Contributors

POETS
Nic Alea is a Bay Area based poet who co-hosts an open mic, The New Shit Show, which focuses on the production of new work. They also help facilitate a creative writing workshop in the Solano Juvenile Detention Center with The Beat Within. Nic has been published in word riot, >kill author, The Evergreen Review and some other cute places. Nic is a 2012 Lambda Literary Fellow and their chapbook (no trees, all pianos) can be purchased at nicaleapoetry.bigcartel.com.

Scott Beal's poems have appeared recently in Poemeleon, The Collagist, and Union Station. He serves as a writer-in-the-schools for Dzanc Books in Ann Arbor and teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, from which he earned his MFA in 1996. He co-authored Jangle the Threads with Rachel McKibbens and Aracelis Girmay (Red Beard Press, 2010) and Underneath: The Archaeological Approach to Creative Writing with Jeff Kass (Red Beard Press, 2011).

Laura E. Davis is the author of Braiding the Storm (Finishing Line Press 2012). Her poems and reviews are featured or forthcoming in Redactions, The Rumpus, Stone Highway Review, WomenArts Quarterly, and others. The Founding Editor of the literary magazine Weave, Laura teaches poetry writing, translation, and recitation in San Francisco, where she lives with her partner, Sal.

Taylor Mardis Katz is a poet and part-time farmer living in Vermont. Her poems have made an appearance on the radio, in a farmer’s almanac, in a seasonal quarterly focused on whole foods, in handmade chapbooks, and in literary journals such as The Connecticut Review and H_NGM_N. She was once told by a professor, “Every poem you write is a love poem,” and she was pleased as punch. Future plans include establishing a farm with her partner, eating in abundance the fruits of her labor, and inviting everyone to join her. She keeps a scroll online at panacheperhaps.com.

Khary Jackson is a performance poet, playwright, dancer and musician. A Detroit native, he currently resides in the Twin Cities where he serves as a teaching artist and writer. He is a Cave Canem Fellow, and as a result has further reason to adore black people. He has written 12 full length plays, one of which (Water) was produced in 2009 at Ink and Pulp Theatre in Chicago. He's a little weird, but rest assured, there's a method to the way he stares into your house.

Dana Koster received her MFA from Cornell University, and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Cincinnati Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and More Than Soil More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets, among others. She lives in California’s Central Valley with her husband and young son. 

Erika Meitner is the author, most recently, of Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (Anhinga Press, 2011), and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner.  Her next book, Copia, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2014.  She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program.

Born and raised in Southern Virginia, Sean Patrick Mulroy grew up in a house that was built in 1801 and was commandeered by the Union Army during the Civil War to serve as a makeshift hospital. As a boy, Sean loved to peel back the carpets to show where the blood from hasty surgeries on wounded soldiers had stained the wooden floorboards. Now he writes poems. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Bakery, Assaracus, Rua de Baixo, Network Awesome, Moonshot, Side B, Union Station, Tandem, Frigg, Neon, Best Indie Literature of New England,  Flicker and Spark: A Contemporary Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, and Ganymede.  http://www.thevanishingman.com

Melissa Newman-Evans has been the waitress and a regular reader at the Boston Poetry Slam since 2007, and has been designing chapbooks for individuals in the community for even longer. Currently, she provides graphic design for the Boston Poetry Slam, the Encyclopedia Show: Somerville, Bicycle Comics poetry books, and will be Art Director for the upcoming National Poetry Slam 2013 in Boston. She was a member of the 2012 Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge slam team, and has headlined poetry shows around the northeast. If you wanted a tonic and gin, she thinks you should have ordered it that way.

Hannah Oberman-Breindel's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Best of the Net 2012, BOXCAR, Stirring, The Comstock Review, THRUSH, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize, and a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She is completing her MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she also teaches writing at the university and at a local men’s prison.

Christina Olivares earned an MFA from Brooklyn College in Poetry and a BA from Amherst College in Interdisciplinary Studies (Education). She is the recipient of a 2012 Vermont Studio Center Artists Grant, a 2010 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant for Emerging Writers to Cuba, and 2008-2009 Teachers and Writers Collaborative Fellowship. Her poem "Shining" was nominated for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Vinyl Poetry, PALABRA, Tidal Basin Review, The Acentos Literary Review, No, Dear, and The Brooklyn Review. 

Sam Sax is the first ever Bay Area Unified Grand Slam Champion and Oakland’s first two-time queer Grand Slam Champion. He curates 'The New Sh!t Show', a reading series in San Francisco and facilitates regular intergenerational writing workshops. You can find more of his work in Rattle, PANK, The Evergreen Review, Gertrude, The Nervous Breakdown, and other journals.

Danez Smith, a Cave Canem Fellow and 2-time Pushcart Nominee, works in Madison, WI, as a Student Advisor for the First Wave Program at UW-Madison. He likes tattoos, bad food, drinking Capri Suns, reading manga and good poems. His work appears or is forthcoming in PANK, Anti-, Radius, Southern Indiana Review, and other places. He thinks you look good today.

Sasha Warner-Berry lives in Brooklyn and works as a community organizer. Her greatest achievement as a writer came at the age of eight, when her short story about dancing frogs and unrequited love won first prize in a contest in her hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

VISUAL ARTISTS
Roger Camp's photographs have been published in over 100 magazines. He is the author of three books, including the award winning Butterflies in Flight, Thames & Hudson, 2002. He has taught photography at the Columbus College of Art & Design, University of Iowa and the Cite Internationale Universitaire de Paris. His documentary photography has been awarded the prestigious Leica Medal of Excellence. He is represented by the Robin Rice Gallery, NYC. Additional examples of his work may be found at rcampphoto.com..

After twenty years of working as a visual stylist and designer for such clients as Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY, and, The New York Times, among others, Laura Kiselevach decided to turn her passion for photography into a career, applying her well trained eye to capture both the grandeur and minutia of her everyday life. A native of a small coal town in Pennsylvania, Laura lives in New York City.

Jason Ruhl received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002. He is a co-director of the online gallery Red Rocket and one half of the collaborative duo The Scavengers. His work has been shown in various national and international locations such as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Berlin. He currently resides in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is a Master Printer at Tandem Press.

Stephanie Tisza is a time-based artist. She grew up in a working class neighborhood on the Southwest Side of Chicago. As soon as she learned to ride a bicycle at age six, she ran away from home for several hours, wandering alone alongside freight train tracks and knocking on the neighborhood cat lady's door, asking for candy. In her early 20s, she studied experimental film-making under James Benning at California Institute of the Arts before finishing her MFA in 2011 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work is motivated by an interest in alienation, voyeurism & intimacy. She can be found online at:
www.stephanietisza.com.

Susan Wicker graduated from the Arts University Bournemouth, England, in 2012. She is driven by a passionate force and the reaction her work evokes using found ephemera taken out of context and given new meaning. As a freelance artist she has collaborated in exhibitions ranging from social and cultural issues to having her work accepted and published by creatively diverse communities.