Pere Lachaise, Street Photography in Rochester, Untitled, Brainstorm, Lifeboat,Untitled, Untitled, Bystander Series Image #47, Newburgh Tornado, Members of the Cabinet series, Entropic Idols—Paul D. Van Hoy II received his MFA in Fine Art Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. In 2007 he was named Microsoft Future Pro Photographer Competition Grand Prize Winner and recognized as Creative Quarterly’s "Photographer of the Year." American Photo magazine recently profiled Van Hoy’s MFA thesis series, Bystander, and his work has been widely published in many other photographic magazines, including After Capture, PDN, Digital Photo Pro, CMYK, Photographer’s Forum, Professional Photographer, American Photo, Camera Arts, and Creative Quarterly.
"A Song for Fever"—Angie Macri received an MFA from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Her work has been published in journals including Arts & Letters, Connecticut Review, Fugue, and New Orleans Review and was featured in The Spoon River Poetry Review. She was recently awarded an individual artist fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council.
"White Herons"—Kirk Wilson lives in Austin, Texas. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and in a Burning Deck chapbook called The Early Word. Wilson is the author of a non-fiction book called Unsolved: The Top Ten Mysteries of the 20th Century, and is now completing a novel.
"Natural History"—John Drury teaches at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of two books of poetry, The Disappearing Town and Burning the Aspern Papers (both published by Miami University Press), and two books about poetry,Creating Poetry and The Poetry Dictionary (Writer’s Digest Books). Drury has won the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review, a Pushcart Prize, and two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships. He is currently a Taft Center Fellow, working on a memoir, The Bad Soldier, about his experiences in the Army.
"My Namesake is Dying"—Nancy K. Pearson’s first book of poems, Two Minutes of Light, published by Perugia Press in August 2008, won the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award and is a current finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have been published in journals such as The Iowa Review,Black Warrior Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Pearson has received numerous awards including two seven-month poetry fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee, she now lives on Cape Cod.
"Blood Kinship"—Marita Garin edited Southern Appalachian Poetry: An Anthology of Works by 37 Poets (McFarland, 2008). Her work is included in Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains: A Guidebook. New poems are forthcoming in Zone 3 and River Oak Review. She lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
"These Gods are Known by the Shapes of Their Teeth"—John M. Anderson teaches creative writing and the Emily Dickinson Seminar at Boston College and divides his time between Boston and Cripple Creek, Colorado. He has new poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, Quiddity, and The Antioch Review, as well as a chapbook Dictionary Quilt (Pudding House, 2007). He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007 and 2008; this year, his manuscript Blackwater Driveby was a finalist for the May Swenson Prize. He looks forward to serving as guest poetry editor for Crazyhorse this summer.
"the all night bus to Austin"—Steve Hellyard Swartz's poetry has appeared in New Verse News, Best Poem, Haggard and Halloo, The Kennesaw Review,switched-on guttenberg, and The Paterson Review. He has received honorable mention in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards (2007 and 2008), as well as the Mary C. Mohr and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards. In 1990, Never Leave Nevada, which he wrote and directed, opened at the U.S. Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Swartz lives in Schenectady, New York, with his wife, Lyudmila Shmidova, and their daughter, Katerina Jane.
"Raisins"—Recent publications by Jim Daniels include Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies, winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize (Eastern Washington University Press); Mr. Pleasant (fiction, Michigan State University Press); and In Line for the Exterminator (Wayne State University Press), all published in 2007. He is the Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
"Gem City"—Michael Haeflinger is a poet, educator, and organizer from Rochester, Minnesota; Crawfordsville, Indiana; West Chester and Dayton, Ohio; the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; one half of the Twin Cities; north central Iowa; and Chicago, Illinois. Work has appeared in new leaf, Blaze, VOX, milk, and most recently in city lighthouse: a tall-lighthouse anthology and Guided By Poets. He lives in Berlin, Germany.
"Storm Season" & "Notes on Prison"—Catherine MacDonald lives in Richmond, Virginia, and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her poems have appeared in Washington Square, Crab Orchard Review, The Cortland Review,Blackbird, and other journals. Finishing Line Press will publish her chapbook,How to Leave Home, in June 2009.
"Gemstones"—Rachel Contreni Flynn was awarded a 2007 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her first book: Ice, Mouth, Song was published in 2005 by Tupelo Press after winning the Dorset Prize. Flynn is a corporate attorney and a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. Her work has been widely published in literary journals.
"Amanuensis" & "Ghazal: By Hand"—Heidi Czerwiec is assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of North Dakota, where she directs the annual UND Writers Conference. Czerwiec is the author of Hiking the Maze(Finishing Line Press, 2009), and has poems or translations published or forthcoming in The Connecticut Review, Measure, The Evansville Review, Hunger Mountain, and International Poetry Review.
"Safeway Boxboys"—Rachel Dilworth’s first book, The Wild Rose Asylum: Poems of the Magdalen Laundries of Ireland, won the 2008 Akron Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Akron Press in fall 2009. Her poems have appeared in AGNI Online, TriQuarterly, American Literary Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and are forthcoming in Chautauqua Literary Journal and Bay Nature. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship to Ireland, Yale’s Clapp Fellowship for poetry, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and scholarship support from the Bread Loaf and Napa Valley Writers’ Conferences.
"If I believed in poems, we all live in this country" & "The Brave One"—Otis Haschemeyer attended Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow, spent a year at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, and currently lives in Oregon with writer Zondie Zinke and their daughter, Ozymandias Wild Zhaschemeyerinke.
"Lil' Earl"—Otis Haschemeyer
"Papal Indulgence"—Hadley Hall Meares is a writer, actress, and singer from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A graduate of Hollins University, her writing has appeared in The Santa Monica Review, Ostrich Ink, and Quintessentially Magazine. She just finished her first novel, Absolutely, and is hard at work on her second. She currently lives in Los Angeles, with a clear view of the Hollywood sign.
"On By"—Eliot Treichel is originally from northern Wisconsin and now lives in Oregon with his wife and daughter. He’s a regular contributor to Eugene Magazine, and an adjunct instructor at Lane Community College. Recent stories have appeared in Passages North and Cold-drill.
"Just Fine"—Gary Fincke’s latest collection of stories, Sorry I Worried You, won the Flannery O’Connor prize and was published by Georgia Press. New stories are recently in Crazyhorse, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, and Beloit Fiction Journal. His next book will be a memoir, The Canals of Mars, which will be published by Michigan State in 2010.
Mary C. Mohr Nonfiction Award First Prize Winner: "Pilgrim"—Lili Wright worked as a newspaper reporter for ten years before she earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University. She is author of the travel memoir Learning to Float: The Journey of a Woman, a Dog, and Just Enough Men (Broadway, 2002). Her essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Esquire, The Chicago Tribune, Maize, Grand Tour, and other publications. She teaches writing at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where she lives with her husband and two children. Her essay, "Pilgrim," is an excerpt of a work-in-progress called Mother at Sea.
Mary C. Mohr Nonfiction Award Second Prize Winner: "Four Eyes in a Dark Room"—Julie Marie Wade's first collection of lyric essays, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, just received the Colgate University Press Nonfiction Book Prize and is forthcoming in 2010. Wade completed an MA in English at Western Washington University in 2003 and an MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006. She has received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry, the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, and six Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Southeast Review, Diner, Nimrod and Georgetown Review, among others. She lives with Angie and their two cats in northern Kentucky, where she is a doctoral candidate and graduate teaching fellow in the Humanities program at the University of Louisville. An Interview with Julie Marie Wade
Mary C. Mohr Nonfiction Award Third Prize Winner: "Bread"—Michael Colonnese serves as the managing editor of Longleaf Press and directs the Creative Writing Program at Methodist University. He lives in Fayetteville, NC. An Interview with Michael Colonnese
"Endless Reward: An Interview with Susan Neville"—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. Susan Neville’s essay collections include Indiana Winter and Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning. She is the author of the story collections Invention of Flight, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and In the House of Blue Lights, selected as one of the "Best Books of 1998" by the Chicago Tribune, and Iconography, a memoir and meditation on writing. Her most recent book is Sailing the Inland Sea: On Writing, Literature, and Land (Quarry Books, 2007). A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, Neville teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis.
"Immortalized Meditation"—Andy McFadyen-Ketchum received his MFA in poetry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. A number of his interviews, poems, and reviews have recently been published in Sou'wester, Blueline, The Missouri Review, The Cortland Review, and The Crab Orchard Review. He is the founder and managing editor of PoemoftheWeek.org, an online forum of Contemporary American Poetry, original and previously published author-interviews, and essays and reviews.
"A Brief Journey: A Review of Katherine's Wish"—Mary Jane Schenk is the executive director of the Arts Council of Southwestern Indiana. As a former employee of the University of Southern Indiana and the USI Foundation, she was a staff member of RopeWalk and the Southern Indiana Review for many years. Her current role with the Council includes managing the Bower-Suhrheinrich Foundation Gallery, which features the works of local visual artists, and serving as a regional services director for the Indiana Arts Commission.
"A Curative Critique"—Shannon R. Wooden has been fiction editor at the Carolina Quarterly and faculty advisor for iris: the UNC journal of medicine, literature, and visual art. Her primary interests lie in Victorian fiction and the connections between literature and science, but she has also written on contemporary texts for The Journal of African Travel Writing, The Journal of Popular Culture, and The Journal of Popular Film and Television. Wooden teaches literature, literary theory, and composition at Missouri State University.