeared, or is forth coming in Pittsburgh City Paper, Main Street Rag, Voices From The Attic Vols 13-16;18, Girls with Glasses, and Cossack. Ulsamer has been anthologized in Along These Rivers Poetry & Photography from Pittsburgh and Dionne’s Story.

Sheila McMullin is the 2012-2013 Heritage Fellow at George Mason University where she is an MFA candidate in poetry. She is poetry editor and blog/twitter manager for So to Speak: a journal of language of art. Winning the 2012 Mary Reinhart Poetry Prize and 2012 Virginia Downs Poetry Prize, her work can be found or is forthcoming in YEW: A Journal of Innovative Writing and Images by Women, 1913: A Journal of Forms, Counterexample Poetics: Assemblage of Experimental Artistry and Gentle Strength Quarterly. McMullin interns at the Library of Congress in the Poetry and Literature Center.”

Barbara Yost grew up in the Midwest and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Iowa in Journalism and English. After moving to Phoenix, she worked for several years as a newspaper writer and earned two degrees from Arizona State University : a Master of Arts in English and an MFA in Creative Writing in the fiction program.

2012 Contributors

Catherine Austin Alexander, Pushcart Prize nominee, has published stories in 26 literary journals, including North Atlantic Review, Rosebud (two successive issues), Bryant Literary 64 Review, Rockhurst Review and won “Jurors’ Choice” in Spindrift. National Public Radio has aired her work. In a Word Theatre production, Jorja Fox, (Sara Sidle in TV’s CSI) performed her story. She has taught fiction and memoir at the University of Washington, Horizon House in Seattle and to homeless groups. Currently teaching in Lynnwood and privately in Seattle, she lives in Edmonds, Washington.

Vinithini Anantakrishnan is a self-taught artist and specializes in Warli Art, a tribal art form from India. She uses Warlis to create murals and has used it extensively on fabrics. She lives in Bangalore, India along with her husband and two daughters. This is her first published art.

Jennifer Arin is the author of a new book of poetry, Ways We Hold (Dos Madres Press), and a poetry chapbook, The Roots of Desire (Thicket Press). Her writings have been published in both the U.S. and Europe, in The AWP Writer’s Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Book Review, Gastronomica, Puerto del Sol, Poet Lore, ZYZZYVA, Paris/Atlantic Review, Lucero, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among many others. Her awards include a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a PEN Writer’s Fund grant, a Poets & Writers Writers-On-Site Residency, and funding from the Spanish Ministry of Culture for co-editing and researching a book about the Spanish Civil War. She teaches in the English Department atSan FranciscoStateUniversity, and hosts poetry segments for KRON-TV (San Francisco).

Diana Arterian was born and raised in Arizona, and currently resides in Los Angeles where she is pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She is on the founding board of Gold Line Press, chapbook publisher of poetry and fiction. Her own chapbook, Death Centos, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2013, and her work has appeared in River Styx and Iron Horse Literary Review, among others. Follow her at dianaarterian.com.

Debka Colson writes fiction, poetry and nonfiction and has been published in North American Review, NEWN, Poetry Cram 11, Maine Progressive, and Quaker Action among others. She is currently working on her first novel set in an unnamed Latin American country. “Writing & Wanderlust” are the themes of her blog, ‘HomenDunRoamin’ which can be found on WordPress. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts but packs her bags whenever she can. With three kids to support and the everincreasing cost of travel, she continues her day (and sometimes night) job with the American Friends Service Committee in New England.

Sara M. Crickenberger is a consultant, teacher, and writer living in the small town of Lewisburg, West Virginia, in the heart of central Appalachia. She has won awards for fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. One of her short stories was nominated for the 2009 Best New American Voices. She earned her MFA from Virginia Tech. Although severely addicted to fountain pens and the color purple, she stubbornly refuses to seek help.

Julia Dasbach came to the United States in 1993, from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, a place where nationality was stamped: “Jewish” on her passport. With that identity, her freedoms and those of her family were restricted by law. Her poetry rebels against the past: defying restrictions, defining her identity, and speaking with a voice her family never had. She is currently a Graduate Teaching Fellow pursing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Oregon. She was awarded an Honorary Mention in the 2010 Spoon River Poetry Review Editor’s Prize and named the winner of the 2011 Karen Jackson Ford Poetry Prize.

Maureen C. Ewing received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago and her MA in English from Rhodes University in South Africa. She works in the sustainability community, teaches at Columbia College Chicago, and mentors young writers. The poem “To Shave” is from her first manuscript. Leave Tonight in Pieces, which she is currently submitting for publication. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Mindful Metropolis, Rhino, Slurve, and So to Speak.

Lucy Hitz is currently working toward her MFA at the University of New Hampshire. She grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, earned her B.A. in Creative Writing and Italian Studies from Colby College, and has worked in publishing for many years.

Charlotte Hornsby is a photographer, filmmaker and production designer from Charlottesville, Virginia. She received a BFA in film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is currently living in Brooklyn where she directs, photographs, writes, teaches, worries and procrastinates.

Jessica Kagansky has recently completed her BA at NYU. Her work is featured or is forthcoming in Minetta Review, West 10th, Coldfront Magazine, The Last Romantics, Sole Literary Journal and on NYU’s Creative Writing program website. She unstereotypically lives in Brooklyn.

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music, (Word Press) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). For the past 35 years, her poems have appeared in journals,including APR, The New Republic, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, The Colorado Review and many others. She moved to Dorchester five years ago and is beginning to write “Boston” poems and give readings in the greater Boston area.

Kate Kimball earned her MFA from Virginia Tech. Her work has appeared in Weber, Ellipsis, Kestrel, and The Midwest Magazine, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City.

Alyse Knorr is the poetry and co-blog editor of So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, based out of George Mason University, where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry and teaching undergraduate English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Puerto Del Sol, Salamander, Cold Mountain Review, and The Minnesota Review, among others.

Crystal Koe is completing an M.F.A in Poetry at UMass Boston. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Corral, It’s About Time, and Belletrist Coterie. She is also a founding editor of ripples: a postcard press, a postcard magazine mailed to subscriber’s homes.

Sarah Lane grew up in small town British Columbia, completed her M.A. in comparative literature at the University of British Columbia and taught English in Vancouver to immigrants and refugees until she went on maternity leave. She has lived abroad and traveled in Latin America, Europe and Central Africa. Her work has previously appeared in Quills: Canadian Poetry Magazine and think equity and her literary translations in Educational Insights and Wreck Magazine. Her writing projects include finding a publisher for her first novel The Primary Colours of a Self-Portrait about a young woman who must confront her multiple self-deceptions to become a visual artist; revising her second novel Tangled about an international love affair torn apart by selfishness; completing her translation of Yann Appery’s award-winning literary gothic Diabolus in musica; and compiling two collections, one of poetry and one of short stories, on the dislocation and loss inherent to emigration. She is also working on a third novel, set in Vancouver, about a doppelganger who seeks recognition from her original self, with tragic consequences. Visit her at www.sarahlane.ca.

Renee Beauregard Lute’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Northern New England Review, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor of The Review Review, and and holds an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University. She lives with her husband, daughter, and two cats in Barrington, Rhode Island. You can visit her website at reneebeauregardlute.com

Tessa Micaela was born and raised in Philadelphia. She is a new transplant to Oakland, California, where she is an MFA candidate at Mills college and is continuing her work on Reproductive Justice. She just finished working on a poem series of letters without recipients called Without Winter, and is now starting pieces about the borders of illness. Tessa believes that someday soon the world will get flipped right side up.

Helena Minton has two poetry collections, “The Canal Bed” with Alice James Books and “The Gardener and the Bees” with March Street Press. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including “Solstice,” “Parting Gifts,” “edna,” and “Four Corners.” Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including “Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology” and “Merrimack: An Anthology.” She works as a librarian outside of Boston.

Danielle Jones-Pruett is an MFA candidate at UMass Boston, where she also teaches creative writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Abject Press, Cider Press Review, The Mom Egg, Southern Women’s Review, and others. She is the winner of the 2011Vella Poetry Prize.

Michelle Reale is an academic librarian on faculty at Arcadia University in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Gargoyle, Pank, JMWW, Smokelong Quarterly , Staccato, Word Riot, and elimae. Her work was included in Dzanc’s 2011 Best of the Web Anthology. Her short fiction collection, Natural Habitat, was published by Burning River in 2010. Her short fiction chapbook, Like Lungfish Getting Through the Dry Season (2011), is available from Thunderclap Press. She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Nicole Louise Reid is the author of the short story collection, So There! (SFA University Press) a 65 novel, In the Breeze of Passing Things (MacAdam/Cage), and two fiction chapbooks, If You Must Know (Burnside Review Press) and Girls (RockSaw Press). Her award-winning short stories have appeared in the Southern Review, Other Voices, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, and Meridian. Winner of the 2010 Dana Award in Short Fiction and 2011 Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Competition, she teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Indiana, where she directs the RopeWalk Reading Series and is editor of RopeWalk Press and fiction editor of Southern Indiana Review.

Tarah Scalzo finished her MFA in Fiction at UC-Irvine in the spring of 2011. She still lives in Irvine and is now a lecturer at UCI. She is originally from Wisconsin.

Penelope Scambly Schott’s verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth received the 2008 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent book, Crow Mercies , 2010, was awarded the Sarah Lantz Memorial Award from Calyx Press.

Michelle Tooker works in marketing by day and writes by night. Her work has appeared in Asia Literary Review, Ampersand, Gargoyle Literary Magazine, Foundling Review and others. Michelle received second honorable mention in Ruminate’s 2011 Janet McCabe Poetry Contest, which was judged by Naomi Shihab Nye. She is editor of Marathon Literary Review and on the editorial board of Obsession. Her second passion is traveling—she’s been to 34 countries and plans to visit at least 100. Follow her at: michelletooker.com.

Alexis Natasha Tsachres is twenty-three years old, a graduate student at Chapman University. She will be getting her Master of Arts degree in English Literature and Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing. She obtained her Bachelors degree at UC Davis, where she began to develop a passion for oil painting and utilizing her time researching experimental poetry and art. She looks forward to one day becoming a professional artist and writer.

July Westhale is a poet, activist, and radical archivist with a weakness for botany and hot air balloons. She has been awarded fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Tin House, and the Dairy Hollow Writers Colony. Her poetry has most recently been published in University of Wisconsin’s Women in REDzine, Generations Literary Journal, Hinchas de Poesia, WordRiot, 580 Split, Quarterly West, Muzzle Magazine and So to Speak: A Feminist Literary Journal. Her poetry can also be found in the recently released anthology, Conversations at the Wartime Café: a Decade of War 2001-2011. She is currently an editorial intern at Copper Canyon Press, a travel writer at Gogo Bot, and homemaker to endless stray cats.

Laura Madeline Wiseman has a doctorate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she teaches English. She is the author of five chapbooks including, Branding Girls (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poetry has appeared in Margie, Poet Lore, Cream City Review, Pebble Lake Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her prose has appeared in Arts & Letters, Spittoon, Blackbird, American Short Fiction, 13th Moon, and elsewhere. Her reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Valparaiso Poetry Review, 42Opus, and elsewhere.

Susan Yount is madam of the Chicago Poetry Brothel and editor and publisher of the Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal. Her work has recently appeared in Anobium Literary Magazine, Glint Literary and Weave Magazine. She received first place in the Poetry Center of Chicago’s 2010 Juried Reading and works fulltime at the Associated Press. She is a wife, a mother and an MFA student in poetry at Columbia College Chicago.

2011 Contributors

Carol Moldaw is the 2011 Louis D. Rubin., Jr., Writer-in REsidence at Hollins University. She is the author of five books of poetry including So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems and The Lighting Field, as well as a novel, The Widening.

Diane Raptosh teaches literature and creative writing at the College of Idaho.  She has published three collections of poems, Just West of Now (Guernica Editions, 1992), Labor Songs ( Guernica, 1999), and Parents from a Different Alphabet: Prose Poems (Guernica, 2008).  She has published widely in such journals as The Los Angeles Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Women Studies Quarterly. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission of the Arts, she has published her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in numerous anthologies in the U. S. and Canada.

Emilia Snyder is originally from Elko, Nevada, but she is currently living a wild, whirling bohemian life in London.  she attended Hollins University and The Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in MAYDAY Magazine’s Fall 2010 issue.

Jennifer DeLeon is a writer living in Boston.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ms. Magazine, Poets & Writers, Guernica, Solstice, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing among other publications, and received awards including the Fourth Genre Michael Steinberg Essay Prize, scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Hedgebrook Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Macondo Writers’ Workshop.  She is working on a novel ad editing an anthology of essays on higher education by Latina writers.

Kimberly Hawlena lives and writes in coastal Massachusetts, where she also works in publishing.

Ladan Osman received her MFA as a Michener Fellow through the University of Texas Austin.  Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Artful Dodge, Callaloo, MELUS, Ted Kooser’s “Poetry in America,” and Poet Lore.

Lunabella Mrozik Gawler is a writer, film maker, pancake eater and practical advice avoider currently residing in Melbourne, Australia.  Occasionally when cleaning cobwebs from the far reaches of her mind, a piece of writing is found, dusted off and published. This is considered by Lunabella to be a very agreeable state of affairs.

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music, is forthcoming in May 2011 from Word Press.  Her second collection, The Ceremonies of Lonnging, winner of the 2002 AWP Award Series in Poetry, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in November, 2003.  An earlier volume The Country of Women, was published in 1995 by Calyx Books.  Her poems have appeared over the past thirty years in journals including Prairie Schooner, The Women’s Review of Books, Calyx, The New Republic, Beloit Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, The missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and The Colorado Review.

April May Woods was raised in a small town in Missouri: Rogersville.  She left for Virginia to attend Hollins University, graduating in 2006 with a major in Philosophy and a minor in Film.  She is currently managing a bookstore in Roanoke, VA where she does some freelance photography on the side.

Elena May is a graphic designed living in Bristol, Rhode Island.  She attended Salve Regina University in Newport, and graduated in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design.  She practices and loves fine art and illustration, and often incorporates this kind of creativity into her designs.  In addition to freelancing, she has held a position as a Creative Director at a small company in Rhode Island, but she sees new possibilities on the horizon for her career. Onward