Alison Baker is the author of two short story collections, Loving Wanda Beaver and How I Came West, and Why I Stayed; each was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has received several O. Henry Awards. She was named 2001 Oregon Library Supporter of the Year by the Oregon Library Association, and has recently enjoyed residencies at both Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She and her husband, Hans Rilling, live in Rockbridge County, Virginia.

B.J. Best holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. His first book, Birds of Wisconsin, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press in the fall of 2010. His recent chapbooks are Drag: Twenty Short Poems about Smoking (Centennial Press) and State Sonnets (sunnyoutside).

Randall Brown teaches at Saint Joseph’s University & Rosemont College and holds an MFA from Vermont College. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Quick Fiction, Connecticut Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Evansville Review, Laurel Review, Dalhousie Review, upstreet, Gargoyle, and others. He is the lead editor of SmokeLong Quarterly and the author of the award-winning collection Mad to Live (Flume Press, 2008).

Jerah Chadwick spent the last 26 years on the Aleutian island of Unalaska and has recently moved to Duluth, Minnesota. His latest book is Story Hunger (Salmon Publishing, Ireland) and he’s recently had poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Alaska Reader (Fulcrum), and Crosscurrents North (U of Alaska Press).

Ed Fischer, a research psychologist, is a native of Danbury, Connecticut. For the past 41 years he’s lived in Glastonbury, near the state’s best rock climbing sites. Two of his other articles about mountaineering and rock climbing were published in Desert Exposure and the Manchester Journal Inquirer.

Brent Fisk is a writer from Bowling Green, Kentucky. His work can be found in recent issues of Boxcar Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, and Innisfree Journal.

CB Follett is author of 6 books of poems, the most recent, And Freddie is My Darling (2009). At the Turning of the Light won the 2001 National Poetry Book Award; Editor/publisher of Grrrrr, A Collection of Poems about Bears, publisher and co-editor of Runes, a Review of Poetry (2001-2008), and general dogsbody of Arctos Press. She has several nominations for Pushcart Prizes, a Marin Arts Council Grant for Poetry, awards and honors and has been widely published.

Bart Galle is a medical educator and visual artist living in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a 2008-2009 Loft Mentor Series Winner in Poetry and the winner of the 2008 Passager Poetry Contest for writers over 50. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets 2009. They have appeared previously in Minnetonka Review and in Water-Stone Review, The Comstock Review, White Pelican Review, Main Channel Voices, Coe Review, Eclipse, and elsewhere.

Stephen Graf lived in Madrid, where he worked for the public relations firm SEIS. He holds a Ph.D. in British Literature from University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England. He has been published in, among others: Cicada, AIM Magazine, The Mountain Laurel, the Dana Literary Society Online Journal, The Southern Review, Mobius, The Chrysalis Reader, Fiction, New Works Review, and The Black Mountain Review. He currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he teaches English at Robert Morris University.

Peter Harris teaches at Colby College in Maine. He’s published a chapbook, Blue Hallelujahs. His poetry has appeared in many magazines including, The Atlantic Monthly, Epoch, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Seattle Review, and Sewanee Review. A former Dibner Fellow, he has been awarded residencies at Macdowell, the Guthrie Center, Red Cinder House, and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Alamgir Hashmi has published eleven books of poetry and several volumes of literary criticism in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, India, Pakistan, etc. He has won a number of national and international awards and honors, and his work has been translated into several European and Asian languages. For over three decades he has taught in European, Asian, and U.S. universities, as Professor of English and Comparative Literature.

Brandon Krieg grew up in Portland, OR. He is currently an instructor at DePaul University and Truman College in Chicago.

Eli Langner is a poet living in Tucson, AZ. His work has been published or is forthcoming in: Sanskrit, The North American Review, descant, Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, Celebrations, The Angry Poet, Bryant Literary Review, California Quarterly, Concho River Review, Confluence, Crucible, The Distillery, Fulcrum, Meridian Anthology Of Contemporary Poetry, Mother Earth Journal, The Old Red Kimono, The Owen Wister Review, Performance Poets Association Literary Review, Poetry @ The River Annual Review, SLAB, Steam Ticket, Veil: Journal of Darker Musings, Wisconsin Review, and Creations Magazine.

Naton Leslie is the author of a book of narrative nonfiction, That Might Be Useful (Lyon Press, 2005), six volumes of poetry: Their Shadows Are Dark Daughters (1998) Moving to Find Work (2000), Salvaged Maxims (2002) Egress (2004) and The Last Best Motif (2004), and Emma Saves Her Life (2007). A collection of his short fiction, Marconi’s Dream and Other Stories (2003) won the George Garrett Fiction Prize, and he is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He teaches writing and literature at Siena College, in Loudonville, New York.

Susan Lilley lives and teaches in Florida. Her collection, Night Windows, is the 2006 co-winner of the Yellow Jacket Press Chapbook Contest. She is a recipient of a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship and the 2009 winner of the Rita Dove Poetry Award (Salem College International Literary Awards). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Apalachee Review, Poet Lore, New Madrid, CALYX, Passager, and The Southern Review. Her MFA in Creative Writing is from Stonecoast at University of Southern Maine.

George Looney’s books include The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (2005 White Pine Press Poetry Prize), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (1995 Bluestem Award), and the novella Hymn of Ash (the 2007 Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award). In addition, Open Between Us, a new book of poetry, is due out from the Turning Point imprint of WordTech Communications early in 2010. He is chair of the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and co-director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.

Denton Loving lives on a farm near the historic Cumberland Gap, where Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia come together. He co-directs the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival at Lincoln Memorial University. His story “Authentically Weathered Lumber” received the 2007 Gurney Norman Prize for Short Fiction through the journal Kudzu. Other work has appeared in Birmingham Arts Journal, Appalachian Journal, Somnambulist Quarterly, Heartland Review and in numerous anthologies including We All Live Downstream: Writings about Mountaintop Removal.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is currently completing her MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Emerson College, where she is working on a memoir about the law. Her short-short fiction appears online at Storyglossia, Pindeldyboz, and Monkeybicycle. Her essay “In the Fade,” adapted from her memoir-in-progress, won the 2009 Bellingham Review/Annie Dillard Prize in Creative Nonfiction and is forthcoming from that publication in Spring 2010. For more information and links to other work, visit: www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.

Caitlin Militello is a writer and freelance editor living in suburban Buffalo, New York. Much of her work has been inspired by the 11 months she spent living in Japan: her short fiction piece, “Coming of Age,” which appeared in the May 2009 issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, has been nominated for Best of the Net 2009, and “An Unexpected Stop at Tama-reien,” a work of non-fiction, is forthcoming in the August issue of Cha. In addition to creative writing, she writes and edits for the blogzine she founded, The Talking Twenties, and has had editorials published in English and Japanese on the TalkingScience blogs. She is currently working on a novel.

Martina Nicholson is a practicing Ob-Gyn in Santa Cruz, Ca. She is married, and has two teenage sons. She is interested in the emotional interior-scapes in women, and in the mysteries of the body and health; and how we find meaning in our lives. She has published two books of poems, My Throat is Full of Songbirds, and Walking on Stars and Water.

David Oestreich works as a human resources professional in Ohio where he lives with his wife and three children. His work has previously appeared in Dash, Eclectica, Red Wheelbarrow and Ruminate.

Robert Parham’s recent work has been published by The Oxford American, South Carolina Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, English Journal, Cincinnati Review, Atlanta Review, Baltimore Review, 5 A.M., Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Folio, Southern Quarterly, and many other journals. Earlier work appeared in Georgia Review, Southern Humanities Review, California Quarterly, America, Rolling Stone, and a wide variety of other magazines. His chapbook What Part Motion Plays in the Equation of Love won the Palanquin Competition. He has published two other chapbooks. A collection of his poetry was a finalist for the Richard Snyder, Main Street Rag, Snake Nation Press, and the Marianne Moore poetry competitions. He presently edits the Southern Poetry Review and serves as Dean of the Katherine Reese Pamplin College of Arts and Sciences at Augusta State University.

Carlos Reyes is a noted poet and translator. His latest book of poetry is At the Edge of the Western Wave (2004). His The Book of Shadows; New and Selected Poems is due out next year from Lost Horse Press. A Suitcase Full of Crows (1995) was a winner of the Bluestem Prize. His most recent book of translations is Ignacio Ruiz Pérez’s La señal del cuervo / The Sign of the Crow. Last year he was recipient of The Fortner Award from St Andrews College. He has been an Oregon Arts Commission Fellow, a Yaddo Fellow, a Fundación Valparaíso Fellow, (Spain), a Heinrich Boll Fellow (Ireland) and most recently was poet-in-resident at the Joshua Tree National Park.

Nick Ripatrazone’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Sou’wester, The Los Angeles Review, Mudlark, and The New York Quarterly. He lives with his wife in New Jersey and is pursuing an MFA from Rutgers University.

Brian Shawver is the author of two novels, The Cuban Prospect and Aftermath. He is an associate professor in the English Department at Missouri State University, and a graduate of the University of Kansas and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He lives in Missouri with his wife, Pam, and their baby son, Simon.

Mark Spitzer grew up fishing for one-eyed monsters in the Mississippi River, but then lit out for Colorado, France, Louisiana, and ultimately, Arkansas—where he is now a prof. of creative writing. He has nine books out, most of them revolving around some sort of fish theme. He was recently featured as an expert on gar in the Animal Planet series River Monsters. For more info, see www.sptzr.net.

Donna Trump’s writing career began in mid-life when she attended her first writing class, “Writing for the Absolute Beginner”, at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. In the ensuing four years she has taken many other classes at The Loft, participated in The Loft’s Mentor Series for Emerging Writers, published poems and stories in Speakeasy, Fog City Review, and now, Minnetonka Review. She lives in downtown Minneapolis with her remarkably supportive husband and the occasional company of her two grown children. Donna continues her relationship with colleagues at The Loft, teaching and being taught in the country’s oldest, largest and most comprehensive literary arts center.

A.D. Winans is the author of more than 45 published works of poetry and prose, which have been translated into eight languages. His work has appeared in over one thousand literary journals and anthologies.
         He was the editor and publisher of Second Coming for l7 years. The archives of this award winning magazine and press are housed at Brown University.
        His book, The Land Is Not My Land, was awarded a PEN Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature. In 2005 a song poem of his was performed at New York’s Tully Hall. He has been awarded editing, publishing, and writing awards from the National Endowment For the Arts, The California Arts Council, PEN, and the Academy of American Poets. Further information can be found at www.adwinans.mysite.com.

Robert E. Wood teaches in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. His film studies include essays on Fosse, DePalma, and Verhoeven, as well as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He is the author of Some Necessary Questions of the Play, a study of Hamlet. His poetry has appeared recently in Quiddity, Quercus Review, Blue Fifth Review, Ouroboros and Umbrella, and is to appear in War, Literature, and the Arts, Jabberwock Review, Blue Unicorn and Prairie Schooner. A chapbook, Gorizia Notebook, from Finishing Line Press includes the poems presented here.