Arlene Ang serves as a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. Her third full-length collection is Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu (Cinnamon Press, 2010). She lives in Spinea, Italy.

Lucile Barker is a Toronto poet and activist. She has been running a group called The Joy of Writing since 1993. Her writing has recently been published in Memewar, The Antigonish Review, and Creative Keyboards.

Jenn Blair has been published in Copper Nickel, The Santa Fe Review, and The Innisfree Poetry Journal. Her chapbook is All Things Are Ordered (Finishing Line Press, 2010).

Stacy Brewster lives in Portland, Oregon. He received a BFA in film and television production from New York University and worked for many years in the television and advertising industries. He has copyedited for The Portland Review and Bitch magazine, and he currently facilitates writing workshops for Write Around Portland.

Ronda Broatch is the author of Shedding Our Skins (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and Some Other Eden (Finishing Line Press, 2005). Nominated several times for the Pushcart, Ronda is the recipient of a 2007 Artist Trust GAP Grant and is currently an assistant editor for Crab Creek Review.

Diya Chaudhuri received her BA from Emory University and is currently in the MFA program at the University of Florida. Her primary scholarly interests are the role of children in the grooming of housecats in Southern gothic poetry, theories of unfulfillable longing for cigarettes in high modern political pamphlets, and how these themes are manifest within contemporary queer cinema. Her poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Redivider, Zoland Poetry, elimae, and anderbo, among others.

Wieslawa B. Contoski was born in 1934 in Poland and died in 1998 in Lawrence, KS. She held degrees in Ancient Persian and International Law from Jagellonian University in Krakow. Her photographs and collages have received several local and national awards, and her collages were published in the book Encounters (Western Hills, 1999).

Laura E. Davis is a poet, editor, teacher, freelance writer, and performer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is an MFA candidate at Chatham University in poetry and nonfiction. Laura was recently featured on Prosody, a weekly radio program showcasing poets and writers. She is founding co-editor of the independent literary journal Weave Magazine and has work forthcoming in Coal Hill Review. You can read her musings about writing and teaching on her blog “Dear Outer Space.”

Aaron DeLee is working on an MFA at Northwestern University. He serves as a first reader of poetry for TriQuarterly, and he has been previously published in Prove & Confusion and Sharkforum. DeLee enjoys running and is currently training for the Chicago marathon.

Heather Derr-Smith is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has published two books of poetry, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005) and The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008). Her poems have also appeared in Fence, Crazyhorse, Brink and Valpo.

Aaron Patrick Flanagan was born and raised in Southern West Virginia. He teaches at Columbia College Chicago, and his poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Arsenic Lobster, Off Channel, Court Green, Tammy, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Globe (Dark Lark Press, 2010), a book-length photo essay about a Chicago soccer pub. He is the 2010 winner of the Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest.

Robert Fontella is the author of a book of poetry, Lines Through (Seetalk, 2010). A bilingual play of his, Clown Crossing, will be performed at the 2010 Arizona Fringe Festival. He is currently pursuing a MFA in creative writing at the University of New Orleans.

Rashad Givhan has had work published in Bare Root Review, Callaloo, and Kansas City Voices.

Allen C. Jones was raised in northern California. He is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where his academic work revolves around the digital humanities. His creative work has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Flaming Arrows (Ireland), GSU Review, and Zillah.

Susan Lin is a writer, artist, and recent graduate of the University of Houston. Her work is forthcoming in Poet Lore and elimae.

Catherine McGuire has been widely published over the past two decades: more than 160 poems in such publications as The Lyric, New Verse News, The Smoking Poet, Poetry In Motion, Downgo Sun and Main Street Rag. She has published a chapbook, Joy Into Stillness: Seasons of Lake Quinault (2003).

Laura Merleau was born and grew up in the Kansas City area. She has published a novella, Little Fugue (Woodley Memorial Press, 1992), and she received a doctoral degree in American literature from the University of Kansas in 2000.

Peter Mladinic is a Professor of English at New Mexico Junior College. He has published a collection of poetry, Lost in Lea: Southeast New Mexico Poems (Lea County Museum, 2008), as well as having co-edited Love, Death, and the Plains: Historical Narratives of Lea County (Lea County Museum, 2007) with Joe Byers.

Lana Rakhman is completing her MFA at Northwestern University, where she is an assistant editor of poetry for TriQuarterly. She was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and currently lives in Chicago. She does not know how to ride a bike.

Mary Rogers-Grantham is an English instructor whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Present Magazine, Composing Ourselves, Visions, Kansas City Voices, and Kansas City Star. She is a creative writing MA candidate at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

Rita Rubin, a longtime journalist whose reporting has appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines, earned an MA in writing this year from Johns Hopkins University. She has published essays and short stories in Brevity, Literary Mama, Short Story America, HealthAffairs.org, Prism Review, The Battered Suitcase, Literary House Review, and Six Sentences. She is also the author of What If I Have a C-Section? (Rodale Books, 2004). She lives with her husband and two daughters in suburban Washington, D.C.

Kathleen Sands has fiction published or forthcoming in Joyland, Inkspill, ShatterColors, EarthSpeak, Wanderings, Fringe, Literary Mama, and Camera Obscura, among others. Her major nonfiction publications are Demon Possession in Elizabethan England (Prager, 2004) and An Elizabethan Lawyer’s Possession by the Devil: The Story of Robert Brigges (Praeger, 2002). A recovering academic, she has taught literature and writing for ten universities, including Temple University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Maryland. Her nonacademic jobs have included dog groomer, animal laboratory technician, zoo keeper, and environmental regulation writer. She has lived in Arizona, Scotland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Robert Spiegel is a journalist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He's a contributing editor to a number of trade publications, covering such lyrical subjects as factory technology and electronic components distribution. He has three kids and a dog who stares at him while he writes. He writes poetry and fiction whether the world wants him to or not.

Scott T. Starbuck is a creative writing coordinator at San Diego Mesa College and lives near the Clackamas River in Oregon. His poems can be heard at Fogged Clarity, and his fossil art is online at The Spirit of the Salmon Fund. His chapbook of nature and protest poems, The Warrior Poems (Pudding House, 2010), was a finalist in the 2009 Pudding House Poetry Chapbook Competition.

David Svenson is an MFA candidate at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He is the editor for Gulf Stream Magazine. 

Steve Tompkins has work published or forthcoming in Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley; Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review; Chiron Review; Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts; Fifth Wednesday; Jelly Bucket; Natural Bridge; Nerve Cowboy; New South; and The San Pedro River Review. He lives in Colorado.

Joshua Young holds an MA from Western Washington University and is scheduled to begin the MFA program in poetry at Columbia College Chicago in the fall of 2011. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife, Emily, and their dog, Indie. They're expecting their first child in October.