Karen Lee Boren’s novel, Girls in Peril was published by Tin House Books (2006) and was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover program.  Her stories have appeared in journals such as The Florida Review, Night Train, Karamu, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Dominion Review, Yemassee, and Epoch.  Her nonfiction has appeared in Fourth Genre, Cream City Review, Best of Lonely Planet's Travel Writing, and BookForum.  She is an associate professor at Rhode Island College, where she is also the director of the creative writing program.  “Recluse” is her first foray into playwriting.

Jack Carbee is a retired high school English teacher who is in his 37^th season as a varsity basketball coach.  Born and raised in Iowa, he graduated from Cornell College where he played basketball and baseball.  He completed a Masters degree from Iowa State University in 1980.  His teaching and coaching career spanned five decades with stops in Iowa, Illinois, Dubai UAE, Missouri, and Michigan.  He and his wife Julie have four children: Jason, an urban planner, Marie, a college basketball coach, Christopher, an electrical technician in the Navy, and Katie, a college senior.  He has completed a collection of 24 stories from which "Morning Wine" is excerpted, and a novel, Trapped in the Inferno, based on Dante’s Comedia.

Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh  is the product of a mixed marriage between an Iranian doctor and an American schoolteacher. She was born in Washington, D.C., came of age in Tehran, Iran during the Shah’s era, was sent to the United States to attend Stanford University, and returned to Iran shortly after Khomeini came to power.  She later moved to Spain, where she married, literally and figuratively, into a third culture. Her cultural identity is a bit of a moving target, which makes it a paradox that she has resided, for the better part of the past two decades, on a mini-farm in Woodstock, Georgia. Suzi has authored two school histories as well as a number of personal essays, stories, and translations. Her work has appeared in Quiddity International Literary Journal and Foundling Review.

Kristina Faye is a native New Yorker. Her poems have appeared in Promethean and Poetry in Performance. She studied English Literature and psychology at the Macaulay Honors College at City College, CUNY. 

Alice Fogel's third book of poems, Be That Empty, was a national poetry bestseller in 2008, and in 2009 Strange Terrain (a guide for poets, and nonpoet readers and teachers) came out.  A recipient of a fellowship from the NEA and five-time Pushcart nominee, she has poems appearing in recent or upcoming issues of Hotel Amerika, Spillway, Crazyhorse, No Tell Motel, and elsewhere.  A freelance proof reader and copy editor, she teaches writing and other arts, and is also an award-winning designer and creator of custom clothing, particularly from upcycled materials (www.lyriccouture.com). 

T.R. Healy was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, and my stories have appeared in such publications as the Boston Literary Review, Limestone, Scarlet Sound, and the Steel Toe Review.

Theodosia Henney is a fig and goat cheese enthusiast who has no idea what to do with her life, though she plans to spend a good deal of it in various libraries and sturdy trees. Her work has appeared in Vestal Review, The Allegheny Review, Ghost Ocean Magazine, and Damselfly Press. 

Katherine Hoerth is the author of Among the Mariposas (Mouthfeel Press, 2010), a chapbook of poems that received the Nuestra Voz Prize for border women poets. She received her MFA from the University of Texas Pan American, and her poems have been featured in various journals, including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Front Porch, and Conte: a Journal of Narrative Poetry. She teaches English at South Texas College and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Fifth Wednesday Journal. Katherine also has two forthcoming titles, including a second chapbook manuscript titled The Garden of Dresses (Mouthfeel Press, 2012), and a full poetry manuscript The Garden, Uprooted (Slough Press, 2012). She lives in deep South Texas, but can easily be found online at http://www.katiehoerth.blogspot.com.

Topher MacDonald, "Withdrawal."

Sjohnna McCray is a graduate of Teachers College, Columbia University and the MFA program at the University of Virginia.  He has taught English literature and composition in The Bronx, Phoenix, Arizona and Chicago.  His work has been published in various journals including Willow Springs, Sheanandoah, Callaloo, The Evergreen Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Brilliant Corners. 

Aw-o-tan Nisgah (Shield Little Brother) is a member of the Many Faces People, a family/gang practicing traditional Blackfoot ways in Caddo Mills, Texas. His poetry has recently appeared in The 2River View and is forthcoming in New Plains Review, amongst other journals. He is married to the poet Angela Marie Kaiser, or Ko-mon-oyi Ah-ki.

Teresa Peipins is  a writer of Latvian descent from Western New York. Her chapbook, Box of Surprises, was recently published by Finishing Line Press and is available on Amazon and her new chapbook, A Remedy of Touch, will be out this spring. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Barcelona Review, The Buffalo News, Conte, Pedestal, Poesia,and other literary magazines in the US and abroad.  Her short story, “That Underwater Place” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  She  taught English language at the University of Barcelona, the Open University of Catalonia,and presently at the International Institute of Buffalo. She blogs at: http://peipins.blogspot.com/

Eric Rawson lives and works in Los Angeles.  He is the author of "The Hummingbird Hour."

Ryan Sanford Smith received an MFA from the University of Notre Dame. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared in: Nashville Review, JMWW, The Pedestal Magazine, Mannequin Envy, and Merge Poetry. Book reviews and provocations erratically appear at: www.wwbi.wordpress.com

Kate Stone, "hannah was waiting in the car" and "mary's house."

Meredith Stricker is the author of Alphabet Theater, a collection of mixed media performance poetry (Wesleyan) and Tenderness Shore (which received the National Poetry Series award). She works in as a poet/designer/artist in visual poetry collaborative on projects to bring together artists, architects, writers, musicians and experimental forms.

Cecilia Turner is a graduate of NYU where she majored in journalism and politics. She has held freelance reporting jobs around New York City and has worked as features editor at a student-based webzine in Prague, Czech Republic. In February 2011 she began the roadtrip from which the stories of "No Tie Binds" come. She lives in Western Massachusetts.

Jan Wiezorek writes and teaches at an elementary school in Chicago.  His fiction has appeared at PressboardPress.com, ShadowFictionPress.com, CommuterLit.com, CracktheSpine.com, Seeds Literary Arts Journal in Chicago, Sleepytown Press, and Ozone Park Journal.  He is author of Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (New York:  Scholastic, 2011).  He holds an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts Education from Columbia College Chicago and a B.A. in Journalism from Iowa State University.  He also has studied fiction writing at Northeastern Illinois University.  He enjoys biking along the country roads in Harbor Country of southwestern Michigan.

AUTHORS

Barry Anderson was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. He’s been in love with writing since he found out there was poetry on a visit to his local public library at age twelve. While pursuing a degree in Economics at the University of Washington, he ventured into creative writing and had the awesome luck to study under Heather McHugh and Coleen McElroy. He has been published in Plains Poetry and Poetry Northwest. He will continue to write until he can no longer hold a pen (or punch keys, or yell at someone else to do it for him).

Star Black's sixth book of poems, Velleity's Shade, was released by Saturnalia Books late last year. She is the author of three books of sonnets—Waterworn, Balefire and Ghostwood—a collection of double sestinas—Double Time—and a book of collaged free verse, October for Idas. Her poems have been anthologized in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, 110 Stories: New York Writers After September 11, and The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1880 to The Present. Her collages have been exhibited at Poets House and The Center for Book Arts, and published in One of a Kind: Unique Artists Books by Pierre Menard Gallery. She lives in New York City and currently is a Visiting Associate Professor at Stony Brook University.

William C. Blome is a writer of short fiction and poetry. He beds down nightly in between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he is an MA graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. His work has previously seen the light of day in such little mags as Amarillo Bay, Prism International, Taj Mahal Review, Pure Francis, Salted Feathers and The California Quarterly.

Rachael Button hails from Metro-Detroit but lives and teaches in Ames, Iowa. Her nonfiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Creative Nonfiction, Redivider, KNOCK, and Flyway: Journal of Writing and the Environment. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about Michigan titled When I Get Home. Button can be contacted at rachael.shay.button@gmail.com.

Mark DeCarteret’s work has appeared in 300 different publications including AGNI, Boston Review, Caketrain, Chicago Review, Conduit, Cream City Review, Diagram, failbetter, Gargoyle, H-NGM-N, Hotel Amerika, Matter, New Orleans Review, Phoebe, Poetry East, Pool, Quick Fiction, Salamander, Salt Hill, Sonora Review, Superstition Review, Tampa Review, and Third Coast as well as the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press), Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader (Black Sparrow Press), New Pony: Collaborations & Responses (Horse Less Press), and Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press) which he also co-edited. Flap, his fifth book, is due out with Finishing Line Press this May. He is currently Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. You can check out his Postcard Project at pplp.org.

Heinz Insu Fenkl was born in 1960 in Incheon, Korea. He is a novelist, translator, and editor. His autobiographical novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, was named a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection in 1996 and a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist in 1997. He is co-editor of Kori: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Literature and Century of the Tiger:  One Hundred Years of Korean Culture in America 1903-2003. His most recent book is Korean Folktales. He serves on the editorial board of AZALEA: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, published by Harvard University’s Korea Institute.

Vesselin Hanchev (1919-1966) was a Bulgarian poet, publicist, playwright, and translator from French and Russian. He studied law at Sofia University, fought in the Second World War, and then embarked on a journalism career working as an editor and publishing his poetry and prose in numerous newspapers and literary periodicals. His poems have been translated into almost all European languages, and his lyrical style and attention to rhythm have influenced poets and attracted readers for generations.

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in Elimae, Nano Fiction, Decomp, and Prick of the Spindle. He is the author of several chapbooks, including Avenue C and Cat People, both from Scars Publications.

Mark R. Jabaut lives in upstate New York with his wife, two dogs and some children. His one-act play "In the Territories" was recently featured in the Regional Writers' Showcase at the GEVA Theatre in Rochester.

Hristina Keranova is a professor of English, Reading, and ESL at Atlanta Metropolitan College in Atlanta, GA. She is originally Bulgarian and is currently translating poetry and prose from her native language as well as writing original work.

Canadian Bruce McRae has had almost six hundred publications in the past twelve years. Originally from Niagara Falls, he has moved extensively, living in London for eighteen years and currently residing on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. A musician who has recorded and toured, many of his poems have been set to music receiving airplay in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia. His first collection, The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), is now available. Website: www.bpmcrae.com.

Sameer Pandya has published his fiction in Narrative, Other Voices, and Epiphany, and his non-fiction in Sports Illustrated, The New York Daily News, and Miller-McCune. He teaches creative writing and literature in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Patricia Schultheis has had several essays and nearly two dozen short stories published in national and international literary journals. A member of The Author’s Guild and a voting member of The National Book Critics Circle, she has served on the editorial board of The Baltimore Review and currently serves on the editorial board of Narrative. Her pictorial local history titled Baltimore’s Lexington Market was published by Arcadia Publishing of South Carolina in 2007, and her collection of short was a finalist for the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award and Snake Nation Press awards. In 2010 she was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and also received an award for literary nonfiction from the NobHill branch of the League for American Pen Women.

Originally from the Ukraine, Askold Skalsky is a retired English professor living in western Maryland. His poems have been published in numerous small press magazines and journals such as Notre Dame Review and Southern Poetry Review, and most recently in Cutthroat and Poetry Salzburg Review, among others. He is currently at work on his first book of poems, The Ponies of Chuang Tzu.

Lucia Stacey is a rising junior English major at Davidson College in North Carolina. She has been writing since she can remember (graduating from the crayon to keyboard). Lucia also plays guitar and writes songs, enjoys volunteering with special needs children, and likes writing poetry and journaling. For the next six months she will be living, studying and writing in Berlin.

J. Tarwood's work has appeared in magazines ranging from American Poetry Review to Visions. He has two books published, The Cats in Zanzibar, and most recently by Black Buzzard Press, Grand Detour.

Sweta Srivastava Vikram (www.swetavikram.com) is a two time Pushcart–nominated poet, novelist, author, essayist, columnist, educator, and blogger whose musings have become four chapbooks of poetry, two collaborative collections of poetry, a novel, and a book of nonfiction prose and poems (forthcoming in 2012). Her scribbles have also appeared in several anthologies, literary journals, and online publications across six countries in three continents. Taj Mahal Review describes Sweta as "a poet with hauntingly beautiful talent." A graduate of Columbia University, she lives and writes in New York City and reads her work across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Sweta also teaches creative writing workshops. Find her on Twitter (@ssvik) or Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/Words.By.Sweta).

Martin Walls was born in Brighton, England, and now lives in Baldwinsville, New York. He is the author of three books of poems: Small Human Detail in Care of National Trust (2000), Commonwealth (2005), and The Solvay Process (2009). His poetry has appeared in FIELD, Epoch, Commonweal, Crazyhorse, Boulevard, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among other journals. Walls’ poetry awards include a Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship from the US Library of Congress, a Nation/"Discovery" Prize, and a Breadloaf Writers Conference Scholarship. Walls’ collaboration with photographer Philip MacCabe and graphic designer Shadric Toop can be found at smallhumandetail.com. His electronic anthology The Book of Snails can be read online at bookofsnails.weebly.com.

Kirby Wright was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is a graduate of Punahou School in Honolulu and the University of California at San Diego. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Wright has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a past recipient of the Ann Fields Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Award, the Browning Society Award for Dramatic Monologue, and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowships in Poetry and The Novel. Before the City, his first book of poetry, took First Place at the 2003 San Diego Book Awards. Wright is also the author of the companion novels Punahou Blues and Moloka’i Nui Ahina, both set in Hawaii. He was a Visiting Writer at the 2009 International Writers Conference in Hong Kong, where he represented the Pacific Rim region of Hawaii. He was also a Visiting Writer at the 2010 Martha’s Vineyard Writers Residency in Edgartown, Mass.

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Marie-Claire Bancquart (b. 1932) is a prolific and prize-winning French poet, novelist, essayist, and critic, as well as a Professor Emeritus of French literature at the Sorbonne (Université de Paris-IV). Her most recent book of poems, Explorer l'incertain, was published by Amourier in 2010.

Jeffery Berg received an MFA from New York University. His work has appeared in Harpur Palate, MiPOesias, the Gay & Lesbian Review, Inertia Magazine, The Comstock Review, Hiram Poetry Review and Softblow.  He lives in New York and edits poetry for Mary - A Literary Quarterly and Clementine. 

Eric Day teaches and writes in Phoenix, Arizona, where he lives with the best family under the sun. He is currently at work on his fifth interesting mistake, a book of nonfiction pieces about his Oregon upbringing, called Raised by Trees.

Wendeline A. Hardenberg received a dual Masters degree in Comparative Literature and Library Science as well as a Certificate of Literary Translation from Indiana University Bloomington. She is currently pursuing a dual career as a librarian and a translator. Some of her translations of Marie-Claire Bancquart's poetry have previously appeared in Ezra: An Online Journal of Literary Translation, and more are forthcoming in The Dirty Goat.

Heidi Hart received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and currently teaches creative writing at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.  Her publications include the memoir Grace Notes: The Waking of a Woman’s Voice (University of Utah Press, 2004) and the four-poet collection Edge by Edge (Toadlily Press, 2007).  She has received a Pushcart Prize for poetry, a Jentel Foundation Residency Award, and Utah Arts Council Established Artist Grant.  Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Northern Lights, Cimarron Review, Quarterly West, Pleiades, Pilgrimage, Lumina, Ellipsis, Isotope, The Cortland Review, Monkscript, Western Humanities Review, Harpur Palate, Broken Plate, qarrtsiluni, Friends Journal, The Salt Flats Annual, Folly, Grey Sparrow, Adirondack Review, and the Kent State exhibit Speak Peace: American Voices Respond to Vietnamese Children’s Painting.

Vyacheslav Kiktenko was born in 1952 in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. He attended the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow and graduated in 1980. Kiktenko has worked for various publishing houses and literary journals in Kazakhstan, and he served as Secretary of the Writers’ Union of Kazakhstan from 1997 to 1999. He now lives in Moscow, where he works as curator of regional divisions for the Union of Russian Writers and runs the literary studio at the University Center for Continuing Education. Kiktenko has published numerous collections of poetry, including Rosla trava (As the Grass Grew, 1980), Svet kornei (The Light of the Roots, 1986), Prikol-zvezda (Star-Joke, 1990), and Volshebnye stikhi (Magic Poems, 1997). His poetry and essays have appeared in the respected Russian periodicals Druzhba narodov, Poezia, Nash sovremennik, and Literaturnaya gazeta. Kiktenko recently published a book-length study of Russian poets from the past three centuries entitled Poliubi so mnoi (Fall in Love with Me; 2006), which Russians knew under the working title Antologia odnogo stikhotvorenia (An Anthology of One Poem).

Jamie Olson teaches in the English Department at Saint Martin’s University, just outside of Olympia, Washington. He writes about poetry, translation, and Russian culture on his blog The Flaxen Wave.

Rebecca Leah Papucaru is a doctoral student at the University of Montreal. Her poetry and prose have been shortlisted for a number of awards in Canada, including Arc Magazine's Poem of the Year. Her poetry has been anthologized in the 2010 edition of The Best Canadian Poetry in English (guest editor Lorna Crozier and series editor Molly Peacock), and in the Headlight anthology of emerging writers. In Canada, her poetry has appeared in Prism international, The Antigonish Review, Acta Victoriana, and Existere, while both her poetry and prose have been featured in The Nashwaak Review. In the United States, her work has appeared in The Orange Coast Review, The Emerson Review, Kestrel and Caesura: the Journal of the Poetry Center San Jose. Her poetry is forthcoming in Crannóg (Ireland) and SLAB: Sound and Literary Artbook (Slippery Rock, PA).

James Payne is an artist, musician and writer living in Chicago, Illinois. Follow him at banalization.blogspot.com.

In 2007, Levi Rubeck left the prairies of Wyoming for New York City’s cramped cityscape. He often contemplates the big-hearted metalhead mechanics he left behind and the inevitable misspending of one’s youth. He currently bides his time as a teaching artist who also makes himself useful to Ugly Duckling Press and Brooklyn Rail/Black Square.

Benjamin Schachtman is a graduate student at SUNY Stony Brook, a retired line cook and a semi-retired musician. He lives in Chinatown with his wife, Casey, and his dog, Bear.

Ryan Starinsky is a writer and a musician who plays in the bands The Sidekicks, Slugging Percentage, Letters, and What Gives. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he works at a school and lives at the DIY locus, the Monster House.

Jessica L. Thoubboron makes stories, poems, and films, among other things. She creates because she does not know what else to do.

Pete Vanderberg served in the US Navy for four years and now teaches high school English and Art. He received an MFA from Queens College, CUNY, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Four and Twenty, and Hunger Mountain, among other journals. He lives with his wife and children in Lynbrook, New York.