Geraldine Connolly was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She earned a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and and an M.A. from the University of Maryland. For seven years she served as co-editor of the literary quarterly, Poet Lore. She is author of a chapbook, The Red Room, and three full-length poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press) and Hand of the Wind (Iris Press). Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review and Shenandoah. It has been anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework, and The Doll Collection.
She has won many awards, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for The Arts, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship and the Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry and has been broadcast on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac, as well as Grace Cavalieri’s The Poet and the Poem.
She has taught classes in the Maryland Poetry-in-the-Schools program, at the Writers Center in Bethesda MD, the Chautauqua Institute in Chautauqua NY, the University of Arizona Poetry Center and the Johns Hopkins Graduate Writing Program in Washington, DC. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Julia Nunnally Duncan is an award-winning North Carolina author, whose publication credits include nine books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and scores of stories, essays, and poems in literary journals and anthologies. Her credits and biography have been listed in Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains (UNC Press), she has been reviewed and interviewed in Southern Literary Review, and featured in North Carolina Literary Review. Additional reviews of her work have appeared in Our State Magazine, Asheville Citizen-Times, Appalachian Heritage, and many other newspapers and journals.
Julia’s literary works often explore life in a Western North Carolina textile mill town and confront issues of poverty, unemployment, and alcohol abuse.
Educated at Warren Wilson College, from which she holds a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing, Julia has taught English and Southern Culture for over thirty years at her local community college. Recently retiring as a full-time instructor, she continues to teach part-time.
Julia lives in Marion, NC, a town thirty miles east of Asheville, with her husband Steve, a wood carver, and their daughter Annie, a college sophomore. Julia is currently working on a second essay collection and a fifth poetry collection.
Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, and editor. Her books of poems are Wild With It (2002), a National Books Critics Circle Notable Book, Madly in Love (1997), Windows in Providence (1981), and The Real Tin Flower (which was introduced by Anne Sexton and was published in 1968, when she was twelve years old). She edited A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (1980; second edition, 1992), The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (1997), The Shambhala Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Poetry (1999; 2003), and she introduced and wrote the readers’ notes for H.D.’s Trilogy (1997). She has recorded a collaborative CD with musician Frank Haney. Her translation of C.P. Cavafy’s collected poems and a study of the development of Emily Dickinson’s poetry are forthcoming.
The daughter of poet, Willis Barnstone, and painter, Elli Tzalopoulou-Barnstone, Aliki was raised with her two brothers, Robert and Tony, in Bloomington, Indiana and Brandon, Vermont; the family traveled widely, especially to Greece, the country of her mother. Barnstone has also traveled to Spain, Holland, Italy, Portugal, England, Turkey, Mexico, Guatemala, Hong Kong, China, Tibet, Nepal, and Burma.
Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to five other novels, including One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, The World Made Straight, and Above the Waterfall; five collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award, and most recently, Something Rich and Strange. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
Dana Wildsmith is the author of a novel, Jumping, and an environmental memoir , Back to Abnormal: Surviving With An Old Farm in the New South, which was Finalist for Georgia Author of the Year. She is also the author of five collections of poetry. Wildsmith has served as Artist-in-Residence for Grand Canyon National Park and will serve as Artist-in-Residence for Everglades National Park in October of this year She lives with her family on an old farm in north Georgia, and works as an English Literacy Instructor at Lanier Technical College. Her widely followed blog, http://www.danawildsmith.com/blog, focuses on the life of a working writer.
Raised in North Carolina and Cincinnati, Janice Moore Fuller is Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina. She has published a poetry book Archeology Is a Destructive Science (Scots Plaid Press, 1998) and poems and essays in numerous American and European journals and anthologies, including New Welsh Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Sow’s Ear, Pembroke Magazine, and Mississippi Quarterly. Her plays have been produced at Catawba’s Florence Busby Corriher Theater, Charlotte’s BareBones Theater, and the Minneapolis Fringe Festival. Her libretto for German composer Knut Mueller’s Destructive Science premiered at the Rendez-Vous Musique Nouvelle in France in November 2003.
Educated at Duke University (B.A.) and UNC-Greensboro (M.A., Ph.D.), she has studied Yeats in Ireland and post-colonial literature at the University of London through National Endowment for the Humanities seminars. She has read her poetry and taught workshops at universities and other venues throughout the United States, Wales, Ireland, Italy, and Russia.
A Fellow at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Fundación Valparaiso in Spain, Hawthornden International Center in Edinburgh, and the Vermont Studio Center, she has been honored for her work by the North Carolina Arts Council, the Arts and Science Council, North Carolina State University, the Southern Women Writers Conference, and the Blumenthal Writers and Readers series.
Keith Flynn (www.keithflynn.net) is the award-winning author of seven books, including five collections of poetry: The Talking Drum (1991), The Book of Monsters (1994), The Lost Sea (2000), The Golden Ratio (Iris Press, 2007), Colony Collapse Disorder (Wings Press, 2013), and a collection of essays, entitled The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How To Make Your Poetry Swing (Writer’s Digest Books, 2007). His latest book is a collaboration with photographer Charter Weeks, entitled Prosperity Gospel: Portraits of the Great Recession. From 1984-1999, he was lyricist and lead singer for the nationally acclaimed rock band, The Crystal Zoo, which produced three albums: Swimming Through Lake Eerie (1992), Pouch (1996), and the spoken-word and music compilation, Nervous Splendor (2003). He is currently touring with a supporting combo, The Holy Men, whose album, LIVE at Diana Wortham Theatre, was released in 2011. His award-winning poetry and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies around the world, including The American Literary Review, The Colorado Review, Poetry Wales, The Cuirt Journal (Ireland), Takahe (New Zealand), Poetry East, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Margie, The Cimarron Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, Word and Witness: 100 Years of NC Poetry, Crazyhorse, and many others. He has been awarded the Sandburg Prize for poetry, a 2013 NC Literary Fellowship, the ASCAP Emerging Songwriter Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award and was twice named the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for NC. Flynn is founder and managing editor of The Asheville Poetry Review, which began publishing in 1994. For more information, please visit: www.ashevillepoetryreview.com.
Joseph Enzweiler was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1950. He received a degree in Physics from Xavier University, and moved to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1975. He received a ms in Physics from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and in 1981 built a log house in Goldstream Valley north of town where he has lived ever since. He works as a carpenter, stone mason and photographer during the summer and fall months, and spends his winters writing. Every few years he returns to rural northern Kentucky for several months where he lives with his brother and his family, and is building a rock fence around his brother’s 3 acres of land. Enzweiler has published 3 previous books of poetry: Home Country (Fireweed Press, 1986), Stonework of the Sky (Graywolf Press, 1995) and A Curb in Eden, first version (Salmon Publishing, Ltd, 1999). A Curb in Eden, new version was published by Iris Press in 2003.
Charlotte Matthews was born in Washington D. C., and her childhood memories are a prominent feature in a number of her poems. She has always felt a great affinity for the land. Right after college, she lived in a tomato greenhouse and farmed in Vermont.
She is the author of two published chapbooks, A Kind of Devotion (Palanquin Press, 2004) and Biding Time (Half Moon Bay Press, 2005). Her poems have recently appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Tar River Poetry, Meridian, and other journals. She is the recipient of numerous awards for both teaching and writing including a fellowship from Brown University and a grant from the Klingenstein Foundation. She teaches at Piedmont Virginia Community College and Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.
She lives with her two children, Emma and Garland, in Crozet, Virginia.
Thorpe Moeckel has guided trips on rivers and trails throughout the Appalachians. His first book of poems, Odd Botany, won the Gerald Cable Award and was published in 2002. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hollins University and lives with his family on a small farm near the James River in Western Virginia.