Author Biographies
Sarah Allard is an English major nearing twenty at Framingham State College in Framingham, Massachusetts. She enjoys rain, iced coffee, and time spent with her dog, Gretta.
Rae Armantrout is the author of seven books of poetry. Her latest is Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004). She teaches writing at the University of California, San Diego.
John Balaban is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, including four volumes which together have won The Academy of American Poets' Lamont prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Balaban is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and currently a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. www.johnbalaban.com
Marcus Bales -- no bio available
Walter Bargen has published eleven books of poetry. The two most recent books are, The Body of Water (2003), Timberline Press, and The Feast (2004), BkMk Press-UMKC. His poems appear in recent issues of the Iowa Review, Boulevard, Beloit Poetry Journal, Notre Dame Review, and New Letters. He was the winner of the Chester H. Jones Foundation prize in 1997 and received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in 1991. bargenw@missouri.edu
Donna Biffar is the author of two books of poetry, Water Witching in the Garden (Edwin Mellen Poetry Press, 1995) and Events Preceding Death (Mellen Poetry Press 2000) and two chapbooks, Down: Poems and Other Syndromes (Pudding House Publications, 2002), and When Tractors Are Art (Snark Publishing, 2003). Her next book, Vinegar Moon is forthcoming from BeWrite Books. She is a co-editor of River King Press' anthology New Century North American Poets and the forthcoming anthology The Best of River King. Poems, articles and reviews have appeared in Orbis, College English, The Midday Moon, 90 Poets of the Nineties, Higginsville Reader, Kaleidoscope, Chiron Review, Poetry Motel and numerous other journals and anthologies. She is former editor of Southwestern Illinois College's award winning literary publication Head to Hand and now co-edits River King Poetry Supplement. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is a recent Illinois Poet Laureate nominee.
Jared Carter, whose web site may be visited at Jared Carter Poetry, has published three books of poems with the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, most recently Les Barricades Mystérieuses (1999). His work has appeared in many literary journals including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, and The Iowa Review.
C. E. Chaffin edits the Melic Review, and teaches a one-on-one intensive online poetry tutorial for a fee. Widely published in web and print, he has two books to his credit-- both unfortunately out of print. His work was most recently featured at Tryst. Meanwhile he continues his essays on T. S. Eliot at Melic. He has four kids, a grandkid, a dog, a turtle, lots of plants, and a beautiful wife, also his editor, Kathleen Chaffin. CE may be reached through melicreview@hotmail.com
Joshua Corey is the author of SELAH (Barrow Street Press, 2003) and his second book, FOURIER SERIES, will soon be published by Spineless Books. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he is a PhD student in English at Cornell, and keeps a blog, Cahiers de Corey
Juan Delgado's recent book, A Rush of Hands, is published by the University of Arizona Press. For more information, please go to juandelgado.com
Debra Di Blasi won the 2003 James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Books include the novellas Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions, 1997), winner of the 1998 Thorpe Menn Book Award, and a short story collection Prayers of an Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press, 1999). Her short stories, essays, art reviews and articles have appeared in a variety of national and regional publications, including The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Midwest, and New Letters. Her fiction has been adapted to film, radio, theatre, and audio CD in the U.S. and abroad. Recent collaborations with visual and audio artists have been featured museum installations. Screenwriting credits include The Walking Wounded, finalist in the 1996 Austin Screenwriters Competition, and Drought, for which she won the 1999 Cinovation Screenwriting Award. The short film directed by Lisa Moncure went on to win a host of national and international awards, and was only one of six films selected for the Universe Elle section at 2000 Cannes International Film Festival. Debra is president of Jaded Ibis Productions, Inc., a transmedia production corporation.
Examples of Thomas Dorsett's poetry have appeared in over 400 literary journals and anthologies over the past three decades. He also writes essays, and translates from several languages. A busy pediatrician with Johns Hopkins Community Physicians, Dorsett lives in Baltimore with his wife, Nirmala, and with Schietebuemchen and Gopinath, his hep cats. All four miss his son, Philip, who now lives, alas! 600 miles away.
Camille Dungy, author of the forthcoming What to Eat, What to Drink and What to Leave for Poison, has been awarded fellowships and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, Cave Canem and Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She lives in Lynchburg,Virginia where she serves as Assistant Professor of English at Randolph Macon Woman's College. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, The Crab Orchard Review and other places.
A long-time visual poet, Bob Grumman began seriously making visio-mathematical poems in the early nineties. Long division poems, a form he considers himself a pioneer in, are his primary output now, but he occasionally writes purely verbal poems about a character named "Poem," too. His work has gotten some exposure in the micro press, and in scattered galleries, but he's most visible as a columnist covering lesser known kinds of poetry at Small Press Review. He earns a living as a substitute teacher in Port Charlotte, Florida. He can be reached at bobgrumman@nut-n-but.net
R. S. Gwynn is the author of No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970-2000 (Story Line Press, 2001). In 2004, he was awarded the Michael Braude award for Light Verse from the American Academy of Arts and Letters He lives in Beaumont, Texas, where he has taught at Lamar University since 1976.
Annalynn Hammond's first book, Dirty Birth, won the First Annual Sundress Publications' Book Contest. A group of her poems also won the 2004 Marc Penka Poetry Award. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in: Gargoyle, Can we have our ball back?, Diagram, The Pedestal Magazine, The Glut, Shampoo, Spork, Failbetter, Dicey Brown and elsewhere. - annalynn0@yahoo.com
Mark Jarman’s latest collection of poetry is To the Green Man, from Sarabande Books. He is the author of two books of essays on poetry: The Secret of Poetry, from Story Line Press, and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry, from the University of Michigan’s Poets on Poetry Series. In 1998 he won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine. He teaches at Vanderbilt University.
Meg Kearney's collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2001. She has been featured on Poetry Daily, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Agni, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and the anthologies Where Icarus Falls, Urban Nature, Poets Grimm, Shade, and The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present. Recipient of an 2001 Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, she received a New York Times Fellowship and the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award in 1998. Her book of poems for young adults, My Life as a Mistake, will be published by Persea Books in 2006. She teaches poetry at The New School University, and is Associate Director of the National Book Foundation in Manhattan. www.megkearney.com
Guy Kettelhack
is the author or coauthor of more than 30 nonfiction books, including DANCING AROUND THE VOLCANO, EASING THE ACHE, HOW TO MAKE LOVE WHILE CONSCIOUS and THE WIT & WISDOM OF QUENTIN CRISP. His poems have appeared in Outstretch, Van Gogh's Ear, and Melic Review. Two poems were selected for prizes in the IBPC competition, four poems were selected to represent him as one of the "featured poets" in Poetry Life & Times this past June, and one poem was first place prize winner in Triplopia's July 2004 laughter contest. He has given readings at A Different Light and CBGBs in New York City. Mr. Kettelhack graduated from Middlebury College, has done graduate work in literature at the Bread Loaf School of English and Oxford University, and coursework in psychoanalysis at the Centers for Modern Pscyhoanalytic Studies in New York City and Brookline, Massachusetts. He lives in Manhattan. His email address is: GuyBlakeKett@aol.com
Christine Klocek-Lim’s poetry has appeared in Tryst, Shemom, Seeker Magazine, the Quarterly Journal of Ideology, Writer’s Hood, Mi Poesias, and Ella. Another will be appearing in a forthcoming issue of The Unrorean. She is currently working on an anthology of poems with poets from around the world, within which her photography will be featured. After receiving a degree in writing from Carnegie Mellon, she worked for several years as a technical writer in Manhattan. Her poetry and photography can be viewed at novembersky.com and her email address is chrissiemkl@yahoo.com. She lives with her husband and two sons in Pennsylvania.
Michael Paul Ladanyi resides in the foothills of the North Georgia Mountains, with his wife and two daughters. His poetry, reviews, interviews and reviews written of his work, have appeared in hundreds of print and online magazines, in the US and abroad. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks Palm Shadows, (Purple Rose Publications, June 2002) Spelling Crows of Winter, ISBN 1-58998-229-0 (Pudding House Publications, Sept. 2003) Chicken Bones, (Little Poem Press, June 2004) and All Your Picasso Trees, (Sun Rising Poetry Press, July 2004.) His is also the author of the 72 poem collection, Humming Riddles in Naked Seasons, ISBN 0-9755955-0-4 (Sun Rising Poetry Press, August 2004). Michael is currently working on his second poetry collection, entitled, Raindogs in the Sun, which will contain 67 poems and be published in early 2005 by Sun Rising Poetry Press. He is the founder and editor of Adagio Verse Quarterly and maintains a personal site at:
http://www.geocities.com/michael_paul_ladanyi/index.html
Dan Memmolo's poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, including Another Chicago Magazine, Southern Poetry Review and Sycamore Review. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife and son.
Corey Mesler is the owner of Burke’s Book Store (www.burkesbooks.com), in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He has published poetry and fiction in numerous journals including Rattle, Pindeldyboz, Quick Fiction, Black Dirt, Thema, Mars Hill Review, Poet Lore and others. He has also been a book reviewer for The Memphis Commercial Appeal. A short story of his was chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, edited by Shannon Ravenel, published by Algonquin Books. Talk, his first novel, appeared in 2002. His latest two poetry chapbooks are Chin-Chin in Eden (2003) and Dark on Purpose (2004). He also has a book of short stories, The Booksellers’ Beautiful Daughter, coming out in 2004. Most importantly, he is Toby and Chloe’s dad and Cheryl’s husband. chmesler@earthlink.net
Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz is a fiction writer and poet. She writes for children and adults, and her work has appeared in various journals, online and in print. She can be reached at gwendolynjoycemintz@yahoo.com.
Tom Moore says -- I teach (history of ideas) at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. I have a wife and, yes, two sons--one of whom has been greatly troubled. About every two years I come up with a batch of poems which I send out and which end up in a variety of places--let's see, Rhino, College English, Red River Review and elsewhere.
Richard Newman's newest collection of poems is a chapbook called Tastes Like Chicken and Other Meditations (Snark Publishing). His poems, stories, and essays, have recently appeared in American Literary Review, Boulevard, 5AM, The Laurel Review, Meridian, StoryQuarterly, The Sun, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He lives in St. Louis where he edits River Styx and reviews books for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of Miracle Fruit, winner of ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year and the Tupelo Press Poetry Prize. New work will appear in Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review and Mid-American Review. She is assistant professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia, where it is blueberry season in August. www.aimeenez.com
Chris O'Carroll is a writer, actor, comedian, Pushcart Prize nominee, and two-time Cambridge Poetry Award recipient, once for his individual work, once as a member of the performance ensemble Dr. Brown's Traveling Poetry Show. He also performs with People's Poetry Theatre, a quartet based in Northampton, Massachusetts. He has made several previous appearances in The Melic Review, and also has poems published or forthcoming in Eclectica, Iambs & Trochees, Snow Monkey, 3rd Muse, Triplopia, and other journals. http://www.anticdisposition.com
Nancy Powers is a poet working as a journalist in St. Louis. A member of the MFA program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, she hopes to complete her degree before Social Security kicks in, but it could be close. She has been recognized in several local contests and her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Mankato Poetry Review, PMS and Fan Magazine. Her poem, "Saying O", won the 2004 Wednesday Club Poetry Contest judged by R.S. Gwynn.
David Ray's recent books are One Thousand Years: Poems About the Holocaust (Timberline Press, 2004) and The Endless Search: A Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2003) His awards include the William Carlos Williams Award (twice) and The Nuclear Age Foundation Peace Award. He lives in Tucson, travels for readings, and can be reached at www.davidraypoet.com. "Sestina For A Troubled Year" is from SARDANAPALUS, poems about the Iraq war. (Howling Dog Press, 2004).
Tad Richards is president and artistic director of Opus 40 in Saugerties, NY. His most recent book is Situations: A Novel in Verse (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press). He has written entries on contemporary poetry for The Facts on File Companion to 20Th-Century American Poetry and the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry. email: tad@opus40.org website: www.opus40.org/tadrichards
Lee Ann Roripaugh’s second volume of poetry, Year of the Snake, was published by Southern Illinois University Press as part of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry. Her first volume of poetry, Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin Books, 1999), was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series, and was selected as a finalist for the 2000 Asian American Literary Awards. The recipient of a 2003 Archibald Bush Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, she was also named the 2004 winner of the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the 2001 winner of the Frederick Manfred Award for Best Creative Writing awarded by the Western Literature Association, and the 1995 winner of the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Roripaugh is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Dakota. E-mail: lroripau@usd.edu Website: http://lovesinsects.blogspot.com
John Rybicki's poems and stories have appeared in the North American Review, Field, Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly, and others. He was recently interviewed by Nidus, an online magazine out of the University of Pittsburgh. His main gig, his missionary work, is teaching creative writing to inner-city children in Detroit. His first book of poems, Traveling at High Speeds (New Issues Press) went into second edition last fall. He is also the author of two chapbooks, Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider, and Love is the Heel that Knocks Hard Against the Floor, both available on March Street Press. jjrybick@yahoo.com
Evie Shockley has published a chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess (Carolina Wren Press, 2001). Her poetry also appears or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Callaloo, Carolina Quarterly, HOW2, nocturnes (re)view, the Poetry Daily anthology, and elsewhere. She teaches literature at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC.
Jim Simmerman is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Moon Go Away, I Don’t Love You No More and Kingdom Come (both from Miami Univ. Press); and co-editor of Dog Music: Poetry about Dogs (St. Martin’s). A new collection, American Children, is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd., in 2005. He is Regents’ Professor of English at Northern Arizona Univ. and lives in Flagstaff, AZ.
W.D. Snodgrass's poetry and translations have appeared most recently in APR, Poetry, The Southern Review, and The Kenyon Review. His critical book, De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems (Graywolf, 2001) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Born in Malacca, Malaysia, Siew Siang Tay migrated to Australia in 1992. She works as web editor for a university, and has had short stories published in RedE2 and aired over Saturday Short Stories Program (Australia), Snow Monkey (USA) and Dimsum (Hong Kong). One of her stories has been accepted by The Paumanok Review (USA). She lives in Adelaide. With a degree in journalism, she has completed one novel, entitled The Whisper of Padi Fields, and is working on her second. Email: siang.tay@unisa.edu.au
Dawn Tefft lives in Chicago where, she says, she regularly writes things down, and where she teaches composition at Columbia College and Roosevelt University. She won an Academy of American Poets Prize at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and has poems published or forthcoming in Mudlark, The Cream City Review, Karamu, and The Lullwater Review. tefftdawn@hotmail.com
Kelley White is the mother of three teenagers, a Quaker, an inner city pediatrician for more than twenty years, a collector of stray animals and seeker after Buddha nature. She has degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School. In the past five years she has published poems in a wide range of journals including Nimrod, Rattle, Poet Lore, and the Journal of the American Medical Association and has published two full length poetry collections, THE PATIENT PRESENTS and LATE (The People's Press,) two chapbooks, I am going to walk toward the sanctuary, (Via Dolorosa Press,) and Against Medical Advice (Pudding House,) an on-line book, AT THE MONKEY-FEAST TABLE (Zebook company), an online chapbook, May (Tamaphyr Mountain Poetry) and has several chapbooks under contract including Rule of Thumb, recent recipient of The Cynic Prize from the Cynic Press, Philadelphia. KelleyWhiteMD@Yahoo.com
Michael White's collections are The Island, from Copper Canyon Press, and Palma Cathedral, which won the Colorado Prize. A new collection entitled Re-Entry is circulating. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, The New Republic, the Best American Poetry annual, and many others. He has won fellowships from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Utah Arts Council, and others.
As one half of the semi-legendary playwriting team Broken Gopher Ink, MICHAEL K. WHITE spent his youth tricking producers into investing their dirty money in his lurching, lumbering plays. Incredibly this led to forty play productions, including fifteen off-Broadway runs that cloaked the author with a bogus literary credibility he misuses to this day. His low cholesterol mega monologue play, My Heart And the Real World ran for almost two years in New York City, enabling the authors to eat at John's Pizzeria. A shy, humble man who lives with the cows in Colorado, White, a deeply scarred veteran of the furious litmag scene of the 80s, is now content to live in solitude with his debts and addictions. Recently his family introduced a new addition; a sassy black and white kitten named Circe who enjoys sleeping, dashing about late at night and eating spiders.
Contact: Broken Gopher Ink: www.brokengopher.com; brokengopher@hotmail.com
Dara Wier's most recent books are HAT ON A POND (Verse Press) and VOYAGES IN ENGLISH (Carnegie Mellon University Press). A limited edition chapbook (X in Fix) is now available from Raintaxi in their Brainstorm series. New poems will be appearing in Volt, American Poetry Review, Conduit and jubilat soon. A new book, a book length poem, REVERSE RAPTURE will be coming out with Verse Press in spring 2005. Wier will be dividing her time between Amherst, where she is part of the faculty of the mfa program for poets and writers, and Roanoke, Virginia, where she will be the Louis Rubin Visiting Chairholder for spring 2005.
Les Wolf was born, lives and works in Southeast Michigan with his wife and three children. He's collected enough books to survive a direct hit on the local library and has managed to publish poems in a smattering of on-line and hard-copy journals. His writing continues to improve and he's served as site monitor, contest judge and co-editor here and there. He plans to return to college in the Fall. boticello@hotmail.com
Clarence Wolfshohl has published both poetry and prose in various and numerous small press journals and operates Timberline Press. To afford to do so, he teaches at William Woods University in Missouri, where he lives in oak and hickory woods. He may be contacted at cwolfsho@williamwoods.edu.
Kirby Wright was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is a graduate of Punahou School in Honolulu and the University of California at San Diego. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where he studied under the tutelage of Frances Mayes (UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN). Kirby has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a past recipient of the Ann Fields Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Award, the Browning Society Award for Dramatic Monologue, and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowships in Poetry and The Novel. BEFORE THE CITY, Kirby’s first book of poetry, took First Place at the 2004 San Diego Book Awards. kirby33@earthlink.net