Contributors
POETS
CRISTIN O'KEEFE APTOWICZ is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Everything is Everything (Write Bloody Publishing), as well as the nonfiction book, Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam (Soft Skull Press). Her work has been published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendancies, Rattle, Pank, kill author, decomP, Conduit, and La Petite Zine, among others. Her recent awards include the ArtsEdge Writer-In-Residency at the University of Pennsylvania (2010-2011), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (2011), and the Amy Clampitt Residency (2013). For more information, please visit her website at www.aptowicz.com.
REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS is a husband and father of two sons. His memoir, A Question of Freedom (Avery/Penguin 2009), won the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, and his collection of poetry, Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), was awarded fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, and Warren Wilson College. As a poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society.
MALACHI BLACK is the author of the limited edition chapbook Echolocation (Float Press, 2010). His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. A 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellow, he has also received recent fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The MacDowell Colony, UT-Austin’s Michener Center for Writers, and the University of Utah.
SIERRA DEMULDER is a two-time National Poetry Slam Champion and the author of The Bones Below published in 2010 by Write Bloody Publishing. When not doing poetry, she enjoys making and imbibing coffee, making full use of public transportation, and waxing on and on about feminism.
Born in Israel, SHIRA ERLICHMAN moved to the United States when she was 6. She remembers the sun setting as her family boarded the plane. She has read her poems in nearly every state in the US and sung on stages with Ani Difranco, TuNe-YaRdS, and Coco Rosie. She has had her poetry set to motion by a dance company as well as animated for a pro-choice campaign. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY, where she teaches poetry and lives in her indoor treehouse. Her poems can be found in The Massachusetts Review, Union Station, The Reader, and more. Check out www.shiraerlichman.com for goodies.
MEGAN FALLEY is one of a mere handful of poets to be published both on Penmanship Books and Write Bloody Press. After representing SUNY New Paltz for four years on the college slam team, Megan later earned her degree in English Literature and Creative Writing and returned to New Paltz to coach the team. In 2009 she helped found the second largest collegiate spoken word tournament in the country, The Wade-Lewis Poetry Slam Invitational. In 2010 she represented New York City on a competing team at the National Poetry Slam and her work began appearing in several literary magazines and anthologies such as PANK, Kill Author, decomP, Vinyl, The Crescent City Review, and The Legendary. When she is not writing poems, Megan occupies herself by turning her ex-lovers into pies.
Author of Otherness (Brick Road Poetry Press), M. AYODELE HEATH is recipient of fellowships to Cave Canem and the Caversham Center for Writers & Artists in Balgowan, South Africa. His poems have been published in several print and online publications, including diode, Crab Orchard Review, Mississippi Review, Chattahoochee Review, International Gallerie (India), storySouth, and Poetry Slam: the Competitive Art of Performance Poetry. A graduate of the MFA program at New England College, he lives and writes in Atlanta.
SALLY WEN MAO is an 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar and a Kundiman fellow. Her work can be found published or forthcoming in Cream City Review, Fourteen Hills, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, Post Road, Sycamore Review, and West Branch, among others. Born in Wuhan, China, she has lived in Boston, the Bay Area, Pittsburgh, Amsterdam, and most recently Ithaca, where she is an MFA candidate at Cornell University.
MICHAEL MLEKODAY is an MFA candidate at Indiana University and a National Poetry Slam Champion. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, The Collagist, The Journal, kill author, and others.
GREGORY PARDLO is the author of Totem (APR 2007). He is recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received other fellowships from the New York Times, the MacDowell Colony, and the Lotos Club Foundation. He currently teaches at George Washington University.
Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, LEIGH PHILLIPS is a poet, fiction writer and memoirist published in various creative and scholarly print and online journals; author of one poetry manuscript, Naked in the Heartbreak House and novel in progress, Leaving Flagstaff: An Epistolary Novel in Verse.
BEN ROBERTS is a CT technologist and an editor of Unstuck, a speculative literature annual. He holds a James A. Michener Fellowship at the University of Texas. His fiction hasappeared in Quarterly West and Harvard Review. His prose poetry received recognition from the 2011 Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship for New Parents.
JACOB VICTORINE is a New York City-bred poet and performance artist. He has featured or spotlighted at venues throughout New York and New Jersey, including the Cornelia Street Café and the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, where he competed in the 2009 runoffs for its National Slam Team. Jacob was a 2010 Intangible Grand Slam finalist and a member of the 2011 Jersey City National Slam Team. Currently, he is pursuing his MFA in Poetry at Columbia College Chicago. His work appears in the Uphook Press anthologies, Hell Strung and Crooked and -gape-seed-. Find him at www.jacobvictorine.com.
JULY WESTHALE is a poet, activist, and radical archivist with a weakness for botany and hot air balloons. She is a 2011 Emerging LGBT Voices Fellow in Poetry through the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her poetry has most recently been published in University of Wisconsin’s Women in REDzine, Generations Literary Journal, Hinchas de Poesia, WordRiot, 580 Split, Quarterly West, and So to Speak: A Feminist Literary Journal. Her poetry can also be found in the recently released anthology, Conversations at the Wartime Café: a Decade of War 2001-2011. A graduate of Mills College, she is currently a candidate for the MFA in Poetry at Lesley University. www.julywesthale.com.
MARCUS WICKER was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A 2011 Ruth Lilly recipient, he has also held fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and Indiana University, where he received his MFA. His first book, Maybe the Saddest Thing, was selected by DA Powell for the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from Harper Collins in 2012.
ARTISTS
ADRIAN CHIN graduated with a double major in Studio Art and Neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh. He went on to work on his MFA degree in Printmaking from Northern Illinois University, where he is currently a student. His recent work has been primarily etching and lithography, drawing inspiration from biology and nature.
REBECCA EBELING holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts, as well as a BFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In her recent paintings she collages pages from high fashion magazines onto chaotic watercolor swirls, depicting voids, cosmic events and the unknown or unknowable as images. Seduced by the shiny and new, yet also entranced by objects in demise and decay, Ebeling makes artwork that accepts the rapture of material culture in its enthralling embrace and self-destructiveness. Her work has been exhibited at such places as: The Sam Lee Gallery, MANIAC Los Angeles, The San Francisco Public Library, Southern Exposure, The Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the F.A.B. Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University. Rebecca’s work has also been featured in New American Paintings issue #85. She currently lives and works in San Francisco.
BRENT FOGT, a visual artist currently based in the Chicago area, produces drawings and installations inspired by aerial views, sea life, maps, and plants. Born in Ohio and raised in Texas, Brent had a career in politics and government before he decided to go to art school. He worked for the late Congressman Don Pease (D-OH) and the U.S. International Trade Administration, among other assignments. Brent's work has been featured in New American Paintings, Art in America, and the Houston Press. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.
TRAVIS GRAVES is an artist and Associate Professor at East Tennessee State University. His sculptures and video address the complex relationships that exist between Nature and Culture. The work engages questions of expectation and cultural attitudes as it defines our relationship to the natural world. Recent exhibits include the William King Museum, Abingdon, VA; Redux Contemporary Art Center, Charleston, SC; and the In Space Gallery, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI. Travis’s MFA work was completed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his focus of study was in sculpture. In his last year of graduate work he received the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award presented by the International SculptureCenter.
MARCIN MAJKOWSKI is thirty-seven and was born and raised in Kielce, Poland. He is a performance/spoken word poet/writer and currently lives in Krakow, Poland. His poems touch aspects of life, love, sex, death, etc. He has been awarded in several internet Polish competitions and published in several US zines. In 2010 his 60 poems were published by a Polish publisher “WFW” http://www.wfw.com.pl/. Find his poems at his official site www.depechmaniac.pl and blog http://depechmaniac.bloog.pl. In addition to this, he has found photography as great hobby and second way to express himself and his mind. Find his photography at http://ateist-kleranty.deviantart.com/.
CLARE RICKMAN is an artist, photographer, and graphic designer. Her current work includes a photographic series following the young lives of three sisters and examining the performance of womanhood through the game of dress-up. She is influenced by fashion photography, horror movies, and Symbolist art and literature. She holds a BA in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley and resides in Loomis, California.
TYLONN J. SAWYER is a Detroit based figurative artist, with a strong emphasis on the portrait. He received his MFA from the New york Academy Art and has studied independently at the Royal Academy Art in London, England. Tylonn is currently an adjunct professor at Eastern Michigan University, as well as, the program manager for an arts infused education non-profit.