Contributors

L. Ward Abel, poet, composer and performer of music (www.arhband.com), teacher, retired lawyer, lives in rural Georgia, has been published hundreds of times in print and online, and is the author of Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006), The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008), Torn Sky Bleeding Blue (erbacce-Press, 2010), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), and Cousins Over Colder Fields (Finishing Line Press, 2013).

Michelle Auerbach is the author of The Third Kind of Horse (2013 Beatdom Books). Her writing has appeared in (among other places) The New York Times, The Denver Quarterly, Chelsea Magazine, Bombay Gin, and the literary anthologies The Veil (UC Berkley Press), Uncontained Baksun Books, and You. An Anthology of Essays in the Second Person (Welcome Table Press).  She is the winner of the 2011 Northern Colorado Fiction Prize. She’s an organizational storytelling and communications consultant and lives in Colorado with her partner and her three kids. She can be found here. 

Travis Baker’s work has previously been published in Masons Road, Hawk & Handsaw, The Maine Edge, Pennsylvania English and Puckerbrush Review among others.  His play, One Blue Tarp, was recently named the Best from Maine in the Clauder New England Playwrights Competition and will be presented at the Penobscot Theatre in the 2013-14 season.  He holds an MFA from Fairfield University and an MA from the University of Maine where he teaches composition and creative writing.  He recently completed his first novel, Texas Sky, and lives in Orono with his wife, Holly and two sons, Zane and August.

Joe Baumann is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he recently served as the editor-in-chief of the Southwestern Review and is the current editor-in-chief of Rougarou: an Online Literary Journal.  His work has appeared in Hawai’i Review, SNReview, Sleet Magazine, and others, and his first book is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks.

Brittany Cagle is an MFA student at the University of South Florida. When she’s not in a coffee-induced coma, she works as a writing consultant and engages in daily sword battles against her students’ “to-be” verbs. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Campus Firewatch, Life As An [Insert Label Here], and is forthcoming in Welter and This Zine Will Change Your Life.

Erin Cisney is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College and currently resides in Pennsylvania with her husband and two sons.

Gemma Cooper-Novack is a writer, writing coach, and arts educator who lived in New York, Chicago, and Accra before moving to Boston. Her work has appeared in Hanging Loose, Aubade, Euphony, The Saint Ann’s Review, Rufous City Review, and Blast Furnace Review, and is forthcoming in Lyre Lyre and Amethyst Arsenic; an article co-written with Eileen Berger appeared in the NASPA Knowledge Communities Journal. Her plays have been produced in New York and Chicago, and her musical adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, co-written with Joshua Tyra, was workshopped in Deerfield, IL this past fall.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach came to the United States in 1993, from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine and grew up in Rockville, MD. She is a third-year MFA Poetry Candidate at the University of Oregon and starting Fall 2013, Julia will be a Benjamin Franklin Fellow Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been 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. Her poetry has appeared in ROAR and Cirque, and is forthcoming from THREE. She is also also the Poetry Editor for Construction Magazine.

Emily Densten is a recent graduate of Rowan University with a BA in Writing Arts with a Creative Writing concentration and an English minor.  She blogs here about trying to act like an adult and her gradual inability to watch a movie without crying. 

Angele Ellis‘s poetry appeared on a theater marquee (after winning Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ G-20 Haiku Contest), and her poetry and prose have been featured in numerous publications, including American Book Review, Mizna, Grey Sparrow, Eunoia, Stone Highway, Lilliput, and the anthology Women Write Resistance.  The author of Arab on Radar (Six Gallery) and Spared (A Main Street Rag Editors’ Choice Chapbook), she received a poetry fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. 

Brian Ellis‘s fiction has appeared in Skive, Zygote in my Coffee, The Whistling Fire, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Trench Foot Gazette, Spittoon, The Big Stupid Review, DOGZPLOT, The Splinter Generation, flashquake, Epiphany, Underground Voices, Glossolalia, The Single Hound, Conte, The Fine Line, Fiction Fix, Covalence, Curbside Quotidian, FLARE: The Flagler Review, Emerge, Asbury Pulp, The Weekenders, and NAP. His story “Jerry’s TV” (from the Fast Forward Press anthology, The Incredible Shrinking Story) was performed by the “Stories on Stage” theatre program in Denver, Colorado. He currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida; moonlights as singer for the Ex-Boogeymen; and is currently compiling a collection of stories.

Greg Emilio is a Southern California native who writes poetry, short fiction, and book reviews. His work has most recently appeared in Anamesa, Foothill, and World Literature Today, and is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Mosaic, and Solo Novo. He currently teaches and waits tables in Claremont, CA.

Doug Fuller is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he is also the lead audio editor of Blackbird. He lives in Richmond, VA where he plays guitar and lap-steel in the local band The Kindling Kind. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mead, The Superstition Review, Bodega, and Monongahela Review.

Iris Graville is a writer and independent publisher from Lopez Island, WA. Her profiles and personal essays have been published in national and regional journals and magazines.  Her first book, Hands at Work—Portraits and Profiles of People Who Work with Their Hands, received numerous awards including a Nautilus Book Award and Independent Publishers Award. Her personal essay, “Boris’s Bluff,” received first place in the student category Oregon Quarterly Magazine’s 2013 Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest.  The essay recounts an experience from her memoir-in-progress, Hiking Naked—A Quaker Woman’s Search for Balance, a personal narrative of what Graville learned in the remote mountain village of Stehekin, WA about work, community, and leadings of the Spirit (as well as dealing with six feet of snow in the winter, ordering groceries by mail, and living without a telephone). She is a student in the MFA in Creative Writing Program of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. 

Lois Marie Harrod’s 13th collection, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis,  has just been published by Word Tech (Cherry Grove).  The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays); Brief Term, poems about teaching, was published by Black Buzzard Press (2011).  A Geraldine R. Dodge poet and former high school teacher, she teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey. Read her work here.

Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter (U of Iowa Press). Her essays and poems have been anthologized and appeared in such places as Tar River Poetry, The Fourth Genre, Post Road, The Florida Review and Nimrod International. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Karen Locascio is a part-time temp, part-time tutor, and full-time MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Boston. Her work has previously appeared in Amethyst Arsenic, Rufous City Review, Breakwater Review, and The Holiday Cafe. She has read at numerous Boston-area venues and has work in the local anthologies Stone Soup Presents: Fresh Broth and Write on the Dot (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2). Karen currently lives in Dorchester, MA, but originally hails from the Jersey Shore.

Gayla Mills teaches writing and directs the writing center at Randolph-Macon College. Her chapbook of personal essays, Finite, was published in April 2012 and won the RED OCHRE LiT Chapbook Contest. Her essays have appeared inPrairie Wolf Press, The Stylus, Agenda: The Magazine of Politics and Culture, The Hook, Skirt!, The Truth about the Fact, RED OCHRE LiT, and Greenwoman. She has also published features, reviews, and essays in magazines and newspapers. Visit her website for more information.

Kelly Morris is a current MFA student at Spalding University.  She lives in Austin, TX with her husband and 2.5 kids.  She is happy to report she does not have an ex-fiancé.

Katie Darby Mullins is currently finishing her MFA at Spalding University and teaching at the University of Evansville. In addition to editing a recent rock ‘n roll crossover edition of the metrical poetry journal Measure, she’s been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Harpur Palate, Broad River Review, Big Lucks, The Evansville Review, and more. She’s also an editor at The Louisville Review and the lead writer and founder of the music blog Katie Darby Recommends, located here.

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.

Rachel Riebe is the byproduct of being raised on a family farm in rural South Dakota. She is currently working on her MFA at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and her poetry has appeared in literary journals South 85 and Shark Reef. Her daytime hours belong to the Hazelden Foundation, her evenings to her husband and daughter on their miniature farm in Taylors Falls, and the blue hours to her musing and fascination with words.

Carrie Ryan is a creative writing student at Cleveland State University. Her creative nonfiction piece “Emaciation” was recently featured in the Freshly Hatched section of the Freerange Nonfiction Reading Series. She is a musician and is set to release her EP “This Year” in June. She also manages her own blog.

Ray Scanlon. Massachusetts boy. Has grandchildren. Extraordinarily lucky. No MFA. No novel. No extrovert. His work has been published recently in Camroc Press Review, Stymie, and Prime Number Magazine. Find him on the web.

Christy Scott is a graduate of the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, and now spends her time as an adjunct English professor at The College of New Rochelle in Westchester County, New York. She is currently writing her first book, a work of science fiction entitled, “How to Remove Your Soul.”  Keep an eye out for her forthcoming short stories on Amazon.

Lee Stoops believes deeply in the power of story and humanity’s capacity for wonder. He still builds forts, disappears into wilderness, and brings ghosts to campfires. A graduate of Antioch University’s MFA program, he teaches and writes in the mountains of Idaho with his wife and children. He is a fiction editor for The Citron Review and a nonfiction editor for Lunch Ticket. For more information, visit his website.

Amanda Stopa is originally from the Seattle area. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and has had work appear in 4and20poetry, New Fraktur Arts Journal and Philadelphia Stories.

Brogan Sullivan was born in Miami, Florida, a fact for which he has yet to forgive his parents. He moved to Tampa to attend the University of South Florida, where he is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing, and although he much prefers it there, he is still looking for that perfect cup of café con leche.

Simon Walsh lives in Vermont and teaches English at Greenfield Community College and works for a hunger relief agency, Food for Free, in Cambridge, MA. His poems have appeared in Willow Springs, The Manchester Literary Journal, Birchsong , and his play People Different from Us , was a finalist in the Paramount Theater’s New England Playwriting competition.