"In a Foreign City"—Amy Fleury's collection of poems, Beautiful Trouble, won the 2003 Crab Orchard First Book Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2004. Her poems have appeared in The American Life in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, and The Southeast Review, among others. She is an associate professor of English at McNeese State University.
"Love Note"—E.G. Burrows was born in Texas, lived and worked in New England, Michigan, and Wisconsin before moving to Washington state. His poetry collections include The Arctic Tern, Man Fishing, Kiva, and The House of August, as well as numerous chapbooks, including Handsigns for Rain and Sailing as Before. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Margie, Gettysburg Review, and many other journals.
"Love and Rummy" & "Audrey Hepburn & the Westerns"—Vandana Khannawas born in New Delhi, India, and received her MFA from Indiana University. Her collection of poetry, Train to Agra, won the 2000 Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Crazyhorse, Callaloo, and The Atlanta Review, among others. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California.
"At Home with the Croghans, Locust Grove, December 8, 1820"—Lynnell Edwards is the author of two books of poetry: The Highwayman's Wife (2007) and The Farmer's Daughter (2003), both from Red Hen Press. Her work has appeared on Verse Daily and in the anthologies Poets Against the War; Raising Our Voices: Oregon Poets Against the War; and Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po listserve, as well as literary journals including: Poems & Plays, Smartish Pace, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry East, and Dos Passos Review.
"Son of a Brothel"—Sara Stripling just finished her third year in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas. In 1998, she received her BS in secondary English education from Indiana University and then moved to New York City. In 2003, she returned to Bloomington, Indiana, where there were more trees. She currently lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with her husband and two cats.
"Wound"—Corinne Wohlford Taff lives in Saint Louis, Missouri. She teaches American culture studies and English and directs interdisciplinary programs at Fontbonne University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Grolier Poetry Prize Annual, Plainsongs, Pleaides, Margie, Harvard Review, Georgetown Review, Quercus Review, Flint Hills Review, and Alabama Literary Review.
"Afternights"—Greg McBride won the 2008 Boulevard Emerging Poet prize. His chapbook, Back of the Envelope, is published by Copperdome Press, and his work appears in Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, Gettysburg Review, Hollins Critic, Salmagundi, Southeast Review, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A Vietnam veteran, he began writing after a thirty-year legal career and now edits The Innisfree Poetry Journal.
"Switch Grass/Big Bluestem"—Heather Lee Schroeder is a free-lance writer and journalist who lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Her twice-monthly column, Literary Lunch, appears in The Capital Times. She received her master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She currently is an assistant visiting professor of journalism at Beloit College.
"When it Rains"—Andrea Gilham received her MFA from Vermont College. She is currently teaching high school English in Evansville, Indiana.
"In the Sculpture Garden"—Lee Rossi's most recent book is Ghost Diary (Terrapin Press, 2003). His poetry, reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared widely in such journals as The Sun, Poetry East, Nimrod, Green Mountains Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and pedestal. He lives in San Carlos, California.
"Passing through Flint" & "The Price of Exhuming the Dead"—Patrick Carrington is the poetry editor at Mannequin Envy. He is the author of Rise, Fall and Acceptance (MSR Publishing, 2006) and Thirst (Codhill Press, 2007). His poetry has appeared in The Connecticut Review, Rattle, The Evansville Review, Sou’wester, The New York Quarterly, and many other journals.
"Saturday Night, Drunk but Sobering"—Doug Ramspeck directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing and composition at The Ohio State University at Lima. His book, Black Tupelo Country, was awarded the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and is published by BkMk Press. He lives in Lima with his wife, Beth, and their eighteen-year-old daughter, Lee.
"Plants and Cats"—Jesse Mountjoy is a practicing attorney in Owensboro, Kentucky, specializing in tax law and estate planning. He has published poems in Open 24 Hours, Flint Hills Review, Wind Magazine, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, the Kentucky Poetry Review, Adena, Approaches, The Small Pond Review, and the Exquisite Corpse. A number of his poems have appeared in the 2006, 2008 and 2009 poetry/fiction issues of Legal Studies Forum (West Virginia University College of Law). He is fond of Flaubert's assertion that “Every lawyer carries within himself the debris of a poet.”
"Listening Between Stations"—Mary Lou Buschi lives in New York City and is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. Mary Lou teaches in the Paul McGhee Division of New York University. Her poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Italian Americana, and the Red River Review, among others.
"Rock Garden"—Patricia Giragosian’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Connecticut Review, The New Hampshire Review, The Boston Globe, Louisiana Literature, The Classical Outlook, and other publications. A collection of her poems, to be published next year in Boston, received the Finalist Award in the 2005 Poetry Chapbook Competition of Bright Hill Press, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.
"Headstones"—Joe Wilferth teaches English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is passionate about his family, his students, and the land surrounding his home in southeast Missouri.
"Obituary, In-Depth"—Dan Carpenter is an editorial page staffer with The Indianapolis Star. He has published poetry and fiction in Illuminations, Pearl, Maize, Tipton Poetry Journal, Laurel Review, and other journals.
"From Father Dirt," "Phone Call from Romania," & "Watching My Son in the Bathtub, Thinking of Sixteen-Year-Old Mara"—Contributing editor Mihaela Moscaliuc’s poetry manuscript Father Dirt won the 2008 Kinereth Gensler Award at Alice James Books. Her co-translations of Romanian poetry appear in Arts & Letters, Mississippi Review, Connecticut Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. Other publications include articles in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal and History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe (2005) and Interculturality and Translation (2007); book reviews in TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Georgia Review, Fugue, and Poetry International; and poems in Great River Review, Near East Review, Crab Orchard Review, New Letters, The English Record, and Meridians.
"Stephen Pace: Then and Now"—Margaret Skoglund is an associate professor of art history at the University of Southern Indiana. She specializes in inter-cultural relationships between Spain and Italy from the Medieval through the Baroque periods. Her PhD in art history and archeology is from the University of Missouri.
"Rolling with the Punchlines: The New American Humorous Essay"—Contributing editor Brenda DeMartini’s stories and poems have appeared in Confrontation, Kansas Quarterly, Minnesota Review, Mississippi Mud, the Sun, and Three Rivers Poetry Journal.
"Goose and Gander"—B.J. Hollars, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama where he’s served as nonfiction editor and assistant fiction editor for Black Warrior Review. He is also the editor of You Must Be This Tall To Ride, which will be published by Writer’s Digest Books in May 2009. He’s published or has work forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, Fugue, The Bellingham Review, Hobart, and Memorious, among others.
"Memory Shop"—Patrick Hicks is Writer-in-Residence at Augustana College, and his work has appeared in scores of international publications including Ploughshares, The Utne Reader, Commonweal, The National Catholic Reporter, Poetry East, Nimrod, and many others. He is the author of Traveling Through History (2005), Draglines (2006), and The Kiss that Saved My Life (2007). Several poems from his forthcoming collection, The Gossamer, have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Aside from being a Visiting Fellow at Oxford and winning a variety of grants to support his work, he has lived in Northern Ireland, England, Germany, and Spain. He currently lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he enjoys thunderstorms rolling across the prairie.
"Conversations with Stephen Pace"—Associate professor of art history Hilary Braysmith joined the University of Southern Indiana faculty in 1989; she holds a PhD in the history of art from Ohio State University. Kathryn Waters is a professor of art at the University of Southern Indiana and has been awarded an Arts Midwest National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two Indiana Arts Commission Fellowships. She has been selected for artist residencies at Yaddo, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Clowes Painting Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited widely and appear in corporate, private, public and museum collections nationally and internationally.
"Parties"—Maggie Mitchell's fiction has appeared in Green Mountains Review, the American Literary Review, the Saranac Review, and elsewhere. Her collection of short stories has been a finalist for the Ohio State University Short Fiction Award and Eastern Washington University Press’s Spokane Prize. She teaches English at the University of West Georgia.
"The View From Here"—Pam Binning Pearce grew up in Oklahoma but has lived most of her adult life in Arkansas. She earned an MA in English from George Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina. She and her husband have two grown sons.
"The Great American Risk"—Kevin Allton received his MA and PhD in creative writing: fiction from the University of Missouri. His shorter fiction has appeared in Shiftless Stone, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Quarter After Eight.
"Brilliant Coping: Beth Ann Fennelly’s Unmentionables"—Melanie Jordan received her PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston. Her work has appeared in Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Diagram, Poetry Southeast, and Pebble Lake Review.