A Professor at Georgia State University and award-winning writer, Beth Gylys has published three collections of poetry (Sky Blue Enough to Drink, Spot in the Dark and Bodies that Hum) and two chapbooks (Matchbook and Balloon Heart). Recipient of a fellowship to attend the MacDowell Colony, her work has been featured on the Writers Almanac, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and she has had poetry published in many anthologies and journals including Rattle, Barrow Street, Paris Review, Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Southern Review.
Up until now, Alex Panasenko has been a slave laborer in Nazi Germany, a factory worker, a soldier in the US Army during the Korean War, a graduate student in Entomology at UC Berkeley, a science instructor at Berkeley High School, and a bartender. In only a few more years, he will be one hundred, at which point he plans to decide what to do with his life. In the meantime, he is biding his time cooking for wife Sally and dog Lucy in Portland, Oregon.
Jane Sasser was born and raised on a farm in Fairview, NC. She grew up in a family of storytellers and began writing her own stories at the age of six. Her poetry has appeared in JAMA, North American Review, The Sun, and other publications. She has published two poetry chapbooks, Recollecting the Snow and Itinerant. A retired high school English teacher, she lives in Oak Ridge, TN, with her husband and retired greyhounds.
Rita Quillen’s full-length poetry collection, The Mad Farmer’s Wife, was published in 2016 by Texas Review Press (a Texas A&M affiliation) and was a finalist for the Weatherford Award in Appalachian Literature from Berea College. Her novel, Hiding Ezra (Little Creek Books), was a finalist for the 2005 DANA Awards. One of six semi-finalists for the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Virginia, she has received three Pushcart nominations and a Best of the Net nomination in 2012.
For more information visit: www.ritasimsquillen.com.
Katherine Smith’s poems and fiction have appeared in a number of journals, among them Mezzo Cammin, Unsplendid, Measure, Fiction International, Gargoyle, Ploughshares, The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Atlanta Review, and Appalachian Heritage. Her first book, Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House), appeared in 2003. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland where she is Poetry Editor for the Potomac Review.
Karen Head is the author of Disrupt This!: MOOCs and the Promises of Technology (a nonfiction book about issues in contemporary higher education), as well as four books of poetry (Sassing, My Paris Year, Shadow Boxes, and On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year). She also co-edited the poetry anthology Teaching as a Human Experience: An Anthology of Poetry, and has exhibited several acclaimed digital poetry projects, including her project “Monumental” (part of Antony Gormley’s One and Other Project) which was detailed in a TIME online mini-documentary. Her poetry appears in a number of national and international journals and anthologies. In 2010 she won the Oxford International Women’s Festival Poetry Prize.
Head has held residencies at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts-France. She has also taught in study abroad programs in Barcelona, Spain and Oxford, England.
She serves as Editor of the international poetry journal Atlanta Review, and as secretary for the Poetry Atlanta Board of Directors. On a more unusual note, she is currently the Poet Laureate of Waffle House—a title that reflects an outreach program to bring arts awareness to rural high schools in Georgia, which has been generously sponsored by the Waffle House Foundation. She is the Associate Chair and an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she also serves as the Executive Director of the Naugle Communication Center. For fifteen years, Head has been a visiting artist and scholar at the Institute for American Studies at Technische Universität Dortmund in Germany.
Head grew up as an Army Brat—one reason she loves to travel so much—and has family in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She is a native of Atlanta, Georgia, where she lives with her very English husband, and fellow traveler, Colin Potts.
Sandy Coomer is a poet, artist, and endurance athlete living in Brentwood, TN. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including Rivers Within Us (Unsolicited Press). Over 130 of her paintings have been published in literary art magazines, as well as being featured in local exhibits and art shows. Sandy is the founding editor of the online poetry journal Rockvale Review, the curator of the ekphrastic poetry project 20/20 Vision, a Poetic Response to Photography, and the founder and director of Rockvale Writers’ Colony, located in College Grove, TN. She is a teacher, a dreamer, an explorer, and an Ironman triathlete. Her favorite word is “Believe.”
Wesley Sims has published one chapbook of poetry, When Night Comes (Finishing Line Press, 2013). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Connecticut Review, G. W. Review, South Carolina Review, Liquid Imagination, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Praxis Magazine, The Avocet, Nature Writing, Plum Tree Tavern, Pangolin Review, Magnets and Ladders, Bewildering Stories, Breath & Shadow, Artemis Journal, and others.
Dan Veach is the founder and for two decades the editor of Atlanta Review. His collection of poems and Chinese ink paintings, Elephant Water, won the Georgia Author of the Year Award. Dan’s translations from Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon have won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Independent Publisher Book Award. He is the editor and co-translator of Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq (Michigan State University Press, 2008). A recipient of the Georgia Writers Lifetime Achievement Award, Dan has performed his poetry worldwide, including Oxford University, People’s University in Beijing, the American University in Cairo, the Atheneum in Madrid, and the Adelaide Festival in Australia. He also plays bass clarinet and composes for concert band and orchestra.
Daniel Corrie’s first full-length book of poems is near completion. Chapbooks of his poetry include Human and For the Future (Iris Press) and Words, World (Blue Horse Press). His poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Birmingham Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Hudson Review, Image, Kenyon Review, Measure, Missouri Review, The Nation, New Criterion, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Terrain.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, with poems selected for five anthologies and for Verse Daily. One of his poems received the first-place 2011 Morton Marr Poetry Prize. He and his wife live on their farm in rural Georgia.