Fall/Winter 2006: Contributors Neil Aitken is the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review www.boxcarpoetry.com. His first collection of poetry, The Lost Country of Sight, was a 2005 semi-finalist for the 2005 Brittingham/Pollak Prizes in Poetry and is currently making its rounds again. His work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Crab Orchard Review, Portland Review, Poetry Southeast, RHINO, and Washington Square. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside and was a Kundiman Asian American Poet Fellow in 2005 and 2006. A long time expatriate, Neil Aitken recently returned home to Canada and now lives and works in Port Coquitlam, BC. More information about Neil Aitken can be found at www.neil-aitken.com. Kazim Ali is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Shippensburg University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque (Alice James Books) and The Fortieth Day (forthcoming in spring 2008 from BOA Editions) and a novel Quinn’s Passage was published by blazeVox books. His work has been featured in many national journals such as American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Barrow Street, jubilat and Massachusetts Review. He is one of the founding editors of Nightboat Books. Keith Althaus lives in North Truro MA on Cape Cod. He moved to Cape Cod in 1969 as a Writing Fellow (the first year of the program) at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He’s lived there ever since, and some of that time served on the Writing Committee of the Work Center and was its Chairman for awhile. He has received grants from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and from the National Endowment. He has two books: Rival Heavens (Provincetown Arts Press, 1993) and Ladder of Hours (Ausable Press, 2005). He has also written on art and curated several shows. Tamiko Beyer ‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Calyx, Crab Creek Review, Mizna, Gay and Lesbian Review, and Triplopia. She was a Kundiman Fellow in 2005 and will be a Hedgebrook resident in 2007. In New York City, Beyer works as a freelance writer and is the publication coordinator for Women Make Movies. She also leads writing workshops for homeless LGBT youth through the New York Writers Coalition. She has a website: www.wonderinghome.com. Amaranth Borsuk ‘s poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Smartish Pace, The Los Angeles Review, and Hotel Amerika. Her awards include an Edward W. Moses prize, a Falling Leaves creative writing prize, a statewide Ina Coolbrith award, a Shirle Dorothy Robbins Award, and a May Merrill Miller Award. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California where she is a co-founder of The Loudest Voice, a poetry and fiction reading series. Melanie Braverman is the author of the novel East Justice (Permanent Press, 1996), and Red, a collection of poems (Perugia Press, 2002). She teaches Creative Writing at Brandeis University. Olga Broumas lives with her partner, Christine Hart, and their two dogs, Lily and Nouni, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the terrible (every angel is) luxury of NOT HAVING YET BEEN EATEN. Her 7 books of poetry are collected in RAVE, and her 4 volumes of translation from the Greek of Odysseas Elytis are collected in Eros, Eros, Eros, both from Copper Canyon Press. A CD of her reading from these books is available from Copper Canyon as well. She currently translates American poetry into Greek, teaches Pilates, meditates, and practices as a bodywork therapist. She teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program at Brandeis University. Melissa Buckheit is a poet, dancer/choreographer and a photographer. Her poems have appeared in Laurel Moon, Bombay Gin and Sonora Review, among others. Her manuscript, On the Back of the Animal Is the Mouth of the Vase, was a finalist for the Backwaters Press First Book Prize. She is a recipient of the American Poets Honorary Prize and the Andrew Grossbardt Memorial Poetry Prize, among others. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Naropa University, and a BA from Brandeis University. Melissa has taught Creative Writing and modern dance at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and currently teaches writing, literature and Creative Writing at Pima Community College, and in private workshop. She translates the poet Ioulíta Heliopoulou, from Modern Greek and the poet Olga Broumas, into French. She has performed her original choreography at Brandeis University, Naropa University and in professional venues in Tucson. This past June, Melissa co-produced, directed and performed in an evening of new dance work, Entrances. Other recent work includes, Give Me Your Name, pt iii: Mirror, through Zuzi Dance Company, Re:Configurations, an intergenerational dance production about GLBTQ partnership, with New Articulations Dance Theatre and Narrative in Coming Back and Moving Forward, with the Brandeis Dance Collective in Boston, MA, of which she is a member. She currently lives in Tucson, AZ and is completing a second manuscript, Noctilucent. Wendy Burk is the author of a chapbook of poems, The Deer, from Finishing Line Press, and the translator of Tedi López Mills’s While Light Is Built, from Kore Press. Her translations of poems by Luigi Amara are included in the anthology Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico, from Sarabande Books. She can also be heard reading her poetry and translations on the just-released Kore Press audio anthology Autumnal: A Collection of Elegies. Wendy’s poems and translations have appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Nimrod, Slipstream, and EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and has twice been named Artist-in-Residence with the National Park Service. Her collaborations include a broadside with artist Paul Mirocha and poems and works in glass with artist/poet Eric Magrane. She resides in Arizona, where the wilderness inspires her. Kevin Coval is the author of Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica) which has been hailed by The Chicago Tribune‘s Rick Kogan as the “voice of the new Chicago, whose work should stand up there with Carl Sandburg”. Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, Founder of Louder than A Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival and Curator of Chicago’s Hip-Hop Theater Festival, Kevin has been writing, performing, teaching and organizing in Chicago for 10 years. His website and his press, www.em-press.com DeLana Dameron , a native of Columbia, SC spends her days in Chapel Hill, North Carolina translating the world around her — forever trying to marry the historical and the literary. She is a Cave Canem fellow and a member of the Carolina African American Writer’s Collective. Oliver de la Paz teaches creative writing at Western Washington University. He is a co-founder and a board member of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization committed to the discovery and cultivation of emerging Asian-American poets. A recipient of a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, his work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, Cream City Review, Third Coast, North American Review, and elsewhere. Names Above Houses, a book of his prose and verse, was a winner of the 2000 Crab Orchard Award Series and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001. His second book, Furious Lullaby will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2007. For more information, visit www.oliverdelapaz.com. Patrick Donnelly‘s collection of poems is The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003), about which Gregory Orr wrote “. . . everything he writes is suffused with tenderness and intelligence, lucidity and courage.” He is an Associate Editor at Four Way Books, and has taught writing at Smith College, the New School University, Clark University, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was Thornton writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College for Spring, 2006. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, The Marlboro Review, and have been anthologized in the Four Way Reader #2, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present, and elsewhere. From the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he received a scholarship in 2003 and a fellowship in 2004, and grants from the PEN Fund for Writers in 2000 and 2001. His translations, with Stephen Miller, from the Japanese Crossing the Ocean of Suffering are also in this issue. Ann Marie Fine earned her MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars in 2002. Some of her poems have appeared in nocturnes (re)view of literary arts, Nota Bene, For the Gathering, Diner, and are forthcoming in the Sonora Review and Cue. Currently she serves as the director of Casa Libre en la Solana www.casalibre.org, a writing and residency center for writers and scholars in Tucson. Cameron K. Gearen was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1969 and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. She has published a chapbook of poetry entitled Night, Relative to Day and selected by Robert Pinsky (2004). Her poetry has appeared in Fence, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, The Bellingham Review, River Styx, Quarterly West, Another Chicago Magazine, Northwest Review and elsewhere. She won the Grolier Prize in 1994, the W.B. Yeats Society Poetry Contest in 2001 (judged by Paul Muldoon), and placed third in the 1997 Painted Bride Quarterly Poetry Contest (judged by Mark Doty). In 2001, her manuscript was selected as a finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She has given readings in several venues including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and In the First Place, a quarterly salon. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry writing from Indiana University. She lives in New Haven, where she teaches at the Educational Center for the Arts. Suheir Hammad is the author of ZaatarDiva, published by Cypher Press, as well as Born Palestinian, Born Black and Drops of This Story, by Harlem River Press. She is an original writer and performer of the TONY Award winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. Her website is suheirhammad.com Lilah Hegnauer‘s first book of poetry, Dark Under Kiganda Stars, a collection based on her experiences living and teaching in Uganda, was published by Ausable Press in March 2005 and was an honorable mention for this year’s Library of Virginia Literary Award. Her poems have been published in Kenyon Review, Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, St. Ann’s Review, Orion, Marginalia , Identity Theory, versedaily. org , and Guernica . She was a featured poet on Leonard Schwartz’s radio show, Cross-Cultural Poetics , and her poetry will be in the 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets . She was runner up for the 2007 Astraea Lesbian Writers Award and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia where she is the poetry editor of Meridian . Tung-Hui Hu is the author of The Book of Motion (University of Georgia, 2003) and Mine (Ausable, 2007). He lives in San Francisco, where he writes on film and visual culture. Lillian Baker Kennedy , author of Tomorrow After Night (Bay River Press, 2003) and Notions (Pudding House, 2004), practices law and lives in an old cape bordered by wild roses in Auburn, Maine. Kennedy’s poetry has been included in Off the Record, (James Elkins, Editor) Legal Studies Forum, 2004, an anthology of poetry by lawyers; exhibited (Earthly Beatitudes, An Exhibit of Sculpture by Kerstin Engman and Poetry by Lillian Baker Kennedy), University of Southern Maine, Lewiston/Auburn Atrium Gallery, and included in various journals including Cider Press Review which nominated her poem, “The Red Radio Flyer Wagon” for a Pushcart. Ruth Ellen Kocher ‘s work has been published in Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Ploughshares, African American Review,The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Washington Square Journal, Crab Orchard Review, ninth letter, as well as other literary journals, and has been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She’r. Her first book of poetry, Desdemona’s Fire, won the Naomi Long Madget Award for African American Poets and was published by Lotus Press in 1999. Her second book, When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering, won the Green Rose Prose and was published by Western Michigan and New Issues Poetry and Prose in 2001, who also published her third book, One Girl Babylon. She has been a fellow at the Bucknell Seminar, the Cave Canem Workshop, and Yaddo. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Joseph O. Legaspi was born in the Philippines, and 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 New York City and works at Columbia University. Imago, his debut poetry collection, is forthcoming in fall 2007 from CavanKerry Press. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, recently in the North American Review, Bamboo Ridge, Crab Orchard Review, Puerto Del Sol, Seneca Review, The Literary Review, and the anthologies Contemporary Voices of the Eastern World and Titling the Continent. A recipient of a 2001 poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), he is a co-founder of Kundiman www.kundiman.org, a non-profit organization serving Asian American poets. Rachel Lehrman lives and works in London where she directs Nomadic-Collaborations, an international team of artists dedicated to promoting communication and collaboration among different artistic disciplines, places, and cultures in order to create fuller, multi-media and interdisciplinary works. In addition to her work as a multi-media and installation artist, Rachel’s poetry accompanied an installation at the Camden People’s Theatre in London in broadside format and was recorded to accompany an installation in the basement of the Hayward Gallery in Autumn 2004. Her awards include the UA Foundation Award for her poetry, the UA Graduate and Professional Award for Community Work, the Dorothy Blumenfield Memorial Prize, and the Knight’s Of Pythias Award. Rachel is expected to complete a practice based PhD in the Communicative Dynamics of Collaborative Art by June 2007. Genine Lentine ‘s poems, essays, and interviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, O, the Oprah Magazine, Roger, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. She collaborated with Stanley Kunitz and Marnie Crawford Samuelson on The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (W.W. Norton, 2005). Currently she is shaping her manuscript of poems, Mr. Worthington’s Beautiful Experiments on Splashes. Dana Levin‘s books are In the Surgical Theatre and Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press). A grateful recipient of numerous honors, Levin has recently received fellowships and awards from the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe and the Whiting Foundations. She teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program and at College of Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Stephen Miller is assistant professor of Japanese language and literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is translator of A Pilgrim’s Guide to Forty-Six Temples (Weatherhill Inc., 1990), and editor of Partings at Dawn: An Anthology of Japanese Gay Literature (Gay Sunshine Press, 1996). He lived in Japan for nine years between 1980 and 1999, in part as the recipient of two Japan Foundation fellowships for research abroad. He is currently working on a study of the Buddhist poetry in the Japanese imperial poetry anthologies. Anna Moschovakis is the author of I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone. Juliet Patterson‘s first book, The Truant Lover, was selected by Jean Valentine as the 2004 winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and was recently published by Nightboat Books. Her poems have appeared in American Letters &, Commentary, Bellingham Review, New Orleans Review, Washington Square, Verse and other magazines. Jon Pineda is the author of Birthmark (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Series Open Competition. The recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, he has been a featured poet at the Emerging Writers Festival at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, and was recently a member of the teaching faculty at the KUNDIMAN Asian American Poets Retreat. He currently teaches in the English Department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. Josh Rathkamp ‘s first book of poems, Some Nights No Cars At All, will be published by Ausable Press in September 2007. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Meridian, Fugue, Passages North, Rhino, Indiana Review, 42opus, Puerto Del Sol, and Rosebud. He teaches at Arizona State University and Phoenix College. Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her MFA at San Francisco State University, and is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), for which she received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Asian Pacific American Journal, Chain, New American Writing, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, and Parthenon West Review. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Mills College, and she lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, CA. Her author website is barbarajanereyes.com. Yael Shinar was born in California and grew up in Iowa. Since earning a B.A. at Brandeis University in 2003, she has taught public school in northwest New Mexico and studied classical Semitic languages at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She lives in Jerusalem, where she works as a writer and translator and trains in vijnana yoga. Cathy Stonehouse was born and raised in the UK and emigrated in 1988 to Vancouver, Canada—the city in which she still lives, along with her husband, lively two-year-old daughter (“don’t talk to me I’m talking to myself”) and two aged cats. She has published one volume of poems, The Words I Know, now sadly out of print, and a volume of juvenilia, Keys to the City. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies, mostly in Canada. She has studied for varying periods of time with Olga Broumas, Eleni Sikelianos and Alice Notley, and is extremely grateful to each, for their work and example. Sam Taylor spent the past several years caretaking a wilderness refuge in the San Juan Mountains of Northern New Mexico. He is currently the Dobie Paisano Fellow at the former writing ranch of J. Frank Dobie in Central Texas. His first book, Body of the World, is available from Ausable Press. TC Tolbert is a gender-queer feminist, photographer, thinker, and poet. He received his MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona in 2005. Right now he’s busy cultivating his favorite life— playing with pinholes; working at Outward Bound and Eon, the queer youth lounge; walking up hills with his companion of 7 years, Isabella the d-o-g; creating a chosen family; and writing poems in his most excellent outdoor chair. He is also learning to do fabulous things with vegetables and yarn. You can peak in on him at www.tigercakes74.blogspot. com. Frank X Walker is a native of Danville, Ky., a graduate of the University of Kentucky, and completed an MFA in Writing at Spalding University in May 2003. A founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, he is the editor of Eclipsing a Nappy New Millennium and the author of three poetry collections: Black Box (Old Cove Press, 2005); Buffalo Dance: the Journey of York (University of Kentucky Press, 2003), winner of the 35th Annual Lillian Smith Book Award; and Affrilachia (Old Cove Press, 2000), a Kentucky Public Librarians’ Choice Award nominee. A Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Fellowship recipient, Walker’s poems have been converted into a stage production by the University of Kentucky Theatre department and widely anthologized in numerous collections; including The Appalachian Journal, Limestone, Roundtable, My Brothers Keeper, Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art. He is a former contributing writer and columnist for Ace Weekly and has appeared on television in PBS’s GED Connection Series, Writing: Getting Ideas on Paper, in In Performance At the Governor’s Mansion and in Living the Story: The Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky. He co-produced a video documentary, Coal Black Voices: the History of the Affrilachian Poets, which received the 2002-2003 Jesse Stuart Award presented by the Kentucky School Media Association, and produced a documentary exploring the effects of 9.11 on the arts community, KY2NYC: Art/life & 9.11. He is the recipient of the 2006 Thomas D. Clark Literary Award for Excellence, Actors Theatre’s Keeper of the Chronicle Award and a 2005 Recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry. Walker regularly teaches in writing programs like Fishtrap in Oregon and SplitRock at the University of Minnesota; currently serves as a Visting Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and Communication at Transylvania University and is the proud Editor and Publisher of PLUCK!, the new Journal of Affrilachian Art & Culture, due out in spring 2007. For more information, visit his website www.frankxwalker.com Karen Whalley lives in Port Angeles, Washington, where she grew up. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Washington, and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including Harvard Review, Blue Unicorn, Passages North, Bellowing Ark, and Shades. In 2001 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award. She has taught English at Peninsula College, and currently works in Port Townsend, Washington, for the Department of Community Development, Environmental Health Division. The Rented Violin is her first book. Arisa White holds a MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A recipient of the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and, in 2006, she was awarded a writing residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Arisa is a Cave Canem fellow, currently working on a manuscript inspired by Nina Simone’s song “Four Women.” Her poems appear in Gathering Ground: Cave Canem 10th Anniversary Reader, Meridians, Softblow, Snowvigate.com, Failbetter.com, A Gathering of Tribes and African Voices and the AIDS/HIV Anthology, Fingernails Across A Chalkboard.