Current (Inaugural) Issue

Our Contributors

KIM ADDONIZIO is the author of four poetry collections, most recently What is This Thing Called Love (W. W. Norton). She has published two novels with Simon & Schuster, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street. She is co-author of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Her awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award. For more about Kim, visit her at www.kimaddonizio.com.

JON BALLARD's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Quay: A Journal of the Arts, Farmhouse, Barnwood Magazine and many others. Jon has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2007: Lonesome (Pudding House) and Sad Town (Maverick Duck Press). A Michigan native, he currently lives in Mexico City, Mexico.

DANIEL BORZUTZKY is the author of two books: The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007) and Arbitrary Tales (Triple Press, 2005); and the translator of Port Trakl (Action Books, forthcoming) by Chilean poet Jaime Luis Huenun; and of One Year and Other Stories by Chilean fiction writer Juan Emar (Review of Contemporary Fiction, forthcoming). His writing has appeared in dozens of print and online journals.

PATRICK CARRINGTON teaches creative writing in New Jersey, and is the poetry editor at Mannequin Envy (www.mannequinenvy.com). His manuscript Thirst (Codhill, 2007), winner of Codhill Press' 2006 Poetry Chapbook Award, has just been released (www.codhill.com). His poetry has appeared recently (or is forthcoming) in The Connecticut Review, The Potomac Review, Rattle, The Evansville Review, The New York Quarterly, and other journals. Rise, Fall and Acceptance (MSR Publishing, 2006), his first collection, is available at Main St. Rag Press (www.mainstreetrag.com).

CYRUS CASSELLS's fourth book of poetry, More Than Peace and Cypresses, was named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2004 by Library Journal. He is the author of Beautiful Signor (Copper Canyon Press, 1997), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; Soul Make a Path Through Shouting (Copper Canyon Press, 1994), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; and The Mud Actor (Henry Holt & Company, 1982), a National Poetry Series selection; He is the recipient of a 1995 Pushcart Prize, the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, and fellowships from the Lannon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has worked as a translator, film critic, actor, and teacher. He lives in Austin, Texas and Paris, France.

CHING-IN CHEN is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and a Kundiman Asian American Poet Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in CRATE, Tea Party, Growing Up Girl: an Anthology of Voices from Marginalized Spaces and others. Her Cool Li?: a riddle is part of a series of connected poems about the travails, heartbreak and adventures of a Chinese-American girl called Xiaomei.

MELANIE FAITH educates young minds at a private high school in Pennsylvania. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. In addition to publication of her chapbook, Restless: Relative Poems (Foothills Publishing), her writing earned 3rd place in a Maison Neuve Magazine (Montreal) writing contest and placed honorable mention in the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes. She was selected recipient of the 2006 Wilson College Outstanding Young Alumnae Award. Currently, she is creating a manuscript of her poetry and rural landscape photography (her other passion) and writing a novel.

JOHN FLYNN's stories have appeared in The Paterson Review, Hiss Quarterly, The Powhatan Review, Salt Flats Annual, and The Redwood Coast Review. He's earned writing awards from the U.S. Peace Corps, and the New England Poetry Club. His poetry chapbooks, Westbound Freight, and A Dozen Lemons In Autotropolis are available from Pudding House. To read a variety of his previously published stories go to www.EditRed.com/ionelajo.

J.C. HALLMAN has published a variety of fiction and nonfiction, most recently in Salon and Tin House. He is the author of The Chess Artist and The Devil is a Gentleman. He lives in Minnesota.

LARRY JANOWSKI's poems have appeared in After Hours: a Journal of Chicago Writing and Art, other areas journals like TriQuarterly, Court Green, Rhino and Spoon River Poetry Review, as well as journals in New York, Maryland, Ohio and Colorado. His first-full length collection of poems, BrotherKeeper, is still warm-off-the-press from Chicago's own Puddin'head Press. He's very proud to have found a spot in the premiere issue of Fifth Wednesday Journal. Larry teaches at Dominican University and Wilbur Wright Community College. He is a Franciscan friar, and has been anthologized in Francis and Clare in Poetry (2005) from St. Anthony Messenger Press.

LIESL JOBSON lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa as a musician, writer and photographer. Her creative writing appears in The Southern Review, The Mississippi Review, Snow*vigate, elimae, Diner (USA), Aesthetica, The Journal, Brittle Star (UK), LICHEN (Canada) and South African journals New Coin, Chimurenga, Botsotso, Timbila, New Contrast and Green Dragon. She won the 2005 POWA Women's Writing Poetry Competition, the 2006 Ernst Van Heerden Award from the University of the Witwatersrand and the 2006 Faye Goldie Award from the South African Writers' Circle. Her anthology of short-short fiction 100 Papers will be published by Botsotso in early 2008.

FRANK JOHNSON has published prose and poetry in Square Lake, The Red Rock Review, Asylum, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Chiron, Clackamas, Kumquat Meringue, The Bellingham Review, Peregrine, Poetry Motel, and many others. He writes by a tidal cove near Tenants Harbor, Maine.

PATRICIA SPEARS JONES is a widely anthologized and award-winning African-American poet, arts writer, performer and playwright with two collections of poetry: Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press, 2006) and The Weather That Kills (Coffee House Press, 1995). Her poems are anthologized in Bowery Women: Poems, The Jazz Poem; Poetry After 91, Best American Poetry, 2000, The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color, and Black Sister. Her poetry and prose appear in TriQuarterly, Callaloo,, Black Issues Book Review, Essence, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and many others. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, the Goethe Institute for travel and research in Germany. She has taught at St. Mark's Poetry Project, Cave Canem's New York City Workshop, Naropa University, Sarah Lawrence College and Parsons College of Design at New School University. For more about Patricia visit her at www.psjones.com

ANGELA JUST As a teenager in a Catholic girls' school in the 60s, Angela Just's dream of apprenticing to a commercial photographer was snuffed out when her mother realized that a man and a darkroom were involved. And so began a modest foray into creative writing. Angela's poems have turned up in Make Magazine, Free Lunch, After Hours, Wicked Alice and Her Mark. Seeding the Snow recently featured one of her essays. This is the first publication of her photographs and she looks forward to combining her poems and photos in an upcoming project.

FRANCES KERRIDGE's stories have appeared in Santa Monica Review, Redbook, Press, Crescent Review, Passages North, and the Australian magazine, Cleo. She lives with her husband in the community of Lakeshore at Huntington Lake in the central Sierras.

KATHLEEN KIRK is the author of a chapbook of theatre and persona poems, Selected Roles (Moon Journal Press, 2006) and is among the editors of RHINO Magazine. Her poems, stories, and essays appear or are forthcoming in a number of print and online journals, including Beauty/Truth, Blood Lotus, Comstock Review, Ekphrasis, Greensboro Review, Many Mountains Moving, Wicked Alice, Ninth Letter, and Poetry East.

JANE ROSENBERG LAFORGE has published poetry in Rain City Review, The Panhandler, La Petite Zine, and Wheelhouse, a critical essay in Paradoxa, and fiction in Pebble Lake Review. Another short story is forthcoming in The Adirondack Review. This submission is an excerpt from a novel in progress, Sending Mommy to the Moon.

J. ALBIN LARSON is a graduate of the MFA program at Bowling Green State University. His fiction has appeared in the Jabberwock Review and is forthcoming in the Seattle Review. He is 26 years old and a second-year law student at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He is also at work on a novel set in the white knuckle world of corporate insurance sales and just walking down the street and trying not to get run over by a car.

CHIQUITA MULLINS LEE, formerly of Atlanta, and currently living in Columbus, Ohio, was the 2007 Ohio Arts Council summer writer-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts. She has written a novel, novella, and memoir, as well as scripts for TechKNOWKids, which was nominated for a Chicago/Mid-West regional Emmy. Her plays have been staged at Columbus' Contemporary American Theatre Company. She won fellowships from the Greater Columbus Arts Council in fiction and playwriting and from the Ohio Arts Council in fiction and non-fiction. She wrote and performs in Faces of Grace, a solo piece about women from the Bible.

TERRY LUCAS grew up in New Mexico, studying under the poet, Keith Wilson. He has lived in the San Francisco bay area for twelve years. Terry's work has been published in numerous print and online journals, including Columbia Poetry Review, Solo, Rosebud, and MiPoesias. He is a 2008 New England College poetry MFA candidate.

FRANK MATAGRANO is the author of I Can Only Go As Fast As the Guy in Front of Me (Black Lawrence Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in Many Mountains Moving, Crab Orchard Review, Rhino, Spoon River Poetry Review and Cimarron Review, among others.

CRIS MAZZA is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently Waterbaby (Fall, 2007). Her other fiction titles include the critically notable Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? and the PEN Nelson Algren Award winning How to Leave a Country. She also has a collection of personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Mazza has had a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and three Illinois Arts Council literary awards. A native of Southern California, Mazza currently lives 50 miles west of Chicago and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

MOLLY McNETT's short stories have appeared in The New England Review, Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, New Letters, Crazyhorse, Other Voices, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005. She's not 36 anymore.

ERIKA MIKKALO's writing received the Tobias Wolff Award for short fiction from The Bellingham Review, and has appeared in Nimrod, The 2nd Hand, Exquisite Corpse, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, POM2, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, The Notre Dame Review, The Texas Review and other publications. She lives and works in Chicago.

MATT MULLINS lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with his wife Megan and his daughter Nola. His fiction and poetry have appeared in various magazines and literary journals including Descant, The Birmingham Poetry Review, and Born Magazine. He continues to write music and play guitar with his band, Few of the Many.

MELANIE PAPPADIS received her MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her novel Searching Ana won The New School Fiction Chapbook Competition and was a finalist in Sarabande Books' Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction. Her work was also chosen as a finalist in Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. She has published a book of non-fiction entitled Limbu Folklore, a collection of translated oral folklore and photographs from Nepal. She started the Sunday Salon reading series in Chicago where she currently lives and teaches. She is working on her second novel.

MARK PERLBERG is the author of three books of poems, the latest being The Impossible Toystore (Louisiana State University Press, 2000). His fourth book, Waiting For the Alchemist, will be published by LSU Press in 2009. He is a founder of The Poetry Center of Chicago, which he led as president for fourteen years. He has read his poems in many venues, including The Library of Congress, and they have appeared in many journals: The New Yorker, Poetry, and most recently, Prairie Schooner.

MYRA SHERMAN is a second-career writer. In her previous life she worked as a social worker/therapist, most recently in a county jail. She is now focusing on writing and has just started to submit her work for publication. She was a finalist in the 2006 SLS-Kenya Fiction Contest, the 2006 Moment-Karma Short Fiction Contest and was long-listed for the 2006 Fish International Short Story Prize.

SAID SHIRAZI lives in suburban New Jersey. His stories have appeared in Open City, The Paris Review, New England Review, Bridge, and the anthology Juncture. He also writes about music and television for the blogzine Printculture.

BARRY SILESKY's new collection of poetry, This Disease, was published Summer, 2007 by Tampa University Press. His other books include One Thing That Can Save Us (prose poems, or short-short fiction, Coffee House Press); The New Tenants (verse, Eye of the Comet Press), Greatest Hits (verse, Pudding House Press), and the biographies, John Gardner, Literary Outlaw and Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time. His poems and fiction have appeared in Poetry, Boulevard, Tampa Review, Witness, Fiction, Fiction International, Notre Dame Review, and others. His autobiography is in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series by Gale Research. He is editor of the literary journal, ACM, and teaches writing and literature at Loyola University-Chicago.

SUZANNE SIMMONS studied poetry in the MFA program at the University of Washington. She lives in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire with her two children.

JARED SMITH's poem, “Looking into The Machinery,” is from his seventh book of poetry, The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations, now in press at Higganum Hill Books. His sixth volume of poetry, Where Images Become Imbued With Time, was published in May by Puddin'head Press. Over the past year, his work has appeared in Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville News, Wilderness House Literary Review, Shabdaguchha, After Hours, The Pedestal, Small Press Review, Home Planet News, Poetrysky, The Iconoclast, Poetryfish, Bogg, Confrontation, Presa, Stone Table Review, The Seventh Quarry (Wales,) China Poetry Monthly (China,)and Ariel. His work has appeared hundreds of times in literary journals here and abroad over the past 30 years, and has been adapted to stage in New York and Chicago.

MICHAEL SPRING writes from London: Back in the old days, particularly when I was at university in Belfast, I got to know some annoyingly talented people. Just in the last few years, I've been trying to catch up. In 2006, I had a couple of very short stories broadcast on radio, and that shoved me along a bit. I think I understand the craft of writing a little better now, but the search for perfection goes on. “Night Boat” is part of a novel which is having a difficult birth. I live in London now, where great things sometimes happen.

KEVIN STEIN is Poet Laureate of Illinois. He has published nine volumes of poetry and criticism, including the forthcoming History's Bicep (University of Illinois Press, fall 2008). His collection American Ghost Roses (University of Illinois, 2005) won the Society of Midland Authors 2006 Poetry Award. In 2007 he edited BREAD & STEEL: Illinois Poets Reading from Their Works. He has also received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, the Vernon Louis Parrington Medal for Distinguished Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. He's Caterpillar Professor of English at Bradley University.

HENRY F. TONN is a semi-retired psychologist who lives in Wilmington, N.C. with his dog, Fred. His articles, poems, short stories and essays have appeared in such publications as the British Journal of Social Psychiatry, Gettysburg Review, Quay, and The Foliate Oak. A man of cosmopolitan taste and profound neurosis, he is working haphazardly on his memoir of forty years in the mental health field. With a little luck, he will complete it before the hovering specter of senility evolves into daily reality.

LINA RAMONA VITKAUSKAS is the co-editor of the online literary magazine, milk magazine, http://www.milkmag.org/. She is the author of THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING (Ravenna Press, 2008), Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star (dancing girl press, 2006), and Shooting Dead Films With Poets (Fractal Edge Press, 2004). She has been widely published in such magazines and anthologies such as The Prague Literary Review, The Chicago Review, 2008 Outside Voices Anthology of Younger Poets” (Ed. Jessica Smith - Outside Voices), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), Aufgabe, Moria, MiPoesias, Van Gogh's Ear (Paris), Rampike (University of Windsor), Paper Tiger (Australia), and many others. Her web site is www.linaramona.com.

DONNA D. VITUCCI helps raise funds for local nonprofits, while her head and heart are engaged in the lives of the characters mounting a coup in her head. If her eyes appear vacant, you'll know she's in her alternate universe, following her "people" as they muck up their lives. Some of her recent work appears in Ward 6 Review, Steel City Review, Pequin, Temenos, The Oklahoma Review, The Houston Literary Review, MO: Writings from the River, and others. “Vocation,” is part of her unpublished novel ABIDE HEREIN, which features the characters of Vivian, Lindy, and Father Benedict.

LAURA MADELINE WISEMAN is working on her dissertation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Geist, and Blue Collar Review, among other journals and magazines. She is a reader for Prairie Schooner.


	contrib.html Our Contributors KIM ADDONIZIO is the author of four poetry collections, most recently What is This Thing Called Love (W. W. Norton). She has published two novels with Simon & Schuster, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street. She is co-author of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Her awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award. For more about Kim, visit her at www.kimaddonizio.com. JON BALLARD's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Quay: A Journal of the Arts, Farmhouse, Barnwood Magazine and many others. Jon has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2007: Lonesome (Pudding House) and Sad Town (Maverick Duck Press). A Michigan native, he currently lives in Mexico City, Mexico. DANIEL BORZUTZKY is the author of two books: The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007) and Arbitrary Tales (Triple Press, 2005); and the translator of Port Trakl (Action Books, forthcoming) by Chilean poet Jaime Luis Huenun; and of One Year and Other Stories by Chilean fiction writer Juan Emar (Review of Contemporary Fiction, forthcoming). His writing has appeared in dozens of print and online journals. PATRICK CARRINGTON teaches creative writing in New Jersey, and is the poetry editor at Mannequin Envy (www.mannequinenvy.com). His manuscript Thirst (Codhill, 2007), winner of Codhill Press' 2006 Poetry Chapbook Award, has just been released (www.codhill.com). His poetry has appeared recently (or is forthcoming) in The Connecticut Review, The Potomac Review, Rattle, The Evansville Review, The New York Quarterly, and other journals. Rise, Fall and Acceptance (MSR Publishing, 2006), his first collection, is available at Main St. Rag Press (www.mainstreetrag.com). CYRUS CASSELLS's fourth book of poetry, More Than Peace and Cypresses, was named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2004 by Library Journal. He is the author of Beautiful Signor (Copper Canyon Press, 1997), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; Soul Make a Path Through Shouting (Copper Canyon Press, 1994), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; and The Mud Actor (Henry Holt & Company, 1982), a National Poetry Series selection; He is the recipient of a 1995 Pushcart Prize, the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, and fellowships from the Lannon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has worked as a translator, film critic, actor, and teacher. He lives in Austin, Texas and Paris, France. CHING-IN CHEN is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and a Kundiman Asian American Poet Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in CRATE, Tea Party, Growing Up Girl: an Anthology of Voices from Marginalized Spaces and others. Her Cool Li?: a riddle is part of a series of connected poems about the travails, heartbreak and adventures of a Chinese-American girl called Xiaomei. MELANIE FAITH educates young minds at a private high school in Pennsylvania. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. In addition to publication of her chapbook, Restless: Relative Poems (Foothills Publishing), her writing earned 3rd place in a Maison Neuve Magazine (Montreal) writing contest and placed honorable mention in the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes. She was selected recipient of the 2006 Wilson College Outstanding Young Alumnae Award. Currently, she is creating a manuscript of her poetry and rural landscape photography (her other passion) and writing a novel. JOHN FLYNN's stories have appeared in The Paterson Review, Hiss Quarterly, The Powhatan Review, Salt Flats Annual, and The Redwood Coast Review. He's earned writing awards from the U.S. Peace Corps, and the New England Poetry Club. His poetry chapbooks, Westbound Freight, and A Dozen Lemons In Autotropolis are available from Pudding House. To read a variety of his previously published stories go to www.EditRed.com/ionelajo. J.C. HALLMAN has published a variety of fiction and nonfiction, most recently in Salon and Tin House. He is the author of The Chess Artist and The Devil is a Gentleman. He lives in Minnesota. LARRY JANOWSKI's poems have appeared in After Hours: a Journal of Chicago Writing and Art, other areas journals like TriQuarterly, Court Green, Rhino and Spoon River Poetry Review, as well as journals in New York, Maryland, Ohio and Colorado. His first-full length collection of poems, BrotherKeeper, is still warm-off-the-press from Chicago's own Puddin'head Press. He's very proud to have found a spot in the premiere issue of Fifth Wednesday Journal. Larry teaches at Dominican University and Wilbur Wright Community College. He is a Franciscan friar, and has been anthologized in Francis and Clare in Poetry (2005) from St. Anthony Messenger Press. LIESL JOBSON lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa as a musician, writer and photographer. Her creative writing appears in The Southern Review, The Mississippi Review, Snow*vigate, elimae, Diner (USA), Aesthetica, The Journal, Brittle Star (UK), LICHEN (Canada) and South African journals New Coin, Chimurenga, Botsotso, Timbila, New Contrast and Green Dragon. She won the 2005 POWA Women's Writing Poetry Competition, the 2006 Ernst Van Heerden Award from the University of the Witwatersrand and the 2006 Faye Goldie Award from the South African Writers' Circle. Her anthology of short-short fiction 100 Papers will be published by Botsotso in early 2008. FRANK JOHNSON has published prose and poetry in Square Lake, The Red Rock Review, Asylum, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Chiron, Clackamas, Kumquat Meringue, The Bellingham Review, Peregrine, Poetry Motel, and many others. He writes by a tidal cove near Tenants Harbor, Maine. PATRICIA SPEARS JONES is a widely anthologized and award-winning African-American poet, arts writer, performer and playwright with two collections of poetry: Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press, 2006) and The Weather That Kills (Coffee House Press, 1995). Her poems are anthologized in Bowery Women: Poems, The Jazz Poem; Poetry After 91, Best American Poetry, 2000, The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color, and Black Sister. Her poetry and prose appear in TriQuarterly, Callaloo,, Black Issues Book Review, Essence, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and many others. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, the Goethe Institute for travel and research in Germany. She has taught at St. Mark's Poetry Project, Cave Canem's New York City Workshop, Naropa University, Sarah Lawrence College and Parsons College of Design at New School University. For more about Patricia visit her at www.psjones.com ANGELA JUST As a teenager in a Catholic girls' school in the 60s, Angela Just's dream of apprenticing to a commercial photographer was snuffed out when her mother realized that a man and a darkroom were involved. And so began a modest foray into creative writing. Angela's poems have turned up in Make Magazine, Free Lunch, After Hours, Wicked Alice and Her Mark. Seeding the Snow recently featured one of her essays. This is the first publication of her photographs and she looks forward to combining her poems and photos in an upcoming project. FRANCES KERRIDGE's stories have appeared in Santa Monica Review, Redbook, Press, Crescent Review, Passages North, and the Australian magazine, Cleo. She lives with her husband in the community of Lakeshore at Huntington Lake in the central Sierras. KATHLEEN KIRK is the author of a chapbook of theatre and persona poems, Selected Roles (Moon Journal Press, 2006) and is among the editors of RHINO Magazine. Her poems, stories, and essays appear or are forthcoming in a number of print and online journals, including Beauty/Truth, Blood Lotus, Comstock Review, Ekphrasis, Greensboro Review, Many Mountains Moving, Wicked Alice, Ninth Letter, and Poetry East. JANE ROSENBERG LAFORGE has published poetry in Rain City Review, The Panhandler, La Petite Zine, and Wheelhouse, a critical essay in Paradoxa, and fiction in Pebble Lake Review. Another short story is forthcoming in The Adirondack Review. This submission is an excerpt from a novel in progress, Sending Mommy to the Moon. J. ALBIN LARSON is a graduate of the MFA program at Bowling Green State University. His fiction has appeared in the Jabberwock Review and is forthcoming in the Seattle Review. He is 26 years old and a second-year law student at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He is also at work on a novel set in the white knuckle world of corporate insurance sales and just walking down the street and trying not to get run over by a car. CHIQUITA MULLINS LEE, formerly of Atlanta, and currently living in Columbus, Ohio, was the 2007 Ohio Arts Council summer writer-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts. She has written a novel, novella, and memoir, as well as scripts for TechKNOWKids, which was nominated for a Chicago/Mid-West regional Emmy. Her plays have been staged at Columbus' Contemporary American Theatre Company. She won fellowships from the Greater Columbus Arts Council in fiction and playwriting and from the Ohio Arts Council in fiction and non-fiction. She wrote and performs in Faces of Grace, a solo piece about women from the Bible. TERRY LUCAS grew up in New Mexico, studying under the poet, Keith Wilson. He has lived in the San Francisco bay area for twelve years. Terry's work has been published in numerous print and online journals, including Columbia Poetry Review, Solo, Rosebud, and MiPoesias. He is a 2008 New England College poetry MFA candidate. FRANK MATAGRANO is the author of I Can Only Go As Fast As the Guy in Front of Me (Black Lawrence Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in Many Mountains Moving, Crab Orchard Review, Rhino, Spoon River Poetry Review and Cimarron Review, among others. CRIS MAZZA is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently Waterbaby (Fall, 2007). Her other fiction titles include the critically notable Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? and the PEN Nelson Algren Award winning How to Leave a Country. She also has a collection of personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Mazza has had a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and three Illinois Arts Council literary awards. A native of Southern California, Mazza currently lives 50 miles west of Chicago and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. MOLLY McNETT's short stories have appeared in The New England Review, Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, New Letters, Crazyhorse, Other Voices, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005. She's not 36 anymore. ERIKA MIKKALO's writing received the Tobias Wolff Award for short fiction from The Bellingham Review, and has appeared in Nimrod, The 2nd Hand, Exquisite Corpse, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, POM2, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, The Notre Dame Review, The Texas Review and other publications. She lives and works in Chicago. MATT MULLINS lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with his wife Megan and his daughter Nola. His fiction and poetry have appeared in various magazines and literary journals including Descant, The Birmingham Poetry Review, and Born Magazine. He continues to write music and play guitar with his band, Few of the Many. MELANIE PAPPADIS received her MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her novel Searching Ana won The New School Fiction Chapbook Competition and was a finalist in Sarabande Books' Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction. Her work was also chosen as a finalist in Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. She has published a book of non-fiction entitled Limbu Folklore, a collection of translated oral folklore and photographs from Nepal. She started the Sunday Salon reading series in Chicago where she currently lives and teaches. She is working on her second novel. MARK PERLBERG is the author of three books of poems, the latest being The Impossible Toystore (Louisiana State University Press, 2000). His fourth book, Waiting For the Alchemist, will be published by LSU Press in 2009. He is a founder of The Poetry Center of Chicago, which he led as president for fourteen years. He has read his poems in many venues, including The Library of Congress, and they have appeared in many journals: The New Yorker, Poetry, and most recently, Prairie Schooner. MYRA SHERMAN is a second-career writer. In her previous life she worked as a social worker/therapist, most recently in a county jail. She is now focusing on writing and has just started to submit her work for publication. She was a finalist in the 2006 SLS-Kenya Fiction Contest, the 2006 Moment-Karma Short Fiction Contest and was long-listed for the 2006 Fish International Short Story Prize. SAID SHIRAZI lives in suburban New Jersey. His stories have appeared in Open City, The Paris Review, New England Review, Bridge, and the anthology Juncture. He also writes about music and television for the blogzine Printculture. BARRY SILESKY's new collection of poetry, This Disease, was published Summer, 2007 by Tampa University Press. His other books include One Thing That Can Save Us (prose poems, or short-short fiction, Coffee House Press); The New Tenants (verse, Eye of the Comet Press), Greatest Hits (verse, Pudding House Press), and the biographies, John Gardner, Literary Outlaw and Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time. His poems and fiction have appeared in Poetry, Boulevard, Tampa Review, Witness, Fiction, Fiction International, Notre Dame Review, and others. His autobiography is in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series by Gale Research. He is editor of the literary journal, ACM, and teaches writing and literature at Loyola University-Chicago. SUZANNE SIMMONS studied poetry in the MFA program at the University of Washington. She lives in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire with her two children. JARED SMITH's poem, “Looking into The Machinery,” is from his seventh book of poetry, The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations, now in press at Higganum Hill Books. His sixth volume of poetry, Where Images Become Imbued With Time, was published in May by Puddin'head Press. Over the past year, his work has appeared in Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville News, Wilderness House Literary Review, Shabdaguchha, After Hours, The Pedestal, Small Press Review, Home Planet News, Poetrysky, The Iconoclast, Poetryfish, Bogg, Confrontation, Presa, Stone Table Review, The Seventh Quarry (Wales,) China Poetry Monthly (China,)and Ariel. His work has appeared hundreds of times in literary journals here and abroad over the past 30 years, and has been adapted to stage in New York and Chicago. MICHAEL SPRING writes from London: Back in the old days, particularly when I was at university in Belfast, I got to know some annoyingly talented people. Just in the last few years, I've been trying to catch up. In 2006, I had a couple of very short stories broadcast on radio, and that shoved me along a bit. I think I understand the craft of writing a little better now, but the search for perfection goes on. “Night Boat” is part of a novel which is having a difficult birth. I live in London now, where great things sometimes happen. KEVIN STEIN is Poet Laureate of Illinois. He has published nine volumes of poetry and criticism, including the forthcoming History's Bicep (University of Illinois Press, fall 2008). His collection American Ghost Roses (University of Illinois, 2005) won the Society of Midland Authors 2006 Poetry Award. In 2007 he edited BREAD & STEEL: Illinois Poets Reading from Their Works. He has also received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, the Vernon Louis Parrington Medal for Distinguished Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. He's Caterpillar Professor of English at Bradley University. HENRY F. TONN is a semi-retired psychologist who lives in Wilmington, N.C. with his dog, Fred. His articles, poems, short stories and essays have appeared in such publications as the British Journal of Social Psychiatry, Gettysburg Review, Quay, and The Foliate Oak. A man of cosmopolitan taste and profound neurosis, he is working haphazardly on his memoir of forty years in the mental health field. With a little luck, he will complete it before the hovering specter of senility evolves into daily reality. LINA RAMONA VITKAUSKAS is the co-editor of the online literary magazine, milk magazine, http://www.milkmag.org/. She is the author of THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING (Ravenna Press, 2008), Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star (dancing girl press, 2006), and Shooting Dead Films With Poets (Fractal Edge Press, 2004). She has been widely published in such magazines and anthologies such as The Prague Literary Review, The Chicago Review, 2008 Outside Voices Anthology of Younger Poets” (Ed. Jessica Smith - Outside Voices), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), Aufgabe, Moria, MiPoesias, Van Gogh's Ear (Paris), Rampike (University of Windsor), Paper Tiger (Australia), and many others. Her web site is www.linaramona.com. DONNA D. VITUCCI helps raise funds for local nonprofits, while her head and heart are engaged in the lives of the characters mounting a coup in her head. If her eyes appear vacant, you'll know she's in her alternate universe, following her "people" as they muck up their lives. Some of her recent work appears in Ward 6 Review, Steel City Review, Pequin, Temenos, The Oklahoma Review, The Houston Literary Review, MO: Writings from the River, and others. “Vocation,” is part of her unpublished novel ABIDE HEREIN, which features the characters of Vivian, Lindy, and Father Benedict. LAURA MADELINE WISEMAN is working on her dissertation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Geist, and Blue Collar Review, among other journals and magazines. She is a reader for Prairie Schooner.