Contributors

Kate Alexander-Kirk drinks copious amounts of tea as she dreams up weird and wonderful stories that she one day hopes to realize. And she does it all donning her Top-Hat at a jaunty angle. Most recently her work has appeared in Vapid Kitten, Negative Suck, Visceral Uterus, Boy Slut and in Every Day Other Things. She blogs at: www.teaandtantalisingtales.wordpress.com and cartoons at: www.spinelesswonders.wordpress.com

Allie Marini Batts is an alumna of New College of Florida, meaning she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform simple math. Her work has appeared in over 100 literary publications that her parents haven’t heard of. Allie lives in Tallahassee with her husband, where she feeds opossums on the porch and rescues treefrogs from the kitchen (they’re very adept at breaking in, it’s the sticky toes). Allie is pursuing her MFA degree in Creative Writing through Antioch University Los Angeles….oh no! It’s getting away! You can find links to Allie’s work at: http://www.kiddeternity.wordpress.com, or visit Bookshelf Bombshells (http://bookshelfbombshells.com), and she’ll boss you around about books to read.

Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone and Love/Iraq. A third collection Wen Kroy is forthcoming. She is also co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, an ALA Notable Book for Adults for 2012. She is a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellow from the Library of Congress for which she was selected by Philip Levine.

Conor Bracken is a first-year MFA candidate at the University of Houston, hails from Virginia, and grew up on both sides of the Atlantic. After undergrad (Virginia Tech, BA English) he spent time teaching English and testing software in France and Argentina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bodega, Foothill and The Oklahoma Review.

Lucas Burris has been writing since the fifth grade, where his surrealistic account of the adventures of Marco Polo was met with great critical acclaim among his fellow students. Lucas continues to experiment with writing of a similar nature at John Carroll University in Cleveland, OH.

Jeremy Byars’s first poetry collection, Eyes Open to the Flash, was published in 2008. His poems and reviews have appeared in many journals, most recently or forthcoming in MOTIF, Pirene’s Fountain, Assisi, 580 Split, and Naugatuck River Review. He currently serves as VP for a national textbook rental company.

Elizabeth Cooley‘s work has previously appeared in Mason’s Road and Catch. A graduate of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, she now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Adrien Creger is a transmasculine, queer writer, reader, doer; studying English and Gender & Sexuality at VCU in Richmond, VA.

B.D. Fischer has published fiction, poetry, and non-fiction in places like Glint, Thrice Fiction Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, and the New Times. His short play “The Soda” is forthcoming in Ayris. He was educated at Syracuse University and the University of Texas at Austin and lives in Chicago.

Christine Hale‘s prose has appeared in Arts & Letters, Sow Palm, Apalachee Review, and The Sun.Her debut novel Basil’s Dreom (Livingston Press 2009) received honorable mention in the 2010 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. A fellow of MacDowell, Ucross, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ms. Hale been a finalist for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers and the Rona Jaffee Foundation Writers’ Award. She teaches in the Antioch University-Los Angeles Low-Residency MFA Program as well as the Great Smokies Writing Program in Asheville, NC. She has just completed a memoir, In Your Line of Sight, from which “Milk” is excerpted. 

Wei He is a Chinese graduate student in the creative writing program at Miami University. She grew up in inner Mongolia and didn’t start writing in English until 2009. Her Chinese stories, poems and essays have appeared in Youth (a Chinese literary magazine in Nanjing), Prose (a Chinese Literary Magazine in Hubei) and Youth Literary (a Taiwanese magazine in Taipei). This is Wei’s first English publication.

Elizabeth Hilts earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Fairfield University. Formerly the editor of an alternative newsweekly and editorial director for direct mail companies, she is the author of four humor books and is an adjunct professor of English. This piece is an excerpt from her memoir. She is currently working on a novel and a series of essays.

Erin Hoover is a poet living in Tallahassee, Florida, a PhD student in Florida State University’s Creative Writing Program. Erin has writing published or forthcoming in Mason’s Road, SPECS, Division Leap, and The Nervous Breakdown. Erin is also the founder and former co-director of Late Night Library, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting writers early in their careers.

Leigh Anne Hornfeldt lives in Kentucky with her husband and three young sons. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Foundling Review, Literary Mama, The Meadowland Review, and most recently Lunch Ticket. In 2012 she was a semi-finalist for the Mary Kay Ballard Poetry Prize, the James Baker Hall Memorial Prize in Poetry, and was the recipient of the Kudzu prize in Poetry. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Bourbon for Blood (Winged City Press and Two of Cups Press, 2013). Her first chapbook, East Main Aviary, is available through Flutter Press.

Paul Hostovsky is the author of four books of poetry, Hurt Into Beauty (FutureCycle Press, 2012), A Little in Love a Lot (Main Street Rag, 2011), Dear Truth (Main Street Rag, 2009), and Bending the Notes (Main Street Rag, 2008). His poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the Murial Craft Bailey Award from The Comstock Review, and chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, Frank Cat Press, and Split Oak Press. He has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. To read more of his work, visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com

Training out of Pacific Ring Sports in Oakland, Matthew Lucas has been a Muay Thai boxer for six years. He has fought in the States and Thailand under the guidance of Mike Regnier and Ganyao Arunleung. Along with boxing, he also engages in sports journalism covering bouts on the popular blog, My Muay Thai.

Jeni McFarland is a former pasty chef from Michigan. She moved to Houston in 2008 with her husband, and received a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston in 2011. She works as a writing consultant at the University of Houston Writing Center, and her stories have appeared in Forge, Glass Mountain and on makeblank.com.

Kevin Miller lives in Tacoma, WA. Pleasure Boat Studio published his third collection Home & Away: The Old Town Poems in 2009. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Crab Creek Review, and The Museum of Americana.

Saeide Mirzaei is an MFA student at the University of Alabama. Born in Zahedan, a provincial town in the southeast of Iran, she won several literary prizes including the prize for President Khatami’s call for submissions. By 20, she had published several stories and poems, both in English and Farsi, in local magazine while she pursued her literary interests by doing both her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in English literature before moving to the Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Jenni Nance is an MFA student at the University of South Florida. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Mother, Sweet: A Literary Confection and Necessary Fiction. In 2012 she received The Knocky Parker Creative Nonfiction Award. Jenni teaches creative writing at the University of South Florida and with the Dunedin Fine Arts Center.

Paul Pekin‘s work has appeared in the Chicago Reader, The New York Press, and other newspapers. He has published essays and short stories in numerous literary magazines including Other Voices, The Bridge, The South Dakota Review, and Sou’wester. He is a recipient of a Peter Lisagor Award for outstanding journalism and his work has been anthologized by Houghton Mifflin in Best Sports Writing of 1991. Paul Pekin has served as a full time writing workshop director at Columbia College of Chicago, directed Freshmen English courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and participated in programs for the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Bill Riley is a lecturer at Penn State and a recent graduate from the MFA program at Ohio State. He is writing a book about the current Milan High School basketball team who plays in the shadow of their school’s 1954 championship that inspired the movie “Hoosiers.”

Michael Sarnowski earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt University, where he was a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poetry has appeared in Potomac Review, Memoir Journal, Underground Voices, and Foundling Review, among others. He currently lives in Rochester, New York, where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Amy Sibley is originally from California and is currently pursuing an MFA degree at the University of Glasgow.

Alan Shaw is a third year student in the Creative Writing program at the University of South Florida. When he’s not working on his thesis, a memoir about being raised in the Mormon church, he serves as the managing editor for The Tripod Cat, an audio literary journal.  His work has appeared online in the journals Sweet: A Literary Confection and Scissors and Spackle, and is forthcoming in the anthologies Going Om and Sins and Needles. He can be found online at http://www.thetripodcat.com.

Michael Dwayne Smith proudly owns and operates the English-speaking world’s most mysterious name. His apparitions can be seen at Word Riot, kill author, Monkeybicycle, BLIP, Northville Review, Blue Fifth Review, Orion headless, WhiskeyPaper, Cortland Review, Heavy Feather Review, and other haunts. A recipient of both the Polonsky Prize for fiction and the Hinderaker Prize for poetry, he lives in a desert town with his wife, son, and rescued animals—all of whom talk in their sleep.

Ben Sneyd is a native of the Appalachian Mountains where he grew up learning how to write, paint, and play guitar. He now resides as peacefully as possible in the small farm town of Greeneville, Tennessee with his wife and two cats.

Alexandra Todak is a fiction writer of the MFA program at Rutgers-Camden. She is originally from Eastern Pennsylvania and attended St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Janna Vought received her MFA from Lindenwood University.  She is a 2012 nominee for the AWP Intro Journals Project for her poetry work.  Her nonfiction, poetry, and fiction works are featured in several publications.  She resides in Colorado with her husband and two daughters.

Barbara Wanamaker graduated from Fairfield University, Magna Cum Laude, in 2009 with a major in English and minor in Art History.  She returned to Fairfield in 2011 to pursue the goal of earning her MFA.  Barbara was assistant editor for the literary journal Dogwood and a poetry reader for the on-line literary journal Mason’s Road. She is currently co-editing the poetry section of the upcoming issue of Mason’s Road.  Barbara’s critical essay examining several historic female writers’ use of spirituality in their poetry can be found in the fourth issue of Mason’s Road.  She shares her 90 year old Connecticut home with her husband Greg and Cairn terrier Riley.  Barbara enjoys playing with her six grandsons and one granddaughter,  loves life and is grateful for her family and friends.  She enjoys sharing her many blessings with others.