Gary Amdahl lives in California.

Kris Bigalk’s poetry has appeared in Dust and Fire and The Barefoot Muse, and is forthcoming in Caveat Lector. She teaches in the AFA in Creative Writing program at Normandale Community College, and makes her home in Minnetonka, near the banks of Minnehaha Creek.

Carol Pearce Bjorlie, The Poet Behind the Cello, teaches poetry and creative process at the Loft Literary Center and music at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls.

Wendy Brown-Baez is passionate about bringing poetry to fresh, unique venues and inspiring others to find their own words. She performs her poetry nationally and in Mexico, from cafes to galleries to cultural centers, solo and in collaborations. She was a recipient of a 2008 McKnight grant through COMPAS to teach a bilingual writing/performance workshop. She has published poetry and creative nonfiction in literary magazines, such as Sin Fronteras, The Chrysalis Reader, The Litchfield Review, and Wising Up Press. She is the creator of Writing Circles for Healing, a writing support group to heal grief and life-altering transitions. More info can be found at www.wendysmuse.blogspot.com.

Mary Kovaleski Byrnes is a student in the MFA writing program at Emerson College. Originally from Lancaster County, PA, she lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband, Corey. She can be found online at www.marykovaleskibyrnes.com.

Chip Cheek received his MFA at Emerson College in 2007. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Washington Square, Quick Fiction, Fringe, and Brevity & Echo: An Anthology of Short Short Stories (Rose Metal Press, 2006). He grew up in Houston and currently resides in Boston.

Rita Ciresi is the author of five works of fiction, including Blue Italian, Pink Slip, and Sometimes I Dream in Italian. She is professor of English at the University of South Florida.

Allan Douglass Coleman writes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, makes music, photographs, and produces various other forms of visual art. His poetry and fiction have appeared or are scheduled for publication in The Cape Rock, Iodine Poetry Journal, Lalitamba, Nimrod, Poetry Harbor, Texas Review, and the e-zine Urban Desires. In 2008 he received a Pushcart Prize nomination for poetry. Under the pen name A. D. Coleman, he publishes critical writings on photography, art and mass media, and curates traveling exhibitions of photography. His creative work can be found online at villaflorentine.us.

Philip Dacey’s latest of nine books is The New York Postcard Sonnets: A Midwesterner Moves to Manhattan (Rain Mountain Press, 2007). The winner of three Pushcart Prizes, he has written collections of poems about Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Eakins. His tenth book is forthcoming: Vertebrae Rosaries: 50 Sonnets (Red Dragonfly Press, 2008). More of his work can be found at www.philipdacey.com.

Keith Demanche has published short fiction and poetry in a number of small press and online magazines, including Northern New England Review and ChiZine. He also was a contributing writer and art director for weekly arts and culture papers The Wire and HippoPress Manchester as well as art director for two issues of The Dogtown Review, edited by David Schwartz. He is currently art director for the Minnetonka Review. His artwork has been featured in a number of group shows, including the Massachusetts College of Art and The Millyard Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire. On a separate creative track, he has been a musician since age 13, recorded six albums with four different bands, played hundreds of clubs—including the infamous CBGB in New York City—and currently plays bass in the band Burning The Lie.

Brent Fisk has had over a hundred poems accepted in the past three years, by such journals as Prairie Schooner, Rattle, White Pelican Review, Exit 13, Rhino, and Bitter Oleander, and he’s served as guest editor of Steel Toe Books.

John Forssen writes: I have just retired from teaching at Traip Academy in Kittery (Maine), where I taught American literature, journalism and fiction writing. Prior to that, I worked in a variety of government and private sector organizations, principally as a pubic affairs writer. I received a number of awards for my work with the Federal government and, in 2006, I won the Roanoke fiction competition with a story entitled “Every Boy’s Dream.”

Bart Galle is a medical educator and visual artist who has self-published a letterpress book of original paintings and poems, Continuing Presence (2004). He is the winner of the 2008 Passager Poetry Contest for Writers over 50, and his poems have been accepted for publication in recent or future issues of Water-Stone Review, White Pelican Review, Main Channel Voices, Coe Review, Eclipse, and other journals. Passager and r.kv.ry have published his poems and paintings together. Bart and his wife live in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Joseph Gannon is 27 years old. He currently works in the Financial Services industry in New York City.

Andrey Gritsman is a poet and essayist, originally from Russia, who lives in New York City. His works have appeared in Richmond Review, Poetry International, Manhattan Review, New Orleans Review, Poet Lore and many others and were included in several anthologies. He runs Poetry Series at Cornelia Street Café in New York City and edits an international poetry magazine INTERPOEZIA on the web.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota, Bruce Henricksen earned his Ph.D. in literature from the University of Southern California. Subsequently, he taught at Loyola University New Orleans, chairing the English Department and editing New Orleans Review. His academic books include a study of novelist Joseph Conrad, Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative (U of Illinois Press).
   Bruce’s short stories have appeared in many magazines and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His story collection, Ticket to a Lonely Town, received second-place honors in the national competition for the Grace Paley Prize in 2005 and was published the following year. His first novel, After the Floods, was published in 2008. Bruce is also the editor of From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright. His books are available at Barnes & Noble sites everywhere, from selected independents, and from the online sellers.
Bruce offers workshops in fiction. You can contact him at info@losthillsbooks.com.

Arthur Winfield Knight’s latest novel, Misfits Country (set against the making of The Misfits movie), was published in March 2008 by Tres Picos Press in California. He is also the author of novels Johnnie D. (Forge, 2000) and Blue Skies Falling (Forge, 2001). His imaginary autobiography of James Dean, James Dean’s Diaries, was published by The King’s English in 2005. He has taught autobiographical writing and multi-cultural
literature at the University of San Francisco.

Dean Kostos’s books include: Last Supper of the Senses, The Sentence That Ends with a Comma, and Celestial Rust. He co-edited Mama’s Boy and edited Pomegranate Seeds. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Western Humanities Review, Boulevard, Southwest Review, Chelsea, Stand Magazine, on Oprah Winfrey’s website Oxygen.com, and elsewhere. He teaches at The City University of New York and has served as judge for Columbia University’s Gold Crown and Gold Circle Awards.

Susan Lewis’ poetry chapbook, Animal Husbandry, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including The Raritan Review, The New Orleans Review, Seneca Review, The Journal, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, and Phoebe. Her collaborations with composer Jonathan Golove have been recorded as well as performed at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall.

Mark Maire has lived in Duluth, Minnesota, for 23 years, employed as a reference librarian. His poems have previously appeared in a number of literary magazines, most recently in Blueline, Cape Rock, and Phantasmagoria. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005.

Donna McClanahan writes both fiction and non-fiction. Her work has appeared in Blink, Kudzu and Now and Then. She is the recipient of the 2008 Sue Ellen Hudson Award for Excellence in Writing from Tennessee Mountain Writers. She lives in the heart of the Daniel Boone National Forest and is a founding member of The Gap House Writers.

Letitia L. Moffitt was born and raised in Hawaii. Her fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have been published in literary journals including Black Warrior Review, Aux Arc Review, Jabberwock Review, Coe Review, The MacGuffin, and Dos Passos Review, and her recently completed short story collection has been a finalist for prizes from both Livingston Press and Black Lawrence Press. She received a doctoral degree in English and creative writing from Binghamton University in New York and currently teaches creative writing as an assisstant professor at Eastern Illinois University.

B. Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest); Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Gwynn O’Gara is the author of three collections of poetry, Snake Woman Poems (Beatitude Press), Fixer-Upper (dpress), and Winter at Green Haven (Small Change Press). She lives north of San Francisco and works as a teacher with California Poets in the Schools.

Rob Plath is a 38 year old poet from New York. He has 6 chapbooks of poetry out and a 7th on the way. He was once a student of Allen Ginsberg in the mid 1990’s.

Julie Porter was a finalist in the Charles Simic Poetry Competition and Bread Loaf’s Robert Haiduke Poetry Competition. She is a doctoral student at Columbia University and holds graduate degrees from Middlebury College, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and Sarah Lawrence College. Julie is a nationally licensed soccer coach, the pitmaster of an amateur barbecue team, and the owner of a yellow Labrador Retriever named Zoe. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Dennis Saleh’s poetry, prose, and artwork appear widely in magazines and collections in the US, and overseas, including Blackbird, Boulevard, Phantasmagoria, Psychological Perspectives, and Terra Incognita, and forthcoming poetry anthologies, Reeds and Rushes and Tapestries. He has read from his poetry, and a novel-in-progress, Bast, set in Ancient Egypt, at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, CA.

Red Shuttleworth has had poems in numerous journals, including Concho River Review, Plains Song Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. His Western Settings (University of Nevada Press) received the first Spur Award for Western Poetry from Western Writers of America in 2001. In 2007, True West magazine named Red “Best Living Western Poet.”

Ann Struthers was born and grew up on an Iowa farm. She has published widely; her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Iowa Review and others. She has two collections and two chapbooks. She also publishes short fiction and academic articles. She was once a student in the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, and has had two Fulbright Fellowships, one to Syria and one to Sri Lanka.

Christopher Thomas has been publishing poems in gay/lesbian and mainstream reviews for many years. His work has appeared in Amelia, Bay Windows, Chiron Review, Duckabush Review, Evergreen Chronicles, The James White Review, New York Native, Paramour Magazine, and others. Some of his work has been anthologized and Lone Willow Press published his collection, The Smell of Carnal Knowledge.

Gayle Thorsen has come back to poetry after years as a public relations executive in the field of philanthropy. She has undergraduate degrees in English and journalism, and a masters degree in English. Right now, she runs her own nonprofit communications consulting firm in Minneapolis, and among other creative pursuits, maintains a blog called The Violet Hoarder.

Christamar Varicella lives in Atlanta with his wife and daughter. “The Blue Whale” comes from his novel Dashboard Hula.

René Georg Vasicek lives in Astoria, Queens with his wife Catherine and son Radek. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Divide, High Times, Post Road, Diner, The Prague Revue, and Yuan Yang. He teaches at Hofstra University and Lehman College of the City University of New York.

Fredrick Zydek is the author of eight collections of poetry. T’Kopechuck: the Buckley Poems is forthcoming from Winthrop Press later this year. Formerly a professor of creative writing and theology at the University of Nebraska and later at the College of Saint Mary, he is now a gentleman farmer when he isn’t writing. He is the editor for Lone Willow Press.