Steve Earle is a novelist, short story writer, playwright, and songwriter. He is also an actor currently appearing on the hit HBO series Treme.
El Perro Del Mar is the indie pop musical project of Swedish-born Sarah Assbring. Reminiscent of Portishead and Swandive, El Perro Del Mar features multi-instrumentation and electronic looping to create a layered, symphonic and emotional sound.
Paul Epp is an arranger and performer on trumpet and keyboards in Nashville. His pieces have been performed and recorded by the Nashville Jazz Orchestra and the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music Philharmonia Orchestra. His jazz symphony “Divergence” was featured in Spring 2010 Nashville Review. www.pauleppmusic.com
Fitz & The Tantrums are a neo-soul band based out of Los Angeles.
Nene Giorgadze was born Georgia in 1971, has an MA in Georgian Literature from Ilia University (Tbilisi, Georgia), has lived in US since 1999, and speaks three languages. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Raleigh Review, The Dirty Goat, and Los Angeles Review.
Amy Demas Grunder is a writer and immigration lawyer who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is attracted to writing in which our unjust social arrangements are at least visible. This poem in translation was written during the Writer’s Workshop of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Yaul Perez-Stable Husni is a senior at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts High School in San Francisco. He is enrolled in the Creative Writing department and has been published previously in Motif: Writing by Ear, A Celebration of Poets, in the California Coastal Art and Poetry Contest, and in the school literary journal umläut. His poem “Elephant” appeared in the Spring 2010 Nashville Review.
Chavawn Kelley lives at 7,200 feet in Laramie, Wyoming. Her poems, essays and short stories have appeared in lofty publications such as Creative Nonfiction, Quarterly West, High Desert Review and Terrain.org and in numerous anthologies. Her husband, Shaun Kelley, is the bass player in the Jalan Crossland Band. Their son, Joe, has a small scar.
Timothy Kercher is in the process of moving to Kyiv, Ukraine from the Republic of Georgia, where he has been editing and translating an anthology of contemporary Georgian poetry. His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in the Atlanta Review, The Dirty Goat, Poetry International Journal, The Evansville Review, Ellipsis: Art and Literature, Barnyard Poetry Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Eclectica, Fringe, and others.
Natasha Lvovich is a writer and a scholar of second language acquisition and bilingualism. She teaches ESL, literature, and graduate courses at the City University of New York and divides her loyalties between the academic and “romantic” inquiry into language, culture, memory, and home. She is the author of a collection of autobiographical narratives, The Multilingual Self, and a number of academic articles and personal essays. Her creative work has appeared in academic and literary journals and magazines, including Life Writing, New Writing, BigCityLit, Post Road, WHL Review, and Paradigm. She is originally from Moscow, Russia.
Tasha Matsumoto‘s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Marginalia, Quarterly West, Pank, and elsewhere. She will be a doctoral candidate in the creative writing program at the University of Utah in the fall.
Alice Neiley spent two summers working as an intern for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and now lives and writes there through the winters, enjoying the constant artistic energy of the town and sea. She also works full time at a clothing store, Silk and Feathers/Mary DeAngelis, and teaches yoga a few times a week. Poetry has been Alice’s genre of focus for the past few years, but she is beginning to experiment with creative non-fiction prose as well. She is grateful for the opportunity to have studied with Marie Howe, Melanie Braverman, Major Jackson, David Huddle, and Michael Klein, among others, and hopes to continue learning, taking risks, and branching out in her writing in as many ways as possible.
D.A. Powell is the author of four collections of poetry. His most recent book Chronic (2009) received the Kingsley Tufts Award and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Keiler Roberts was born in 1978 in Wisconsin. After studying art at the University of Wisconsin and Northwestern University, she made paintings and drawings for ten years, and then happily switched to comics. She now lives in Evanston, Illinois and teaches at DePaul University in Chicago. Her comic “Powdered Milk” appeared in Spring 2010 Nashville Review. www.keilerroberts.com
Maya Sarishvili is one of the most prominent women poets writing in the Republic of Georgia today. In 2008 she won the SABA Prize for Poetry, Georgia’s top literature award, for her collection Microscope. She is the author of one other poetry collection, Covering Reality, as well as three radio plays. She lives in Tbilisi, where she works as a third-grade teacher and is mother to four children.
Jess Smart Smiley was born barefoot in Utah’s mountains. He draws pictures all the time and is smiling right now because his first graphic novel, Upside Down, comes out from Top Shelf Productions on Halloween 2011. Jess is busy remembering more things from the past to put in comics of the future.
Nick St. John is a writer artist and peach farmer living in rural California.
Steep Canyon Rangers released Deep in the Shade, their fourth album, in 2009. In addition to serving as the touring and back-up band to Grammy winning banjoist and artiste extraordinaire Steve Martin, Steep Canyon Rangers has developed a large following all their own as they continue to dazzle bluegrass festivals, the jam band circuit, and rock & roll venues.
J. David Stevens teaches creative writing at the University of Richmond in Virginia. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Mid-American Review, Denver Quarterly, and Flatmancrooked. His latest collection of fiction is Mexico is Missing and Other Stories.
Margo Valiante is a singer-songwriter born in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and now based out of Austin, Texas. A recent finalist for the 2010 Telluride Troubadour contest, Valiante’s soulful and powerful voice ranges from folk music to the deep blues.
César Vallejo (1892-1938) was a Peruvian poet. A socialist, he supported the Spanish Republic during the rise of fascism in Europe. His work both reflects and universalizes his own experience of poverty, war, and political persecution. One of the great poetic innovators of the early twentieth century, he died in his beloved Paris at the age of 46.
Brooke Waggoner is a Nashville-based musician, songwriter, and composer, recently awarded the Next Big Nashville Emerging Artist Award for 2009. Her latest album, Go Easy Little Doves, debuted at #1 on the iTunes Singer/Songwriter Chart in October 2009.
Julian Wayser was born in Los Angeles in the summer of 1983. Every Summer since, there has been strange music. Also, Winters of some consequence, Autumns of charity toward dolphins, and Spring.