Kirstin Allio's novel, Garner, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award in 2007. Her short stories have appeared in many different publications, including the 2010 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She was born in Maine, and currently lives in Seattle with her husband and sons.
Bryan Ballinger is a photographer, illustrator, cartoonist and author. He is also an Associate Professor of Digital Media Arts at Huntington University. Bryan’s work has shown in galleries in the U.S. and Japan. His work has been published in magazines, children’s books, album covers, video games, television shows, and a feature film. You can see more of his photography at www.breadwig.com/photography and his illustration work at http://www.breadwig.com.
Samiya Bashir is the author of Gospel, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2009 Lambda Literary Award, and Where the Apple Falls, a Poetry Foundation bestseller and finalist for the 2005 Lambda Literary Award. Bashir is editor of Black Women’s Erotica 2 and co-editor, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana, of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art.
Tara Betts is the author of the book Arc and Hue. A Cave Canem alumnus, she teaches at Rutgers University. She is co-editing Bop, Strut, and Dance, a collection of Bop poems, with Afaa M. Weaver. Her work is anthologized in Gathering Ground, Bum Rush the Page, and the upcoming A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University of Akron Press, 2012) and Villanelles (Everyman's Library, 2012).
Ryan Black has been published in AGNI, TriQuarterly, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. In 2009, he was a Norma Millay Ellis Foundation Fellow at The Millay Colony for the Arts. He currently teaches in the English department at Queens College/CUNY.
Chris Bolin has published poems in Jubilat, Lana Turner, 1913, VOLT, and Post Road. He has received postgraduate fellowships from the University of Iowa and the MacDowell Colony. His poetry manuscript was a semi-finalist for the Saturnalia Poetry Prize and a finalist for the New Issues Poetry Prize.
Justin Bond's work has appeared in This Land, and is forthcoming in Penny Ante Feud. He lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and is the author of, most recently, two collections of poems: Breach (LSU Press 2010) and Milk Dress (Alice James Books 2010). She has also published two other collections of poems and a novel. She directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-City University of New York where she is a professor of English. She lives outside of New York City with her husband and two daughters.
Gerry Hadden was born in New York City. In 2000, National Public Radio dispatched him to Mexico City. There, his Buddhist philosophy was put to the test by a house full of ghosts, a married woman with whom he fell in love, and a culture rampant with corruption. For the next four years Hadden covered Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean for NPR. In 2004, he and his partner, Mouche, moved to Spain. They have three children: Lula, Nino and Emile. Today, Hadden is the Europe Correspondent for The World, a Public Radio International/BBC World Service radio co-production. His memoir, Never the Hope Itself, is not your typical blood-and-guts, John Wayne journalism story. It’s the opposite of that, despite the suffering and misery. His is a book for anyone concerned with human injustice and how one journalist tried to chronicle it, and maintain his sanity.
Sharanya Manivannan was born in India in 1985. Her first book of poems, Witchcraft, was published in 2008. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, The Nervous Breakdown, Superstition Review, Killing the Buddha, Monkeybicycle, Cordite, Melusine, Dark Sky Magazine and elsewhere. Sharanya can be found online at www.sharanyamanivannan.com.
Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago, a poetry collection, from CavanKerry Press. Born in the Philippines, he was raised there and in Los Angeles where he immigrated with his family when he was twelve. He holds degrees from Loyola Marymount University and the Creative Writing Program at New York University. Currently, he lives in Manhattan and works at Columbia University. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Gulf Coast, Crab Orchard Review, Bloomsbury Review, Puerto Del Sol, Seneca Review, The Literary Review, Gay & Lesbian Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bamboo Ridge, and the anthologies Contemporary Voices of the Eastern World, PinoyPoetics, and Titling the Continent. A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), he co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a non-profit organization serving Asian American poets.
Matthew Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the Kundiman Prize and will be published by Alice James Books in April, 2013. His poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. He’s currently the 2011 Poet-in-residence for the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program at the University of Michigan.
David Schuman's stories have been published in the 2007 Pushcart Prize Anthology, Missouri Review, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review and many other magazines and anthologies. He teaches fiction writing at Washington University in St. Louis where he lives with his wife and daughter.
Vanni Taing is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Western Michigan University. Her work has previously appeared in Lantern Review and Byzantium.