Sylvan Allen lives and works on a farm in rural North Carolina. She is working on a novel set in the foothills near her home.
Alice Bolin‘s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, FIELD, Blackbird, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Washington Square, among other journals. Her essays are featured regularly on publications around the internet such as This Recording and The Paris Review Daily. She lives in Missoula, Montana.
Born Gold is the high-energy, beat-driven songwriting project of Canadian pop experimentalist Cecil Frena. Caught in an unusual dialogue between future-leaning electronic music, harsh noise and mainstream pop, Born Gold conjures stuttering, blown-out and chopped guitar, erratic, bubbling synth arpeggios, sparkling drum machine peals, and bursts of meticulously processed digital noise.
J. Scott Brownlee is a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at NYU, where he teaches poetry to undergraduates and second graders through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, RATTLE, Ninth Letter, Tar River Poetry, Boxcar Poetry Review, Front Porch, Pebble Lake Review, and elsewhere. Involved with several literary journal start-ups, he was the managing editor and co-founder of both Hothouse and The Raleigh Review. A poet-of-place, Brownlee writes primarily about the people and landscape of rural Texas. His book-length work, County Lines, was recently named a Semifinalist for the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Alexander Chisum, despite being born and raised in a small town near Reno, is terrible at gambling. He blames his lack of blackjack skills on ineptitude rather than chronic bad luck, however, as his extreme good fortune is exhibited by his presence in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama, where he is currently pursuing an MFA.
Joellen Craft works in publishing and teaches for Duke’s Creative Writer’s Workshop and The Hinge Literary Center. Her poems and reviews appear or are forthcoming in Grist, Juked, Sugar Mule, storySouth, The Pedestal, and FutureCycle.
Ashley Rose Davidson‘s work has appeared in Mid-American Review (winner of the 2011 Fineline Competition), Southern Indiana Review, Sou’wester, Quarterly West, and other journals. A recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she teaches Creative Writing for the Ecologically Aware at the University of Iowa, where she is an Adjunct Assistant Professor.
Delicate Steve is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Steve Marion. He composed, recorded, mixed, and played every instrument on Positive Force, his latest foray into joyful, guitar-driven eclecticism since 2010’s Wondervisions.
Matthew Erman lives in Columbus, Ohio were he works as a janitor for a Montessori School. His work has been featured in, 614 Magazine, Cracked, Filigree Literary Journal (Issues III & IV), Candygram Literary Journal (Issue II) and Oxford University in Miami. He has a high school education and holds it over all his college friends in debt. He is currently working on a novella, LOURA, as well a three comic compilation with his girlfriend and illustrator, Lisa Sterle. Weird Bodies, the next graphic story will be debuting in January 2013. You can check out more of Matthew’s work on his website: www.passivevoice.tumblr.com
Heinz Insu Fenkl is a writer, editor, translator, and folklorist. His first novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, was a Barnes and Noble “Great New Writer” pick and a PEN/Hemingway finalist. He serves on the editorial board of AZALEA: the Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, published by Harvard’s Korea Institute and as a consulting editor to the internet translation journal, Words Without Borders. He is best known for his deconstruction of the Starbucks logo and teaches a comics course, “Visual/Verbal Storytelling,” at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Samuel Hanson was born in Salt Lake City. His work is a blend of dance, video and other performance practice. He holds a BA in Performance and Media from the University of Utah and has recently presented work in Utah, Florida, Montana, New York and Los Angeles. He is the New Media Coordinator for loveDANCEmore and writes criticism for the loveDANCEmore.org blog/performance journal.
Joe Harkenrider is a native of Indiana and a graduate of Columbia College Chicago film school. Joe has developed and produced several short films, television pilots, and featured videos for Funny or Die. As well, he has developed comedy for television while working at Comedy Central and Dickhouse Entertainment, creators of the “Jackass” movies and TV series. Currently Joe resides in Los Angeles where he continues to produce and develop comedic content that will hopefully make you laugh, cry, and then eat a cheeseburger. http://www.funnyordie.com/joe_harkenrider
J. Roddy Walston and the Business: Known for their head-banging Southern Rock sound and rowdy live show (according to Spin Magazine, they ended a show in Manhattan this past summer by throwing their shattered piano bench into the East River), J. Roddy Walston and the Business are a four-piece band out of Baltimore, Md.
Stefan P. Kuszewski, M.D. is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School. He has been a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Penn State College of Medicine and Associate Medical Director of the Physicians’ Health Programs of the Foundation of the Pennsylvania Medical Society. He is a psychopharmacologist who specializes in general psychiatry as well as geriatric, adolescent and addiction psychiatry as well as addiction medicine, and he has been widely published in medical journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, Journal of the American Medical Association, Neurology, and American Journal of Psychiatry. He has been a major party to two of the largest drug-related civil fraud cases in recent history, including the $520 million AstraZeneca case in 2010 and the $2.3 billion Pfizer case in 2009, in which he offered expert testimony critical the drug companies.
Michael Marberry is an MFA candidate in poetry at The Ohio State University, where he also serves as Poetry Editor of The Journal. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Third Coast, Guernica, Linebreak, Passages North, and elsewhere.
Sandra Marchetti was named the winner of the Midwest Writing Center’s 2011 Mississippi Valley Chapbook Contest for her volume, The Canopy. She was also a finalist in Gulf Coast’s 2011 Poetry Prize and Phoebe’s Greg Grummer Poetry Contest. Sandra has recently published poems in various magazines including Ohio State’s The Journal, Phoebe, Spiral Orb, and The Bakery. She writes poetry reviews for PIF Magazine and Fifth Wednesday Journal and has poems forthcoming in Flycatcher and Gargoyle, among others. Currently, Sandy is an assistant poetry editor at Fifth Wednesday Journal. You can also find her at sandrapoetry.net.
Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. He was the star of the award winning full-length documentary “Louder Than A Bomb” and has been featured on HBO’s “Brave New Voices. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan and received his BA at Vanderbilt University. His work has appeared in Learn Then Burn, Vinyl Poetry, The Spoken Word Revolution: Redux, on Chicago Public Radio and in many other publications. Nate has also been a teaching artist with organizations such as Young Chicago Authors, InsideOut Detroit, and Southern Word. Nate is the founder of the Lost Count Scholarship Fund that promotes youth violence prevention in Chicago. He has performed poetry at venues and universities across the US, Canada, and South Africa. He is also a rapper. Nate can be reached at nathaniel.a.marshall@gmail.com.
Susan McCarty‘s stories and essays have appeared in Utne Reader, the Iowa Review, Conjunctions, and other journals. She’s finishing the PhD program in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah. She lives with two rabbits, a deaf Australian shepherd, a mutt named Swayze, and the writer Matt Kirkpatrick.
Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also published five chapbooks and is the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. For more information, please visit troublewithhammers.com.
George Moore is the author of Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry, 2013), and earlier collections, Headhunting (2002) and The Petroglyphs at Wedding Rocks (1997). He has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best of the Web and Net Awards, the Rhysling Poetry Award, and been among the finalists for The National Poetry Series, the Brittingham Award, and Anhinga’s Poetry Prize. He travels a good deal, and has attended recent artist residencies in Greece, Iceland, Portugal, Spain, and Canada. He lives in the foothills of Colorado, and teaches with the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Jacob Newberry is pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State University, where he is the recipient of the University Fellowship. Winner of the 2012 Ploughshares Emerging Writers’ Contest in Nonfiction, he has received fellowships and scholarships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. His poetry and nonfiction have been published or are forthcoming in Granta, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, Best New Poets 2011, and Out Magazine, among others. Originally from the Mississippi coast, he received his M.A. in French Literature in 2009.
Rosanna Oh is originally from Long Island, New York, but now lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
t.j. peters is a Chicago-born filmmaker living in Los Angeles, CA. His mother thinks he is very handsome and talented. As a direct result, his comedy has been featured in places where people like comedy. If you’d like him to give you a compliment, send him an email at haveacompliment@gmail.com. He is also a human that uses Twitter – @tpeters. t.j. asks that you enjoy the things he does so to stabilize his fragile ego. http://www.funnyordie.com/t_j_peters
Kevin Somers grew up in Dayton Ohio. He studied fine arts at Antioch College, focusing his attentions on sculpture. In the early 1990s he moved to New York where he worked as an editor and freelance artist for Marvel Comics Group. While working in comics, he developed a passion for the art of sequential storytelling. Through his work in comic books, comic strips, animation, storyboarding, and children’s books, he has maintained a diverse range of visual styles and a keen sensitivity for storytelling in all media.
Lisa Sterle holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from Columbus College of Art & Design. Voted the Best Visiting Artist at Junctionview Studio’s Agora 7 (Over 500 Artists), Lisa’s work has been seen in Filigree Literary Journal, Red Stylo Media, as well as other galleries in Columbus, Ohio. Lisa lives in Columbus, Ohio with her two cats, Miles & Oliver and watches Star Trek: TNG as she works on her comics. She bartends and freelances on the side as well as working on her next story, Weird Bodies, due out in January 2013. For more of Lisa Sterle’s work or freelance, visit her website www.lisasterle.com
Bianca Stone is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including I Saw The Devil With HIs Needlework (Argos Books), and an ongoing poetry-comic series from Factory Hollow Press. She is the illustrator of Antigonick, a collaboration with Anne Carson (New Directions), and her poems have appeared in such magazines as Conduit, Tin House, and APR. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Stonewall and the Jacksons is a folk-rock band whose members hail from Kentucky and Massachusetts. “The Portent” is an adaptation of a poem written by Herman Melville about revolutionary abolitionist John Brown, and is the opening track from an acoustic EP about the Civil War titled “Mystic Chords.”
Town Hall is an earnest, adventurous indie folk band from New York City. Their music (determined by a dusty pile of old 78 records, an affinity for the avant-garde, and plenty of pop sensibility) is a modern take on an old recipe. Salty yet sophisticated, raw yet refined. Anchored around the trio of mandolinist/vocalist Stefan Weiner, multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Phoebe Ryan, and guitarist Jesse Kranzler, the band has toured across the country and up into Canada, exploring the unexpected rhythms, warm textures, and candid lyrics that have come to truly define their sound.