Karen Carissimo was born in Berkeley, California, and educated at Mills College and The University of Southern California. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, American Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Puerto del Sol. Her fiction has appeared in Green Mountains Review, and her nonfiction in The San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is currently at work on a novel and a second collection of poems.
Tony Reevy is a graduate of North Carolina State University, UNC-Chapel Hill and Miami University. His previous publications include poetry, non-fiction, essays and short fiction, including the non-fiction books Ghost Train!, O. Winston Link: Life Along the Line, The Railroad Photography of Jack Delano and The Railroad Photography of Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg; the poetry chapbooks Green Cove Stop, Magdalena, Lightning in Wartime and In Mountain Lion Country; and the full books of poetry, Old North, Passage and Socorro. He lives in Durham, North Carolina with wife, Caroline Weaver, and children Lindley and Ian.
Holly Guran, author of the chapbooks River Tracks (Poets Corner Press) and Mothers’ Trails (Noctiluca Press), grew up with a view of the Hudson River which partly accounts for the frequency of rivers and water in this collection. Holly went on to live in a variety of places from Eugene, Oregon to Rome, Italy, eventually landing in Boston where she is retired from a long career at Roxbury Community College. She earned a Massachusetts Cultural Council finalist award (2012), is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets, and has been a presenter at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Each summer Holly attends the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequence where writing workshops host veterans and others. Her publications include Salamander, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Westchester Review, U.S. Worksheets 1, andshe was a featured poet in The Aurorean and Bellowing Ark. Holly lives with her husband, Philip and their dog, Ginger, and enjoys visits with children and grandchildren.
Holly Guran Website
Jacqueline Marcus is the author of Close to the Shore (Michigan State University Press). Her work has appeared in the Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, North Dakota Quarterly, New Madrid, Tampa Review, Hotel Amerika, Verse Daily, and other journals. She taught philosophy at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, California. Marcus’ collection of commentaries, Man Cannot Live on Oil, Alone: Time to end our dependency on oil before it ends us, is available at Kindle Books. She is the editor of the online poetry journals, ForPoetry.com and EnvironmentalPress.com. Her essays have been published at BuzzFlash at Truth-out.org, the North American Review, CommonDreams.org and more.
Stuart Friebert received a Ph.D. at U. Wisconsin—Madison in German Language & Literature in 1958. He taught at Mt. Holyoke College (1957-59), and Harvard University (1959-61), before settling at Oberlin College in 1961. With help from colleagues, he founded Oberlin’s Creative Writing Program and directed it until retiring in 1997. He co-founded Field Magazine, and later, the Field Translation Series/Oberlin College Press. He has published thirteen previous collections of poems. Among them, Funeral Pie co-won the Four Way Book Award in 1997, and Floating Heart won the Ohioana Book Award for poetry in 2015. He has also published ten volumes of translations. With David Young, he has co-edited two anthologies, The Longman Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem. With David Young & David Walker, he co-edited A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry & Poetics. He has also published a textbook edition of Max Frisch’s Als der Krieg zu Ende war. Having started to write prose in 2000, he has published a number of stories and memoir-pieces, which are collected in a volume entitled The Language of the Enemy, forthcoming from Black Mountain Press. He has also published numerous critical essays and reviews, held an N.E.A. Fellowship in poetry, and received a number of awards for poems and translations over the years.
Matt Urmy studied poetry as an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, then earned his MFA at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. He is a musician and recording artist, as well as a successful technology entrepreneur. He has also spent years studying the healing arts with a family of Maori healers from New Zealand. He lives and works in Music City, Tennessee.
Austin Kodra lives in Cambridge, MA, where he works as a recruiter in the tech industry. He received his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and his writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Harpur Palate, Superstition Review, Connotations Press: an Online Artifact, Prime Number Magazine, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and elsewhere.
Michele Poulos is an award-winning poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker. Her chapbook, A Disturbance in the Air, won the 2012 Slapering Hol Press competition, and her poetry has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2012 (chosen by Matthew Dickman) as well as The Southern Poetry Anthology. She has published poetry and fiction in such journals as The Southern Review, Smartish Pace, Crab Orchard Review, Sycamore Review, and many others. Her essays and book reviews have been published in Blackbird, 32 Poems, and Stone Canoe, and her screenplay, Mule Bone Blues, won the 2010 Virginia Screenwriting Competition. She holds an MFA degree in poetry from Arizona State University, and an MFA in fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University; earlier, she earned a BFA in filmmaking at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Recently, she has produced and directed a feature-length documentary film titled A Late Style of Fire about the poet Larry Levis.
www.michelepoulos.com
Richard Lyons has taught literature and creative writing for more than two decades at Mississippi State University. Lyons is a former winner of the “Discovery” Award from The Nation and the 92nd Street YHMA in New York City and the Lavan Younger Poet’s Prize from the chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in New York City. His other collections include These Modern Nights, Hours of the Cardinal, and Fleur Carnivore. Born in Boston, he hails from the Mid-South where he lives with his wife and his cats.
Amy Wright is the author of two poetry books, one collaboration, and six chapbooks, including the prose collection Think I’ll Go Eat a Worm. Most recently her essays won first place in two contests, sponsored by London Magazine and Quarterly West. She has also received two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her essays appear or are forthcoming in Brevity, Fourth Genre, Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, Waveform: Anthology of Women Essayists, and elsewhere.
For more information, visit: www.awrightawright.com