Contributor Notes

 

 

Dick Allen's seventh collection, Present Vanishing, will be published by Sarabande Books in October. His previous two volumes, also from Sarabande, are The Day Before: New Poems and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected. He has received poetry writing grants from the N.E.A. and Ingram Merrill Foundations and a Pushcart Prize, and his poetry has been included in five editions of The Best American Poetry as well as The Best American Spiritual Writing: 2007. Other new poems have been published or are forthcoming in Agni, the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Image, the New England Review, and Ontario Review. He lives in Trumbull, Connecticut.

Margo Berdeshevsky’s new poetry collection, But a Passage in Wilderness,has just been published by The Sheep Meadow Press in fall 2007. Her honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America (selected by Marie Ponsot,), the Chelsea Poetry Award, Kalliope's Sue Saniel Elkind Award, places in the Pablo Neruda and Ann Stanford Awards (selected by Yusef Komunyakaa,) and Border's Books/ Honolulu Magazine Grand Prize for Fiction, and 4 Pushcart Prize nominations for works in leading literary journals, including Agni, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New Letters, Poetry International, Runes, Siècle 21, Europe. Her Tsunami Notebook of poems and photographs followed a journey to Sumatra in Spring 2005, to work in a survivors' clinic in Aceh. An illustrated collection of her short stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, and a poetic novel, Vagrant, are at the gate. A "visual poem" series, Les Ombres de Versailles, (The Ghosts of Versailles) was seen at the Parisian Galerie Benchaieb. The cover art for "But a Passage in Wilderness is one of her montages. She is a contributing editor of the magazine.

Lorna Knowles Blake was born in Havana and lived in Cuba, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico before moving to the United States to attend college. She was educated at Trinity College (B.A.), New York University (M.B.A.), and Sarah Lawrence College (M.F.A.). Her poems have appeared in The Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Hudson Review, Rattapallax, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan University Press), Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets (University of Evansville Press), and Chance of a Ghost (Helicon Nine Editions). Many of the poems appearing here are from her first collection, Permanent Address, which won the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize and will be published by the Ashland Poetry Press in May of this year. In addition to her position as Executive Director of the New York State IOLA Fund, she is a creative writing teacher and an editor atBarrow Street. She lives with her husband and daughter in New York City and Cape Cod.

David Boyd, a lifelong native of Cumbria, England, is writing a biography of Norman Nicholson.

Clifford Browder is a writer and retired freelance editor living in New York City. His poetry has appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review, The Bitter Oleander, Chattahoochee Review, Hawaii Review, Heliotrope, Oxford Magazine, Peregrine, Pivot, Runes, and Snake Nation Review. Excerpts from his long novel Metropolis have been published in New York Stories, Quarter After Eight, and Third Coast. He is also author of two published biographies and a critical study of the French Surrealist poet André Breton.

Suzanne Cleary's poetry books are Trick Pear and Keeping Time, both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and recent resident at the MacDowell Colony, she is completing the manuscript of her third collection.

Anne Coray is the author of Bone Strings and Soon the Wind and coeditor of Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment, forthcoming from the University of Alaska Press. She lives at her birthplace on Qizhjeh Vena (Lake Clark), in southwest Alaska.

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of five chapbooks, which include Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006) and The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006). A Pushcart Prize nominee in 2006, her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, which include Janus Head, Rattle, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Rain Taxi, The Adirondack Review, The Main Street Rag, Tarpaulin Sky, CutBank, The Mid-American Review, Jacket, Redactions: Poetry and Poetics and others. Recent awards include residencies from the Centrum Foundation and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

Greg Delanty is the Artist in Residence at St. Michael's College, Vermont. He became an U.S. citizen in 1994, is politically active, and ran for the Green Party in the U.S. elections. His Collected Poems 1986-2006 recently came out in the Oxford Poets series of Carcanet Press. His other recent books are The Ship of Birth (Carcanet Press, 2003; Louisiana State University Press, 2007), The Blind Stitch (Carcanet Press, 2001; Louisiana State University Press, 2002), and The Hellbox (Oxford University Press, 1998). He has received numerous awards, including a recent Guggenheim for Poetry.

Lori Desrosiers was born and raised in New York but now lives in Westfield, Massachusetts. She hosts a regular poetry open mic at Jester's Café in Westfield on Monday nights. She teaches English Composition at Westfield State College. She is currently studying for her MFA in Poetry at New England College in Henniker, NH. She also publishes the Poetry News, an online newsletter chronicling poetry events in the Pioneer Valley and beyond. Her work has been published in the Ballard Street Poetry Journal, The Equinox Magazine and the November 3rd Club online journal. She has self-published three chapbooks and a CD of original music.

Writer/artist Robert Dunn is the author of such books as Zen Yentas in Bondage, Horse Latitudes, Baffled in Baloneyville, and The Sap Songbook, plus the poetry/music CD, Sickly Minutes. He is the editor of Asbestos Poetry Journal and has served as Editor of Medicinal Purposes Literary Review and The New Press Literary Quarterly. Mr. Dunn's poetry has appeared around the world, which is more than you can say for him. His comic strip, Knish & Carobas, currently runs in Street News. Mr. Dunn has recently been named the Poet Laureate of Pluto. (Some people will do anything to get him off the planet.)

Evelyn Duncan has published poems in the Comstock Review, Newsletter, The New Yorker, Phoebe (SUNY Oneonta), Poem, Satire Newsletter, and The Second Word Thursdays Anthology. Picking Up, a book of poems, is forthcoming from Bright Hill Press.

Graham Duncan's poems have been published in numerous magazines, including Blueline, Rattapallax, Rattle, and Southern Poetry Review. Bright Hill Press issued hisEvery Infant's Blood: New and Selected Poems in 2002.

Robert Klein Engler lives in Chicago and New Orleans. He is a writer and artist whose work is sometimes characterized as politically incorrect. Born on the southwest side of the city, Robert taught many years at Richard J. Daley College, until he was banned by the chancellor. Robert holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of Chicago Divinity School. He has received two Illinois Arts Council awards for his poetry. Just Google his name to find his writing on the Internet.

Allen C. Fischer was director of marketing for an international corporation. His poems have appeared in the Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, Laurel Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and River Styx. He is a regular contributor to the magazine.

Margaux Fragoso recently completed a PhD in English and creative writing at Binghamton University. Her short stories and poems have appeared in The Literary Review and Barrow Street, among other literary journals.

Eamon Grennan's latest volumes are Still Life with Waterfall, which won the Lenore Marshall Prize, The Quick of It, and a translation (with Rachel Kitzinger) of Oedipus at Colonus. A new collection, Matter of Fact, is forthcoming from Graywolf.

Patrick Henry: Born 1938, Yorkshire, England, Irish parentage. Customs Officer London, Royal Airforce Draftee, Cyprus, 1957-59. Wrote poetry in London, Paris, Cornwall; worked construction, farming, factory, café, bookshop jobs. Published On the Track, Peterloo Poets 1971. Published translations of Fruits of Winter, Prix Goncourt, 1970 and Women of The Celts, Cremonesi, 1975. Adult student at University of Wales, University of East Anglia, Trinity College, Hartford Connecticut during 1980s. Painting exhibition Paris, 1998. Poetry Reading Tour in New York 2001 arranged by Big City Lit. Painting Exhibition, Australia, 2003. Poetry Reading and Painting Exhibition tour New York State, 2004, arranged by The Author's Watermark and Poets & Writers. Poetry and prose featured in BigCityLit and in www.thisisull.com (UK website), 2001-2007. He is a contributing editor of the magazine.

Colette Inez has published nine books of poetry and has won Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and two NEA fellowships and Pushcart Prizes. She teaches in Columbia University's Undergraduate Writing Program. She is the author, most recently, of a memoir, The Secret of M. Dulong. Her most recent collection of poems is Spinoza Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

Elena Kondracki was born in Iowa City, Iowa in the last century. Her father was a professor of Comparative Religion. As a result of her exposure to many of the world's religions, she wrote her own when she was 18. She is an member of SAG, AFTRA, AEA and ASCAP. A graduate of the High School of Performing Arts, she spent the early part of her life as an actor in plays, television and film. She is also a photographer and has had several shows in New York. Has lived in Brazil, and traveled in France, England, Germany and Poland. One of her poems, written when she was 16, was given, at his request, to Dylan Thomas one night at the White Horse. She studied with William Packard. Her song lyrics have been published in Their Words Are Music by Lehman Engel. She composes music as well and is, at present, working on a musical. She is Associate Editor of the magazine.

Gabrielle LeMay received her MFA in poetry in 2001 from Hunter College, where she won awards for poetry and prose. In 2004 she won the Tennessee Chapbook Prize for Pandora's Barn. Other work appears inConfrontation, The Ledge, Poetry East, Poetry London, Rattapallax, and The Same.

Kate Light is the author of three volumes of poetry — Gravity's Dream (Donald Justice Award), Open Slowly, and The Laws of Falling Bodies (Nicholas Roerich Prize) — and the texts of two works for narrator and musicians, Oceanophony and Einstein's Mozart. She is also a professional violinist in New York City.

Deena Linett's second poetry collection from BOA Editions, Woman Crossing a Field, appeared in 2006. Her poems have been included in the anthologies Never Before and Chance of a Ghost and in a variety of little magazines.

Brant Lyon is a poet and composer of music who often conflates both, as in his peripatetic/sporadic 'jazzoetry' reading series, Hydrogen Jukebox in NYC, and in his newly released poemusic CD, Beauty Keeps Laying Its Sharp Knife Against Me (Logochrysalis 2008). Other recent publications include his chapbook, Your Infidel Eyes (Poets Wear Prada 2006), now in its second printing; and poems and photographs anthologized in A Cautionary Tale: Peer into the Lives of Seven New York Poets (Uphook 2008).

Janet McCann's poems have been published in Kansas Quaterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou'wester, New York Quarterly, Tendril, Poetry Australia, and many others. She has won three chapbook contests, sponsored by Pudding Publications, Chimera Connections, and Franciscan University Press. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, McCann has taught at Texas A & M University since 1969 and co-edited the anthologies, Odd Angles of Heaven (Shaw Publishers, 1994) and Place of Passage ( Story Line, 2000). Her most recent poetry collection: Emily's Dress (Pecan Grove Press, 2004).

Gardner McFall is the author of The Pilot's Daughter and the libretto of the forthcoming opera Amelia, commissioned by Seattle Opera. She has new poems scheduled to appear in the Sewanee Review.M/p>

Following service in the U.S. Army infantry in World War II and study in London and the Sorbonne, where he received his advanced degree, Samuel Menashe's first collection of poetry, The Many Named Beloved (1961), was published in London to wide acclaim after his search for an American publisher was unsuccessful. He persisted in writing and produced several collections, including The Niche Narrows (2000). In 2004, he received the Poetry Foundation's first Neglected Masters Award, designed to bring renewed critical attention to the work of an under-recognized, significant American poet. The award included the publication of his most recent collection, New and Selected Poems (Library of America, 2005). Mr. Menashe lives in New York City.

Philip Miller has published his poems in many magazines including Chelsea, Pivot, Poetry, and Rattapallax. He has work forthcoming in others, including The Birmingham Poetry Review, Gargoyle, The Journal (U.K.), and Poetry Wales. His book, The Casablanca Fan, is due this year from Unholy Day Press. He edits The Same, lives in Mt. Union, PA, and is a contributing editor of the magazine.

D. Nurkse received a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship in poetry. His next book, The Border Kingdom, will be published this year by Alfred Knopf. Other forthcoming poems are in The Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review.

Marie Ponsot's first book, True Minds, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1957. Twenty-five years later, she published Admit Impediment with Knopf, followed by The Green Dark. Springing: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 2002) was named a "notable book of the year" by the New York Times Book Review. A translator of books from the French, she has taught in graduate programs at Queens College, the Poetry Center of the YMHA, and New York University; she currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association.

Holly Posner is the author of Explorations in American Culture and has taught at the New School, Hunter College, and NYU. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence, where she was editor of the graduate writing literary journal. She is currently editor of Line, a journal for the Hadar Foundation, which sponsors scholarships for young people in the creative arts. She won the 2005 Greenburgh Poetry Competition, and her work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Laurel Review, Lumina, Rattapallax, The Same, the Westchester Review, and the anthology Let the Poets Speak.

Ron Price is Poet in Residence at the Juilliard School in New York City. He has also worked as a Poet in the Parks, a Poet in the Schools, and a Poet in the Prisons — as well as a large number of useless jobs that include mailroom gofer, production line worker, forklift driver, leather craftsman, house organ editor, parking lot attendant, and bookstore clerk. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Leviathan Quarterly (U.K.), Lilliput, Poetry, Rattapallax, Revista Forum (Mexico), and Zone 3. He is the author of Surviving Brothers, A Crucible for the Left Hand, and A Small Song Called Ash from the Fire.

Bertha Rogers, founder and publisher of Bright Hill Press, has published her poems in magazines and literary journals and in the collections Sleeper, You Wake, The Fourth Beast, and A House of Corners. Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2000, and her translation of the riddle-poems from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book will be published this year.

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of the novels Tetched and Roughhouse. Both books were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award. His writing has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Randi Hoffman, and daughter, Shay. His Web site is www.thaddeusrutkowski.com.

Peter Schwartz is a painter, poet and writer. He's also an associate art editor for Mad Hatter's Review. His artwork can be seen all over the Internet but specifically at: www.sitrahahra.com. He's had hundreds of paintings, poems, and stories published both online and in print and is constantly submitting new work as if his very life depended on it. His last show was at the Amsterdam Whitney Gallery in Chelsea NYC and went well enough for them to invite him back.

Larissa Shmailo is a poet and a translator. Her new chapbook is A Cure for Suicide (Cervena Barva Press 2008) and her new CD is Exorcism (SongCrew 2008). Visit her on the web at larissashmailo.blogspot.com and http://www.myspace.com/thenonetworld.

Charlie Smith is the author of seven collections of poetry — most recently Heroin, Women of America, and (forthcoming) Word Comix, all from Norton — and nine novels and novellas, including Cheap Ticket to Heaven, Shine Hawk, The Lives of the Dead, and (forthcoming) Three Delays and You Are Welcome Here. Five of his books have been New York Times Notable Books. He has received Guggenheim, N.E.A., and New York Foundation for the Arts grants, as well as the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine. He has taught at Iowa and Princeton and was the Coal Royalty Fellow at the University of Alabama.

Stephen Stepanchev, professor emeritus of English at Queens College, served as first Poet Laureate of Queens (1998-2000). Born in Serbia, he emigrated to America in 1922, attended the University of Chicago, and earned a doctorate from New York University following service in the U.S. Army. His newest collection is Beyond the Gate: New and Selected Poems (Orchises Press, 2005).

Mervyn Taylor is a Trinidad-born poet recently retired from teaching in the New York City public school system and Lang College of The New School. He now divides his time between Brooklyn and his native island. He is an avid designer of costumes in the Carnival, and many images thereof filter into his work, which includes three volumes of poetry: An Island of His Own (1992), The Goat (1999), and Gone Away (2006). He can be heard reading his poems on the CD Road Clear (2004), a collaboration with bassist David "Happy" Williams.

Alison Woods's poems have appeared in the Kean Review, National Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry East, Rattallapax, Western Humanities Review, and others. Her poetry/lyrics are featured on a new CD by singer/songwriter Marion LoGuidice. She currently teaches at The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Rachel Wetzsteon is the author of three collections of poems — The Other Stars (Penguin, 1994; National Poetry Series winner), Home and Away (Penguin, 1998), and Sakura Park (Persea, 2006) — as well as a critical work, Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden's Sources (Routledge, 2007). She has received an Ingram Merrill grant and the 2001 Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at William Paterson University and the Unterberg Poetry Center of the Ninety-Second Street Y, and lives in Manhattan.

Robert Wrigley's most recent book is Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006). He lives in Idaho.

Michael T. Young received a 2007 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; he also received the 2005 Chaffin Poetry award and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent collection of poetry is Transcriptions of Daylight. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Heliotrope, The Same, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, and others. He lives in Jersey City, N.J., with his wife and newborn.

Donald Zirilli has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Drew University. He has been writing poetry for over twenty years, with publications in The River, Art Times, The Panhandler and Grasslands Review. His chapbook My History of Mental Illness was published by Lopside Press in 2007. He is the co-editor of Now Culture and the art editor of Shit Creek Review.