Contributors
Peter Atkinson
Born in Seattle, Atkinson grew up mostly in New York and various places in Europe attending some twenty-two schools before completing his secondary education in Ireland. Some years later he began his undergraduate work in mathematics at N.Y.U, where he was admitted to the Ph.D. program before becoming a naval officer for nearly six years. Thereafter he and his brother owned and operated a company that developed and/or built mid-rise apartment buildings in the New York area. His post-graduate education includes an M.F.A. in poetry and a Ph.D. in philosophy with a dissertation on the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He has taught courses in philosophy and/or English literature. At other times in his life he has earned his living as a carpenter, a guitar teacher, high school teacher, contract manager for a large defense contractor, yoga teacher, and private investor.
Susan Nisenbaum Becker
Susan Nisenbaum Becker’s poetry has appeared in Plainsongs, Summer Home Review ll, Phoebe, Salamander, Comstock Review, Poetry East, Wilderness House Literary Review, Lumina, and Consequence among others. She is a playwright, actor and arts organizer for which she has received several Local Massachusetts Cultural Council Grants. She has been awarded fellowships at Canada’s Banff Center for the Arts, Yaddo where she held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency, and the MacDowell Colony. She was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. Currently, Susan is completing work on her first book of poems, Little Architects of Time and Space.
Nina Bennett
Nina Bennett is the author of Forgotten Tears: A Grandmother’s Journey Through Grief. In 2006, she was selected to attend the Delaware Division of the Arts Masters’ Workshop in poetry. Nina’s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Panache, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, EarthSpeak, Main Street Journal, The Smoking Poet, Oranges & Sardines, Philadelphia Stories, Pirene’s Fountain, The Broadkill Review, Slow Trains Literary Journal, and Mourning Sickness. Nina is a contributing author to the Open to Hope Foundation.
Nicolette Bethel
Nicolette Bethel is a Bahamian playwright, poet, anthropologist and blogger and the founding editor of the online literary journal tongues of the ocean (http://tonguesoftheocean.org). Her work has been published in a variety of print and online publications.
Maryellen Cammarosano
Maryellen Cammarosano has read and featured in many venues around New York City including The Cornelia Street Cafe, Pink Pony Poets Series the Bitter End, Bluestocking and Bowery Poetry Club. She has been a featured poet on WBAI for their gay pride special, and, among other publications, has been published in Candlelight Poetry Journal, RiversEdge, and St. Luke’s Review, in the anthology The Company We Keep and The Bathyspheric Review in Monterey. She has completed her first manuscript and is currently searching for a publisher.
Robert Campbell
Robert Campbell is a graduate student in Library Science at the University of Kentucky. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Asheville Poetry Review, Heartland Review, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Valentina Cano
Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time either writing or reading. Her works have appeared in Exercise Bowler, Blinking Cursor, Theory Train, Magnolia’s Press, Cartier Street Press, Berg Gasse 19, Precious Metals and will appear in the upcoming editions of A Handful of Dust, The Scarlet Sound, The Adroit Journal, Perceptions Literary Magazine, Welcome to Wherever, The Corner Club Press, Death Rattle, Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Generations Literary Journal, Super Poetry Highway and Perhaps I’m Wrong About the World. You can find her here: http://coldbloodedlives.blogspot.com
Rebekha Carlsen
Rebekha Carlsen’s poems have appeared in Retort Magazine, The Broadkill Review, Fire and The Asahi Shimbun with a forthcoming viewing at the Biggar Poetry Garden. She is currently completing a novel The end of darkness.
Susanna Childress
Susanna Childress has recent work published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Her first book was selected by Billy Collins for the 2005 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and her second book is forthcoming this fall from New Issues Press.
Peter Ciccariello
Peter Ciccariello is a digital artist and poet living in Providence, Rhode Island. His visual interests include inquiry into the processes of organic decomposition and entropy, and the synthesis and manipulation of atmosphere through light and optics.
Maria Cinanni
Maria Cinanni grew up in Ottawa, Canada and now lives in Umbria, Italy, where she works as an educator. Quasi-hysterical, culturally-insecure Maria writes poetry when she manages to find a pen.
Joan Colby
Joan Colby has 7 published books of poetry including The Atrocity Book, The Lonely Hearts Killers, How the Sky Begins to Fall, The Boundary Waters, Blue Woman Dancing in the Nerve. She has over 900 poems in such periodicals as Poetry, Grand Street, Western Humanities Review, Gargoyle, North American Review, Atlanta Review, and others. She is a recipient of a Literary Fellowship and two Literary Awards from the Illinois Arts Council plus numerous other awards. She is editor of Illinois Racing News, the official publication for the Illinois Thoroughbred Breeders and Owners Foundation and she lives on a small horse farm in northern Illinois. She blogs at http://poetjm.blogspot.com and http://poemshorses.blogspot.com.
Jason Cooper
Jason Cooper earned a BA in English from the University of Wyoming and an MA in English Literature from the University of Montana, at which he is currently an adjunct English instructor. He continues to wait for a community college in the Wyoming area to hire him for a full-time, tenure-track position. Of principal interest to him are the ways in which the Christian tradition surfaces in a secular literary landscape, literary representations of the natural world (the poem included in this issue is one of a series he has written inspired by the BBC series Planet Earth), the bildungsroman as pedagogical foundation and the history of the Booker Prize. His book club, The Eclectic Shade Tree, will — in honor of Mayan silliness — celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2012 with a full year of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction.
Joshua Daniel Edwin
Joshua Daniel Edwin was born in Baltimore, MD and has lived in Atlanta, Seoul, South Korea, and New York City. He is a proud resident of the County of Kings and a student at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
Michael Estabrook
Michael Estabrook is a baby boomer who began getting his poetry published in the late 1980s. Over the years he has published 15 poetry chapbooks, his most recent entitled When the Muse Speaks. Other interests include art, music, theatre, opera, and his wife who just happens to be the most beautiful woman he has ever known.
Hugh Fox
Now retired, Hugh Fox taught for over forty years at various US and Latin American and universities. He was editor of Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry, from 1968-1995, and Latin American editor of Western World Review and North American Review during the sixties. He is currently a contributing reviewer to SPR and SMR.
He has published over 100 books. The most recent of these are Defiance (Higganum Hill Press, 2007) (poetry), Finalmente/Finally (Solo Press, 2007) (poetry), Opening the Door to French Film (World Audience, 2007), Rediscovering America (World Audience, 2009) (archaeology), Alex (poetry chapbook, Rubicon Press), Peace/LaPaix (Higganum Hill, 2008, poetry chapbook), The Collected Poetry (World Audience, 2008), Icehouse & Thirteen Keys to Talmud (Crossing Chaos Press in London, Ontario).
Gerburg Garmann
Gerburg Garmann, a native of Germany, is a professor of German and French at the University of Indianapolis. Her scholarly publications have appeared in both German and French in international journals, and her poems have been featured in various magazines and anthologies around the world, including The Adirondack Review, Dichtungsring, gangway, Die Gazette, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, In Posse Review, In ein anderes Blau, and Lyrikwelt. A strong believer in interdisciplinary artistic endeavors, she is also a painter concentrating on Abstract Expressionism:
Painting is yet another foreign language for me and allows for aesthetic expression inform of color, shape, thought, and passion. It is a language, which can be shared by many, verbally and non-verbally. Because paintings (just as other forms of art) provide symbolic as well as real meeting grounds of the spiritual and our day-to-day experiences, they solicit our reaction no matter whether our engagement with the actual piece of art ends up in affection or dislike, in affirmation or disapproval. In the end, all artwork manifests a story, or at least a small sliver of a de-centered plot.
Gerburg Garmann had several solo exhibitions and participated in national group exhibitions. Currently, she is working on a multimedia presentation combining her poetry, painting, and composition–Language, Image, and Sound: A Multimedia Orchestration of Three Pieces (“Eliza’s Bird”, “Reprise”, and “In The Month of Haymaking”). Recently, she received a commendation from the British art magazine Aesthetica for her poem “Eliza’s Bird.” Her paintings are collected locally and internationally.
(Website: http://europeanartstudio.carbonmade.com/)
Jeremy Glazer
Jeremy Glazer is a regular fiction contributor to Under the Sun, a locally-produced public radio program on WLRN, Miami’s NPR affiliate. He has also participated in Lip Service, a writers group which puts on public readings.
A.M. Houser
A.M. Houser is a freelance writer and editor in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has recently been published in Cortland Review and Midway Journal and is a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize. She writes nonfiction YA books for a living.
A.J. Huffman
A.J. Huffman is a poet and freelance writer in Daytona Beach, Florida. She has previously published her work in literary journals, in the U.K. as well as America, such as Avon Literary Intelligencer, Eastern Rainbow, Medicinal Purposes Literary Review, The Intercultural Writer’s Review, Icon, Writer’s Gazette, and The Penwood Review.
Jennifer Hurley
Jennifer Hurley’s fiction has appeared in The Mississippi Review, Stone’s Throw Magazine, and Natural Bridge, among others.
She is an alum of Boston University’s graduate creative writing program, and she currently works as a professor of English at Ohlone College in the San Francisco Bay Area. She lives in the island town of Alameda, sharing a 1,000-square-foot bungalow with her husband, four cats, and a puppy.
Jenny Johnson
Jenny Starr-Busch Johnson is inspired by a variety of illustrative artists and their individual styles, such as Alfred Rethel, Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Dr. Seuss, and Caspar David Friedrich. Her artwork revolves around happenings in her life and her imaginative responses to them. They are mainly executed with lithographic stone printmaking or mixed media drawing. She is a recent graduate from Missouri State University with a BFA in printmaking and drawing and a BSED in art education with a minor in art history.
M. S. Karikath
M.S.Karikath is the pen name of Saikumar Menon, a consultant tea taster, living in Cochin, South India. Karikath’s short stories and poems have been published on ezines like Cerebration – www.cerebration.org and Muse India – www.museindia.com.
Len Krisak
Len Krisak’s two most recent books are The Odes of Horace (Carcanet) and Virgil’s Eclogues (University of Pennsylvania Press). He is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Frost Prizes and is a four-time champion on Jeopardy!
R. L. Kurtz
R. L. Kurtz is a published poet, essayist, and teacher who has traveled abroad extensively, teaching in such places as Riyadh, Barcelona, Bahrain, and Taipei. His poem “Star Sapphire” has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and can be found in the journal Splash of Red. R. L. Kurtz is currently the director of an English Language school in Taiwan where he resides with his wife and two children. He has degrees in both English and Philosophy and received his Masters in literature in ’98.
Michael Larrain
Michael Larrain was born in Los Angeles in 1947. He is the author of three collections of poems: The Promises Kept in Sleep, Just One Drink for the Diamond Cutter and For One Moment There Was No Queen. Rainy Day Women Press of Willits, CA, has released a CD of his reading of selected love poems called Lipstick: A Catalogue for Continuous Undressing. His novels are South of The North Star, Movies on the Sails, and As the Case May Be. His children’s storybooks are The Girl With the Loom In Her Room, Heaven & Earth and Homer the Hobo & Ulysses the Goat. He lives in Sonoma County (California) with his wife and four year old daughter, Wilder Kathleen the Rage of Paris Larrain, and has long been a senior partner in the Way-Up, Firm And High-Tail It Bright Out of Town Detective Agency, a loosely aligned confederacy of shady characters devoted to the complete discrediting of reality in our time.
Joseph Lombo
Jospeh Lombo’s work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories Magazine, Sub-Lit Journal, The Northville and Chaffey Reviews, BAP Quarterly, The Shine Journal, Superstition Review, Word Catalyst and The Wilderness House Literary Review. He has also received the Toni Libro award for Outstanding Masters Thesis from Rowan University.
Charles Lowe
Charles Lowe’s fiction has been nominated for the forthcoming Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Fiction International, the Pacific Review, Dirty Goat, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, and elsewhere. “Cowboys and Indians” appearing in this issue of Avatar has been published in Notes from the Underground, http://www.notesfromtheunderground.co.uk/. Charles Lowe lectures at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and lives with his wife and daughter in Shanghai.
Maggie Morton
Maggie Morton lives in Northern California with her partner and their Japanese Bobtail.
Terry Mulert
Terry Mulert lives in Cordova, NM, an isolated mountain village north of Santa Fe. He is a poet and adjunct faculty member at a small four year college in the area. He has published work in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Puerto del Sol, The Water~Stone Review, California Quarterly, The Madison Review , and others.
Catherine Noonan
Catherine Noonan is from Kildare, Ireland. In 2005 she completed an M. Phil in creative writing in Trinity College Dublin. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, 10×3 Plus, and a Trinity College anthology. She is currently working on her first collection, Dead Pirates.
Kirie Pedersen
Kirie Pedersen’s works are forthcoming or have appeared in Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public Radio program, Wisconsin Review, Eclipse, RiverSedge, Utne Reader, SevenDays, Regeneration (Rodale Press), Glossolalia, American Motorcyclist, Northwest People, Philadelphia Drummer, Gourmet Notebook, Teachers and Writers, and elsewhere. She divides her time between New York City and the Seattle area.
Rae Perkins
Before holing up in the hills of Tennessee to teach belly dance and write, Rae Perkins worked as a journalist in Cairo, Egypt and the western United States. Currently, she lives in Maui and is a founding editor at Otis Nebula. Her work has appeared most recently in Zone, Girls With Insurance, and Zocalo Public Square. When not writing, she spends her time trying to find a publisher for her first novel, translating contemporary Egyptian fiction with her husband, and composing ballads for ukulele and piano. We Are Fourteen is an excerpt from a longer work entitled West Temple, about growing up in Salt Lake City.
Evan Retzer
Evan Retzer lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where apart from writing he is involved locally in music and painting in watercolor. He has been previously published in the Tulane Review and Pif Magazine, and is currently seeking publication for his novel The Daydream Society.
Bertha Rogers
Bertha Rogers’s poems appear in journals and anthologies, on Poetry Daily (poems.com) and Verse Daily (versedaily.com), and in her collections, Heart Turned Back (Salmon Poetry Publishing, Ireland, 2010), The Fourth Beast (chapbook, Snark Press, IL, 2004); A House of Corners (Three Conditions Press, Maryland Poetry Review Chapbook Contest Winner, 2000); and Sleeper, You Wake (Mellen, NY 1991). Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2000 (Birch Brook Press, NY), and her translation of the riddle-poems from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book, Uncommon Creatures, Singing Things, will be published in 2011 (Birch Brook Press, NY). She has received fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, Hawthornden International Writers Retreat, and others. Her poem suite “Three for Summer’s End” was selected by composer Jamie Keesecker and set to music for the MacDowell/Monadnock Music for the Mountain series and performed in 2010.
In 2006 she was the recipient of an AE Ventures Grant for excellence in both poetry and visual art and for contributions to the field through the not-for-profit literary press and center she founded in 1992, brighthillpress.org. She was given the 2007 Teaching Artist Distinguished Service to the Arts in Education Field Award by Partners for Arts Education and the Association of Teaching Artists in New York. She serves as program director for the New York State Literary Web Site, nyslittree.org, publisher of the first Literary Map of New York State (2005), in partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts, and she is a member of the New York State Writers in the Schools panel and the NYS Writers Hall of Fame panel. Her web site is bertharogers.com.
Chantel Schott
Chantel Schott is self taught emerging artist based in Toowoomba, Australia, who has a real passion for her painting and has had outstanding success with many solo and group exhibitions throughout Queensland and in the US (with the Arthouse Sketchbook tour) over the past two years, with more forthcoming exhibitions planned up to 2012. She is an enthusiastic and motivated painter expressing everyday subjects in her whimsical, bright manner. Her work is characterised by expressive use of colour, movement and form, challenging the ordinary to become something spectacular. She is regularly completing art commissions and donates artwork to charity organisations when appropriate.
Website: www.chantelschott.daportfolio.com
Blog: www.chantelschott.blogspot.com
Ron Singer
Prose fiction by Ron Singer has also appeared in publications including big bridge, The Brooklyn Rail, defenestration, diagram, Drunken Boat, elimae, Ellipses, ghoti, Mad Hatters’ Review, Oregon Literary Review, Paper Street, Sleet Magazine, SN Review, Third Wednesday,* Willow Review, and Word Riot. Singer has also published a chapbook, A Voice for My Grandmother (Ten Penny Players/bardpress, 2nd ed, 2008); and an e-book of long stories, The Second Kingdom (Cantarabooks, 2009). During 2010-2011, he is making three protracted visits to Africa to interview pro-democracy activists for a new book, Uhuru Revisited (Africa World Press/Red Sea Press).
* The editors of Third Wednesday have nominated Singer’s story, “On Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art,’ “ for a Puschcart Prize.
Daniela Spoto
Daniela Spoto has participated in various group exhibitions in Italy and she recently had a solo show in Berlin. She blogs at http://danielaspoto.blogspot.com/,
David H. Sutherland
David Sutherland’s work has appeared in The Mid-American Review, Anthology. The Adirondack Review, The American Literary Review and others.
Gene Twaronite
Gene Twaronite’s work has been published by The White Room, Heinemann, Read, Fast Forward Press, Snowy Egret, and Highlights for Children. He is also the author of the middle grade novel The Family That Wasn’t (http://www.thefamilythatwasnt.com).
James Tyner
Half Mexican and half Caucasian, James Tyner grew up in some rough neighborhoods in Los Angeles and in Fresno, California. Gangs and violence were an everyday thing. In his late teens, he decided to become a pacifist. Most of his work deals with these issues, beauty in the ghetto and that striving for a different way of life.
His awards include the 2008 Coal Hill Review chapbook contest, the Larry Levis poetry prize, and the Andres Montoya Scholarship. He was a finalist for the 2008 War Poetry Contest and the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, and was recently in the poetry anthology The Working Poet. His poem “At a Barbeque for R.C.” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his thesis was voted most outstanding thesis of 2009 from Fresno State University.
Jaclyn Watterson
Jaclyn Watterson also has work published or forthcoming in Cloudbank, Thumbnail, Essays and Fictions, and Sou’wester. This fall, she is beginning work on her PhD in fiction at the University of Utah. She is a vegetarian who eats too much cheese.
Carroll Yoder
Now retired, Carroll Yoder taught French and English at Eastern Mennonite University from 1971 to 2004. He also spent five years teaching overseas in Central Africa and Paris and led four student groups on semester programs to France and Ivory Coast. He now enjoys writing, gardening playing with his grandchildren and traveling.
