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Our Contributors
JULIE BABCOCK’s poetry has appeared in The Iowa Review, Spoon River Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Confrontation, and elsewhere. She is a lecturer at University of Michigan and a Ph.D. graduate from University of Illinois at Chicago. “Snark” is from her recently completed short story collection The World of Opportunity and marks her fiction debut.
MICHELLE BRAFMAN is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. Her fiction was nominated for Best New American Voices 2009 and an Association of Writers & Writing Programs award, and in 2006, she won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Contest. Her work has appeared in Lilith Magazine, Electric Grace: Still More Fiction by Washington Area Women, Potomac Review, and Pedestal and is forthcoming in the Jewish Women’s Literary Journal and River Oak Review. She teaches creative writing and lives in Glen Echo, Maryland with her husband and two children.
JENNIFER BRYAN received her MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in LIT, The Madison Review, Flyway, Santa Clara Review, and the New Ohio Review. She lives in Syracuse, New York with her husband and teaches composition at SUNY – Cortland.
ELIZABETH J. COLEN was born in the Midwest, has lived in the Northeast and Southeast, and currently makes her home in the Pacific Northwest. She has been the recipient of several awards and special notices for her work. Most recently shortlisted for University of Wisconsin Press’s Brittingham and Pollak Prizes, her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Redivider, Front Porch Journal, Pebble Lake Review, 3:AM Magazine, Juked, Knockout, and the Bellingham Review.
ROB COOK lives in New York City where he co-edits Skidrow Penthouse with Stephanie Dickinson. Work has appeared in Many Mountains Moving, Colorado Review, The Bitter Oleander, Fence, Salamander, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, etc. His book “Songs for the Extinction of Winter” is out from Rain Mountain Press.
CHRISTINE DAVIS, originally from Chicago, Illinois, has lived in Oxford, Mississippi for nearly four years. She’s recently earned her MFA in poetry from Ole Miss and was the poetry editor for The Yalobusha Review. Her poems, “What We Think We Want” and “The Other Woman” are forthcoming in Flyway and her story, “Things You Realize About Yourself While Sitting Next to a Nun on a Plane Home,” was a semi-finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest. Christine is currently teaching English at Ole Miss and working on a poetry collection.
DENISE DOOLEY studied at the University of Iowa and Newnham College, Cambridge University. She lives in Rogers Park, Chicago and works at the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University. She describes herself as a new-ish poet, having previously published in Big Ugly Review, The Mays (Cambridge University), and with various other small press outlets.
TOIYA KRISTEN FINLEY, a native of Nashville, TN, has been a professional student who traveled to foreign lands like New York University, Iowa State, and Binghamton University. She has had fiction and nonfiction published in such diverse places as The Paterson Literary Review, Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America, TEL: Stories, The Nine Muses, Text: UR - The New Book of Masks, and Nature. She is the founding and former managing/fiction editor of Harpur Palate.
PETRA FORD grew up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where she enjoyed taking snapshots of family and friends. She earned a B.A. in Communication Arts from Benedictine University in 2003. She bought her first digital SLR shortly before the birth of her first child and hasn’t been able to put it down since. She especially enjoys making photographs of people and the emotions, humor, and ironies that surround us. She is currently enrolled in photography classes at College of DuPage.
JASON FRALEY works for an investment firm in Columbus, OH. His work has appeared in Forklift Ohio, 42opus, The Hat, Pebble Lake Review,Caketrain, and No Tell Motel.
ADAM GALLARI is originally from Long Island, New York and a recent graduate of Vassar College. He currently lives in Southern California where he is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside and working on a novel. "No Cause for Concern" is his first published story.
MICHELLE GEOGA, a Hinsdale, Illinois based photographer, graduates from the College of Dupage Photography program in May of this year. She has a B.A. in English Literature from Dominican University and while on a break from DePaul University's MAW program, discovered photography at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn. Finding her literary voice through the visual medium of photography has become her current goal.
JENNIFER GRAVLEY makes her way in Columbia, Missouri, where she works at a university press located on Industrial Boulevard. Recent work has appeared in The Dirty Napkin, New Southerner, and Boxcar Poetry Review.
MONA DANIELLA HADDAD was born and raised in New York City. She is a junior at Hackley School, where she is editor of the annual literary magazine, The Vision. She has attended a number of writing programs including the University of Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and the Advanced Creative Writing Workshop at Columbia University’s High School Summer Program. For the last two years, she has been a mentee with Girls Write Now, a writing-based mentoring program for high school girls. She has published original works in the organization's annual anthology and has presented pieces at public readings at various venues in New York City.
MELANIE HANEY received her MFA from Lesley University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was the 2006 winner of Family Circle Magazine's fiction contest and the 2007 winner of the Ann Arbor Book Festival Short Story Competition. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Family Circle Magazine, Quality Women's Fiction, The Elm (Eureka Literary Magazine), and in a collection of short stories compiled by Writer's Digest. She lives and writes in southern New Hampshire with her husband and two small children.
JANNETT HIGHFILL has had poems in The Iowa Review, Tar River Poetry, The Greensboro Review, RHINO, A Prairie Journal, and elsewhere. Her alter ego teaches Economics at Bradley University, her specialty being International Trade. She also edits the Global Economy Journal.
KATHLEEN JAMESON is a political junkie and a student of Irish history, interests that grew from her roots in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood. While she continues to write short stories, she is also working on her first novel. Her work has appeared in the Blue Earth Review.
ALLISON JOSEPH is the author of What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon, 1997), In Every Seam (Pittsburgh, 1997), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon, 2003) and Worldly Pleasures (Word Press, 2004). Her honors include the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize, fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is editor and poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review and director of the Young Writers Workshop, an annual summer residential creative writing workshop for high school writers. She holds the Judge Williams Holmes Cook Endowed Professorship at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
KRISTIN LATOUR is a poet and English professor living in Aurora, IL. She teaches composition and creative writing at Joliet Jr. College. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program, she has published poems in After Hours, Pearl, and Rambunctious Review. She has also published a chapbook of dramatic monolgues titled Town Limits: Red Beaver Lake, Minnesota (Pudding House Press, 2007).
MICAH LING received her MFA in poetry from Indiana University. She is currently living in Nashville, Tennessee where she teaches writing classes at Belmont University.
LAURENCE LOEB was a semi-finalist in the 1999 Discovery/The Nation Poetry Contest. Some of his poems are to appear in the New York Quarterly. Some have been published in The Mid-America Poetry Review, on the Sonnet Scroll of Poetry Porch, in The Pedestal Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, Tattoo Highway, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Lifelines, and some other work appeared in The New York Times. His translation of a Baudelaire poem appeared in American Imago.
BETH MARZONI is a Ph.D. candidate at Western Michigan University where she serves as the Assistant Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program and as an assistant poetry editor of the literary magazine Third Coast.
CARIDAD McCORMICK's poetry writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as Crab Orchard Review, The Seattle Review, CALYX, Slipstream, Spillway, MiPoesias and others. In 2007 she was the recipient of a Florida Artist Fellowship from the state of Florida. In 2006 she was a finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award. She is Professor of English at Miami Dade College in Miami, FL, where she lives. More of her work can be found at www.southernartistry.org/Caridad_McCormick.
ROBERT McDONALD’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Court Green, Boxcar Poetry Review, Gertrude, The Columbia Poetry Review, and Mudfish, among others. He lives in a charmingly dilapidated coach house in Chicago, and works at an independent bookstore. He is the co-author of A Field Guide to Gay and Lesbian Chicago. If you feel like cyber-stalking him, you can start at www.myspace.com/robertmcpoet .
CARRIE MEADOWS studies fiction and poetry at Virginia Tech’s M.F.A. Program for Creative Writing, where she is a recipient of the Alfred Knobler Scholarship. Her hypertext collection of poems, (NON)sense for to from Eva Hesse, recently appeared in The New River Journal of Digital Writing and Art. “Good Girl” is her first published short story.
ERIK MEYER lives in Fargo and publishes Lovechild Journal. His poems have appeared in The Oklahoma Review and will appear in the forthcoming edition of The Madison Review.
JERRY NEGELE entered the technical field of telecommunications after growing up in Chicago and graduating from college. One of the first items that he bought was a film camera at Altman's Camera store on Wabash Avenue. Due to other priorities at the time and the expense of having prints made, that film camera lay dormant for many years after its initial use. The eventual availability of digital cameras piqued his interest and consequently resulted in digital photography becoming his artistic outlet. That's when he joined the Photo Genesis Photography Club in Naperville where he learned about the Fifth Wednesday Journal.
PATRICK PFISTER is the author of two books of travel literature: Pilgrimage: Tales from the Open Road and Over Sand & Sea. His work has been selected for several Travelers’ Tales anthologies, including Best Travel Writing 2007. His stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous literary magazines and websites such as Pearl, Juked, Snowy Egret, International Quarterly, Slow Trains, Stylus Poetry Journal, Jerseyworks and elsewhere. For the last twenty years he has lived in Barcelona, Spain. Visit his website at www.patrickpfister.com
MARGE PIERCY is the author of 17 poetry collections including Colors Passing Through Us, What are Big Girls Made Of?, the Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish theme, and most recently The Crooked Inheritance, all from Knopf. She has written seventeen novels including Woman on the Edge of Time, He, She and It, Gone to Soldiers and most recently Sex Wars from Morrow/Harper Collins, who published her memoir, Sleeping with Cats. A CD of her political poetry LOUDER, WE CAN’T HEAR YOU YET is out from Leapfrog Press as is -- co-authored with Ira Wood -- So You Want To Write: How to Master the Craft of Fiction and Personal Narrative now in its 2nd enlarged edition. Schocken just published Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own. Her work has been translated into 16 languages.
DAN PINKERTON has new work forthcoming in Subtropics, Poetry East, Northwest Review, and Arts & Letters. A story of his appeared in the 2008 edition of Best New American Voices, and one of his poems was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
GLEN POURCIAU's short story collection, Invite, won the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award and will be published in the fall by the University of Iowa Press. He has a short story forthcoming in Paris Review. His stories have been published in Mississippi Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Ontario Review, Quarterly West, and other magazines.
WILLIAM REICHARD is the author of three collections of poetry. This Brightness (Mid-List Press, 2007) is a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award; How To (Mid-List Press, 2004); and An Alchemy in the Bones (New Rivers Press, 1999). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and has been featured on NPR’s “The Writer’s Almanac” several times. Reichard works as a college teacher and sometime editor, and he lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
ALBERTO ALVARO RIOS, born in 1952 in Nogales, Arizona, is the author of nine books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir. His books of poems include, most recently, The Theater of Night, winner of the 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award, along with The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, a finalist for the National Book Award, Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses, The Lime Orchard Woman, The Warrington Poems, Five Indiscretions, and Whispering to Fool the Wind. His three collections of short stories are, most recently, The Curtain of Trees, along with Pig Cookies and The Iguana Killer. His memoir about growing up on the Mexico-Arizona border—called Capirotada—won the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award. He is the recipient of the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction, and inclusion in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, as well as over 200 other national and international literary anthologies. His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music. He is a Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University, where he has taught for 25 years and where he holds the further distinction of the Katharine C. Turner Endowed Chair in English. F. DANIEL RZICZNEK’s first book of poems is Neck of the World, winner of the 2007 May Swenson Poetry Award, published by Utah State University Press. He is also the author of the chapbook Cloud Tablets (Kent State University Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, AGNI, and Mississippi Review, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He currently teaches English composition at Bowling Green State University.
ARTHUR SALTZMAN (August 10, 1953 - January 8, 2008) died suddenly at age 54 of a massive brain hemorrhage. A Professor of English at Missouri Southern State University, his work appeared in Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, FictionInternational, Ascent, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Cream City Review, Florida Review, Mid-American Review, Columbia, Baltimore Review, and many other journals. He published nine books during his lifetime, including the literary nonfiction collections Objects and Empathy, which won the First Series Creative Nonfiction Award from Mid-List Press (2001); Nearer (Parlor Press, 2006); and Solve for X (U. of South Carolina Press, 2007). A tenth book, The Obligations of the Harp, is forthcoming from Parlor Press in 2008, and he recently completed two more manuscripts of lyric essays that are not yet placed with publishers--All Out Are in Free, and To Be or Not to Be or Not. His six books of literary criticism on contemporary fiction include the first book-length studies of William Gass, Raymond Carver, and Nicholson Baker; his many other critical articles and reviews helped to build readerships for Don DeLillo, Stanley Elkin, Paul West, and others.
AMANDA SCHWARTZ is a senior in Photography at the University of Illinois where she is finishing up a body of work for her graduation thesis show this spring. She entered the field of photography with a love for capturing moments and this interest soon grew into a passion for both the formal and creative process of photography. During the summer of 2007 she had the opportunity to study in Italy where she found the inspiration she had been searching for. Her current photographs portray the beauty of the female model juxtaposed with the presence of nature, creating an overall ambiance that is soft and romantic.
LYNN SWIGART was born in Kansas City, Missouri and spent his youth in Clinton, Illinois. He graduated from Bradley University. He worked at Caterpillar Inc. for over thirty years while privately pursuing his interest in photography. His photographic work is held in a number of private collections as well as The Illinois State Museum, The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Stanford University, Lakeview Museum, Peoria, Illinois. His complete body of work has been accepted into the archives and the permanent collection of Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts. His book Olson’s Gloucester, published by LSU Press, is a photographic exploration of the setting for much of Charles Olson’s poetry. His work has appeared in The Bradley Review, Boundary 2, Cottonwood Review, The Best of Photography Annual, and the North Dakota Quarterly. He is listed in Who’s Who in American Art. He is retired and lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
JUDITH TAYLOR is the author of two books of poems: Selected Dreams from the Animal Kingdom (Zoo Press, 2003) and Curios (Sarabande Books, 2000). She co-edited Air Fare: Stories, Poems and Essays On Flight (Sarabande Books, 2004). Her work has been widely published and anthologized, and she has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Ucross, Djerassi, and VCCA. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, she lives in Los Angeles, and co-edits POOL: A Journal of Poetry.
WENDY VARDAMAN, Madison, WI, has a Ph.D. in English from University of Pennsylvania. Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared forthcoming or are forthcoming in a variety of anthologies and journals, including Riffing on Strings, Letters to the World, Poet Lore, Poemeleon, qaartsiluni, Main Street Rag, Nerve Cowboy, damselfly, Free Verse, Wisconsin People & Ideas, Women’s Review of Books and Portland Review. When not writing, she home schools two of her three children and volunteers for small but enormously valuable arts organizations, like the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and The Young Shakespeare Players (Madison).
ANN WALTERS lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Poetry International, Orbis (UK), The Pedestal Magazine, Carousel (Canada), Cider Press Review and many others. She was a finalist in the LICHEN 2007 ‘Tracking a Serial Poet’ competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
AMIE WHITTEMORE is an Illinois native who spent several years living in Oregon, where she earned her MAT from Lewis and Clark College and worked as a high school English teacher. She is currently a graduate student at Southern Illinois University’s Carbondale campus, where she is working toward her MFA in poetry.
LANCE WILCOX is a professor of English at Elmhurst College. Before moving to Illinois in 1989, he had lived in New Jersey, California, Texas, the Twin Cities, Nashville, and Seattle, with his deepest roots in the forests, lakes, and iron mines of northern Minnesota. He has published scholarly articles, magazine articles, fiction, reviews, and poetry, and had two plays produced, one professionally. Though raised with a camera in his hand, it never occurred to him till lately to seek a public venue for his work. “Children’s Garden, Morton Arboretum” is his first published photograph.
JEFF VANDE ZANDE teaches English at Delta College in Midland, MI. His stories have been collected in Emergency Stopping and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press). Individual stories have appeared in Coe Review, Passages North, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Existere, among others. His novel, Into the Desperate Country, is out from March Street Press. He maintains a website at www.jeffvandezande.com. |