Julie R. Enszer Photo Credit CharlieTPhotography©2010

Janice Gould Photo Credit by Jason Ordaz, School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Kristen E. Nelson Photo Credit by Sarah Dalby

Eleanor Wilner Photo Credit by J.J. Tiziou

Spring/Summer 2012

Guest Editor: Melissa Buckheit

Samuel Ace is the author of three collections of poetry: Normal Sex (Firebrand Books), Home in three days. Don’t wash., a hybrid project of poetry, video and photography (Hard Press), and most recently Stealth, co-authored with Maureen Seaton (Chax Press). He is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, two-time finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, winner of the Astraea Lesbian Writer’s Fund Prize in Poetry, The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in or is forthcoming from, Ploughshares, Eoagh, Spiral Orb, Nimrod, The Prose Poem: an International Journal, Kenyon Review, van Gogh’s Ear, Rhino, 3:am, and others. He lives in Tucson, AZ and Truth or Consequences, NM.

Maya Asher is 27 years old and an Arizona native. She is a poet, an advent student of American Sign Language, and works with children. She graduated from the University of Arizona with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing, a Bachelor of Science in Special Education and Rehabilitation, and a Masters of Arts in Rehabilitation Counseling. She was one of the three founders of the longest running Tucson Poetry Slam. She has been a spoken word artist for 5 years. She has been featured in The Edge Reading Series, in Tucson and been on the KXCI 91.3 Radio show, A Poet’s Moment. She has performed in many bars and coffee shops around the country. She is fascinated by communication is all forms – speech, ASL, behavior, art, and more. She just accepted the title of Director of Health Initiatives for the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam and is creating a pilot program for poetry and healing. Along with her poems in this issue, she has an essay Disability, Poetry, ASL, and Me.

Naomi Benaron’s debut novel Running the Rift won the 2010 Bellwether Prize, for a novel addressing issues of social change. Other awards include the Sharat Chandra Prize for Fiction, the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Prize and the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. Her fiction, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many print and online journals. She teaches writing online for UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and is a mentor for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.

Debby Jo Blank is the author of The Explosion of Binary Stars (Shearsman Books, 2012) and is a primary care physician in Tucson, Arizona. Her medical training was in Boston at Tufts, Harvard and a three-year Sloan Fellowship at MIT. She won the Faulkner Prize for Poetry in 2008 and has been short-listed for the Hippocrates Prize, the Black Lawrence Award and was a finalist for both the St. Lawrence Award and the Joy Harjo Contest. In 2012 she was awarded the W.D. Snodgrass Fellowship. She has studied in the MFA program at Lesley University and studied writing at Sarah Lawrence, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Poetry Week of San Miguel de Allende, Iowa Writer's Workshop, ASU and as an Undergraduate at Stanford. She hikes in the Sonoran Desert in the American Southwest, a greenbelt of cacti, Palo Verdes, Mesquite, Cottonwoods and other indigenous plants hardy enough to withstand the summer heat and the winter freeze. She has volunteered in hospice and at the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona.

Amaranth Borsuk is the author of Handiwork, selected by Paul Hoover for the 2011 Slope Editions Book Prize, and, with programmer Brad Bouse, of Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012). Her chapbook, Tonal Saw (2010), was published by The Song Cave. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT and will join the faculty of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell this fall.

Marguerite Guzman Bouvard is the author of six books and two chapbooks of poetry. Her latest poetry book, The Unpredictability of Light, won the Massbook award for poetry. She is also the author of twelve non-fiction books. Her poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in many literary journals such as Louisiana Literature and the Istambul Literary Magazine. She's a Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and gives poetry workshops at the Yanafide (You Are Not Alone Foundation for Inspiration and Empowerment) non-profit foundation.

Lisa Bowden, Publisher and co-founder of Kore Press, is the editor of Autumnal: A Collection of Elegies, co-editor of Powder: Writing by Women in Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq,and co-adapter, director and producer of Coming in Hot (a play based on Powder). She is the 2011 recipient of the Maryann Campau Fellowship for poetry from the University of Arizona Poetry Center and a Woman on the Move Award from the YWCA. A poet who works with an ensemble of dancers, writers and a musician, Lisa is a graduate of the University of Arizona. She has lived in London and Barcelona but currently resides in Tucson with her partner Eve and daughter Djuna.

A founding member of Oulipo, Paul Braffort is a poet, computer scientist, and songwriter. His books in the Bibliothèque Oulipienne include Mes Hypertropes, Trente-quatre brazzles and Les bibliothèques invisibles, among others. His most recent collection is J & I: les deux combinateurs et la totalité (Plein Chant, 2002). He has also written numerous textbooks on artificial intelligence and programming. Much of his work can be found at www.paulbraffort.net. He lives in Paris.

Originally from New York and New England, Melissa Buckheit is a poet, dancer/choreographer, photographer, English Professor and Bodywork Therapist. She is the author of Noctilucent, (Shearsman Books), published in March 2012, an e-chapbook, Arc, (The Drunken Boat, 2007), and her poems, translations, photography, interviews and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in nth position, Blue Fifth Review, The Drunken Boat, Broad!: A Gentlelady’s Magazine, Blue Five Notebook, Sinister Wisdom, University of Arizona Poetry Center eNewsletter, Cutthroat, Bombay Gin, Pirene’s Fountain, A Trunk of Delirium, Spiral Orb, Shearsman Magazine, and Sonora Review, among others. She translates the poet Ioulita Iliopoulou from Modern Greek and the poet Olga Broumas into French. A recipient of the American Poets Honorary Award, a Grossbardt Prize, and a Tucson-Pima Arts Council Dance grant, her poetry has also been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Naropa University and a B.A. in English & American Literature/Creative Writing, Dance/Theatre, and French from Brandeis University. She has taught Literature and Writing at The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, The Southwest University of Visual Art, Pima Community College, and the University of Arizona, as well as dance through Zuzi! Dance Company, Mirasol Eating Disorder Recovery Program, Arts for All and Paulo Friere Freedom School. Also a choreographer, Melissa has performed and premiered her work in Boulder, Boston, and Tucson, where she is a member of Brandeis Dance Collective and Zuzi! Dance Company. Melissa is the founder and curator of Edge, a monthly reading series for emerging and younger writers at Casa Libre en la Solana in Tucson, AZ, which emphasizes diversity of narrative, identity, and aesthetic. She lives in Tucson with her partner, Rebecca and their son, Jacob. Read more of her work from Noctilucent at Shearsman Books.

Simmons B. Buntin is the founding editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, now in its 15th year. His books of poetry are Bloom (2010) and Riverfall (2005), both published by Ireland's Salmon Poetry. He has published poetry and prose in such publications as North American Review, Orion, Kyoto Journal, and Versal. His book highlighting sustainable communities, Unsprawl, will be published by Planetizen Press this fall. Catch up with him at www.SimmonsBuntin.com.

Wendy Burk is the author of two chapbooks, The Deer and The Place Names The Place Named, and the translator of Tedi López Mills’s While Light Is Built and Arcadia in Chacahua. Read more work online in Spiral Orb, Terrain, and InTranslation.

D. Phillip Clifford received his MFA from the University of Arizona and has completed a manuscript entitled Myth of Scarcity, which deals with the intimate dynamics of family, culture, sexuality and religion. He is the recipient of the Hattie Locket Award for Poetry, University of Arizona Foundation Award for Poetry and was nominated for an Association of Writers and Writing Programs Intro Award. He has had poems published in Persona, Underground Voices and Callaloo.

Lisa M. Cole is a writer and artist who holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona’s Creative Writing program. She is the author of two chapbooks, Tinder// Heart and The Bodyscape both of which are forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She is currently transforming Tinder//Heart into a full-length collection. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the anthology, Bound By the Secrets We Hide; Nimble; Gloom Cupboard; Sawbuck; Snow Monkey; The Albion Review; Persona; The Foundling Review; Bluestream, and other publications. She was nominated for "Best of the Net" award for 2011 and she was the recipient of the Lois Nelson Award in Creative Nonfiction in 2005.

Leopoldine Core was born and raised in Manhattan. Her poems and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Open City, The Literarian, Joyland Magazine, Agriculture Reader, Harp & Altar and The Brooklyn Rail. She is a 2012 Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow.

Nicholas A DeBoer puts out a lot of stuff. Little DIY stuff, Red Night Anti-Matter (PDN 2011), HS Hammerheart (PDN 2012), Vintage Violence Canto (PDN 2012), Port of Saints (PDN 2012), Ushered White Waiting (con/crescent2009). He runs con/crescent press with Jamie Townsend, who is up in the Massachusetts. They sometimes run a poetry reading series, when they have it all together. He did the whole education thing, Naropa, where he met those favorites he keeps up with. The sweet people of Fact-Simile, EOAGH,Cousin Corrine, In Stereo Press and some such stuff coming up in WellGreased have all been super special in putting out his work. Most recently, EOAGH put out an essay on his process, called To the End of Ezra Pound. He is a Potlatch Discordian, believes in the 23 Enigma and has an ongoing debate with Ezra Pound's The Cantos, in his long poem, The Slip.

Jennifer K. Dick is the author of Fluorescence & the forthcoming Circuits (Corrupt Press, summer 2012) as well as 3 chapbooks, including Tracery (Dusie Kollectiv 5, 2011) and Betwixt (Corrupt Press, 2011). She lives in France where she teaches at UHA, curates the Ivy Writers Paris bilingual reading series & co-organizes the Ecrire L'Art French reading mini-residency in Mulhouse. She is also a poetry editor for VERSAL magazine out of Amsterdam & a regular book reviewer for Drunken Boat (USA--see four reviews in the current issue, number 15, online now) and Tears in the Fence (UK--see her most recent article in a series entitled "Of Tradition and Experiment" in issue 55). She organized a massive text and image conference, Lex-ICON, in June 2012. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The Denver Quarterly and Big Bridge. Her blog is jenniferkdick.blogspot.com. Jennifer K Dick’s 6 poems from Betwixt (the continuation) are from a dialogue project with NY poet Amanda Deutch.

Michelle Elvy is a writer and editor in New Zealand whose latitude changes with the seasons. She edits at Blue Five Notebook and A Baker’s Dozen and is also active with poetry and flash fiction in New Zealand. Her current poetry project is a collaborative exhibit planned for 2013 with a collective of seventeen Northland visual artists and poets. You can find Michelle’s work in online and print journals such as Poets & Artists, OCHO, Metazen, Words With JAM, BluePrintReview, and ROOM. Michelle blogs by the light of the Glow Worm

Julie R. Enszer is the author of Handmade Love (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2010) and Sisterhood, a chapbook (Seven Kitchens Press, 2010). She is the editor of Milk and Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2011), which is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. She has her MFA from the University of Maryland and is enrolled currently in the PhD program in Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland. She is a regular book reviewer for the Lambda Book Report and Calyx. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com

Originally from Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter has lived in England since 2001 and is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She has published two collections: The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Award for the best first collection published in the UK and Ireland in the preceding year, and Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2011). She also edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010) and reviews contemporary poetry for The Guardian. She has been blogging since 2005 at http://carrieetter.blogspot.com

Kit Fryatt was born in Iran in 1978. She grew up in England, Singapore and Turkey and moved to Ireland in 1999. Her chapbooks turn push | turn pull (corrupt press) and Rain Down Can (Shearsman Books) will be published later in 2012.

Koyoonk’auwi poet Janice Gould has published poetry in over sixty publications, and has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Astraea Foundation for Lesbian Writers, the Pikes Peak Arts Council, and from the online publication Native Literatures: Generations. Her books of poetry include Beneath My Heart, Alphabet (a chapbook), Earthquake Weather, and most recently, Doubters and Dreamers, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award for 2012, and also a finalist for the 2012 Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. She is the co-editor, with Dean Rader, of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. In March, Janice completed a Residency for Indigenous Writers at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is an Associate Professor in Women’s and Ethnic Studies (WEST) at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, where she has developed a concentration in Native American Studies and teaches Native American Literature, Native American Perspectives on Museums, Native American Philosophical Thought, and Indigenous Views on Sustainability.

Annie Guthrie is a writer and jeweler living in Tucson. She works and teaches at the UA Poetry Center. She has work published or forthcoming in Tarpaulin Sky, Ploughshares, Fairy Tale Review, HNGMAN, The Destroyer, RealPoetik, Everyday Genius, Omniverse, The Volta, Spiral Orb, 1913, A Journal of Forms, and more.

Justin Hardecker was raised in upstate New York and earned his bachelor's degree from Brandeis University, where he was fortunate to study poetry with Olga Broumas, Melanie Braverman, and Franz Wright. He received the Ramon Feliciano Poetry Prize and the American Poets Honorary Prize, and his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Winter 2008-09 (guest edited by Jean Valentine). He currently lives in Albany, NY, where he works as a teacher assistant at a school for students with developmental disabilities.

Mark Haunschild is an instructor of creative and academic writing at Arizona State University’s downtown Phoenix campus and coordinates the creative writing program at Art Intersection in Gilbert, AZ. He has worked as an editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review, Watershed, and the Flume Press Chapbook Series and is the current faculty advisor of poetry for the Superstition Review.

HR Hegnauer is the author of the chapbook Sir (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2011). She is a freelance book designer and website designer specializing in working with independent publishers as well as individual artists and writers. HR has also acted in two movies directed by Ed Bowes: The Value of Small Skeletons (2011) and Essay on Ash (forthcoming). She is a member of the feminist publishing collaborative Belladonna* and the poets’ theater group GASP: Girls Assembling Something Perpetual, and she received her MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University. HR maintains a portfolio of her work at www.hrhegnauer.com.

Jen Hofer is a poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, and urban cyclist. Her recent and forthcoming poem sequences and translations are available through various autonomous small presses including: Atelos, Counterpath Press, Dusie Books, Insert Press, Kenning Editions, Les Figues Press, Litmus Press, Little Red Leaves, Palm Press, and Subpress. Her installation titled “Uncovering: A Quilted Poem Made from Donated and Foraged Materials from Wendover, Utah” is on view at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Utah through 2013. She teaches at California Institute of the Arts and Otis College, and works nationally and locally as a social justice interpreter through Antena, a language justice collaborative. She also writes letters for people in public spaces at her escritorio público, and makes tiny books by hand at her kitchen table in Cypress Park, Los Angeles.

Gabriela Jauregui is the author of the poetry collection Controlled Decay (Akashic Books/ Black Goat Press, 2008) and El Tiempo Se Volvió Cuero (Sur+, 2009), a bilingual Spanish translation of Tom Raworth's poems. With Monica de la Torre, Laureano Toledo, and Aura Estrada, she is the author of the collaborative book El Taller de Taquimecanografia (Tumbona Edicions, 2011). She is a member of the sur⁺ publishing collective in Mexico.

Emma Jones is from Sydney. Her first book, The Striped World, was published by Faber & Faber in 2009. See Melissa Buckheit’s interview with Emma Jones in this issue.

Karen Klein is in her second career. Retiring from Brandeis after 37 years teaching literature and interdisciplinary humanities, she returned to her first love, modern dance and is a member of the performance group, Prometheus Dance Elders Ensemble. A wood sculptor and a poet, she has had eight solo exhibitions, including the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, and is the Exhibitions Chair for New England Sculptors Association, a member of Studios Without Walls and Galatea Fine Art in Boston. Reproductions of her drawings have been published in books, including those from Oxford, Beacon, McGraw-Hill, and her poetry has been published in national and international magazines and anthologies and performed in dance productions in Boston and Tokyo. She says: “But mostly, I’m a very physical person: I walk fast, rarely sit still, am a dancer. Perhaps the dancer part is what loves gesture and wants to capture it or searches, even in the solidity of wood or the formal constraints of poetry, for the line that moves.”

Drew Krewer’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in kill author, DIAGRAM, and The Volta, among others. He is also the author of the chapbook Ars Warholica (Spork Press 2010). He currently co-edits The Destroyer at www.thedestroyermag.com

Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up three miles from the CIA. She edits Corollary Press, a chapbook series devoted to multi-ethnic innovative writing, writes reviews for The Constant Critic, and is a contributing editor at EOAGH. Her books include That Gorgeous Feeling (Coconut Press), Underground National (Factory School), and the forthcoming chapbooks A Primary Mother (Least Weasel Series at Propolis Press) and No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise (Black Warrior Review). You can find her at silentbroadcast.com. This issue includes her collaboration with Nicholas A DeBoer WHAT ONE WANTS AND WHAT WILL BE PRESCRIBED WITHOUT ONE SINGLE CENTER FOREVER and a series of short poems.

Mark Lee is a native of Tucson, AZ. He worked in the IT field, before deciding to attend the University of Arizona's Creative Writing program. His work and travels have taken him from the Olympic Training Center in Colorado to remote villages in China. Currently, he works with amateur and professional cyclists and triathletes as a bicycle mechanic.

Rachel Lehrman is a poet, writer, artist, former academic, and sometimes-teacher living in the idyllic UK village of Chorleywood. Her work has previously appeared in Blue Fifth Review, The Drunken Boat, Fire Magazine, Spiral Orb and Shearsman Magazine, as well as the anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman Press, 2010). She published her first chapbook, Second Waking, with Oystercatcher Press in 2009 and has forthcoming work in Sea Pie: a Shearsman Anthology of Oystercatcher Poetry (2012). Rachel completed her M.F.A. in Creative Writing Poetry at the University of Arizona in 2002, and a practice-based Ph.D in Collaborative Authorship from Roehampton University, in 2009.

Eric Magrane has recent poetry in the journals Versal, Saw Palm, and Fourth River, and artwork in the recent exhibits Object Poems (23 Sandy Gallery, Portland, Oregon), The Preserve (Big Cypress National Preserve, Ochopee, Florida), and Mesquite (Tohono Chul Park, Tucson, Arizona). He is the editor of Spiral Orb, an experiment in permaculture poetics, and has been an Artist in Residence in three national parks. His collaborations also include Borderlands Theater’s Tucson Pastorela and the song cycle (F)light. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with the poet Wendy Burk, two cats, and three chickens.

Kristi Maxwell is the author of Re- (Ahsahta Press, 2011), Hush Sessions (Saturnalia Books, 2009), and Realm Sixty-four (Ahsahta, 2008). She lives and writes in Tucson, Arizona, and teaches at the Poetry Center and Casa Libre en la Solana, among other places.

Jeevan Narney was born in India but was raised in the United States. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in Right Hand Pointing and Spiral Orb. He lived in China from 2007-2009 teaching English to Chinese students at Dezhou University.

Kristen E. Nelson is the author or Write, Dad (Unthinkable Creatures Press, 2012). She has recently published work in Drunken Boat, Dinosaur Bees, Everyday Genius, and GlitterTongue. She has work forthcoming in Denver Quarterly. She is a founder and the Executive Director of Casa Libre en la Solana, a non-profit writing center in Tucson, Arizona; an editor/curator for Trickhouse.org; and a production editor for Tarpaulin Sky Press. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Goddard College and teaches English and creative writing in Tucson, Arizona.

Sarah Rose Nordgren’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Pleiades, The Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, and the Best New Poets 2011 anthology. Winner of the 2012 James Wright Poetry Award from Mid-American Review, Sarah Rose is the recipient of two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown as well as support from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Louis Untermeyer Tuition Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She grew up in Durham, North Carolina and teaches at Miami University of Ohio.

Maria Pinto was born in Jamaica, grew up in Florida, and currently lives in Boston where she went to college. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including Seeds in the Black Earth, Spirited Magazine, and Broad!, and she was awarded the Ivan Gold Fellowship at the Writer’s Room of Boston. She’s an odd-jobber, is seeking representation for her first novel, and has begun to work in earnest on her second. Her top priorities are to read widely and retain her sense of wonder.

Sam Rasnake’s works, receiving five nominations for the Pushcart Prize, have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Southern Poetry Anthology, OCHO, Best of the Web 2009, Literal Latté, BOXCAR Poetry Review Anthology 2, Poets / Artists, Big Muddy, and > kill author. His latest collections are are Lessons in Morphology (GOSS183, 2010) and Inside a Broken Clock (Finishing Line Press, 2010). His personal website is samofthetenthousandthings.wordpress.com/

Eléna Rivera’s most recent books are The Perforated Map (Shearsman Books, 2011) and Remembrance of Things Plastic (LRL e-Editions, 2010). She won the 2010 Robert Fagles prize in translation for her translation of The Rest of the Voyage by Bernard Noël, published by Graywolf Press (2011).

Yael Shinar was born in California and now resides in Cambridge, MA. Her poems have appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Meridian, The Mid-American Review, Third Coast, BOMBlog, The Carolina Quarterly, Poetry Daily, The Drunken Boat, and other publications. Her first manuscript, If God Does Not Sit in the Nostrils of the Starling’s Beak, was a semifinalist for the 2012 Perugia Press Prize and the 2010 Kinereth Gensler Award (Alice James Books). She earned the degree of Master of Divinity at Harvard University in 2010 and completed pre-med requirements at Harvard Extension School in 2012. She reads and writes in English and in Hebrew and has studied Akkadian, Arabic, Sanskrit and French This issue also includes an excerpt from Yael's poetic documentary AWAKE ALERT ORIENTED.

Jennifer Stella just returned to her last year of medical school at the University of California, San Francisco after taking a year off to pursue an MFA in poetry at Brooklyn College. She also worked in harm reduction at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Now on leave of absence from the MFA, to be finished after residency in internal medicine, Jenny used to think that “writer” was who she was and “doctor” was what she did. This year, she’s learned that both are both. Her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Switched-on Gutenberg, The Brooklyn Review, The Examined Life Journal, and others. Medicine, all of it, is about stories – reading, writing, and becoming part of them. It is about learning to listen to the inside of the body, which is telling things the patient knows but lacks vocabulary to describe. The poet, like the doctor, is always listening

Dr. Todd Swift has published eight full collections of poetry including Seaway: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2008) and When All My Disappointments Came At Once (Tightrope Books, 2012). Swift has edited or co-edited many anthologies, including Poetry Nation, 100 Poets Against The War, and (with Evan Jones) Modern Canadian Poets (Carcanet, 2010). In 2007 he and Jason Camlot published the collection of essays on contemporary Anglo-Quebec poetry, Language Acts (Vehicule). He has edited special sections on Canadian Poetry for New American Writing and London Magazine; and on British and Scottish Poets for The Manhattan Review. His poems have appeared widely, in leading publications, including Poetry (Chicago), Poetry London, Poetry Review, Jacket, The Guardian, and The Globe and Mail. His poems have appeared in key North American anthologies, including The New Canon, Open Field, and Best Canadian Poetry 2008. He was Oxfam GB Poet-in-residence in 2004, and continues to run the London-based Oxfam Poetry Series. This project has produced three CDS: Life Lines, Life Lines 2, and Poems for Children; and a DVD, Asking A Shadow To Dance, which have involved over 120 of the leading and emerging poets of Britain. New publications include Lung Jazz: The Oxfam Book of Young British Poets (Cinnamon Press, 2011), co-edited with Kim Lockwood. He lectures in English Literature and Creative Writing (Associate Professor) at Kingston University, England. His PhD was on style in British poets of the 1940s, from UEA. He is Director of the small press Eyewear Publishing Ltd. He lives in London with his wife, Sara.

Shelly Taylor lives in Tucson & is the author of the recent chap, Dirt City Lions (Horse Less Press, 2012). Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarp Sky Press, 2010) is her book. Other chaps are out from Dancing Girl & Portable Press at YoYo Labs.

Scott Thurston’s books include: Reverses Heart’s Reassembly (Veer Books, 2011), Of Being Circular (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2010), Internal Rhyme (Shearsman, 2010), Momentum (Shearsman, 2008), and Hold (Shearsman, 2006). He edits The Radiator, a little magazine of poetics, and co-edits The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. Scott lectures at the University of Salford, UK and has published widely on innovative poetry, including a recent books of interviews Talking Poetics (Shearsman, 2011). See his pages at www.archiveofthenow.com/

M.E.Wakamatsu was born in the border town of San Luis R.C. Sonora, Mexico. The daughter of a Mexican mother and Japanese father, she writes from the border between cultures, between patterns of discourse, between first and third worlds. Her work appears in Cutthroat, Southwestern Women New Voices and Cantos al Sexto Sol. She produced From the Lair, A Spoken Word Poetry CD and Speakwater: Regando La Frontera—A Multi-material Visual Poetry Installation at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She has received numerous awards, including the 2008 Mary Ann Campau Memorial Fellowship Award and the 200 Ohio State Scarlet and Gray Award for Southern Arizona Teacher of the Year.

Joni Wallace earned a B.A. and J.D. at the University of New Mexico and her M.F.A. at the University of Montana. She is the author of Blinking Ephemeral Valentine, selected by Mary Jo Bang for the 2009 Levis Prize (Four Way Books, 2011). She grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico and currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona. Her most recent work appears or is forthcoming here and in Catch-Up, a journal of comics and literature, West Branch Wired www.bucknell.edu/westbranch, Sonora Review and VOCA, the University of Arizona Poetry Center's Audio Visual Library.

Orlando White is the author of Bone Light (Red Hen Press, 2009). Originally from Tólikan, Arizona, he is Diné of the Naaneesht’ézhi Tábaahí and born for the Naakai Diné’e. He holds a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Brown University. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Omnidawn Poetry Feature Blog, Salt Hill Journal, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, American Indian Culture And Research Journal, Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics, and elsewhere. His poetry has been anthologized in Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas and translated into Spanish in In That Round Nation of Blood: An Anthology of Contemporary Indigenous Poetry. He is a recipient of a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Residency. He has taught at The Art Center Design College, Brown University, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Currently, he teaches at Diné College and lives in Tsaile, Arizona. See Melissa Buckheit’s interview with Orlando and her review of Bone Light in this issue.

Eleanor Wilner’s most recent books are Tourist in Hell (University of Chicago, 2010) and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon, 2004). She teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. See the interview and feature of her work in a previous issue.