Contributors

Gail Aronson is a Midwest transplant currently based in Oakland, California. She lives in an apartment by a lake with two roommates and two cats. She recently bought her cats a condo and gave them manicures.
 
 
 

KB Ballentine has a M.A. in Writing and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and publications, including Alehouse, Tidal Basin Review, Interrobang?!, and Touchstone. In 2006, she was a finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Award and was awarded the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2007.  Fragments of Light(2009) and Gathering Stones (2008) were published by Celtic Cat Publishing. In 2011, two anthologies published her work:Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets and A Tapestry of Voices.

Judith Barrington’s Lifesaving: A Memoir won the 2001 Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Her text: Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, is widely used in creative writing programs across the U.S. and in Australia. She is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Horses and the Human Soul (2004) published by Story Line Press. She is on the faculty of the low residency MFA program of the University of Alaska and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Paula Brehm is a recent graduate of the Master of Arts Program in English from The College of Saint Rose.  She lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and has two beautiful daughters and a handsome grandson.  This is her first published work of fiction.
 
 

Dianna Calareso earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Her essays have been published widely in print and online, and last year she self-published her memoir, At Ease. She writes several blogs, focusing on creative nonfiction, food writing and vintage typewriters. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts with her husband and two cats.

Kent H. Dixon writes in all genres and has received awards in most. He teaches creative writing at Wittenberg University, in Springfield, Ohio.  Translations besides Rilke and Mallarme include Baudelaire, Sappho, Japanese hibakusha (in collaboration), and of current note, a rendition of the Epic of Gilgamesh in graphic novel form in collaboration with artist son Kevin—a chapter appearing in the forthcoming anthology of ‘all’ classic literature, The Graphic Canon edited by Russ Kick.

Steffi Drewes made her way to San Francisco via Iowa, Prague and Chicago. She lives in the East Bay, volunteers at Kelsey Street Press, and curates the Featherboard Writing Series in Oakland. Her poems have appeared in SpringGun, Eleven Eleven, Beeswax Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Monday Night, No Tell Motel, and New American Writing.

Siân Griffiths lives in Ogden, Utah where she serves as assistant professor of English at Weber State University.  Her work is published in Quarterly West, Ninth Letter, Cave Wall, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative , Clackamas Literary Review, Oregon Literary Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Permafrost, Versal, Court Green , and The Georgia Review, among other publications.   Her story What Is Solid was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and Janet Burroway included her poem, Fistful, in the third edition of Imaginative Writing.

John Wesley Horton co-directs the University of Washington’s summer creative writing program in Rome. He’s recently published poems in or has poems forthcoming in CutBank, Poetry Northwest, Notre Dame Review, The Monarch Review, Pageboy, Fourteen Hills, and City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry (U. of Iowa Press). His manuscript A New World Where We Can Stand to Live was recently a finalist in the National Poetry Series.
 
Daniel John was raised in Saskatchewan, Canada. He is a dancer, movement & massage therapist, poet, writer, actor, and playwright. He has ten children. He is a garden and landscape designer by trade and teaches Intuitive Gardening for Brookline Adult Education.
 

Robert Kull has spent years wandering and living in North and Sound America, working at a wide variety of jobs. After losing his lower leg to a motorcycle crash in the Dominican Republic where he was teaching scuba diving, he began undergraduate studies at McGill University at age forty. He holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia where he teaches in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Program. His book, Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes, tells the true story of him living completely alone for a year deep in the wilderness of southern Chile.

Candace Nadon holds an MFA from Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing and is currently pursuing a PhD in English with Creative Writing Emphasis at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her fiction has appeared in Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Agnes Scott College Writers’ Festival Magazine, and Platte Valley Review. A Colorado native, her work focuses on women and the West.

Melinda Palacio is a poet and author of the novel Ocotillo Dreams (Bilingual Press 2011). Her poetry chapbook, Folsom Lockdown, won Kulupi Press’ Sense of Place competition. Tia Chucha Press will publish her first full-length poetry collection, How Fire Is A Story, Waiting (Fall 2012). She writes a column for La Bloga.

Eric Pankey (MFA, U of Iowa, 1983) is the author of eight collections of poems. His first collection, For the New Year, was selected as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award by the Academy of American Poets and published by Atheneum in 1984. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such journals at Antaeus, The New Yorker, and the Kenyon Review.  His work has been supported by fellowships from John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.  He teaches poetry workshops and courses on modern and contemporary poetry.

Cliffton Price was born, raised, and educated in a small town in western Pennsylvania.  His job—teaching writing primarily to college freshmen—while not so small town, provides little opportunity.  His work has appeared in Love Poems and Other Messages for Bruce Springsteen and Inside Higher Ed and is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket.  He is still hayseed enough to say, Look who’s in the big town.

Charles Rafferty’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker and The Southern Review, and his stories have appeared in Sonora Review and Cortland Review. His most recent chapbook of poems is Appetites (Clemson University Press). Currently, he directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College.
 

Nick Regiacorte’s poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Phoebe, 14 Hills, and Third Coast, among other journals.  He currently teaches creative writing at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, where he lives with his wife and the Campione del mondo.

 
 
Jeff Richards’ story is based on Cool Guitars, a blues song played by Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers. You can find the song on YouTube. His fiction and essays have appeared in more than forty publications including Pinch, Southern Humanities Review, and most recently Forge Journal and Caveat Lector.  He also has published works in five anthologies including Higher Learning, a freshman composition published by Prentice-Hall, and a forthcoming Civil War story in Filtered Through Time. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland with his wife, also an avid blues fan.

Robert Rothman graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, undergraduate and graduate school (J. D.). He lives in Northern California, near extensive trails and open space, with the Pacific Ocean over the hill. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Alembic, Cold Mountain Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Grey Sparrow, Pank Magazine, Front Range Review, and the Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry.

Sean Trolinder currently holds a MFA in fiction from Texas State University-San Marcos and lives in Kissimmee, Florida. His short stories have appeared in The MacGuffin, The Sand Hill Review,The Helix, Muse & Stone, EDGE, and many other journals. At the moment, he is seeking an agent and working on a revision of his novel.

Helen Wickes lives in Oakland, California, where she worked as a psychotherapist for many years. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first book of poems, In Search of Landscape, was published in 2007 by Sixteen Rivers Press. The three poems published in Mary are all from an unpublished manuscript called The Moon Over Zabriskie.

Heather Woolley studied Art History at U.C. Santa Cruz, where she graduated in 2009.  She lives and works in San Francisco.

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