Authors

The late Ellis Avery taught creative writing at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Village Voice, Lieu, and The Mid-America Poetry Review, as well as onstage at New York’s Expanded Arts Theater.

Clifford Bernier is the author of two poetry chapbooks, "Earth Suite," The Montserrat Review’s Best Chapbook Summer 2010 and recently nominated for a Library of Virginia award, and "Dark Berries," one of The Montserrat Review’s Best Books for Spring Reading 2010. In January 2010 he appeared on the National Public Radio show “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress.” He has published in the Potomac Review, The Baltimore Review, the online journals Notjustair and Innisfree, and elsewhere, and is featured on a CD of poetry duets, "Poetry in Black and White," as well as on two jazzpoetry CDs, "Live at IOTA Club and Cafe" and "Live at Bistro Europa." He is anthologized in the anthology "Ars Poetica." Bernier has been featured in readings in San Francisco, Seattle, Buffalo, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the Washington, DC area, including the Library of Congress, the Arts Club of Washington, George Washington University (where he is a member of the Washington Writer’s Collection) and the Writer's Center. He is founder and former host of the Washington, DC-area poetry reading series, Poesis. He has been a reader for the Washington Prize and a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts' Poetry Out Loud recitation contest. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award.

Teresa Bevin was born in Cuba; however, because of political reasons, she emigrated to Spain in 1969 and later came to the United States in 1972. For over thirty years, Bevin has dedicated herself to the welfare and mental health of culturally diverse children and families due to a variety of reasons. She has also written extensively on the topic of childhood crises. Bevin's first work of fiction entitled "Havana Split" was published by Arte Público (University of Houston). Bevin holds two master's degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park: M.A. in Education and Human Development and M.A. in Speech Pathology. Her B.A. (Speech Pathology and Audiology) is from George Washington University, where she was a member of Sigma Delta Pi and the Romance Languages Fraternity, and her A.A. (Mental Health) is from Montgomery College. Bevin was a professor of Spanish and Mental Health at Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Maryland.

John Blair has published six books, most recently Playful Song Called Beautiful (University of Iowa Press, 2016) as well as poems & stories in The Colorado Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters, and elsewhere. His seventh book, The Aphelion Elegies, was published by Main Street Rag Press.

Mark Brazaitis is the author of five books of fiction, including The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize, from the University of Notre Dame Press. He is also the author of a book of poems, The Other Language, winner of the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he currently teaches English and is the former director of the Creative Writing Program at West Virginia University.

Clifford Browder is a writer and retired freelance editor living in New York City. His poetry has appeared in Heliotrope, The Main Street Rag, Runes, Snake Nation Review, The Bitter Oleander, nycBigCityLit.com, and elsewhere. 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.

Pamela Brown, born in Blytheville, Arkansas, has traveled extensively as a result of her father being in the military. She has lived in Puerto Rico, Japan, as well as Michigan, Colorado and South Carolina, where she makes her home. After graduating from high school in Sumter, South Carolina, she got married and began a family. Years after, a divorce was a motivating factor in her charging into the business world in help raise her two children. Her writing of stories which began in the fifth grade surfaced again as she read to her children and this eventually sparked her interest in writing children—s stories. Her children who loved the many characters she came up with led to the books Barnyard Buddies I & II. In addition to childrens stories, she has written haiku poetry, with her first book titled Wiggles which won first prize back in elementary school while living in Okinawa, Japan. Most recently over the years, she has written for several magazines and newspapers as a food critic and had a food column in several different publications in South Carolina and Colorado. She has also had an advice column online with several thousand followers and her passion for writing continues.

Tim W. Brown who is from Rockford, Illinois, graduated summa cum laude from Northern Illinois University with a degree in American studies. He is the author of three published novels, Deconstruction Acres (1997), Left of the Loop (2001) and Walking Man (2008). Brown’s fiction, poetry and nonfiction have appeared in over two hundred publications, including Another Chicago Magazine, The Bloomsbury Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Chelsea, Chiron Review, Colorado Review, The Ledge, Main Street Rag, New Observations, Oyez Review, Pleiades, Poetry Project Newsletter, Rain Taxi, Rockford Review, Slipstream, Small Press Review and Storyhead. Since 2004 he has been a member of the National Book Critics Circle, specializing in reviewing small-press publications. A long-time resident of Chicago, where he was a fixture in that city’s literary scene as a writer, performer and publisher of Tomorrow Magazine (1982-1999), Brown moved to New York in 2003. He currently earns his living as a technologist for global financial institutions.

Janet I. Buck, Ph.D., lives and writes in Southern Oregon. Her poetry has recently appeared in Three Candles, Red River Review, PoetryBay, The Pedestal Magazine, Stirring, Facets, The American Muse, Southern Ocean Review, Niederngasse, CrossConnect, Offcourse, and hundreds of journals world-wide. In the year 2000, Buck’s poem “Acrylic Thighs” was featured at the United Nations Exhibit Hall in New York City. She is a six-time Pushcart Nominee and Tickets to a Closing Play is her second print collection of poetry.

Beverly Burch’s work appears in many journals, including North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, Many Mountains Moving, River City, Tar River Poetry, and Poetry International. She also has two non-fiction collections: On Intimate Terms (University of Illinois Press) and Other Women (Columbia University Press). She is a psychotherapist in Oakland, California.

Genevieve Carminati is professor of English and College-wide Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies at Montgomery College.

Richard Carr grew up in Blue Earth, Minnesota, and lives in Minneapolis. A former systems analyst, web designer, and tavern manager, he has taught writing and literature at several universities and community colleges. His other poetry collections are Street Portraits (The Backwaters Press), Ace (Word Works, winner of the Washington Prize), and Mister Martini (University of North Texas Press, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize). His chapbooks include Butterfly and Nothingness (Mudlark) and Letters from North Prospect (Frank Cat Press, winner of the Frank Cat Press Chapbook Competition).

Charles Casillo was born in New York City. He has spent many years exploring and documenting his interests and obsessions—such as Marilyn Monroe, strange encounters in various Manhattan bars, unusually talented individuals, eccentrics, sex, tragic figures, and antidotes to insomnia, insecurity, and loneliness. His novel The Marilyn Diaries combines these themes. It is a fictitious recreation of the infamous lost diaries of Monroe and is written in her voice as he imagines it. He is also the author of the biography Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy which tells the story of the legendary literary lion, provocateur, and sexual renegade. Casillo's profiles, short stories, articles, reviews, and poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Street, The Lambda Book Report, The Washington Post, Frontiers, Men's Style, The Harvard Review and many others. He divides his time between New York and Los Angeles.

Barbara de la Cuesta is the author of the novel The Gold Mine, a long poem If There Weren't So Many of Them, and Westerly, a work of non-fiction in the field of arts therapy. Her fiction has appeared in California Quarterly and The Texas Review. She has received fellowships from the New Jersey Arts Council, the Geraldine Dodge Foundation to attend the Virginia Colony, and the Massachusetts Artists' Foundation, as well as a fellowship to Ragdale. Two of her plays have been produced off-off Broadway and she has been a visiting playwright at the Syracuse Stage. She currently teaches Spanish at Ocean County College and has taught literature and writing. She holds a master's degree in Creative Nonfiction from Lesley College as well as a MA in English Literature from Vanderbilt University.

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is a Cave Canem fellow and has attended the Soul Mountain Writer’s Retreat, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has been published in many anthologies including, Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Growing Up Girl, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, and Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets & Emcees. Her work can also be read in the following publications: Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, Natural Bridge, The Sligo Journal, ArLiJo, MiPOesias, Torch, Poet Lore and is forthcoming in the North American Review and the Puerto Del Sol blog. She currently lives in Silver Spring, MD with her husband, poet Hayes Davis and their two children.

Kiki Denis was born in Greece and came to the United States in 1990 when she obtained a full scholarship from Mount Holyoke College (MHC). After receiving her BA in 1994 in philosophy and economics from MHC, she moved to Exeter, England where she completed her MA in psychology from the University of Exeter in 1996. In 1997 she moved to New York City and started writing short stories, poetry and working on her first novel entitled The Last Day of Paradise which she completed the fall of 2004. Currently she is working on her second novel, entitled Noble Silence, and a poetry collection entitled The Cycle of Consciousness.

John Domini received a major 2008 grant from the Iowa Arts Council for his writing and has accepted a visiting position in Creative Writing at Grinnell College. He has published fiction in Paris Review, Ploughshares, Threepeny Review, and anthologies. His second collection, Highway Trade, was praised by Alan Cheuse, of NPR's "All Things Considered," as "the way we live now... witty, biting portraits." His first novel, Talking Heads: 77, was praised by the Pulitzer winner Robert Olen Butler as "both cutting-edge innovative and splendidly readable... a flat-out delight." Italian publications of his work is arranged through Tullio Pironti Editore, also the first Italian house to translate Don DeLillo. Domini has also published essays and other non-fiction in GQ, the New York Times, and many other places, including Italian journals. He is a regular book reviewer with The Believer and other publications. Domini has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and elsewhere. He has taught across the country, has been a visiting writer at Harvard, Lewis & Clark, and Northwestern, and is currently based in Des Moines.

Holly Farris is an Appalachian who has worked as an autopsy assistant, restaurant baker, and beekeeper. She is the fifth generation of her family to live on their farm in the mountains of southwest Virginia. She obtained a BA in biology from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Her education has fostered both her career in science and community activism. Her short fiction has appeared in journals as diverse as Appalachian Heritage, The Greensboro Review, Lodestar Quarterly, and Frontiers. Farris has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

Brianne Friel, who hails from Maryland, is a specialist in Women's Literature and Feminism. Her training, begun at the University of Maryland, College Park, eventually led to her Ph.D. in Women's Literature. Friel's dissertation focused on the works of Zora Neale Hurtston, the African-American writer of Their Eyes Were Watching God and other novels and essays. She taught English composition and literature for several years at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland. While at the College she served as the Director of the Women's Studies Program at Montgomery College for five years and has had extensive experience coordinating the academic program as well as social outreach programs. Friel is producer and host of the TV show Pandora's Box on the Rockville Cable station. This invaluable program has featured numerous influential women and men who have helped promote the awareness and education of the public in terms of women's studies. The topics have ranged from the arts to literature to science to xenophobia. Friel resides in Rockville, Maryland with her family and often travels to Ireland, which holds many cultural ties for her.

Jesús Gardea's only collection of poetry entitled Canciones para una sola cuerda / Songs for a Single String, translated by Robert L. Giron, was published posthumously in 2002. The late Jesús Gardea was born in Ciudad Delicias, Chihuahua, Mexico. He was a graduate of the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, where he took his degree in denistry. He lived most of his adult life with his family in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, where he taught at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, across the Río Grande from sister city El Paso, Texas. Gardea wrote extensively and his work appeared in numerous Mexican and American journals as well as several international anthologies.

Robert L. Giron is the author of five collections of poetry and editor of five anthologies. His poetry and fiction have appeared in national and international anthologies among other publications. He was born in Nebraska, but he describes himself as a transplanted Texan, with family roots that go back over four centuries, who lives in Arlington, Virginia. He discovered recently that his ancestry covers most of Europe and the greater Mediterranean area, including Indigenous roots from Mexico/Texas. He describes himself as “just a man of the world.” About the Translator of "Songs for the Spirit / Canciones para el Espíritu" Javier Prieto Martinez is a Spanish teacher in Spain with more than ten years of experience in different countries (Europe and Asia). He owns a translation service company that translates works into English, German, Chinese and other languages from Spanish and vice versa. More than fifty books have been translated. He is also a TED speaker and an international consultant. Giron worked with Javier Prieto Martinez to finalize the translation.

Perry Glasser is a memoirist, short story writer and novelist. He is the author of three prize-winning collections of short fiction: Dangerous Places received the 2008 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize from BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; Singing on the Titanic (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1987) which was recorded by the Library of Congress for the blind; Suspicious Origins (St. Paul: New Rivers Press, 1985), which was the Winner of the Minnesota Voice Competition. A three time winner of P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Awards, his work has twice been read on National Public Radio's “The Sound of Writing.” He has been named at fellow at The Norman Mailer House, Ucross, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, was a scholar at Bread Loaf, and in consecutive years was named a winner of the annual Boston Fiction Festival. His memoir about his having been a single parent, “Iowa Black Dirt,” won First Prize from The Good Men Foundation; his story, “I-95, Southbound” received the Gival Press Short Story Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His memoir, “Excelsior” won an award from Memoir (and). He has been a Contributing Editor of North American Review since 1994. Glasser was names a 2012 Fellow in Creative Nonfiction by the Massachusetts Cultural Council; he teaches professional writing at Salem State University. He lives in Haverhill, Massachusetts and can often be found bicycling the back roads of the Merrimack River Valley.

Paula Goldman has a master’s in journalism from Marquette University and an MFA from Vermont College. She is a docent and lecturer at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Her work has appeared in the North American Review, Harvard Review, Poet Lore, Poet Miscellany, and in several anthologies. Her collection Wild Beasts was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, Gival Press Poetry Award, Brittingham Award and Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, New Rivers Press, and other competitions. She was born and raised in Atlantic City when the Atlantic Ocean was something then. Formerly of Wisconsin, she currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and children.

John Gosslee is editor of Fjords Arts and Literary Review. He was poet-in-residence for Attitude: the Dancers' Magazine from 2008-2011. As an amateur botanist, he enjoys the tones, fragrances and sounds of the springtime.

A native of West Virginia, Lisa Graley is an assistant professor at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she teaches English and Humanities and coordinates the Interdisciplinary Humanities program. She has published stories and poems in Glimmer Train Stories, The McNeese Review, and Water~Stone Review.

Award winning author Khanh Ha is a nine-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for The Ohio State University Fiction Collection Prize, Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize, and The Santa Fe Writers Project. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, The Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, The Orison Anthology Award for Fiction, The James Knudsen Prize for Fiction, The C&R Press Fiction Prize, The EastOver Fiction Prize, The Blackwater Press Fiction Prize, and The Gival Press Novel Award.

Elizabeth Harris is the author of Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman, which won the 2014 Gival Press Novel Award and has been reviewed with enthusiasm, praised as essential cultural Texana, and listed among the 10 Best Books of 2015. For its style and its penetration of the Western myth, Mayhem has been compared to fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, Wendell Berry, Cormac McCarthy, and Annie Proulx. Harris’s first book, The Ant Generator, a short story collection, was chosen by Marilynne Robinson for the prestigious John Simmons Award from the University of Iowa Press. Those and uncollected stories appeared in Antioch Review, Epoch, Chicago Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, and other magazines, and have been anthologized in New Stories from the South, Best of Wind, The Iowa Award, and Literary Austin. She taught fiction-writing at the University of Texas at Austin for a number of years and counts many successful writers among her former students. Visit Elizabeth Harris at www.elizabethharriswriter.com.

David Garrett Izzo is a writer of fiction and drama as well a scholar of modern British and American literature with numerous books and articles of literary criticism, literary philosophy, literary biography, and literary history. He is an expert in the years between the world wars. Izzo is professor and director of the English program at American Public University.

George Klawitter, originally from the Chicago area, has distinguished himself as a poet, writer, and educator. With degrees from the University of Notre Dame, the University of Michigan, and finally a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he has taught English literature at several institutions, including Indiana University at Indianapolis, Holy Cross College, Viterbo University, and currently chairs the English Department at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, where he teaches Skakespeare, Milton, Chaucer and literary periods. Klawitter has written seven other books. Let Orpheus Take Your Hand is his second collection of poetry. He is currently working on The Life of Urbain Monsimer.

Peter Leach was born and grew up in St. Louis. He attended Amherst College, spent two years in the Cold War army in Germany, then studied playwriting at Yale Drama School. He has taught at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Louisville and currently teaches in the night-school at Washington University in St. Louis. His short story collection Tales of Resistance won the George Garrett Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 1999. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Minnesota Review, Indiana Review, River Styx, Panache, Artful Doge, and Kansas Quarterly. One of his stories was reprinted in an O. Henry Awards and another in an NYU Press Best Little Magazine Fiction. His story The Convict's Tale won the Nebraska Review fiction prize. Leach received a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship.

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee earned a B.A., cum laude, in English and creative writing from Sweet Briar College, where she was a Davison-Foreman scholar. She lived in Athens, Greece, for many years. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary and scholarly publications, including CALYX: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Feminist Studies, The Massachusetts Review, The Midwest Quarterly, the Seattle Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Lee was a finalist for the 2007 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize for her poem "Docking at Limnos" (Calyxpress.org). Her poem "The pines" (published in Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments) was nominated by Simmons B. Buntin, editor and publisher of Terrain.org, for the Best of the Net 2007 anthology by Sundress Publications.

VLADIMIR LEVCHEV is a Bulgarian poet and writer whose parents are a poet and an artist. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, in 1982, and from the MFA program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, DC, in 1996. Levchev’s magazine Glas (“Voice” or “Vote”), was the first independent periodical in Communist Bulgaria, and it was banned by the authorities before the downfall of the regime on November 10, 1989. It featured some of the best known Bulgarian and Eastern European dissidents. Levchev received a Fulbright scholarship in 1994. He resided and worked as a language instructor and a professor of literature in the United States for 13 years. Since 2007, he has been teaching literature and writing at the American University in Sofia, Bulgaria. He has written fifteen books of poetry, two books of essays, and two novels published in Bulgaria. He has had three books of poetry, Leaves from the Dry Tree, Black Book of the Endangered Species, and The Rainbow Mason, published in the United States. His poetry has appeared in many anthologies and literary magazines, including Poetry, Chicago, Child of Europe: Anthology of New East European Poetry, The Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (1997), and Clay and Star: Contemporary Bulgarian Poets. His poems have been translated for literary magazines in Russian, German, French, Greek, Turkish, Polish, Hungarian, Punjabi, and Hebrew. He is the translator of Allen Ginsberg, Stanley Kunitz, and other American poets in Bulgarian. Levchev graduated from American University (Washington, DC) and currently teaches at the American University (Sofia, Bulgaria).

Chip Livingston’s poems and stories appear widely in literary journals such as Ploughshares, New York Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Cincinnati Review, McSweeney’s, and New American Writing. He has received awards from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, AABB Foundation, and Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. He has taught writing for University of Colorado, University of the Virgin Islands, Brooklyn College, and Gotham Writers Workshops. He lives in New York City.

Marta López-Luaces was born in A Coruña, Spain, in 1964, and lives in New York. She is a poet, writer and translator. She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Literatures from New York University (1998). She is a professor at Montclair SU and the coordinator of the Bilingual Poetry Reading via Zoom sponsored by New York Library at Tompkins, Instituto Cervantes of New York and Montclair SU. The readings are held once a month and poets from Latin America, the United States and Spain read their poems while the translation is shown using Powerpoint. Poets like Raúl Zurita (Chile), Norma Cole (USA), Luis García Montero (USA), Ann Lauterbach (USA), Ron Sillman (USA), Peter Gizzi (USA), Jan Xie (USA), Elsa Cross (Mexico), Sandra Lorenzano (Mexico), and Rafael Saraviz (Spain), among others, have read in the series. She has published six books of poetry: Distancias y destierros (1998), Las lenguas del viajero (Madrid: Huerga y Fierro, 2005), Los arquitectos del imaginario (finalist of the prestigious award Ausiás March was published by Pre-Textos, 2011), Talar un nogal (Madrid: politea, 2015) and Después de la oscuridad (Valencia: Pre-Textos 2016). A selection of her work was translated into Romanian and published under the title Pravalirea focului (Orient-Occident, 2010). Her poetry was also translated into Italian under the title Accento Magico (San Marco, 2002). She has also published two novels and a book of short stories. Her novel, Los traductores del viento (Madrid-Monterrey: Vaso Roto, 2013) won the International Latino Book Award for Best Fantasy Novel, 2014. She was named Speaker for the Humanities of NYC (2003-05). About the Translator G. J. Racz is professor of Humanities at LIU Brooklyn, a past president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and review editor for Translation Review. In addition to his nine volumes of translations of the Peruvian poet Eduardo Chirinos and two of the Chilean poet Óscar Hahn, Racz has published translations of dramas by Miguel Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jaime Salom, and Alberto Conejero.

Leonardo Malcovati hails from Milano, Italy. He has followed the path of many poets of the Parnasse; he pursued scientific studies before devoting himself to literature, receiving his M.Sc. (1996) and his Ph.D. (2001) in Chemical Engineering from the Polytechnic School of Milan. He is a journalist for an English magazine in Copenhagen. Fascinated by medieval poetry, he has established the Internet's largest troubadours database, comprising over thirteen hundred poems in the original Provençal, which has become the point of reference for scholars worldwide. He sporadically writes music and poetry, and his sardonic Ballade of the Romantic Lover is among the handful of contemporary works quoted by the International Villon Society. He has had several posts as a researcher in Italy, Canada, and France. He currently lives in Denmark.

Jeff Mann was born in Clifton Forge, Virginia, and spent his first ten years in Covington, Virginia, before moving with his family to Hinton, West Virginia, where he attended high school. Graduating from West Virginia University in 1981, he received from the College of Arts and Sciences a B.A. in English and from the School of Agriculture and orestry a B.S. in Recreation with a Nature Interpretation emphasis. He later returned to West Virginia University to complete an M.A. in English. Mann presently divides his time between Hinton, West Virginia; Charleston, West Virginia; and Blacksburg, Virginia, where he has taught in the English Department since 1989. He teaches an assortment of classes, among them Appalachian literature, Gay and Lesbian literature, Creative Writing, freshman composition (focusing on the vampire in literature and film), Southern literature, and satire.

Cecilia Martinez-Gil is the author of "Psaltery and Serpentines "(Gival Press 2010), which was a finalist for Foreword Reviews' Book of the Year, finalist in the USA National Best Books Award, and runner-up for Los Angeles Book Festival Poetry Award. Her second collection of poetry, "a fix of ink" was published by Finishing Line Press (2016). Her poems have been published in both English and Spanish in the international "Levure Litteraire," "The Paddock Review, " "Women’s Voices," "Anthology of Latin American Writers in L.A.," "Imaginarias: Antología de Poesía" and in her first chapbook "Muecas de Fósforo" (Caballo de Fuego 1987). She also co-wrote and played the lead character in the award-winning experimental video "Itinerarios" (CEMA 1988). Cecilia’s work in journalism has been published in several newspapers and magazines. Cecilia has earned four masters in English, Spanish, Urban Sustainability and Creative Writing. She teaches English and Latin American Literatures at Santa Monica College.

C.M. Mayo is the author of several books of literary fiction and nonfiction, including The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire (a Library Journal Best Book of 2009) and Sky Over El Nido: Stories, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award. Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have been widely published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, among them, Beltway Quarterly, Creative Nonfiction, Gargoyle, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Southwest Review, and the anthologies edited by Robert L. Giron, Poetic Voices Without Borders and Poetic Voices Without Borders 2. In 2017 Mayo was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters. A native of El Paso, Texas, raised in Palo Alto, California, and educated at the University of Chicago, she has been a long-time resident of Mexico City.

Tyler McMahon is the author of the novels How the Mistakes Were Made and Kilometer 99. He studied at the University of Virginia and Boise State University. He teaches writing at Hawai’i Pacific University, edits the Hawai’i Pacific Review, and organizes the Ko’oalu Writers Workshop.

A native of Houston, Texas, Thomas H. McNeely has received fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University, the Dobie Paisano Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well from the MacDowell Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Epoch, and has been anthologized in Algonquin Books' Best of the South and What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. His non-fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter and The Rumpus. Ghost Horse, winner of the 2013 Gival Press Novel Award, is his first book. He teaches in the Emerson College Honors Program and the Stanford Online Writing Studio, and lives with his wife and daughter in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Stephanie Miller is the host of The Stephanie Miller Show which is the #1 liberal talk radio show in the country. With Arbitron ratings clocking over 3+ million listeners a week and simulcast daily in 37 million homes on Free Speech TV, where she is also the number one show, her strongest numbers are in the grand prize demographic of highly educated males 25-54, despite, or maybe because of, her status as an out gay woman. It probably explains the sublime effectiveness of her national billboard slogan: “Stephanie Miller...making men rise in the morning.” Stephanie also headlined the country’s number one comedy tour, “Stephanie Miller’s Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour,” as well as the number one comedy album, Stephanie Miller’s Sexy Liberal Comedy Album. She has recently had her second and third #1 comedy albums in the country with her Stephanie Miller’s Happy Hour, Volume One and Stephanie Miller’s Happy Hour, Volume Two. She frequents the Holy Trinity of cable news: CNN, MSNBC, and FOX, where she bursts the infallibility balloons of right wingers, often with one well-aimed pinpoint punchline.

Kate Monaghan lives in New York City. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Studio Art and English from Yale and a PhD in classical Chinese poetry from Harvard.

Yvette Neisser (Moreno) is a poet, translator, and literary advocate. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Foreign Policy in Focus, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetic Voices Without Borders, and the forthcoming "The New Promised Land: An Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poets." She co-translated with Patricia Bejarano Fisher South Pole/Polo Sur by María Teresa Ogliastri (Settlement House, 2011) and edited Difficult Beauty by Luis Alberto Ambroggio (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2009). She has given readings and presentations at the Library of Congress, the Embassy of Argentina, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Busboys and Poets, and Fall for the Book Festival (George Mason University), and has been featured on the public radio program "The Poet and the Poem." With a specialization in the Middle East, she has worked as an international program coordinator, writer, editor, and translator, and has taught at various institutions, most recently at The George Washington University, Catholic University, and The Writer's Center. Her book reviews and articles on poetry and translation have appeared in the Palestine-Israel Journal, The Montserrat Review, POST NO ILLS, and elsewhere. She is on the programming committee of Split This Rock Poetry Festival and is the founder of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT). In 2012, she was the first runner-up for the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award sponsored by Poets & Writers. Raised in California and New Jersey, she lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband and two children.

Rich Murphy holds degrees from Boston University, including a graduate degree in creative writing. He studied with the late George Starbuck and Derek Walcott. For 21 years, he has taught writing and literature and directed undergraduate writing programs at Bradford and Emmanuel Colleges; he currently teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts. His credits include a book of poems The Apple in the Monkey Tree (Codhill Press); chapbooks Great Grandfather (Pudding House Publications), Family Secret (Finishing Line Press), and Hunting and Pecking (Ahadada Press); poems in hundreds of journals in Anglophone countries; and essays in such periodicals as The International Journal of the Humanities, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture, Fringe, and Big Toe Review. His essay on poetry’s evolving ecology will be in a special issue of The Journal of Ecocritism (University of British Columbia). His books and chapbooks have been nominated for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Griffin Award, Balcones Center Poetry Award, L.L. Winship / PEN New England Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, and William Carlos Williams Award.

Eric Nelson’s five previous poetry collections include The Twins, winner of the Split Oak Press Chapbook Award; Terrestrials, winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Award; and The Interpretation of Waking Life, winner of the Arkansas Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Oxford American, The Sun, and many other venues. He and his wife, the writer Stephanie Tames, recently moved to Asheville, North Carolina.

Yemi D. Ogunyemi, who is the son of Matilda and Chief Reuben Ogunyemi, hails from Nigeria. His first book of poetry Trans-Continental Poems appeared in 1974 and since then he has authored over forty titles of literary works, ranging from fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children's literature. In 1990, he won the Golden Trophy for his literary work. From 1983-1993, he was the Director of the Institute of Creative Writing, where he devoted his time and energy on research and advances in the theory of narrative philosophies. Literatures of the African Diaspora, which covers six continents, traces the influences of African literature in the world. This book was his major research project while at Harvard University. He is the founder of the Institute of Yoruba/African Narrative Philosophies and Diaspora Press of America, which encourages young writers. In addition, he is busy trying to establish The International Independent University of Nigeria and The Academe of the Diaspora.

Elizabeth Oness's stories and poetry have appeared in The Hudson Review, Crazyhorse, Glimmer Train, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, and other magazines. Her stories have received an O. Henry Prize, a Nelson Algren Award, and her story collection Articles of Faith was selected for the 2000 Iowa Short Fiction Prize. Her first novel Departures was published by Penguin in 2004. She directs marketing and development for Sutton Hoo Press, a literary fine press, and lives in rural Minnesota.

William Orem’s first collection of stories, Zombi, You My Love, won the GLCA New Writers Award, formerly given to Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Richard Ford and Alice Munro. His second collection, Across the River, won the Texas Review Novella Prize. His first novel, Killer of Crying Deer, won the Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in the Small Presses, and has been optioned for film. His first collection of poems, Our Purpose in Speaking, won the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. Meanwhile, his short plays have been performed around the country, winning both the Critics’ Prize and Audience Favorite Award at Durango Theatre Fest, and thrice being nominated for the prestigious Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville. A native of Washington, D.C., he currently is a Senior Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College, where he teaches, among other things, classes on gothic literature.

Listen to an interview with Matthew Pennock about "The Miracle Machine" with Katherina Pappas  of Kirkus Reviews. Follow the link below; the interview begins at 00:19:05 to 00:22:57. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/podcast/2020-12-15/ About the Author: Matthew Pennock is the author of "Sudden Dog" (Alice James Books, 2012), which won the Kinereth-Gensler Award. As per the terms of that award, he joined the board of Alice James Books in 2011, In 2014, he co-created AJB's editorial board with executive editor Carey Salerno, and then became the board's first chairperson, a position he held until 2020. He received his MFA from Columbia University and his PhD from the University of Cincinnati. His poems have been widely published in such journals as Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, New York Quarterly, LIT, and elsewhere. He currently owns and operates a learning center outside of Washington, D.C.

Heather Rellihan is professor and coordinator of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Anne Arundel Community College.

J. E. Robinson received the 2005 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for his essays. His novel Skip Macalester was designated a Paperback Pick by the American Booksellers Association. An ancient historian, he teaches at the Saint Louis College of Pharmacy.

A native of Cuba, Carlos Rubio came to the U.S. in 1961 His work, in English and Spanish, has appeared in several anthologies. In 1989 his novel QUADRIVIUM was awarded the Nuevo León International Prize for Novels. In 2003 his novel DEAD TIME received the Silver Award for Translation from Foreword's Magazine Book Literary Competition. He is also the author, among others, of SAGA, ORPHEUS' BLUES, THE NEOPHYTE, SECRET MEMORIES and BULLWHIP. His novel ORISHA was released in June 2006.

Linwood Rumney was recently given a Creative Writing Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society. His poems have appeared widely in journals, including North American Review, Hotel Amerika, New Millennium Writing, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Puerto del Sol, and they have been anthologized by Jacar, FutureCycle, and Main Street Rag. Translations of Aloysius Bertrand, an early practitioner of the modern prose poem in French, have appeared in Arts & Letters, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. An Associate Editor for Black Lawrence Press and previous Poetry Editor for Redivider, he has received awards from the St. Botolph Club and the Writer’s Room of Boston, as well as Kimmel Harding Nelson Center Residency. Originally from Central Maine, he currently lives in Cincinnati, where he completed a PhD as a Charles Phelps Taft Dissertation Fellow.

Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania. He is the author of the book Violent Outbursts (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing), Haywire (Starcherone Books / forthcoming from Blue Streak Press), Tetched (Behler Publications) and Roughhouse (Kaya Press). Haywire won the Members’ Choice Award, given by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York. He teaches literature at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and fiction writing at the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, Randi Hoffman, and their daughter, Shay. He received a fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Schellenberg has written book reviews which have appeared in The Lambda Book Report, The James White Review, and The Gay and Lesbian Harvard Review.

Robert Schirmer is the author of the collection of short stories titled LIVING WITH STRANGERS (NYU Press) and the winner of the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. His stories have appeared in a wide range of literary journals such as BYLINER, GLIMMER TRAIN, THE SEWANEE REVIEW, EPOCH, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW, FICTION, CONFRONTATION and THE BEST OF WITNESS. In addition, he has won an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Walter E. Dakin fellowship to the Sewanee Writers Conference, and a fellowship from the Chesterfield Film Company Writer's Film project. His screenplays have been optioned by Amblin Entertainment and Warner Brothers. He has also been a Visiting Writer at the Southwest Writers Series and at Stetson University as part of the Tim Sullivan Endowment for Writing series.

Esther Schwartz-McKinzie earned her BA from Bard College and her PhD in 19th Century British and American literature from Temple University. Her scholarly work includes efforts to recover the voices of marginalized women writers who used literature as a way to expose injustice and to expand imaginative possibilities for their readers. As a professor of English, Literature and Women’s Studies at Montgomery College, she has worked to promote access to the humanities, improve the well-being of student veterans, and to reduce violence against women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Her chapter, “Keep ‘Doing Good’: Women’s and Gender Studies Programs and VAWA Education Initiatives Against the Tide” appeared in Theory and Praxis, Women’s and Gender Studies at Community Colleges in 2019. Also in 2019, she was among the first recipients of the College’s Excellence in Equity Award, recognizing individuals who demonstrate a commitment to social justice, equity, inclusion, antiracism, and diversity. Her photography and poetry have appeared in the Sligo Journal. Esther can often be found hiking the verdant parks and trails of Montgomery County with her husband, Matthew, and their two dogs.

Pop-culture journalist Gregg Shapiro's interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBT publications and websites. His poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous outlets including Blithe House Quarterly, Beltway, modern words, Bloom, and the anthologies Sex & Chocolate: Tasty Morsels for Mind and Body (Paycock Press) and Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press). He lives in Chicago with his life-partner Rick Karlin and their dogs, Dusty and k.d.

Jordan Silversmith has received degrees from Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia. His poem "Praxis" was chosen by Philip Metres for the 2020 Slippery Elm Prize in Poetry. He works as an attorney in New York City.

G. Tod Slone is the founding editor of "The American Dissident," a nonprofit literary journal offering a forum for vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy.

Seth Brady Tucker’s first book, Mormon Boy, won the 2011 Elixir Press Editor’s Poetry Prize (2012), and was a Finalist for the 2013 Colorado Book Award. He has won a number of writing awards in poetry and fiction, and in 2013 one of his stories won the Shenandoah Bevel Summers Fiction Prize and the Literal Latte Short Fiction Award. His work has been published in such magazines and journals as the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Verse Daily, Apalachee Review, River Styx, Chattahoochee Review, storySouth, Crab Orchard Review, among many others. Seth has served as the Carol Houck Smith Scholar at Bread Loaf, and he is an instructor in the inmate literacy program, Words Beyond Bars, in Colorado. Seth has degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, Northern Arizona University (where he resurrected and worked as Poetry and Fiction Editor for Thin Air magazine), and Florida State University (PhD, 2012). Currently, Seth is writing a novel about his experiences growing up in Wyoming and his time in the Persian Gulf, and his first short fiction collection was recently a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award. Both are represented by Alex Glass at Trident Media Group, New York. He teaches poetry and fiction workshops at the Light House Writer’s Workshop in Denver, and lives and teaches at the University of Colorado near Boulder. He is originally from Wyoming, and served as an Army 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper in the Persian Gulf.

Barbara Ungar is the author of eight books of poems. Save Our Ship, won the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2019; it also won a Franklin Award from the Independent Book Publishers Associations and was a Distinguished Favorite at the Independent Press Awards. Prior books include Immortal Medusa, named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2015, and Charlotte Brontë, You Ru-ined My Life, both from The Word Works, and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Press Poetry Award and a silver Independent Publishers award. A professor at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, she is currently hunkered down in Saratoga Springs with her son Izaak and cats Gracie and Magical Star. Visit: www.barbaraungar.net.

Jeff Walt was born in rural Pennsylvania among a community of coal miners, bricklayers, and railroad workers. His chapbook, Soot, was awarded co-winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize and published in 2010 by Seven Kitchens Press. He’s been awarded writing residencies from The MacDowell Colony, The Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts, and Kalani Eco-Village Artist-in-Residence Program on the Big Island of Hawai’i. His poems have appeared in journals such as Fugue, Red Wheelbarrow, Los Angeles Review, Alligator Juniper, The Sun, Southword, Connecticut Review, Inkwell, New Millennium Writings, The Good Men Project, Harpur Palate, Americas Review, Cream City Review, The Ledge, and Slipstream. Several poems from Soot were selected and scored by composer David Sisco and performed at Carnegie Hall on November 14, 2014. His poem, After a Fight, was selected by Broadside Press for a professionally designed broadside collaboration that was made available as a free download in August 2016. Jeff is a Regional Editor with the San Diego Poetry Annual and serves as SDPA’s coordinator for The Kowit Poetry Prize.

Myles Weber’s criticism appears frequently in such journals as New England Review, Georgia Review, Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Northwest Review, among many others. Middlebrow Annoyances is his first book. A second, "Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don't Publish" is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press. A playwright as well as critic, Weber is assistant professor of English at Ashland University in Ohio.

Lowell Mick White is author of the story collection Long Time Ago Good (Slough Press, 2008). His work has been published in over two dozen journals, including Callaloo, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Short Story. In 1998 he was awarded the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters, an honor that has previously gone to such writers as Sandra Cisneros, Dagoberto Gilb, and Stephen Harrigan. White lived in Austin for 25 years, at various times working as a cab driver, as a shade tree salesman, and as an Internal Revenue Service bureaucrat. He is currently a PhD student at Texas A&M University, where he specializes in creative writing and regional literatures, and teaches creative writing and freshman composition.

Jill Williams is a native of Hartford, Connecticut, but she makes her home in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is also the author of a Broadway musical entitled Rainbow Jones. "As a formalist," says Williams, "I love the challenge of marrying an idea with a specific poetic structure. Writing The Nature Sonnets has given me ample opportunity." Aside from her obvious gift as a poet, Williams has also been a performer both as a recording artist (RCA Victor, "Jill Williams") and a news commentator for CBC-Radio (The Early Editon). Williams states, "I believe creativity can take many different directions. I've been fortunate enough in my lifetime to have experienced quite a few."

David Winner was born in Charlottesville, Virginia and educated at Oberlin and the University of Arizona (Master's of Fine Arts). As a child, Winner was taken to Europe several times, though mostly to Italy where members of his family (passionate Italophiles though not actual Italians) have often lived. Almost by accident in the summer after his final year at college, he found himself traveling for the first time to Mexico. Speaking only minimal Spanish and having only minimal knowledge of Mexican culture, he took long bus rides through steep mountain roads, met some huge insects and howling monkeys. On the way back, he and his American traveling companions glimpsed magical names on the flight board: Buenos Aires, Lima, Bogota. A few years later, he saved a thousand dollars and spent it traveling for six months in South America: from Ecuador down through Chile and across to Brazil, passing through Paraguay in the wake of a military coup, Uruguay, Argentina and Bolivia. Speaking Spanish a tad better, he had adventures and misadventures (versions of which appear in his writing) and developed a love of Latin America that has persisted to this day. Now, he teaches at a community college, lives in Brooklyn and writes fiction. The Cannibal of Guadalajara came not only from his love of Latin America but his interest in unconventional family arrangements, for which he likes to use fiction (rather than his own relatively ordinary marriage) to explore. David Winner has received two Pushcart nominations and first prize in The Ledge's 2003 Fiction Contest. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, Confrontation, Cortland Review, Staple, Dream Catcher, Phantasmagori, KGB, and several other literary magazines in the USA and the UK. A film based on a short story of his was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, and he's the fiction editor of The American, a magazine based in Rome, Italy.

Mark Wisniewski is the author of the novel Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, the collection of short stories All Weekend with the Lights On, and the book of poems One of Us One Night. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as Virginia Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, The Sun, and The Georgia Review, and has been anthologized in Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories. He has held two Regents' Fellowships form the University of California and won an Isherwood Fellowship, a Tobias Wolff Award, a Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, and a Gival Press Short Story Award.

Wozek has received international recognition in recent years for his poetry videos. Co-produced by filmmaker and artist Mary Russell, these short experimental works couple Wozek's spoken word with captured video stills and moving images. These short pieces have played at poetry conferences and short film festivals both in the United States and abroad. Most recently, Planet Out chose to feature his poems "Elemental Reels" on its website's online cinema. Wozek has also had two theatrical productions produced and performed by Lionheart Theatre Troupe in Chicago. The narrative prelude from his first play "The Changeling's Exile" was made into a handbound chapbook, produced and still available online through Deep Wood Press.

Céline Zins is the author of three volumes of poetry published by Gallimard. In addition to being a poet she is also known for being a renowned translator in France of works by Carols Fuentes, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Oscar Lewis, Ernest Hemingway,William Faulkner, J.M. Synge and Julio Cortazar.