ISSUE 12

RUTH WILLIAMS has had work published in jubilat, Barrelhouse, 42 Opus, Lake Effect, Hubbub, and New Delta Review. She completed her MFA at Eastern Washington University in 2006 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati.

MEGHAN WIEMER is a student at Utah Valley University majoring in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. Her poetry has been published in multiple issues of Touchstones.

RONALD WALLACE’s twelve books of poetry, fiction, and criticism include For a Limited Time Only and Long for This World: New and Selected Poems, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is co-director of the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin and is the poetry editor for the University of Wisconsin Press. Married with two grown children and three grandchildren, he divides his time between Madison and a 40-acre farm in Bear Valley, Wisconsin.

DAVID WAGONER has published 18 books of poems, most recently A Map of the Night (U of Illinois P, 2008) and ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991 and has won six yearly prizes from Poetry (Chicago). He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for 23 years. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and twice for the National Book Award. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to its end in 2002. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington.

LAURA STOTT received her MFA from Eastern Washington University. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including Hayden’s Ferry Review and Weber: The Contemporary West. Laura teaches freshman English, occasionally delivers flowers, and takes tourists for hikes in Skagway, Alaska. She loves lichens, bicycles, and stealing hummingbird feeders.

KAREN SCHUBERT is the author of The Geography of Lost Houses (Pudding House, 2008). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies and journals, including Water~Stone Review, Poetry Midwest, Versal, DMQ Review, and diode poetry journal. In 2008, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. She is a recent editor of Whiskey Island Magazine and a current visiting writer at Texas A&M Commerce.

PAISLEY REKDAL is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, and three books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope.

SCOTT POOLE is the author of two books of poetry, Hiding from Salesmen and The Cheap Seats. He is the “House Poet” for Live Wire!, a weekly radio variety show on Oregon Public Broadcasting. He also was the founding director of Get Lit!, the Spokane, Washington, book festival and Wordstock, the Portland, Oregon, book festival. He is a software developer in Portland, Oregon.

JAY PABARUE is a high school senior from Philadelphia. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Philadelphia Stories, and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in 322 Review, Word Riot, and Gloom Cupboard.

ERIC M. MORRIS writes and teaches in Akron, Ohio, and also serves as a poetry editor for Barn Owl Review.

ABBY MILLAGER lives and writes amid mushroom farms in the northern hills of humble Delaware. She was a founding editor of Diner. At one time, briefly, she was a doctor. Her poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in 5am, Barrow Street, Fourteen Hills, Prairie Schooner, Redactions, Terminus, Verse, Worcester Review, and others.

MARIA MELENDEZ, the new editor/publisher for Pilgrimage magazine, lives in Pueblo, Colorado. Her poetry collection How Long She’ll Last in This World (U of Arizona P, 2006), received Honorable Mention at the 2007 International Latino Book Awards and was named a finalist for the 2007 PEN Center USA Literary Awards. Flexible Bones, her third collection of poetry, is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in 2010.

HOPE MAXWELL-SNYDER, a native of Colombia, South America, received an MA in Spanish literature from George Washington University, another MA in Spanish and Latin American literature from Johns Hopkins, and a PhD in Spanish Medieval Literature from the University of Manchester in England. Her work has appeared in Archivio storico italiano, ALDEEU Atalaya, International Poetry Review, OCHO, and The Gettysburg Review. Hope is the founder and director of The Sotto Voce Poetry Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

NOEL PABILLO MARIANO splits his time between Riverside and Los Angeles, California. He is a currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside where he helped edit and produce the first national “Coming Out Monologues.” Noel currently serves as the nonfiction editor for Circumlocution Literary, an online literary magazine focused on young writers. In addition, he was just awarded a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship. For additional information and to read more about other arts-activism projects, visit: noelmariano.com.

Both a visual artist and a poet, DONNA M. MARBACH has published non-fiction, fiction, and poetry in a variety of anthologies and periodicals, including Blueline, Hazmat Review, Homestead Review, Quercus Review, Sea Stories, The MacGuffin, The Red WheelBarrow, Silk Road, The Tipton Poetry Review, Limestone, Willow Swept Review, Halfway Down The Stairs, Breadcrub scabs, Waterways, and Pearl. Most recently, she has been the poetry editor of the national writers’ magazine, Byline, and has previously edited for FootHills Press. She is co-founder and past president of Just Poets Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to the celebration of poetry and poets.

ANGIE MACRI is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Fugue, New Orleans Review, Southern Indiana Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry. She was also featured in The Spoon River Poetry Review. Her manuscript Enough for This Star was recently awarded an individual artist fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council.

SANDY LONGHORN is the author of Blood Almanac (Anhinga, 2006), winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Indiana Review, New South, Quarterly West, West Branch, and elsewhere. She has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council as well.

MARILYN KRYSL's work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation The New Republic, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Short Stories 2000, O. Henry Prize Stories, Sudden Fiction, and Sudden Stories. Dinner with Osama (stories) won the Richard Sullivan Prize. She is the recipient of two NEA fellowships and is former Director of the Creative Writing Program at University of Colorado, Boulder.

CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY is the author of three collections of poetry, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award in 2007, Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity P), and Nietzsche’s Horse (Mitki/Mitki P). His work has appeared in numerous print and on-line journals, including Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Slope, Mississippi Review, and Double Room. One of the founding editors of the literary journal, 3rd Bed, he is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

EVA HOOKER is Professor of English and Writer in Residence at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. The Winter Keeper, a hand-bound chapbook (Chapiteau P, 2000), was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in poetry in 2001. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Harvard Review, Salmagundi, Water~Stone, Orion, Agni, Memorius 9, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Third Coast, Drunken Boat, The Notre Dame Review, and Best New Poets 2008.

JESSICA D. HAND loves poetry, fire-hooping, and nudity. She sometimes manages to combine all three. Jess earned a Creative Writing BA from Carnegie Mellon University and is now MFAing at Georgia State. “Jesus Mirror” won the 2008 Agnes Scott Literary Festival Poetry Competition, judged by Martín Espada, and Jess was a finalist for the same competition in 2007, judged by Yusef Komunyakaa. She was also a finalist in the River Styx 2008 International Poetry competition.

JAMES GRABILL's poems have appeared in numerous periodicals, such as Willow Springs, kayak, Caliban, South Dakota Review, New York Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, New Letters, Ur Vox, Redactions, The Bitter Oleander, East West Journal, and The Common Review. His recent books of poems are October Wind (Sage Hill P, 2006) and An Indigo Scent after the Rain (Lynx House P, 2003). He is not the author of Delusions. He lives in Oregon, where he teaches writing and sustainability.

GUISEPPE GETTO completed these poems over the last several years while working on two master’s degrees in Fresno, CA, one in creative writing (MFA) and one in composition. He’s now at Michigan State University, working on a PhD in composition.

RICHARD GARCIA is author of The Flying Garcias (U of Pittsburgh P, 1991), Rancho Notorious (BOA, 2001), and The Persistence of Objects (BOA, 2006). His awards include the Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. For twelve years, he was the poet-in-residence at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where he conducted workshops in art and poetry for hospitalized children. Richard teaches creative writing in the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program and the Idyllwild Summer Poetry Festival.

REBECCA FOUST’s books Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes in 2007 and 2008. Nominated for two 2008 Pushcart awards, Foust’s poetry appears in 2008-09 issues of Atlanta Review, Margie, Hudson Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others.

ROBER EVORY holds degrees in Music and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. He is a freelance booking agent in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and plays in Good Question, a local touring progressive rock band (www.myspace.com/goodquestiontrio). Currently, he has undertaken the endeavor to fuse poetry and music in live performance and recording.

NICELL CHRISTINE DAVIS was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. She currently lives in Lancaster, California, with her husband and son. She teaches composition at Antelope Valley College.

ANNE C. COON's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Provincetown Arts, Nimrod, The Baltimore Review, Earth’s Daughters, Women’s Studies, The Lyric, Proteus, Northeast Corridor, and the McGraw-Hill anthology Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay. Her books include Henry James Sat Here (The Old School P), Via del Paradiso (FootHills P), Daedalus’ Daughter (FootHills P), and Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry, co-authored with Marcia Birken (Editions Rodopi).

ALEX CIGALE's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Global City Review, Green Mountains Review, Drunken Boat, Hanging Loose, Zoland Poetry, Eleven Eleven, Gargoyle, Many Mountains Moving, North American Review, Tar River Poetry Review, and 32 Poems. He was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine, and lives in New York City. His translations of contemporary Russian poetry can be found in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry, The Manhattan Review, and St. Ann’s Review.

BRITTANY CAVALLARO was a 2008 Bucknell fellow in the Seminar for Younger Poets and has had her poems published in the Comstock Review.

GRACE CAVALIERI is the author of several books of poetry and 21 produced plays. She also founded and still produces/hosts public radio’s “The Poet and the Poem,” now in its 32nd year, now from the Library of Congress. Her new book is Anna Nicole: Poems (Goss183: Casa Menendez, 2008). She is book review editor for The Montserrat Review and a poetry columnist for MiPOradio. Her play in progress, on Anna Nicole, is in development in NYC.

BILL CARPENTER has published three books of poetry and two novels, the most recent being The Wooden Nickel (Little-Brown, 2002). He has won the Associated Writing Programs Award, the Samuel French Morse Prize, and an NEA. He teaches at The College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine.

ROB CARNEY is the author of two books — Weather Report (Somondoco P, 2006) and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts (Pinyon P, 2003), winner of the Pinyon Press National Poetry Book Award — and two chapbooks, New Fables, Old Songs (Dream Horse P, 2003) and This Is One Sexy Planet (Frank Cat P, 2005). His work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Quarterly West, and dozens of other journals, as well as Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton, 2006). He lives in Salt Lake City.

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Modern History: Prose Poems 1987-2007 (Tupelo P, 2008). He is also the editor of many anthologies of contemporary poetry, most recently Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems & Poetics from California (2008). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry for 2007-2008 and received the James Dickey Prize from Five Points for 2008. He teaches in the creative writing department at the University of California Riverside.

AGATHA BEINS received her MFA from Eastern Washington University and is currently a PhD student at Rutgers University.

SARA BARTLETT earned her MFA from Georgia State University in 2008, where she taught creative writing, literature, and composition, first as a teaching assistant and then as a visiting instructor. She has been invited to read her poetry at various venues in both Georgia and Massachusetts, where she is from, was nominated for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2006, and was a finalist in the 2008 Agnes Scott Writer’s Festival Contest. Her poetry appears in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of New South, and she is currently working on a manuscript for her first book of poetry.

SHANNON AMIDON’s poems have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Poet Lore, 42opus, Copper Nickel, Dogwood, and elsewhere. Her manuscript, The Garden After, has been a finalist for the Perugia Press Prize. A member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, she lives in Hilo, Hawai`i (on the Big Island) with her husband and toddler son.

KELLI RUSSEL AGODON has recently appeared in the Atlanta Monthly, Meridian, Sojourn, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, and Bellevue Literary Journal. She is the author of two books of poems: Small Knots and Geography, winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook prize. Currently, she lives in Washington State and is one of the editors of Crab Creek Review.

ISSUE 11

ANDREW KOZMA received his M.F.A. from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Lilies and Cannonballs Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Agni Online, Dislocate, Hunger Mountain, and a non-fiction piece will soon be published by The Iowa Review. His first book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award and was released in September of 2007.

Though JOE WILKINS was born and raised on the Big Dry of eastern Montana. He currently lives in Forest City, Iowa, where he directs the Creative Writing Program at Waldorf College. His work has appeared in recent issues of The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Northwest Review, Boulevard, Pleiades, and Tar River Poetry, among other literary journals.

SARAH VALENTINE completed her PhD in Russian literature at Princeton University in 2007 and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Slavic Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Valentine’s main research interests are late-Soviet avant-garde poetry and poetics, and writing and translating poetry. She has published several articles in professional journals and her book, The Poetics of Gennady Aygi, is forthcoming in the fall of 2008.

JEFF STUMPO is a PhD student at Texas A&M University, where he is active in various literary endeavors in the community – hosting the local poetry slam, bringing writers into high schools, and helping organize larger one-shot events like the Southwest Writers and Artists Festival and bringing the Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion program to campus for a year. He is the author of two chapbooks: El Oceano y La Serpiente / The Ocean and The Serpent (Zenane, 2004) and Riff Raff (Unicorn P, 2007), and his poems have recently appeared in such journals as Borderlands, Pindeldyboz, Fence, and Rio Grande Review.

CHRISTOPHER SHIPMAN was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1982, though he spent most of his youth living in Jonesboro, Arkansas, just over the Mississippi river. He received his BA in English at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, where he began his work in poetry with poet, Rick Lott. Shipman’s poems have appeared in some journals including Arkansas Literary Forum, Arkansas Review, Bohemian Rat, Clark Street Review, Salt Hill, and Poesy.

WANDA SCHUBMEHL is a poet living in Rochester, NY who facilitates collaborations between poets and other arts. Recent work has appeared in Rattle, Ghoti, and The Centrifugal Eye. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2008.

ED SCHELB is a poet who didn’t grow up at the movies. The first movie he attended was The Ten Commandments with his grandmother, who popped popcorn at home and brought it to the theater in greasy paper bags. He also brought the same paper bags filled with popcorn to the Mohawk Zoo in Tulsa, where he fed the antelopes. He’s recently tried to write a poem about a scene in The 400 Blows where the young man spins around in a carnival ride that commentators compared to a zoetrope. The inventor of the zoetrope also called it a “daedulum,” a fact that delights the author.

DONNA M. MARBACH is both an artist and a poet. She was the poetry editor of ByLine, and she previously edited for FootHills Publishing. She is also a co-founder and past president of Just Poets, Inc., a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the celebration of poetry and poets (www.justpoets.org). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blueline, Hazmat Review, Homestead Review, Quercus Review, The MacGuffin, and Silk Road. She has been the featured poet in The Centrifugal Eye.

STEVEN HUFF’s second book of poems, More Daring Escapes, was released in 2008 by Red Hen Press. He teaches Creative Writing at RIT and is director of adult education at Writers & Books, Rochester, NY's community literary center. He is also host of a weekly radio feature, “Fiction in Shorts,” on public radio stations WXXI-FM and WJSL-FM.

SEAN PATRICK HILL is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Exquisite Corpse, elimae, diode, In Posse Review, Willow Springs, RealPoetik, New York Quarterly, Sawbuck, and Quarter After Eight. His blog site is theimaginedfield.blogspot.com.

JAMES GRABILL has many collections of poetry, including October Wind (Becoming the Villainess, was published by Steel Toe Books. Poems from the book were featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and were included in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She has recently been awarded a 2007 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for Poetry and a 2007 Artist Trust GAP grant to work on her new manuscript. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, and Smartish Pace. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and teaches with Centrum’s Young Artists Project.

JAMES DOYLE’s latest book is Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes (Steel Toe Books, 2007). He has poems coming out in The Paterson Literary Review, Chiron Review, Poet Lore, Illuminations, Cimarron Review, and The Briar Cliff Review.

BRIAN DIAMOND is currently an MFA student at Arizona State. His work has previously been published in the Northridge Review and the 4 a.m. Poetry Journal.

KRISTINA MARIE DARLING is an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of four chapbooks, including Fevers and Clocks (March Street P, 2006) and The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl P, 2006). A Pushcart Prize nominee in 2006, her work has appeared in many publications, including The Mid-America Poetry Review, Poesia, Rattle, Janus Head, The Midwest Book Review, The Arabesques Review, and others. Recent awards include residencies at the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow, the Centrum Foundation, and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

PATRIKC CARRINGTON is the author of Hard Blessings (MSR P, 2008), Thirst (Codhill, 2007), and Rise, Fall, and Acceptance (MSR P, 2006), and winner of New Delta Review’s 2008 Matt Clark Prize and Yemassee’s Pocataligo Contest in poetry. His poems are forthcoming in The Bellingham Review, Tar River Poetry, American Literary Review, West Branch, The Connecticut Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing in New Jersey and serves as the poetry editor of Mannequin Envy (www.mannequinenvy.com).

ROB CARNEY is the author of two books: Weather Report (Somondoco P, 2006) and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts (Pinyon P, 2003), both winners of the Utah Book Award for Poetry, and two chapbooks: New Fables, Old Songs (Dream Horse P, 2003) and This Is One Sexy Planet (The Frank Cat P, 2005).His writing has appeared previously in journals such as Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Quarterly West, Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, and others, and in the anthology Flash Fiction Forward (Norton, 2006). You may write to him at carneyro@uvsc.edu.

FREDERICK BRIDGER is the editor of MO: Writings from the River, an annual literary journal published jointly by the MSU Great Falls Literary Guild and the Front Range Writers. His poetry and prose have appeared in Contemporaries, Catskills Magazine, Big Sky Journal, Wanderings, The Masthead, SubtleTea, and the anthologies That Thing That You Do and Poems Across the Big Sky. He teaches literature and creative writing at Montana State University-Great Falls.

ISSUE 10

WILLIAM WRIGHT is author of Dark Orchard, published by Texas Review P and winner of the 2005 Breakthrough Poetry Prize. He has been published in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, North American Review, Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, and Phoebe. He is co-editor of the Southern Poetry Anthology series (with Stephen Gardner) and is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching fellow at the Center for Writers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

DAVI WALDER's work has appeared in such publications as Crab Orchard Review, Potomac Review, Seneca Review, Revisiting Frost, Runes, and 200 or so other places.

JUSTIN VICARI’s work has recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Third Coast, Phoebe, Rhino, Eclipse, Interim, Slant, Megaera, The Modern Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Paper Street, Snow Monkey, International Poetry Review, and Poetry Motel.

CINDY St. JOHN is currently an MFA candidate at Western Michigan University where she is also assistant editor of Third Coast.

CHERYL STILES has published poems and essays in Poet Lore, Atlanta Review, Storysouth, POEM, SLANT, and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. She works as a university librarian in the Atlanta area.

ED SCHELB has scribbled scholarly essays and poems that range from lyrical meditations to rockabilly persona poems. In his lyrical excursions, he generally tends to hide his honky-tonk soul, though occasionally his evil twin brother can be seen caterwaulin’ and stompin’ around like a tornado in a trailer park. He lives with his family in Rochester, New York.

DAVID J. ROTHMAN’s second volume of poetry, The Elephant’s Chiropractor, was a Finalist for the Colorado Book Award. He is the Founding Editor and Publisher of Conundrum Press. He is co-founder and was the first Executive Director of the Crested Butte Music Festival.

LIZ ROBBINS’ debut collection, Hope, As the World Is a Scorpion Fish, is forthcoming from The Backwaters Press in Fall, 2007. She’s the recipient of the First Coast Writers’ Poetry Award, judged by Robert Bly, and a nominee for Best New Poets.

JOSEPH RADKE’s poems have appeared in Boulevard, Versal, Poetry East, Natural Bridge, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize. He is pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he teaches writing and works on The Cream City Review. Salt & Sand, his poetry manuscript, is seeking a publisher.

ADAM PETERSON is a young writer living in Lincoln, Nebraska. His work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, The Cream City Review, The Cupboard Pamphlet, and others. Recently, a story he co-wrote was picked by Aimee Bender to win the 2006 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award at The Mid-American Review. It is forthcoming.

SARAH PERRIER is author Just One of Those Things (Kent State U P, 2003). Her previous journal publications include The Cimarron Review, Hotel Amerika, The Journal, Pleiades, and Mid-American Review. Her work has also been featured on Verse Daily. She works as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, where she teaches courses in both writing and literature.

KRISTEN ORSER is an MFA Poetry candidate at Columbia College Chicago. Her work has most recently appeared in The Trident, Columbia Poetry Review, and After Hours. She is also an editor for Columbia Poetry Review.

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE lives in San Antonio. Her most recent books are I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK? Tales of Driving & Being Driven (Greenwillow/HarperCollins) and You & Yours (BOA Editions).

BEN MILLER holds an MFA from Columbia University and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in composition theory at the City University of New York. His poems have recently appeared in The Greensboro Review, No Tell Motel, and small.spiral.notebook, among other journals. Most days, Ben aspires to become a poorly kept secret.

ABBY MILLAGER lives and writes amid the mushroom farms of north Newark, in the humble state of Delaware. Her poems and other texts have, at times, appeared elsewhere.

SUSIE MESERVE is a poet and essayist living in San Francisco. This is her second appearance in Redactions.

GARY L. McDOWELL is currently the Assistant Poetry Editor for Mid-American Review. He is the author of the chapbook, The Blueprint (Pudding House, 2005). His poetry is forthcoming in Posse Review, The Southeast Review, Ninth Letter, The Yalobusha Review, Caffeine Destiny, and The Eleventh Muse and has appeared recently in No Tell Motel, Pebble Lake Review, Bat City Review, and others. He also has work forthcoming in The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, 2nd Floor (No Tell Books, 2007). He was recently nominated for a Pushcart prize.

CHRISTINA LOVIN is the author of the chapbooks, What We Burned for Warmth and Little Fires. Lovin is the recipient of several artists’ grants from the Kentucky Arts Council (most notably a 2007 Al Smith Fellowship) and the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

C. L. KNIGHT is the associate director of Anhinga Press, where she designs and edits books. Her poetry has appeared in Louisiana Literature, Tar River Review, Poetry Motel, Footsteps, Earth’s Daughters, The Ledge, Slipstream, Comstock Review, Northwest Florida Review, Epicenter, and in the anthologies Off the Cuffs (Soft Skull Press), Touched by Eros (Live Poets Society), and North of Wakulla (Anhinga Press). She is the co-editor of Snakebird: Thirty Years of Anhinga Poets. She is the winner of the 1996 TWA Penumbra prize for poetry. She has exhibited her drawings, pottery, sculpture and computer images throughout the eastern United States.

ALICIA HOFFMAN recently completed an M.A. in Poetry from the SUNY Brockport. Her poems have appeared or are upcoming in journals such as Red Wheelbarrow, The Flask Review, Poetry Midwest, and Whimperbang. She also has the unique experience of having a poem of hers read aloud to unexpected visitors at an antique phone booth, dubbed the “Poetry Booth,” outside of the Writers & Books literary center in Rochester, NY.

JOHN HODGEN’s Grace (U of Pittsburgh, 2006) won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. His first book In My Father's House won the 1993 Bluestem Award, and his second, Bread Without Sorrow (Eastern Washington U P), won the 2002 Balcones Poetry Prize. Hodgen used to dig graves but now is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Assumption College in Worcester, MA, and reports that the jobs have some similarities.

SUSAN KELLY-DeWITT is the author of The Fortunate Islands (forthcoming, Marick Press, 2008). She teaches for University of California, Davis Extension and is an editor of Swan Scythe Press. This poem was based upon her own assignment to her poetry workshop: model a poem based upon/after W.S. Merwin’s poem “Air.”

WILLIAM HEYEN’s Shoah Train: Poems (Etruscan Press) was a Finalist for 2004’s National Book Award. Other recent books include Home: Autobiographies, Etc. and The Hummingbird Corporation: Stories (MAMMOTH Books). His Holocaust essay “Sunlight” recently appeared in American Poetry Review.

CAL FREEMAN poems have appeared in The Journal, Cimarron Review, The Cider Press Preview, The Minnesota Review, and are forthcoming in Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and Ninth Letter. He currently teaches Creative Writing at The University of Detroit Mercy.

JOHN ESTES is a doctoral student at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Dogwood, DIAGRAM, and The Notre Dame Review. His chapbook Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoon was recently released from Finishing Line P. Please visit his website www.johnestes.org.

DAVID CAZDEN is the author of one book of poems, Moving Picture (Word Press, 2005). His work has recently appeared in The Comstock Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and online in The Apple Valley Review. He was one of the presenting authors at the 2007 Southern Fesitval of Books in Nashville, Tennessee. He makes his home in Lexington, Kentucky.

LAURIE BYRO’s work has have appeared in The Literary Review, Single Parent, Aim, Chaminade Review, Grasslimb, Re:al Journal, The New Jersey Journal of Poets, Red Rock Review, Potpourri, and The Paterson Literary Review, among others.

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY is a Guggenheim fellow in poetry for 2007-2008. In 2008 his 15th & 16th books will appear: Modern History: Prose Poems 1987-2007 from Tupelo Press, and Rolling the Bones from Eastern Washington University Press.

WALTER BARGEN has published eleven books of poetry and two chapbooks. The latest are: The Feast (BkMk Press-UMKC, 2004), a series of prose poems, which won the 2005 William Rockhill Nelson Award; Remedies for Vertigo (WordTech Communications, 2006); and West of West (Timberline P, 2007). His poems have recently appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, New Letters, Poetry East, and the Seattle Review. Visit his web site at: www.walterbargen.com.

ISSUE 8/9

JONATHAN WEINERT received an MFA in Writing from Spalding University. His poems and reviews appear in, or are forthcoming from, American Letters & Commentary, Harvard Review, LIT, The Louisville Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, and Review Revue. His manuscript In the Mode of Disappearance was a semi-finalist for the 2006 Brittingham and Pollak Prizes, and a finalist for the 2006 Four Way Books Intro Prize.

THOM WARD is Editor at BOA Editions, Ltd. His poetry collections include Small Boat with Oars of Different Size and Various Orbits, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. He is quite fond of semi-colons, understands how question marks always rescue a line, chooses dashes on occasions calling for breadth. However, he is highly allergic to exclamation points (though his three children are not).

CINDY ST. JOHN is currently an MFA candidate at Western Michigan University, where she is also Assistant Editor of Third Coast.

MATT SMYTHE works at an advertising agency in upstate NY. When he’s not busy creating brochures, print ads, new product launch letters or writing radio scripts, he’s either teaching his three kids the finer points of getting their clothes dirty, or getting ready for the next season of outdoor hobbies.

Born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania in 1958, GERALD SCHWARTZ lives in West Irondequoit, New York. He is the author of Only Others Are: Poems (LEGIBLE P, 2003).

ROSA SALAZAR recently completed her MFA at Colorado State University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Matter, Punto de Partida, and Limestone. A native of Colorado’s San Luis Valley, she currently lives in Monte Vista.

STEVE MUESKE’s first full-length collection is A Mnemonic for Desire. He’s published poems recently in The Massachusetts Review, The Tusculum Review, and Best New Poets 2005. He can be reached at steve.mueske@gmail.com.

KEITH MONTESANO is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, 42opus, Pebble Lake Review, storySouth, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.

KARLA LINN MERRIFIELD holds a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing from SUNY Brockport. She has had poetry published in publications such as CALYX, The Kerf, Redactions, Texas Poetry Journal, Bluelines, Earth’s Daughters, Negative Capability, Paper Street, as well as in many anthologies, including Doorways: Families, Friends and Survivors of September 11th Reflect on Living with Loss and Beyond Katrina. She is also author of Midst (FootHills P, 2004). She is also a co-edior of The Dire Elegies: 59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America (FootHills P, 2006). She teaches writing at SUNY Brockport.

NATHAN McCLAIN’s poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Eleventh Muse, Pebble Lake Review, and Red River Review. He serves on the editorial staff for three candles journal. He currently lives and works in southern California with his wife and three children.

CLAY MATTHEWS has been published (or will be) in Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast , LIT, Backwards City Review, Spinning Jenny, Columbia Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. He is author of Muffler (H_NGM_N B_ _KS).

BETH MARZONI is a Ph.D. candidate at Western Michigan University where she is an assistant poetry editor for Third Coast and the layout editor for New Issues Poetry and Prose.

GEORGE LOONEY's third collection of poetry, The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels, won the 10th annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize and was published in 2005. He is chair of the BFA in creative writing program at Penn State Erie, where he is editor-in-chief of the literary journal Lake Effect and translation editor of Mid-American Review. In 2006 he was awarded a $10,000 poetry fellowship from the Pennsylvania Arts Council.

ALEX LEMON's first collection of poems, Mosquito, has just been published by Tin House Books. His poems have appeared in Tin House, AGNI, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Post Road, among a number of other journals. He is also a frequent reviewer for The Bloomsbury Review, and this spring will return as co-editor for LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. With Wang Ping, He has also published a number of translations of contemporary Chinese poets. In 2005, he was awarded a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2006 Minnesota State Arts Board Grant. His memoir is also forthcoming from Scribner.

GERRY LaFEMINA's latest collection is the split book: Figures from the BIG TIME CIRCUS BOOK/The Book of Clown Baby, in which these two prose poems appear. His other collections include The Parakeets of Brooklyn, The Window Facing Winter, Graffiti Heart and Zarathustra in Love. He teaches at Frostburg State University, where he directs the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing; directs the Controlled Burn seminar for Young Writers; and edits Review Revue, a jounral of reviews, prosody essays and interviews with poets.

SUSAN KELLY-DeWITT has six small press collections, most recently The Land, 2005, from Rattlesnake Press. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Windfall, Passages North, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. Awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Chicago Literary Award from Another Chicago Magazine and a recent Pushcart nomination.

LOUIS JENKINS will have a new book of prose poems, North of the Cities, published by Will o’ the Wisp Books, in May 2007.

JAMES SCOTT IREDELL lives in Atlanta and is fiction editor of Terminus Magazine. Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction appears, or will, in Descant, The Chattahoochee Review, Zone 3, and ISLE, among others. A film based on his short story, “Property of the Church,” premiered in New York in 2002.

RON HOUCHIN is a retired public school teacher. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Poetry Northwest, The Potamac Review, Poetry East, Poetry Ireland Review, Cooweescoowee, Kestrel, and Now & Then. He has had three poems posted on Verse Daily, and his third book of poems, Among Wordless Things, was awarded the Appalachian-Book-of-the-Year for 2005 by the AWA (Appalachian Writers’ Association).

JESSICA HARKINS is the recipient of the Norma Lowry Prize in Poetry at Washington University, and of second place prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Walter and Nancy Kidd Prize at the University of Oregon, judged by Dave Smith.

JAMES GRINWIS’ poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Cimarron Review, APR, New Orleans Review, Crazyhorse, Mudfish, Rhino, Artful Dodge, and many others. Since ’96, he has lived and worked in and near Amherst, Masssachusetts.

NATALIE GIARRATANO is an MFA poetry candidate at Western Michigan University. She also teaches part-time at Western and Davenport University, as well as creative writing classes at the Gospel Mission in Kalamazoo. She is an assistant poetry editor for Third Coast literary journal. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband and two four-legged friends.

JEANNINE HALL GAILEY is a Seattle-area writer whose first book of poetry, Becoming the Villainess, was recently published by Steel Toe Books. Poems from the book have appeared multiple times on NPR’s The Writers Almanac and Verse Daily. Her work has also appeared in The Iowa Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, and The Evansville Review. Her chapbook, Female Comic Book Superheroes, was published by Pudding House Press and is available at her web site, www.webbish6.com.

MICHAELA A. GABRIEL lives in Vienna, Austria, where she assists adults in acquiring computer and English skills, and gets together with the muse as often as possible. She has been published in English, German, Italian, and Polish. Her first chapbook was apples for adam (FootHills P, 2005). When she is not writing, she is reading, listening to music, watching movies, blogging, communicating with friends, playing tennis or travelling — frequently several of these at the same time.

JASON FRALEY works at an investment firm in West Virginia and is pursing his M.B.A. His wife and cat see him occasionally. He has appeared or is forthcoming in Redactions, Confluence, Words on Walls, Pebble Lake Review, Stirring, The Salt River Review, and elsewhere.

KELLY FERRIS is a third year MFA student in Dance Choreography and Performance at SUNY Brockport focusing her studies on the collaboration among the arts.

SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY is the author of eight books of poems and prose including the forthcoming Broken Hallelujahs (Boa Editions, 2007), the experimental novella The Blue City (Marick Press, 2008) and Nightshift Belonging to Lorca (Mammoth Books, 2004), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. His awards include a PA Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a Penn State Junior Faculty Fellowship in Non-Fiction. He teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at Penn State Erie.

JENNIFER DEMPSEY is an undergraduate student double majoring in creative writing and women’s studies at Western Michigan University. When not writing or studying, she works as an editorial assistant at Third Coast literary journal, a writing consultant at WMU’s Writing Center, and a Writing Studio teacher for WMU’s Basic Composition course. She will be pursuing her MFA in poetry upon graduation in one year.

LINDSAY D’ANDREA is currently a senior at Shawnee High School in South Jersey and has only recently begun to scratch her way into the world of publishing. In the summer of 2006, Lindsay attended the New Jersey Governor’s School for Creative Writing with eleven other fantastic adolescent writers. She also serves as the editor of her school’s literary magazine. Lindsay’s work has also been published in Chantarelle’s Notebook.

J. P. DANCING BEAR’s first book of poems is Billy Last Crow (Turning Point Books, 2004). His second book of poems, Conflicted Light, will be published in 2007 by Salmon Poetry. His chapbook, Gacela of Narcissus City, was a finalist in the Main Street Rag chapbook prize and will be published in 2007. He is the host of “Out of Our Minds” a weekly poetry program on public radio station KKUP, the editor of The American Poetry Journal and the independent literary press, Dream Horse Press. His poems have appeared in the National Poetry Review, Shenandoah , Mississippi Review, and New Orleans Review.

TIMOTHY BRADFORD’s poetry and other writings have appeared in Bombay Gin, Diagram, Eclectica, Forward, H_NGM_N, JBooks, Mudlark, No Tell Motel, Poems & Plays, Runes, and Terminus, among others. He is the author of the introduction to Sadhus, a photography book on the ascetics of South Asia published by Cuerpos Pintados in 2003, and he received the Koret Foundation’s Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award for 2004-2005 for his novella-in-progress, based on the history of the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris. In the fall of 2005, he was a writer-in-residence and visiting lecturer at Stanford University.

LISA BOWER’s work has appeared or is forthcoming from such journals as The Southern Review, The Florida Review, The Mississippi Review, and Ellipsis.

AGATHA BEINS received her MFA from Eastern Washington University and is currently a PhD student at Rutgers University. You can find her work in Pebble Lake Review and The Laurel Review.

TRICIA ASKLAR is a native of Erie, Pennsylvania, and has lived in Florida, Indiana, and Massachusetts. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She currently lives in Rochester, New York, and works as a writer, a writing tutor at Monroe Community College, and an instructor at Nazareth College.

AARON ANSTETT’s second collection, No Accident, received the 2005 Balcones Poetry Prize. A new collection, Each Place the Body’s, is forthcoming from Ghost Road Press.

MAUREEN ALSOP’s poems have appeared or are pending in various publications including 88, MARGIE, Typo, Arsenic Lobster, Texas Review, and other publications. She was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

NEIL AITKEN is a former computer games programmer currently completing an MFA at the University of California, Riverside. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Avatar Review, RHINO, Washington Square, Diagram, and numerous other publications. This batch of poems comes from a new project which draws on my experiences as a programmer.

KELLI RUSSELL AGODON is the author of two books of poems, Small Knots (2004) and Geography, winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. She was the editor of the poetry broadside series: The Making of Peace. Visit her website at: www.agodon.com.

ISSUE 6/7

JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON is the author of three collections of poetry: A Ghost as King of the Rabbits (New Michigan P), Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005), and Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk (winner of the 2005 Iowa Poetry Prize and due out spring 2006.) Other work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Fourteen Hills, Typo, Burnside Review, DIAGRAM, Perihelion, Pontoon, Tarpaulin Sky, The Strange Fruit, Double Room, Bird Dog, and elsewhere. He makes his home in Denver where he is completing his first film and pursuing a doctorate in creative writing.

VIRGINIA CHASE SUTTON's Embellishments was published in 2003 by Chatoyant. Her poems have appeared in: Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Witness, Quarterly West, Bellevue Literary Review, Spoon River Review, Poet Lore, and many others. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times, and has won the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, National Poet Hunt, Writers at Work, Paumanock Visiting Writers Poetry Award, and others, and she has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, Walt Whitman Award, Morse Prize, Brittingham Prize, Carnegie Mellon Reading Series, Akron Prize, Ohio/Journal Award, and many others.

EDWARD SCHELB has published numerous poems and critical essays on poetry. Recently he finished a full-length study of the poetry and art criticism of John Yau. He lives in Rochester, New York.

C. J. SAGE edits The National Poetry Review and teaches at Hartnell and De Anza Colleges. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, The Antioch Review, The Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review, and others. “XXVI. An Odysseaic Parable” is from her booklength terza rima Odyssea, which is forthcoming from Turning Point Books. Previous books are And We The Creatures and Let’s Not Sleep.

MICHAEL ROBIN's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Cranky, eye-rhyme, Boston Review, Octopus, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and elsewhere. He is a contributing editor (still) at Born Magazine. Robins lives in Chicago.

LIZ ROBBINS poems have appeared in The South Carolina Review, Rhino, Cairn, The National Poetry Review, Kalliope, Calyx, and The William and Mary Review, and are forthcoming in Iris and Del Sol Review. Her manuscript, Opening, was a finalist for the Perugia P First Book prize and the 2004 Winnow P First Book Prize, and she has been the recipient of the Florida First Coast Poetry Award, judged by Robert Bly, as well as a nominee for Best New Poets 2005.

MELISSA RHOADES currently maintains in Spokane, WA, where, among other things, she actually enjoys writing Web copy (otherwise known as whoring for health insurance). She also pleases herself by teaching creative writing through the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. Her own writing has been published in various small and upcoming journals, and her poem “Dutch East India Company” (which appeared in Redactions issue 1) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2003.

DANIEL PINKERTON is enrolled in the MFA program at Penn State University. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Terminus, Redivider, Indiana Review, and Minnesota Review, while reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in American Literary Review, Shenandoah, The Chattahoochee Review, and Pleiades. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize and an AWP Intro Journals award.

ALEX PHILLIPS lives in Hadley, Massachusetts. He teaches creative writing at UMass Amherst, is the co-founder of a residential writing program for freshmen, and directs the Juniper Institute for Young Writers.

ABBY MILLAGER is currently holed up in Delaware trying to remember how to write while home schooling two reluctant children, running back and forth to the UD skating rink and attempting to explain to her thirteen-year old son why, if you find a gun, you should just leave it in place.

JENNIFER MERRRIFIELD's poetry has most recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Sycamore Review, Minima, and the anthology Wild Sweet Notes II: More Great Poetry from West Virginia. She is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University.

KARLA LINN MERRIFIELD's poems appear, or are forthcoming, in CALYX, The Kerf, Blueline: A Literary Magazine Dedicated to the Sprit of the Adirondacks, Earth’s Daughters, Negative Capability, Paper Street, and Boatman’s Quarterly Review. A collection of poems, Midst, was released in 2004 from Foothills Publishing. She is currently editing an anthology on endangered species for Foothills to be released in concert with Earth Day 2006. She teaches writing at SUNY Brockport each fall and travels widely in North America the remaining months of the year.

NORA McCREA was raised primarily in Eugene, Oregon. Following her BA in English, she spent a year in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, learning to teach ESL and dodge train inspectors. A spoken word performer and former vocalist, her fiction and essays have appeared in 2GQ and Eratica, among others. She was the founder and editor of In Her Own Image, a literary magazine. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches in the Portland Public Schools.

TOD MARSHALL lives in Spokane, Washington. He is the author of Dare Say (winner of the 2002 University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series).

DAWN LONSINGER recently completed the MFA program at Cornell University, and her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Smartish Pace, The Crab Orchard Review, and Verse Daily. She is the recipient of a Corson-Bishop Prize, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, the inaugural Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, and she received honorable mention in The Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest. She has not been recorded by medical science.

JESSICA LINDBERG lives in Rome, Georgia, where she parcels out creative energy to writing poems and raising boys. She is a candidate in the MFA program at Georgia State University.

GEORGE KALAMARAS is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990. He is the author of five collections of poetry: Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair (Quale P, 2004), Borders My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw P, 2003), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (Four Way Books, 2000), which won the Four Way Books Intro Series, chosen by Michael Burkard. He has also published poems in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 1997, American Letters & Commentary, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, New Letters, Sulfur, and TriQuarterly. He is a recipient of Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993) and the Indiana Arts Commission (2001), and he received first prize in the 1998 Abiko Quarterly International Poetry Prize (Japan).

MARCIA L. HURLOW's poems were recently published, or are forthcoming, in Stand, English Journal, Poet Lore, Nimrod, Poetry East, Chiron Review, Rattle, Karamu, and American Literary Review. Her first full-length book, Anomie, won the Edges prize and was published in 2004 by CustomWords.

STEVEN HUFF's first book of poems, The Water We Came From, was released in 2003. His chapbook Proof, was named Editor’s Choice in the Two Rivers Review Chapbook Competition. A story collection will appear this year from Lake Affect Publishers. He teaches writing at Rochester Institute of Technology.

BOB HICOK nts nthin bu go fr al of humknd.

WILLIAM HEYEN's Crazy Horse in Stillness won 1997’s Small Press Book Award for Poetry. Shoah Train: Poems was a Finalist for the 2004 National Book Award.

KAREN HEAD is the author of Shadow Boxes (All Nations P) and her poetry appears in a number of journals including Prairie Schooner, the Women’s Review of Books, and The Southeast Review. She is the Writing Program Coordinator in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech.

NATE HALDEMAN is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Bowling Green State University, where he is also assistant editor for Mid-American Review. His life consists of writing and white-water rafting. (Not always in that order.) During the summer season He can be found in the rivers and canyons of the great Southwest. He does not smoke crack.

JAMES GRABILL’s recent books are a collection of personal essays, Finding the Top of the Sky (Lost Horse P, 2005), and a new book of poems, October Wind (Sage Hill P, 2006). Previous books include four from Lynx House Press. He lives, worries, and works in Portland, Oregon.

JEANNINE HALL GAILEY is a Seattle-area journalist whose first book, Becoming the Villainess, will be published by Steel Toe Books in early summer 2006. She has recently published poems in The Iowa Review, 32 Poems, The Columbia Poetry Review, and Verse Daily (http://www.versedaily.org/). Her chapbook, Female Comic Book Superheroes, is available from Pudding House P.

JOHN ERHARDT is a freelance writer living outside Rochester, NY. He’s the Managing Editor for BaseballProspectus.com, and writes monthly for the New York Sun.

C. S. CARRIER's poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Shampoo, 580 Split, and Word For/Word,, to name a few. (Let’s not forget Redactions, too.) Poems are forthcoming in La Petite Zine and the tiny. A chapbook, The 16’s, is forthcoming from Katalanche P. He lives in Amherst/Northampton, MA, and professes adjunctly at the University of Hartford.

ROB CARNEY's first book, Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts (Pinyon, 2003), won the 2004 Utah Book Award for Poetry. He has published two chapbooks: New Fables, Old Songs (Dream Horse P, 2003) and This Is One Sexy Planet (winner of the 2005 Annual Frank Cat Press Poetry Chapbook Competition). His poems, short-shorts, and a full-length play are forthcoming in Flash Fiction Forward (Norton, 2006) and journals such as Atlanta Review, Rainbow Curve, The Oregon Literary Review, and others. His second book of poems, Weather Report, will be published by Somondoca P in spring/summer 2006. You may write to Rob at carneyro@uvsc.edu.

THOM CARAWAY received his MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University in 2004. He lives in Grand Forks, ND, with his wife and daughter, and was the 2005 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Thomas McGrath Prize for Poetry. He is the founder and publisher of Sage Hill Press, and is currently working on a translation of Paul Eluard’s Poesie Ininterromopue.

LAURIE BYRO's short stories and poetry have appeared in a dozen or so small presses. Additionally, her work has been published in The Literary Review, Single Parent, Aim, Chaminade Review, Grasslimb, Re:al Journal, The New Jersey Journal of Poets, The Red Rock Review, Potpourri, The Paterson Literary Review, and others. Her work has been twice nominated for The Pushcart Prize. In the October 2005 issue of the Journal American Libraries Lee Memorial library (where Laurie is head of circulation) was cited as one of the top ten public libraries. Laurie lives in New Jersey where she facilitates a poetry circle.

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY's poem in this issue of Redactions is from his 14th book of poetry, And the Sea, out any day from The Sheep Meadow P. Most recently, he has edited Homage to Vallejo from Greenhouse Review P (2006) and, with Alexander Long, A Condition of the Spirit: On the Life & Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington Univeristy P, 2004). EWU P will also publish Buckley’s second book of creative nonfiction, Sleep Walk, in April 2006. Buckley teaches in the creative writing department at the Univeristy of California Riverside.

KURT BROWN is the editor of Drive, They Said: Poems about Americans and Their Cars (1994) and Verse & Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics (1998) both from Milkweed Editions. He is also co-editor, with his wife, of Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants, and Bars (1997) also from Milkweed Editions. In addition, he has edited three books of lectures delivered at writers’ conferences across America: The True Subject (Graywolf P, 1993), Writing It Down for James (Beacon P, 1995), and Facing the Lion (Beacon P, 1996). A fourth collection of essays, The Measured Word: On Poetry and Science, appeared from University of Georgia P in 2001. His own first collection of poems, Return of the Prodigals, appeared from Four Way Books in 1999. A second collection, More Things in Heaven and Earth, was published by Four Way Books in 2002. A third collection, Fables from the Ark, won the 2003 CustomWords Prize, and was published by WordTech, and a fourth, Future Ship, will appear from Story Line P in 2006. He is also the author of five award-winning chapbooks of poetry published by various presses, and he was Bruce McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia.

DAN BOWMAN grew up in Mohawk, New York, and studied English at Roberts Wesleyan College and the University of Cincinnati. His work has recently appeared in Seneca Review, The Adirondack Review, The Bitter Oleander, The Midwest Quarterly, and Words on Walls Literary Fresco. He lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife Beth and daughter Una. He loves baseball, Bogart, and big band music.

J. P. DANCING BEAR is the author of Billy Last Crow (Turning Point, 2004). He has recently published poetry in Shenandoah, Poetry International, New Orleans Review, National Poetry Review, Marlboro Review, Mississippi Review, International Poetry Review, and many others. He is the editor of the American Poetry Journal, and the host of “Out of Our Minds,” a weekly poetry program on public radio station KKUP. His next book of poems, Conflicted Light, will be published by Salmon P.

WALTER BARGEN recently had poems appear in the Iowa Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Blue Mesa, and Seattle Review. His most recent books are The Body of Water (Timberline P, 2003) and The Feast (BkMk Press-UMKC, 2004). (You can see a review of The Feast in Redactions issue 4/5.)

ROBYN “Red-Actions Pinko” ART is the author of three chapbooks: Degrees of Being There (Boneworld P, 2003), No Longer A Blonde (Boneworld P, 2006) and Vestigial Portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Dancing Girl P, June 2006.) Her recent poems have appeared in Slope, The Hat, Conduit, Slipstream, Gulf Coast, The New Delta Review, Rhino, The Cream City Review, and canwehaveourballback.com. She’s the author of the poetry manuscript, The Stunt Double In Winter, which was selected as a Finalist for the 2004 Kore Press First Book Award and the 2005 Sawtooth Poetry Prize.

ISSUE 4/5

GARY YOUNG teaches a book arts class to high school kids, and the past couple of weeks the class has been filled with hysterical teenagers trying desperately to complete their projects. He has been wedded to the printing press, but in one more week school will be out. If he can somehow bribe his five-year-old to keep the racket down, maybe he can sleep past 8:00 some morning.

LESLIE WORTMAN’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Plainsongs, Smartish Pace, Main Street Rag, GSU Review, and others. She is an MFA candidate at Georgia State University, where she teaches composition and creative writing.

JOHN WHALEN has been published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Hollins Critic, Willow Springs, CutBank, Lyric, Talking River Review, and the Greensboro Review. His first book, Caliban, was published in 2002 by Lost Horse P.

LAURA SOLOMON grew up in Alabama and Georgia. She is the author of a book of poetry, Bivouac (Slope Editions, 2002), and currently edits poetry for the online journal castagraf.

JEN REID likes herself. She spends her time wearing a blue pashmina and twirling a parasol while smiling coyly over hydrangeas. She feels no regret for imagining the death of pigeons (by twist of neck) who get too near her while she sun bathes on her balcony. In her former life, she was a persecuted Incan sentenced to the bottom of a porcelian pit with her lover as crowned men in red robes held forks in their hands yelling “spear them.” Now she spends her time in Spokane, a life not much different. In her next life, she’s coming back as a monolith in the Pacific Ocean that wears bangs and a houndstooth coat.

CHRISTINE POTTER lives in Rockland County with her organist/choir director husband Ken and two very spoiled half-Siamese cats, Desmond and Molly Jones. She is also a bellringer who rudely awakens the East Bronx to English-style change-chiming and hymn tunes every Sunday morning from the tower of St. Peter’s, Westchester Square. Christine is head moderator at The Alsop Review’s Gazebo, and has been published recently in Full Circle, Eclectica, and Snakeskin.

CORY McCLELLAN was born and raised in Casa Grande (the big house) Arizona, but managed to escape. After receiving his MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he has spent most of his time wandering the old west solving problems with kung fu.

ERIKA MEITNER's first book of poems, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (Anhinga P, 2003), won the 2002 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in: The Southern Review, Slate, Prairie Schooner, and Barrow Street. She is currently the Morgenstern Fellow in Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia, and a member of the Virginia Quarterly Review’s poetry board.

AMY McCANN lives in the Inland Northwest. You can find her poems in Puerto del Sol, New Letters, The Laurel Review, and Third Coast.

LARY KLEEMAN has had poems published in Poet Lore, Whiskey Island Magazine, Kinesis, and most recently in Elixir and Xantippe. In 2002, he was the recipient of a Colorado Council of the Arts Artist Fellowship in Poetry. For the last twelve years he has taught high school English following a stint in the Peace Corps in Estonia.

JOHN ISLES lives in Alameda, California and works as a teacher. His first book, Ark (U Iowa P, 2003), recently came out from the university of Iowa’s Kuhl House Poets series. Just recently, Isles received a grant from the NEA. “New World Narratives” first appeared in Ark.

SANDRA HOSKING is a journalist and playwright. Her work has appeared in various periodicals and in anthologies. Her plays, such as Romeo & Juliet: Part II, Jacob’s Shoe, Bemused, and Detention, have been produced in New York City, Los Angeles, Canada, and elsewhere.

WILLIAM HEYEN’s book of 30+ years of essays, Home: Autobiographies, Etc., has appeared from MAMMOTH Books, and a small book called Brockport Sunflowers has been published by that village’s 175th Anniversary Committee. Carnegie-Mellon has just issued his first book, Depth of Field (Louisiana State UP, 1970) in its Classic Contemporaries Series.

COREY GREEN has decided he couldn’t make it on a desert island if he were surrounded by reality TV contestants and that everything seems narrowable to sex, yes even his mother. He is lucky at his ripe, young age to have been Pushcart nominated and to have been published in Poetry Motel, Diner, and storySouth.

JASON FRALEY is a senior at Concord College in West Virginia. A loving fiancée and oversized Pez collection play important roles in his days. His first chapbook of poetry, The Arche of Existentialism, is available through Little Poems Press. Featured poet in the September 2003 issue of SaucyVox, his poetry has appeared in Verse Libre Quarterly, Carnelian, The Journal, Poindexter, Poems Niederngasse, and others.

ERIC FLATO will graduate in fall of 2005 with a bachelors Degree in English Lit from Idaho State University in the time it takes most humanoids to become medical doctors. He broke a mirror over his back last summer resulting in a scar that resembles a smile. The kiss, he thinks, remains the most underrated of all physical movements.

JEFFREY ENCKE’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Cream City Review, Octopus Magazine, Quarterly West, Salt Hill, and 3rd Bed, among others. Encke has taught creative writing and literary criticism at both the Richard Hugo House in Seattle and Columbia University in New York, where he earned a PhD in English in 2003.

PAUL DICKEY has poems in, or forthcoming in, The Concho River Review, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Wild Strawberries, Rattle, Kansas Quarterly, Nimrod, Quartet, Poet Lore, and Karamu. Also, poems and micro-fiction are online at several e-zines, including ForPoetry.com, 2River View, and Avatar Review. Further biographical information and additional notes on previous publishing activity can be found at http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/dickey.htm.

SUSAN DENNING has poems forthcoming online at In Posse Review, and her work has also appeared in: Seattle Review, Literal Latte, Clackamas Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and edits the online magazine Caffeine Destiny, is married and has two children and two dogs.

J.P. DANCING BEAR’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Shenandoah, Poetry International, New Orleans Review, National Poetry Review, Poetry East, and many others. He is the editor of The American Poetry Journal and the host of “Out of Our Minds,” a weekly poetry program on public radio station KKUP. His latest book of poems is Billy Last Crow (Turning Point, 2004). “Resolution” is a translation of Blanca Castellón’s poem “Resolucion.”

LINDA COOPER is a recent graduate from Eastern Washington University’s Creative Writing MFA Program. She spends summers as a Park Ranger in North Cascades National Park. Cooper also enjoys watching wildlife (even bugs) and reading about them in field guides. She thinks “Ponderous Borer” is a super cool name for a beetle.

CHRISTOPHER CITRO’s first chapbook of poems, Orbiting The Sundress: Prospero’s Pocket Poets Volume 2, Issue 6, was recently released by Unholy Day P in Kansas City. He has poems forthcoming in Poetry Motel and Illya’s Honey. With a BA in Philosophy, he is a full-time temp worker residing in elegant squalor in Lawrence, Kansas.

ROB CARNEY had two Pushcart nominations in 2004. “The Mother of the Mountains” will be the culminating poem in his forthcoming chapbook This Is One Sexy Planet, winner of The Frank Cat Press Annual Chapbook Competition. Carney is a tenured professor at Utah Valley State College and is a past recipient of a Utah Arts Council Grant and the Utah Book Award for Poetry.

POLLY BUCKINGHAM has poetry and fiction published or forthcoming in Hubbub, Exquisite Corpse, Kalliope, and elsewhere. Additionally, her story “Night Train” was nominated by the Tampa Review for a Pushcart Prize (Oct. 2003) and another story is the recipient of the Editors’ Choice Award for Heliotrope #7 (Jan. 2004). She has received grants from the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts and Oregon Literary Arts for fiction. Buckingham is also the editor of StringTown, a Northwest magazine of creative writing, and of StringTown Press. She is a full-time lecturer teaching writing and literature at Eastern Washington University.

DANEEN BERGLAND is currently a graduate student in the Creative Writing Program at Portland State University in Oregon and a reader for the literary journal, The Portland Review. Prior to this she worked for ten years as a social worker.

Assuming AGATHA BEINS passes her thesis defense, she will receive an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University and then move to New Jersey to attend a PhD program in women’s studies at Rutgers. She is the fortunate co-editor of the anthology Women’s Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics, and she hopes someday to have a garden in a backyard and a compost pile.

WALTER BARGEN has published eleven books of poetry. The two most recent are, The Body of Water (Timberline P, 2003), and The Feast (BkMk Press-UMKC, 2004). Recent poems have appeared in the Iowa Review, Boulevard, Beloit Poetry Journal, Notre Dame Review, and New Letters. He was the winner of the Chester H. Jones Foundation prize in 1997 and received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in 1991. And very recently, Bargen’s manuscript, Remedies for Vertigo, was accepted by WordTech Communications and is scheduled for publication in fall of 2006.

Also SOUL RESPONSES from: Matthew J. Zapruder, Natasha Sajé, Liz Robbins, Abby Millager, Jennifer Merrifield, Erika Meitner, David Lenson, Gerry LaFemina, Bob Hicok, Denise Duhamel, Stephanie Dickinson, Richard Deming, Christopher Buckley, & Kim Addonizio.

MONIQUE VAN DEN BERG lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has an MFA in Poetics & Writing from New College of California, and she works in advertising. Her work has been published here and there, including The Café Review, Nerve Cowboy,, and Terminus. Her writing can be found at mopie.com.

BRUCE SWEET’s writing has appeared in numerous magazines and journals. Three of his volumes of poetry have just been published: This Is a Good Thing (Pudding House Publications), Archaeology, and A Dream of Animals (both by Foothills Publishing), November 2003. He teaches writing at Roberts Wesleyan College, and his “What’s the Word?” program celebrating local, national, and international poets, can be heard on NPR station WXXI in Rochester, NY.

LAURA STOTT is currently an MFA candidate at Eastern Washington University. When she finishes, she plans on traveling the world and moving to mountains to make homes for her poems and ceramic sculptures, a journal of literature in art. She is managing editor of Willow Springs. Publications also include Quarterly West and Weber Studies.

KATHRYN E. SMITH is an MFA student at Eastern Washington University and Assistant Managing Editor of Willow Springs. While she’s not writing poetry, she can be found on the karaoke circuit, where she performs using her stage name, Kitty Soleil.

LIZ ROBBINS is a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia State University and teaches poetry at Flagler College. Her poems are forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Calyx, So to Speak, and The National Poetry Review.

CARLOS REYES is a long-time noted Portland poet, writer, and translator. His most recent book of poetry is A Suitcase Full of Crows (1995), and he has collection of poetry, At the Edge of the Western Wave, forthcoming in Spring 2004 from Lost Horse P. He also has books of translations: Poemas de la Isla/Island Poems by Josefina de la Torre (EWU P, 2000); Puertas abiertas/Open Doors by Edwin Madrid (2000), Hojas sueltas/Scattered Leaves by Josefina de la Torre (2002), and Páginas de arena/Pages of Sand by Selena Millares (2003). Open Doors has been translated into Arabic and this year was published in Baharain. Reyes has also completed translating the Obra poética completa (Complete Poetic Works) of the Ecuadorean poet Jorge Carrera Andrade, which will be published this year in a bilingual edition in Ecuador.

JEN REID has bought panty powder and knows what to do with it. This alone should distinguish her among the upper echelon of female poets currently writing in the United States of America. She also likes lawn bowling, when available, despite the fact that she is particularly drawn to snowy climes and single malt scotch. “Take up golfing,” you say. “Stuff your head,” Jennifer says. “Get your poetry on or get the hell out,” she can often be heard saying on Sunday mornings from her porch while screaming at the neighbors wearing her dusty ladybug bathrobe with a fresh Highball in her hand. She has also published in several reputable magazines from the greater Niagara Falls area.

STEVE MUESKEreceived a MFA in Writing from Hamline University, and has had poems recently published in Poet Lore, the Wisconsin Review, 88, and others. He has an unhealthy addiction to chess and can be heard swearing at his cyber opponents in the wee hours of the morning. He edits the literary arts journal three candles, and is a moderator for the poetry workshop at Haven.

CORY McCLELLAN was born and raised in Casa Grande, Arizona. But he managed to escape. He is currently in his final year in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After graduation he plans to travel, make wishes at fountains, sing in the shower, and chase a roadrunner until he gets too dizzy and has to lie down.

FRAN MARKOVER lives in Ithaca, NY, where she has two practices—her work as psychotherapist and as poet. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in, JAMA, Poetica, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, SOULSPEAK, and Möbius Poetry Magazine. Recent awards include a residency at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, a Community Arts Partnership grant, and an Anna Davidson Rosenberg award for emerging poet.

STEPHEN GARY LINDOW will receive his MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2004. His works has appeared in Old Crow Review. He is currently editing his Vietnam journal for publication and will lead an urban exploration team into a large storm drain. He is seeking a painter or photographer for a collaborative art/poetry project.

GERRY LaFEMINA’s newest books are Graffiti Heart (2003 Mammoth Books, winner of the Anthony Piccione Prize in Poetry) and The Window Facing Winter (2004 New Issues P). A new book, The Parakeets of Brooklyn received the 2003 Bordighera Prize and will be released next year in a bi-lingual edition. For the spring of 2004 he is Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Frostburg State University.

ROBERT KRUT’s work has appeared in Barrow Street, Salt Hill, the Mid-American Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others.

JONATHAN JOHNSON’s poems, stories, and critical essays are forthcoming or have appeared in Best American Poetry 1996, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and many other journals. His first collection of poems, Mastodon, 80% Complete, was published in 2001 by Carnegie Mellon U P, and his nonfiction book, Hannah and the Mountain: Notes Toward a Wilderness Fatherhood, will be published in 2005 by the U of Nebraska P in their American Lives series.

As he types this bio-biblio note in the 3rd person, WILLIAM HEYEN decides to console himself with the news that now, thanks to his retirement, he is catching up with himself: Shoah Train: Poems has recently appeared from Etruscan P; The Rope: Poems and The Hummingbird Corporation: Stories have just appeared from MAMMOTH Books; a book of 30 years of essays, Home: Autobiographies, Etc., will be out from MAMMOTH before Redactions 3 is born, and Titanic & Iceberg: Early Essays & Reviews will follow soon after from that same perspicacious and faithful publisher. He’s finished another book of poems called The Confessions of Doc Williams; he’s drafted another book-length poem…. And he’s going to expand Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry (BOA, 1998) over the next few years into Collected Pig Notes: Prose on Poetry, which will include the four pieces here. So what, he says to himself derisively. It’s keeping you out of trouble, off the streets, all this industry, his self answers him. Thus this paragraph, e.g. Almost, but not quite, pig-notian. . . . He lives in Brockport, New York.

Lynx House P recently published JAMES GRABILL’s new book of poems, An Indigo Scent after the Rain. His work has appeared in Willow Springs, Poetry Northwest, The Common Review, The Prose Poem, and many other journals. In the spring of 2004, Lost Horse P will release Grabill’s second book of essays, Finding the Top of the Sky.

PATRICIA GOEDICKE took her first motorcycle ride, on a rebuilt Indian piloted by owner and builder Fred Haefele, on her 70th birthday. She is the author of 12 books of poetry, the most recent of which, As Earth Begins to End, was recognized by the American Library Association as one of the top ten poetry books published in the year 2000. She has been teaching poetry at the University of Montana for many years now, and currently teaches one graduate workshop a year in its Creative Writing Program. She is the recipient of many awards for her poetry, among them a Rockefeller Residency at its Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio. Recent and forthcoming work may be seen in The Hudson Review, The Yale Review, The Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Volt, and many others.

ERIC FLATO is an undergraduate studying English at Idaho State University. This is his first publication. He likes complicated handshakes and melting snow, often at the same time.

TRAVIS WAYNE DENTON spends most of his time as the managing editor of Terminus magazine, writing, skydiving and playing drums. His poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Rattle, Cimarron Review, Tar River Poetry, The Southeast Review, Slipstream, Slant, Blue Mesa Review, and others.

J.P. DANCING BEAR’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Verse Daily, Atlanta Review, Seattle Review, Poetry International, The National Poetry Review, Evansville Review, and many others. He is the editor of The American Poetry Journal and host of “Out of Our Minds” a weekly poetry program on public radio KKUP. In 2004, Turning Point P will release his full-length collection, Billy Last Crow.

YAGO CURA was born in Brooklyn, but raised in Miami. His parents and wife have continuously fed and fostered his abilities as a syntax merc. He protagonizes nickel-and-dime as an adjunct lecturer at Kingsborough Community College/ C.U.N.Y. in Sheepsheads Bay, Brooklyn. He lives on the Upper West Side and is currently looking for a workshop to haranguetang.

BETH COOLEY has poems published or forthcoming in Poet Lore, Roanoke Review, Mid-American Review, Crab Creek Review, Santa Clara Review, Talking River Review, and others. Her novel, Ostrich Eye, is forthcoming from Delacorte Press in January. She teaches at Gonzaga University.

ROB CARNEY’s writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, from journals such as Northwest Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, and many others. His collection New Fables, Old Songs won the 2002 Dream Horse Press National Chapbook Award, and his collection Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts, winner of the Pinyon Press Poetry Book Prize, was published in August 2003. He is a 2003-04 Utah Arts Council Grant Recipient for poetry and a tenured professor of English and Literature at Utah Valley State College. He lives in Salt Lake City.

POLLY BUCKINGHAM has had poetry and fiction published or forthcoming in Hubbub, Exquisite Corpse, Kalliope, and elsewhere. Additionally, her story “Night Train” has been nominated by the Tampa Review for a Pushcart Prize (Oct. 2003) and another story is the recipient of the Editors’ Choice Award for Heliotrope #7 (Jan. 2004). She has received grants from the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts and Oregon Literary Arts for fiction. She is the editor of StringTown, a Northwest magazine of creative writing, and of StringTown Press. She is a full time lecturer teaching writing and literature at Eastern Washington University.

A Libra with a Gemini rising sign, MICHELLE BONCZEK is a writer, photographer (and responsible for the cover photo), cook, and teacher in Spokane, WA. She is a co-founder and co-editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. She loves the smell of coconut, the color of buttercups, and soft, cute, furry things. On February 6th, the day of her best girlfriend’s birthday, Michelle found out her poetry had been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and a photograph of her shaking hands with and handing a copy of Redactions to Dennis Kucinich appeared on the cover of the local newspaper. This was a good day.

J.W. ASHBERY is a creative writing student at SUNY Brockport. His short fiction has appeared in Just Buffalo, Imprint Journal, and Thirteen Stories.

ROBYN ART was born in Boston in 1974, attended Colby College where she was an NCAA Division III All-East runner in XC and the 300 meters, and she lived in Portland, Oregon, for four years. She moved to Brooklyn several years ago to attend the Creative Writing program at NYU and now teaches at Jersey City University. Her poems have appeared in Slope, The Hat, Terminus, Conduit, The New Delta Review, Slant, The Cream City Review, and others, and she is the author of Degrees of Being There, a chapbook from BoneWorld P. She has received a couple of Pushcart nominations and Finalist honors in 2003, as well as grants from the Academy of American Poets and the Vermont Studio Center.

ANTLER, Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, is author of Selected Poems (Soft Skull P, 2000). His poems have also appeared in the anthologies: Poets Against the War; Reclaiming the Heartland: Lesbian & Gay Voices from the Midwest; American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century; and September 11th, 2001: American Writers Respond.

LIBBY WAGNER was born in Madrid, Spain, and spent most of her youth moving around the U.S. with her military family. In her later years, she has waited tables, worked on volunteer planting crews in the Northwest back country, and sold better sportswear at Lord & Taylor. Currently, she teaches writing, hiking, and women's studies at Peninsula College. Her first book of poems, Like This, Like That (Lost Horse P) was published in 2002.

MATT SMYTHE lives in northern Virginia with his wife and two children. He is currently finishing his M.A. in Literature at George Mason University and has just recently finished his thesis, a book length poem in 52 sections, titled All Water.

KATHRYN E. SMITH was born and raised in Port Angeles, Washington. She currently lives in Spokane, Washington, where she is working towards an MFA in creative writing at Eastern Washington University. This is her first honest-to-gosh publication.

ROBERT SCHECHTER has had poems and translations in Light Quarterly, Leviathan Quarterly (UK), Artemis Journal, The Providence Review, Poetry East, Thames Poetry, and Ironwood. He has a forthcoming e-book of translations to be published by The New Formalist.

EVE RIFKAH is the co-founder and artistic director of Poetry Oasis, Inc., a not-for-profit poetry organization and co-editor of Diner. Poems and/or essays have appeared in The MacGuffin, Porcupine Press, The Worcester Review, California Quarterly, Jabberwock Review, Southern New Hampshire Literary Journal, and others. Her chapbook Zodiac of the Misbegotten was a finalist in the Portlandia and the Main Street Rag chapbook contests. She earned an MFA from Vermont College.

CHAD PREVOST is a faculty editor at the Chattahoochee Review and Co-Managing Editor of Terminus: A Magazine of the Arts. He has a chapbook length collection of poetry currently in print in Blackbox Recorder, and a collection of poetry and a work of fiction and non-fiction forthcoming in Abbeywood Press Anthologies 1 and 2. He has other work in print or forthcoming in: Cimarron Review, Confluence, Connecticut Review, Controlled Burn, Illya's Honey, Louisiana Literature, Pearl, Pinyon Poetry, The Seattle Review, The Tulane Review, West Wind Review, Westview, and Wisconsin Review.

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE lives in old downtown San Antonio a block from the river. Her family has a basketball court in their backyard. All the city was a-flutter with GO SPURS GO! signs during the playoffs, and she did not miss watching a single game. A SPURS shrine stayed lit on the dining room table. After the SPURS won the NBA championship, and the whole city celebrated joyously, Naomi wished the signs could change to YOU WENT, SPURS! YOU REALLY WENT!

WILLIAM J. NEUMIRE's works have recently appeared in Adirondack Review, Zuzu's Petals Quarterly, Stirring, and Poetry Midwest. His book reviews have recently appeared in Cortland Review. His chapbook, Resonance of Kin, was due in June 2003 from 2River publishing.

STEVE MUESKE lives in Minnesota with his wife and two daughters. His poetry and prose have appeared in Water-Stone, ArtWord Quarterly, the Wisconsin Review, the South Dakota Review, Rattle, Blaze, the Drunken Boat, and elsewhere, with work forthcoming in Poet Lore, 88, and others. He edits the online literary arts review, three candles, and can be reached at steve@threecandles.org.

People always pronounce NICKY MOUDRY's name wrong. He likes this. He feels like it gives him the opportunity to be a totally different person.

MARIO MILOSEVIC's poetry has appeared in The Black Warrior Review, Nerve Cowboy, Poetry Motel, Rattle, and many other journals and in the anthology Poets Against the War. His father was Serbian, his mother is Croatian. He was born in Italy, grew up in Canada, and now lives with his wife, novelist Kim Antieau, in Bigfoot country on the banks of the Columbia River.

ABBY MILLAGER is a recent graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Phoebe, Cape Rock, Prairie Schooner, Hyde Park Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and edits the poetry journal, Diner.

AMY MCCANN used to live in Chicago, but now she's an MFA student at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. She thinks the greatest perk of being a poet is owning a rhyming dictionary, an endless source of entertaining juxtapositions of words, such as, "heavyset, Juliet, kitchenette" and "deep-freeze, headcheese, striptease, archdiocese."

JAMES KIMBRELL is the author of a volume of poetry, The Gatehouse Heaven (Sarabande, 1998), and co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-seon, and Choi Young-mi (Sarabande, 2002). He has been the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, The "Discovery" / The Nation, award and a Whiting Writer's Award. He is currently the editor of the Southeast Review and teaches at Florida State University.

RICHARD JORDAN is a Ph.D. mathematician who lives in Western Massachusetts. A Pushcart nominee, his poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Chiron Review, Harpur Palate, Poetry Depth Quarterly, The Adirondack Review, can we have our ball back? , The Redneck Review, Yawp, and Zuzu's Petals. He is currently enrolled in the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.

ALLISON EIR JENKS is from Chicago. Her first book, The Palace of Bones (Ohio U P, 2002), won the Hollis Summers Prize, judged by Carolyn Kizer, and is forthcoming in the U.K. with Leviathan Press. Her poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Poetry Ireland, Puerto Del Sol, Columbia, STAND (U.K.), and Michigan Quarterly Review, among others. She was an Assistant Professor at North Central College and Lamar University before going back to work on her Ph.D. at Florida State University.

JOHNNY HORTON is finishing an MFA in poetry at the University of Washington, and he has had poems in Slightly West and Crab Creek Review. He is the coordinating editor of the Seattle Review.

DENNIS HELD was born in 1958 in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. Really. He was. His most recent book of poems, Betting on the Night (Lost Horse P), was published in 2001.

CORWIN ERICSON lives in Western Massachusetts and works as the Managing Editor of The Massachusetts Review and as an instructor at area colleges. Work of his has appeared recently in Web del Sol Review, Lit, and Crowd. There are ravens, vultures, and C5-As circling above his house right now. JOSHUA EDWARDS is a young publisher and editor of The Canary (www.thecanary.org) who tries to discover a better way to tie his shoes in Tuscaloosa. His poems have appeared in Skanky Possum, Good Foot, can we have our ball back? , Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. His manuscript, A Farm in the Middle of the World, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. "Do We Wear More Green in Autumn" is for Cate Marvin.

GRAHAM DUNCAN's poetry has appeared in 118 periodicals. He has also had two chapbooks published, The Map Reader (1987) and Stone Circle (1992), and his book, Every Infant's Blood: New and Selected Poems (Bright Hill P) was published in 2002.

After their grass house was burned in a tragic prairie wildfire, JEFFREY DODD and his wife, Rylie, moved into a complex of caves in far west Texas. This sort or isolation has been the only way for Rylie to assure Jeffrey will not suffer annual breakdowns on the recurring occasion of the Chicago Cubs' late-season collapse. Their lifestyle is fiscally efficient and has the added benefit of requiring very few showers. In his free time, Jeffrey enjoys carving toothpicks from mesquite shrubs and shooting rattlesnakes with his replica 1950's potato gun.

MATTHEW DOCKINS was born in San Francisco, California in 1970 just six minutes ahead of his twin. He was raised in Yonkers, New York ("the big Y-O") and attended university upstate in Albany. After completing his degree through UCLA, Matthew moved north to San Francisco to explore his hometown. In 2001, he married his true love at a charming chateau north of Paris, France. Matt and Gwen lived in Walnut Creek, California for four years, along with their dog Chip. During this time, he worked as an employee communications specialist for global corporations based in San Francisco. This painting, done originally in Walnut Creek, was a shot over the bow of suburban America . . . "We shall not lose ourselves in the passionless middle." Now, Matthew lives with Gwen in Paris where they are pursuing their more creative paths and living each day as if it were their last. Their motto? "Happiness is in a moment."

KATHERINE DIMMA will be graduating with an MFA in poetry from NYU very soon. She lives with a dog named Otto in Brooklyn.

His name is C.S. CARRIER. He was a Program Man at the University of Massachussetts, where he earned an MFA in 2003. He has been an intern at Jubilat. He's totally beautiful & adored by many. Just ask Dockins. He plays basketball like a man on fire & coached the MFA intramural team (imagine such a thing) to its first intramural title. He has work in or forthcoming in Verse and Pleiades.

ROB CARNEY has publications, or work forthcoming, in Mid-American Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Rosebud, and Willow Springs. His New Fables, Old Songs won the 2002 Dream Horse Press National Chapbook Award (available at www.dreamhorsepress.com), and his book of Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts, winner of the Pinyon Press Poetry Book Prize, was released in June 2003.

THOM CARAWAY, whose work has appeared in Heliotrope, is an MFA student at Eastern Washington University. He spent the summer in a mostly futile effort to catch fish at various local lakes. He is available for weddings and anniversaries. Please employ him.

Two of JOHN BRADLEY's prose poems appear in Best of the Prose Poem (White Pine P). He is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. A collection of his parables, Add Musk Here, co-winner of the 2001-02 Pavement Saw Chapbook Contest, was published last year. He is the editor of Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (Coffee House P), and Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader (U of Arizona P). He teaches writing at Northern Illinois University. When not teaching, John Bradley works in his garage making parables out of old sofas and castoff computers. Some of them can be found at the Pavement Saw Musuem of American Artifacts.

SUZANNE BOTTELLI teaches Humanities and coordinates an environment program at The Northwest School in Seattle, Washington. Her poems have appeared in West Branch, Prairie Schooner, and Poet Lore, among others.

RALPH BLACK's poems have appeared in the Carolina Quarterly, Orion, Georgia Review, and Gettysburg Review, among other journals. He is the author of Turning Over the Earth (Milkweed Editions, 2000). His work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2002. He teaches creative writing at SUNY Brockport, where he is Co-Director of the Brockport Writer's Forum.

DANIEL BECKER is at Warren Wilson College, with one semester to go on his MFA. He is 54 years old, a full time physician at the University of Virginia School of Medicine (general internal medicine and hospice work). The doctor work supports the writing and the writing supports the doctor work.

ROBYN ART's works have most recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Hat, Rhino, Slant, Conduit, Skidrow Penthouse, and Good Foot. Some of her work is also incorporated into "Spontaneous Art" and in "Peaceworks," two mixed-media exhibitions at the Times Square Lobby Gallery, NYC. She is the author of the chapbook, Degrees of Being There (Boneworld P, 2003), and she has received grants from The Academy of American Poets and the Vermont Studio Center. She was also a finalist for the 2003 Pushcart Prize. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn.

ANTLER, Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, is author of Selected Poems (Soft Skull P, 2000). His poems have also appeared in the anthologies: Poets Against the War; Reclaiming the Heartland: Lesbian & Gay Voices from the Midwest; American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century; and September 11th, 2001: American Writers Respond.

SUNNI BROWN hails from the beautiful land of Logan, Utah: home to the world’s most incredible yet little-known canyons, the Wellsville Mountains, and the famed Cache Valley Cheese. She loves chocolate pudding, frogs, and Billy Collins. After graduating from Eastern Washington University with an MFA in Creative Writing, she hopes to travel to many foreign lands and, finally!, learn how to cook. Her poems have also appeared in Petroglyph.

CHRIS CARRIER is completing an MFA at UMass. He has interned at Jubilat. He coordinates two reading series at UMass: the Visiting Writers Series & LiveLit. He’s totally beautiful & adored by many. He plays basketball like a man on fire & coached the MFA intramural team (imagine such a thing) to its first intramural title. He has work forthcoming in Verse and Pleiades.

JENNIFER CHAPIS received her MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, where she teaches full-time in the Expository Writing Program. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including So To Speak, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Barrow Street, and Washington Square. Her work is forthcoming in Le Petit Zine and Poetry Midwest.

JAIME CURL is a student at Eastern Washington University and the managing editor of Willow Springs. His recent publications include Beacon Street Review, Portland Review, and Jeopardy Magazine.

KAREN DONOVAN works as a writer in Providence. She co-edits the journal Paragraph and designs handmade books. Her collection of poems, Fugitive Red, won the 1998 Juniper Prize.

DENISE DUHAMEL’s most recent title is Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (U of Pittsburgh P, 2001). She has been anthologized widely, including four editions of The Best American Poetry (2000, 1998, 1994, and 1993). She teaches creative writing and literature at Florida International University. She collects troll dolls and poetry chapbooks from micro-presses.

JOHN ERHARDT lives with his wife in western Massachusetts. He has new poems currently in Quarter After Eight, Passages North, Spinning Jenny, and Good Foot, and at www.canwehaveourballback.com .

CORWIN ERICSON lives in western Massachusetts where he works as the managing editor of The Massachusetts Review. His work has appeared recently in Crowd, Lit, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. He saw a weasel or mink or something on Rattlesnake Gutter Road last week.

In 2003, JAMES GRABILL will have two new books, An Indigo Scent after the Rain (poems) and Actual Energy (creative nonfiction). His Poem Rising Out of the Earth and Standing Up in Someone received the Oregon Book Award for Poetry in 1995, the same year his Through the Green Fire was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. His poems have appeared in many periodicals, including Kayak, Field, Poetry Northwest, The Common Review, and Willow Springs. Grabill teaches writing and literature at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City.

WILLIAM HEYEN lives in Brockport, New York, a village on the Erie Canal through which George Washington sailed in 1823 to make his way to Mount Vernon to kiss his old comrade George Washington’s lead coffin. Heyen’s books include Erika: Poems of the Holocaust and Crazy Horse in Stillness. MAMMOTH Books will soon publish a book of his essays called Home: Autobiographies, Etc., a book of stories called The Hummingbird Corporation, and a book of poetry called The Rope.

JOHN HODGEN’s first book, In My Father’s House, won the Bluestem Award from Emporia State University P (1993), and his second book, Bread Without Sorrow (Lynx House P, 2001), won the 2002 Balcones Poetry Prize. Hodgen used to dig graves, and now teaches writing at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. He reports that the two jobs are the same in some ways.

CHRISTOPHER HOWELL’s seventh collection of poems, Just Waking, was released recently by Lost Horse P. He has received two NEA fellowships, and his poems have three times been included in the Pushcart Prize annual anthology. Recent work appears in Field, Gettysburg Review, and Third Coast. He teaches in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.

LOUIS JENKINS lives in Duluth, Minnesota. His poems have been published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Paris Review, and American Poetry Review. His books of poetry include An Almost Human Gesture (Eighties P and Ally P, 1987), All Tangled Up With the Living (Nineties P, 1991), Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems (Holy Cow! P, 1995), Just Above Water (Holy Cow! P, 1997) and The Winter Road (Holy Cow! P, 2000). Two of his prose poems were published in The Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner, 1999).

GERRY LaFEMINA is the author of several books including 23 Below, Shattered Hours: Poems 1988-94, and Zarathustra in Love (prose poems). His new book, Graffiti Heart, winner of the 2001 Anthony Piccione Memorial Prize from Mammoth Books, will be out in April 2003. He is also co-translator with Sinan Toprak of Voice Lock Puppet, a collection of poems by contemporary Turkish poet Ali Yuce. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

DAVID LENSON, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, is the author of On Drugs and editor of The Massachusetts Review.

PAUL LINDHOLDT got mixed up with Earth First! and soiled by journalism before heeding his more solemn calling as a professor and a father of two young boys. He has published some one hundred and fifty book chapters, journal articles, essays, columns, reviews, and poems on American literature and culture.

SUSIE MESERVE earned her MFA at the University of Massachusetts and taught there for several years. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, in a house with a HOT TUB.

DAN MORRIS was born and raised in the once small community of Issaquah, WA. He has been educated, academic and otherwise, in various locations throughout the West. He is currently an MFA candidate at Eastern Washington University’s creative writing program.

CARRIE OEDING grew up on a farm five miles outside Luverne, Minnesota, a half-day’s drive from the Crossroads of America, which she recently revisited and was disappointed to see stop signs now installed. Carrie received her MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Ohio University after which she plans to move back west and live a life off-centered.

SCOTT POOLE is the former lightweight champion of nothing. He hoped to regain the title when his new book Hiding From Salesmen (Lost Horse P) arrived in December, 2002 B.C. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter by e-mailing him at spoole@spocom.com.

JEN REID earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Hey Listen!, Willow Springs, and Firebush. She currently teaches English at Spokane Community College and Creative Writing at the Corbin Art Center while pursuing a Masters in Publishing with an emphasis in Editing and Design.

PAISLEY REKDAL’s poems “Finisher” and “A Metamorpohsis” first appeared in her book Six Girls without Pants (Eastern Washington University P, 2002). She is the author of A Crash of Rhinos and The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee. She is also a certified ass-kicker.

MELISSA RHOADES was born and raised in the suburbs of Kansas City. She also lived in England for two years, where she completed an M. Soc. Sci. in Cultural Studies. On returning to the U.S., she put her education to good use as assistant manager at a submarine sandwich shop. She is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry.

RITA RICH is completing an MFA at the University of Massachusetts, with poetry published or forthcoming in the The Seattle Review and Quick Fiction. She is an assistive-listening-device cyborg, recklessly learning American Sign Language.

NINA ELLEN RIGGS is an MFA student at UNC-Greensboro where she is working on her first manuscript of poems. Her work has appeared in recent issues of The Threepenny Reivew, The Baltimore Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Tar River Poetry.

RENÉE ROEHL cohabits in Spokane WA with her son: Dario; fiancé: Kelly; dog: Arlo; two cats: Oliver and Henri. She is the assistant managing editor of Willow Springs and is working on her MFA in poetry at Eastern Washington University.

MATTHEW ROHRER is the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, Satellite, and Nice Hat. Thanks. (with Joshua Beckman). The series A Plate of Chicken is inspired by readings in Chinese and Sufi poetry, and the city of New York. Rohrer lives in Brooklyn and is an editor of Fence magazine and Fence Books.

STAN SANVEL RUBIN directs the SUNY Brockport Writers Forum. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Ohio Review, and Poetry Northwest. He was the recipient of a 2001 Constance J. Saltonstall Foundation grant in poetry.

BETHANY SCHULTZ is currently an MFA student at Eastern Washington University. In her spare time, she enjoys discussing Beat poetry, hobos, and feline activism. Writing biographical information often makes her feel like a playboy bunny.

LORI SHINE’s poems have appeared in The Common Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, CROWD, and Indiana Review. She is a student in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Managing Editor of Verse Press.

JOHN WHALEN’s first book of poems, Caliban, was published in August 2002 by Lost Horse P. He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his two daughters and works in the technology industry.

VICTORIA WYTTENBERG earned an MFA in poetry at the University of Washington and won the Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest in 1980 and the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Vernon M. Spence Prize for poetry at the University of Washington in 1990. She has published in various literary magazines, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Canada, Seattle Review, Malahat Review, Willow Springs, and Calyx.