Contributors - Fall 2010
Dawn Allison is a graduate student at East Carolina University. Her work has been featured in Bound Off, Burst Literary E-zine, The Writer's Eye Magazine, The Whidbey Student Choice Award, and others.
Diane Hoover Bechtler lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, Michael Gross who is a poet with a day job and with their cat, Call Me IshMeow. As well as writing short work, she is looking for an agent for her memoir, which is about learning to live with brain disease. She has an undergraduate degree in English from Queens University where she graduated summa cum laude and subsequently earned her MFA.
She has had short work published in journals such as
The Gettysburg Review, Thema, Literary
Journal, Pangolin Press, Bewildering Stories, Everyday Fiction and The Dead
Mule, School of Southern Literature.
Laurel Blossom’s book-length narrative poem, Degrees of Latitude, was published by Four Way Books in November, 2007. Her most recent book of lyric poetry is Wednesday: New and Selected Poems, Ridgeway Press, 2004. Earlier books include The Papers Said (Greenhouse Review Press, 1993), What’s Wrong (Cobham & Hatherton Press, 1987), and a chapbook, Any Minute (Greenhouse Review Press, 1979). An earlier long poem, the mock epic “Easy Come/Easy Go,” was published in American Poetry Review in summer, 1976. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, edited by Billy Collins (Random House, 2005), and in national and international journals including Poetry, Pequod, The Paris Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Deadsnake Apotheosis, Many Mountains Moving, Seneca Review, things, and Harper’s, among others, and online at friggmagazine.com, BigCityLit.com, and elsewhere. .Her poetry has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and the Elliston Prize.
Blossom is the editor of Splash! Great Writing About Swimming (Ecco Press, 1996) and Many Lights in Many Windows: Twenty Years of Great Fiction and Poetry from The Writers Community (Milkweed Editions, 1997), among others. She serves on the editorial board of Heliotrope: a journal of poetry.
Blossom has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and Harris Manchester College (Oxford University), where she was elected Regent Emeritus in 2008. She co-founded The Writers Community, the esteemed writing residency and advanced workshop program of the YMCA National Writer’s Voice. She serves on the Boards of the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation in Vero Beach, Florida and the Musical Arts Association in Cleveland, Ohio.
Rosa Alice Branco’s poems have appeared in Per Contra before. A Watermill Beneath the Bed,” is drawn from her collection of sixty poems called The World Does Not End In the Cold of Your Bones (she tells herself) (published in May, 2009). The author’s most recent collection Cattle of the Lord, has just won the prestigious 15,000 Euros 2009 Espiral Maior de Poesia Award for best book of poetry from Galicia, Portugal, Angola, or Brazil. Levitin’s translations of her work have appeared in close to thirty magazines in the USA and were also included in the recent Graywolf anthology New European Poets.
Leah Browning is the author of three nonfiction books for teens and pre-teens (Capstone Press) and a chapbook, Making Love to the Same Man for Fifteen Years (Big Table Publishing, 2009). Her second chapbook, Picking Cherries in the Espańola Valley, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Browning's fiction, poetry, essays, and articles have previously appeared in a variety of publications including Queen's Quarterly, 42opus, Blood Orange Review, Brink Magazine, and Pequin, as well as on a broadside from Broadsided Press, on postcards from the program Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf, and in several anthologies. In addition to writing, Browning serves as editor of the Apple Valley Review. Her personal website is located at www . leahbrowning . com.
H.R. Coursen's 32nd book of poetry, 'Blues in the Night' was published by Moon Pie Press in March 2010. He was a featured poet at the Plunkett Festival at UMaine, Augusta, in April. He lives in Brunswick, Maine and teaches Aviation History at Embry Riddle and Shakespeare at Southern New Hampshire University. He is also the author of Contemporary Shakespeare Production, Shakespeare in Production: Whose History.
Wesli Court is an anagram pen name of Lewis Turco. His latest book is The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems, published in September, 2010,
by Star Cloud Press.
Brett Kroska’s work has appeared in Prologue, Pentimento, and the Gray Beard Review. In the past he has farmed sugar cane, cleaned toilets, taught self-defense and writing (not dissimilar), and he is currently an MFA in Fiction at Florida State University. He lives with his wife and pets. He is at work on a novel about Iraq.
Alexis Levitin - See staff bios.
Julia Mishkin is a poet and screenwriter. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, The Nation, and in many other magazines. She is currently working with installation artist Babs Reingold, who is creating work about culture, sociology, politics, and the environment. Through the use of linguistic/literary elements, she seeks an additional layer for her work. The text scrolls across the walls and objects within the installation, and appears as words or phrases from a poem, interspersed with a political slogan or remark. This juxtaposition of opposing dialogues creates a push/pull dynamic, and introduces a dialectical visual tension within the work.
Joanne Merriam is a Nova Scotian living in Nashville. Her fiction has appeared in Escape Pod, The Fiddlehead, Stirring and Strange Horizons. You can find her online at joannemerriam.com.
Judith Moffett is the author of eleven books in five genres, including two volumes of original poetry--Keeping Time (LSU, 1976) and Whinny Moor Crossing (1984)--and two of Swedish poetry in formal translation. Recent poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Literary Imagination, Cimarron, The Notre Dame Review, and also in Barnwood, an online magazine; and a new collection is currently seeking a publisher. Moffett is the author of four science-fiction novels; The Bird Shaman, Vol. III of her Holy Ground Trilogy, came out in 2008 from Bascom Hill, and her first novel, Pennterra, was reissued by Fantastic Books last year. She is at work on a memoir (working title Unlikely Friends) of her long friendship with the poet James Merrill, who died in 1995, and about whom she has published a critical study. She taught in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and for many years at the University of Pennsylvania. Widowed in 1998, she lives on a hundred-acre recovering farm near Lawrenceburg KY, and sometimes in Swarthmore PA.
Anita Naughton is the author of a memoir/cookbook, Tea & Sympathy about her years as a waitress. "Bitter Lemons" is her first published story.
Hollis Robbins teaches literature, poetry, aesthetics, and film at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where she is also an Associate Research Scholar with the Center for Africana Studies. She is the editor of the forthcoming Penguin Classics edition of Frances Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy. She is co-editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2006), as well as In Search of Hannah Crafts, Essays on The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2003). She has a Ph.D in English from Princeton and is a graduate of the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins. She is at work on long project entitled Sonnets of Imprisonment.
Dan Sociu was born in Boto'ani, Romania, in 1978. His first book, borcane bine legate, bani pentru încă o săptămînă, came out in 2002 (jars with tight lids, money for another week) and was recognized by the National Mihai Eminescu Prize for Poetry debut award. In 2004, fratele păduche (brother flea) appeared; this was reprinted in 2007. In 2005, cîntece eXcesive (eXcessive songs) won the Romanian Writers’ Union Prize for the best poetry book of the year—the first time a book by a non-member was either nominated or won this major prize. In 2007, he co-authored Pove'ti erotice române'ti (Romanian erotica) and in 2008, his first novel, Urbancolia, was published to acclaim. Sociu has translated Charles Bukowski into Romanian. He is one of nine Romanian poets in the 2008 Graywolf anthology, New European Poets. In May 2008, he read as part of PEN World Voices, New York, and for summer 2008, he was awarded a residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany. His poems have appeared in Calque, Modern Poetry in Translation and Jelly Bucket. and are forthcoming in The Café Review.
Adam J. Sorkin recently published Memory Glyphs: Three Prose Poets from Romania (Twisted Spoon Press) and Mircea Ivănescu’s lines poems poetry (University Press of Plymouth, UK, translated with Lidia Vianu), both in 2009. In press for 2010 is Rock and Dew, poems by Carmen Firan (The Sheep Meadow Press, translated mostly with the poet). With Vianu, he was awarded The Poetry Society’s Poetry Translation Prize for Marin Sorescu’s The Bridge (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). Sorkin is Distinguished Professor of English, Penn State Brandywine.
Kevin Spaide is from Auburn, New York. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Witness, Per Contra, The Summerset Review, Short Fiction, Identity Theory, Frigg, Opium Magazine, and several other places, both online and in print. His story “Monkey Hat” was shortlisted in the 2010 Willesden Herald competition. After six years in the northwest of Ireland, he moved to Spain. He lives in Madrid with his wife and son.
Alice Teeter writes poetry. Her chapbook String Theory won the Georgia Poetry Society’s 2008 Charles B. Dickson chapbook competition, judged by Lewis Turco. A collection of poems entitled When it happens to you… was published by Star Cloud Press in January 2009. She is currently working on a new volume of poetry to be published in 2011.
Elaine Terranova’s most recent collection is Not To: New and Selected Poems. Her chapbook Elegiac: Footnotes to Rilke's Duino Elegies is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She has new nonfiction in South Loop Review and poetry in Salamander and West Branch. She teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia and in the Rutgers, Camden MFA Creative Writing Program.
Lewis Turco - See Staff Bios.
Amanda Yskamp’s work has appeared widely in such magazines as Threepenny Review, Hunger Mountain , caketrain, Redivider, and The Georgia Review. She lives with poet Doug Larsen and their two children on the 10-year flood plain of the Russian River, where she teaches correspondence courses.
