Michelle Blake has published poetry and essays in Tin House, The New York Times,
Ploughshares, Southern Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, MORE Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Parents and others. Her essay “A Fable for Our Times” won the Solstice Nonfiction Award for 2015. She has also published three critically acclaimed novels—The Tentmaker, Earth Has No Sorrow and The Book of Light (Putnam Penguin). Her chapbook of poems, Into the Wide and Startling World, was awarded publication in the New Women’s Voices
competition in 2012 (Finishing Line Press). In 2014, her collaborative project with photo-montage artist Fran Forman, Escape Artist, was published by Schiffer. In 2017 she was a Resident Writer at the Siena Arts Institute, and she has twice received residency grants at Vermont Studio Center. In addition, she has taught writing at Goddard College, Stanford University and Tufts University and directed both the Goddard MFA and Warren Wilson MFA
programs. See her website at www.michelleblakewriter.com
Jane Blanchard lives and writes in Georgia. One of her sonnets won the inaugural Letheon Poetry Prize. Her two collections—Unloosed and Tides & Currents—are available from Kelsay Books.
Kim Bridgford is the director of Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. As editor of Mezzo Cammin, she was the founder of The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, which was launched at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and has held events at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at Fordham-Lincoln Center. The author of ten books of poetry, including The Blue Whale Sonnets (forthcoming) and Human Interest, she is the recipient of fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ucross Foundation. Her collaborative three-volume work with visual artist Jo Yarrington on Iceland, Venezuela, and Bhutan, The Falling Edge, is forthcoming. Bridgford has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Connecticut Post, on NPR, and in various headline news outlets. She wrote the introduction to Russell Goings' The Children of Children Keep Coming: An Epic Griot Song, and joined Goings in ringing the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange, the week before the first Obama inauguration. Bridgford has been called "America's First Lady of Form."
Barbara Lydecker Crane has published three chapbooks, Zero Gravitas (White Violet Press, 2012), Alphabetricks (for children, Daffydowndilly Press, 2013), and BackWords Logic (Local Gems Press, 2017). She has won the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, the Humor Award and a Laureate's Choice Award in the Maria Faust Sonnet Contest, and was a Finalist for the Rattle Readers' Choice Award. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Atlanta Review, First Things, Light, Measure and Think Journal, among many others, and in several anthologies. She is also a visual artist.
Lee Ann Dalton is a poet, fiction writer, fiber arts columnist, and LGBTQIA+ youth advocate with an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poems have appeared in journals such as New Ohio Review, Faultline, and The Formalist, and her fiction won the 2014 Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize at Hunger Mountain. She is a Canadian/American dual citizen and she lives in southern NH with her husband and daughter.
Susan de Sola's poetry has appeared in The Hudson Review, The Dark Horse, Ambit, Birmingham Poetry Review, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly, Fringe Magazine, Measure, Light, The Hopkins Review and Per Contra, among many other publications and anthologies, including the forthcoming Best American Poetry 2018. She is a past recipient of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize. She holds a PhD from The Johns Hopkins University and is the author of several monographs on architecture and design, as well as numerous critical essays. As a photographer, she created the chapbook Little Blue Man (Seabiscuit Press). She is Assistant Poetry Editor for the journal Able Muse, and lives near Amsterdam with her family. She has recently won the Frost Prize.
Lynn Hoggard has published translations, a memoir, a biography, and poetry. In 2003, the Texas Institute of Letters awarded her the Soeurette Diehl Fraser prize for best translation. Her poem "Love in the Desert" was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize by Word Fountain, and her latest book, Bushwhacking Home (TCU Press, 2017), has won the 2018 Press Women of Texas award for best book of poetry. Her poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, The MacGuffin, and New Ohio Review, among other places.
Michele Leavitt, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. Her essays appear in venues including The Rumpus, Shondaland, Catapult, and The Sycamore Review. Recent poems can be found in Poet Lore, North American Review, Stirring, and Baltimore Review. More at www.michelejleavitt.com
Lynn Levin is a poet, writer, translator, and teacher. She is the author of six books, most recently a poetry collection, Miss Plastique (Ragged Sky Press); a translation from the Spanish, Birds on the Kiswar Tree (2Leaf Press) by Peruvian Andean poet Odi Gonzales; and, as co-author, the textbook Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (Texture Press). The recipient of fourteen Pushcart Prize nominations, Levin has published poems, stories, essays, and translations in Ploughshares, Boulevard, The Hopkins Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mezzo Cammin, Rattle, and Verse Daily; Garrison Keillor has read her work on his radio show The Writer’s Almanac. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University. Her website is www.lynnlevinpoet.com.
Marjorie Maddox, Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell University (MFA) and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, has published eleven collections of poetry—including True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Wives' Tales; Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize) and Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite Press), and over 500 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. Co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU), she also has published four children’s books. She is an assistant editor for Presence. For more information, please see www.marjorie maddox.com
Megan Marlatt has been a Professor of Studio Art at the University of Virginia since 1988. She is presently a Fulbright Scholar, pursuing the study of Belgian carnivals and their relation to the Belgian painters; Ensor, Bruegel and Bosch. She is the founder and director of The Big Head Brigade, an artist collective that creates and performs in large, papier-mache’ masks. In addition, her narrative paintings respond to these performances by referencing circus and side-show posters. She has received fellowships in painting from the National Endowment for the Arts (1995), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2013 and 2006), the Virginia Commission on the Arts (1996), and The New Jersey State Council on the Arts (1985). Marlatt's paintings and big head performances have been exhibited nationally and internationally.
From Assistant Professor of English to management trainer to retiree, Carolyn Martin has journeyed from New Jersey to Oregon to discover Douglas firs, months of rain, and dry summers. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in publications throughout North America and the UK including Stirring, Naugatuck River Review, CALYX, The Curlew, and Antiphon. Her third collection, Thin Places, was released by Kelsay Books in 2017. She is currently the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly.
Bernadette McBride, author of three poetry collections—most recently, Whatever Measure of Light (Kelsay Books, 2016), is poetry editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a Pennsylvania county Poet Laureate, and poetry winner, second place, for the International Ray Bradbury Writing Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Cider Press Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Ekphrastic Review, and Ragged Sky Press, as well as in the UK, Canada, and on PRI's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. She welcomes your visit at bernadette mcbrideblog.wordpress.com.
Susan McLean is recently retired from teaching English at Southwest Minnesota State University. She has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial's Latin poems, Selected Epigrams. Her poems and translations have recently appeared in Measure, The Classical Outlook, Snakeskin, Light, and elsewhere.
Kamilah Aisha Moon is a Pushcart Prize winner, Lambda Award finalist, and a 2015 New American Poet who has received fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, Rose O'Neill Literary House, Hedgebrook, and Cave Canem. The author of Starshine & Clay (2017) and She Has a Name (2013), both published by Four Way Books, her work has been featured widely, including the Harvard Review, Poem A Day, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Moon holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.
Sally Nacker (MFA 2013, Fairfield University) is the author of two poetry collections: Vireo (2015), and Night Snow (2017), both by Kelsay Books. Her poetry has been published in The Fourth River; Grey Sparrow Journal, and its anthology Snow Jewel; Mezzo Cammin: An Online Journal of Formalist Poetry by Women; The Orchards; Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, the National Issue; and The Wayfarer. An article about her paper on poet Amy Lowell was published by Annie Finch on Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog: "Wings and Windows: My Letter to Amy Lowell." An edited version of the paper appears on Winona Media: Poems and Stories from the Heart. She is an annual attendee and panelist at Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference each May. Sally resides quietly in New England with her husband and their two cats, and works in flowers. Please visit her website at www.sallynacker.com
Patty Nolan has lived her entire life in southeast Michigan and her outlook is informed by a love of lake water, the thrum of industry, and the optimistic belief that while people are often foolish, they essentially mean well. She has been scribbling words since she was allowed to use sharp pencils and earns her keep as a freelance writer in the marketing/communications field. She is an enthusiast of the performing arts and reviews theatre in the greater Detroit area. Her personal motto is: There's a lot to be said for brevity.
Katy Rawdon is an archivist and librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia. She lives in southern New Jersey with her son and numerous pets. Her work has appeared in The Lyric and will appear in an upcoming issue of Able Muse.
Leslie Schultz (Northfield, MN) is the author of Still Life with Poppies: Elegies and Cloud Song (Kelsay Books, 2016, 2018). She has published poetry, fiction, and essays in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Able Muse, Blue Unicorn, Mezzo Cammin; Light, Swamp Lily; Poetic Strokes Anthology; The Pacific Review; The Northern Review; The Madison Review, The Mid-American Poetry Review; The Midwest Quarterly; The Orchards, Stone Country; Sun Dog; The Wayfarer, Third Wednesday, and in a chapbook, Living Room (Midwestern Writers' Publishing House). She has twice had winning poems in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Schultz posts poems, essays, reviews, interviews, and photographs at www.winonamedia.net
Myrna Stone is the author of five books of poems, the most recent being Luz Bones, released by Etruscan Press in 2017. A two-time Ohioana Book Award Finalist, her work has appeared in over fifty journals including, among others, Poetry, Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, Boulevard, Nimrod, and River Styx. Among her awards are three Ohio Arts Council Grants, a full fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, the 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year award, and the 2017 New Letters Prize in Poetry. Stone is a founding member of The Greenville Poets, based in Greenville, Ohio.
Poet and teacher Gail Thomas has published four books: Odd Mercy (2016), Waving Back (2015), No Simple Wilderness: An Elegy for Swift River Valley (2001) and Finding the Bear (1997). Odd Mercy was chosen by Ellen Bass for the Charlotte Mew Prize of Headmistress Press, and its "Little Mommy Sonnets" won Honorable Mention for the Tom Howard/ Margaret Prize for Traditional Verse. Also, Waving Back was named a Must Read for 2016 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book and Honorable Mention in the New England Book Festival.
Nell Wilson studied English at St Andrews, graduating in 2011. She was runner up in the Jane Martin Prize in 2016 and has had poems published in Measure, The Moth, and Acumen. She lives in Lincolnshire.
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| Megan Marlatt:Looking like large puppet heads, it was "anima", the root of "animation", that led me to the making of the big heads, (or "capgrossos" as they are called in Catalonia where I learned the craft.) Anima is the soul or what breathes life into a being and to animate an inanimate object, an artist must insert a little soul into it. However to bring attention to what is invisible, (the soul), I chose to mold its opposite in solid form: the persona, the ego, the big head, the mask. Nearly every culture across the globe has masks. They allow performers to climb into the skin of another being and witness the other's world from behind their eyes. While doing so, the mask erases all clues of the performer's age, gender, species or race. In this regard, I find them to be the most transformative and empathic of all human artifacts.
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