Melissa Balmain's new poetry collection, Walking in on People, was chosen by X.J. Kennedy as the winner of the 2013 Able Muse Book Award. Her poems and prose have appeared, or are forthcoming, in American Arts Quarterly, Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry Daily, The Spectator, and Success, where she is a columnist. She edits Light, an online journal of light verse, www.lightpoetrymagazine.com, and teaches writing at the University of Rochester. For more of her work, visitwww.melissabalmain.com.
Judith Barrington has published three poetry collections, most recently Horses and the Human Soul and two chapbooks: Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands (winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). She was the winner of the 2012 Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Prize (Cork International Poetry Festival), and her memoir, Lifesaving won the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. She has been on the faculty of the MFA program at the University of Alaska, and teaches classes and workshops in the USA, England and The Almassera, Spain: www.judithbarrington.com
Meredith Bergmann is a sculptor currently working on the FDR Hope Memorial for Roosevelt Island, NYC. Her poems and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Contemporary Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Lavender Review, Light, Per Contra, The New Criterion, The Same, Umbrella and the anthology Hot Sonnets. A chapbook is forthcoming from EXOT Books. She is poetry editor of American Arts Quarterly (www.nccsc.net).
Jane Blanchard studied English at Wake Forest before earning a doctorate from Rutgers. She currently divides her time between Augusta and Saint Simon's Island, Georgia. Her other work appears this season in Noctua Review, Orbis, Penwood Review, and River Poets Journal. She is looking forward to participating in the 2014 Sewanee Writers' Conference.
Cally Conan-Davies, this issue's featured poet, hails from the island of Tasmania, famous for apples and wilderness. She moved, for love, to the United States in 2012. Her poems can be read, now or soon, in such places as The Hudson Review, Subtropics, Poetry, Quadrant, The New Criterion, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southwest Review, and various online journals.
Barbara Lydecker Crane has published two collections, Zero Gravitas (White Violet Press, 2012) and ALPHABETRICKS (for children, Daffydowndilly Press, 2013). In the U.S., her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Light Quarterly, Measure, and Mezzo Cammin; in the U.K., in Angle, The Flea, Magma, and 14 by 14; and in eight anthologies.
Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles and lives on New Zealand's Kapiti Coast. Her third book, Trace Fossils, was published in 2011. She has poems in a variety of journals (US, NZ, Australia, Canada, and the UK), and she's very pleased to debut in Mezzo Cammin. More info here.
Rebekah Curry is a graduate student at the University of Texas. Her poems have also appeared in journals including Antiphonand Strange Horizons, and in the collaborative work To the Stars Through Difficulties: A Kansas Renga in 150 Voices (Mammoth Publications, 2012).
Anna M. Evans' poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Richard Stockton College of NJ. Her new sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans, is out this June from White Violet Press. Visit her online at www.annamevans.com.
Marcene Gandolfo's work has appeared recently in several journals, including DMQ Review, Harpur Palate, Bayou, Poet Lore, Van Gogh's Ear, The Café Review, Paterson Literary Review, River Oak Review, Inertia, Georgetown Review and Red Rock Review. Her first full-length collection of poems, Angles of Departure, is from Cherry Grove Collections/WordTech Communications. She teaches literature and writing at Sacramento City College and UC Davis.
Claudia Gary
writes, edits, sings, and composes (tonally) near Washington DC. A 2013 semifinalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and past finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, she is author of Humor Me (David Robert Books 2006) and several chapbooks. Her poems appear in anthologies such as Forgetting Home (Barefoot Muse Press 2013) and Villanelles (Everyman Press 2012). "Understudy," "Fifteen Minutes at Juilliard," "Song of Flight," and "Letter Space" are from her forthcoming narrative sonnet sequence.
Roya Hakakian is a writer. Her opinion columns, essays and book reviews appear in English language publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NPR's All Things Considered among many others. She has collaborated on over a dozen hours of programming for leading journalism units in network television, including CBS 60 Minutes. She currently serves as an editorial board member of World Affairs. An active thinker of foreign relations, Roya is a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. She has been featured in the Washington Post and the US News and World Report, among other publications. In the book, Political Awakenings by University of California at Berkeley's Professor Harry Kreisler, she has been highlighted "among the most important activists, academics, and journalists of her generation." In 2008, she received a Guggenheim prize in nonfiction.
Gwen Hart teaches writing at Buena Vista University. Her story "This Is a Good Idea" won 2nd place in the 2013 International Women Who Write prose and poetry contest. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in literary journals such as Measure, Calliope, Lake Effect, and Open to Interpretation. Her poetry collection Lost and Found is available from David Robert Books. She and her husband live in Storm Lake, Iowa, with over 300 lbs of Newfoundland dogs.
A.J. Huffman
has published five solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses. Her sixth solo chapbook will be published in October by Writing Knights Press. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the winner of the 2012 Promise of Light Haiku Contest. Her poetry, fiction, and haiku have appeared in hundreds of national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, Kritya, and Offerta Speciale, in which her work appeared in both English and Italian translation. She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.
Kathryn Jacobs is editor of The Road Not Taken and professor at Texas A & M - C. She has published four volumes of poetry, some fifteen articles, and over 150 poems in Mezzo Cammin, Measure, The New Formalist, Raintown Review, Whiskey Island, Xavier Review and Poetry and South, among others.
Geneva Kachman is the author of three books of poetry, and paints. She attended the University of Iowa Workshop. One of her current creative goals is for a Poet's Float in the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, down Woodward in Detroit.
Poet, writer, and translator Lynn Levin is the author of four collections of poems: Miss Plastique (Ragged Sky Press, 2013); Fair Creatures of an Hour (Loonfeather Press, 2009), a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry; Imaginarium (Loonfeather Press, 2005), a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award; and A Few Questions about Paradise (Loonfeather Press, 2000). She is, with Valerie Fox, the author of a craft-of-poetry book, Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (Texture Press, 2013). Lynn Levin's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Boulevard, The Hopkins Review, Washington Square Review, Verse Daily, and on Garrison Keillor's radio show The Writer's Almanac. She is currently involved in translating the work of Odi Gonzales, a Peruvian Andean poet. Lynn Levin teaches at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, writing coach and seminar leader. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Perigee/ Penguin/ Putnam), and her work has appeared in Cider Press Review, Rattle, Off the Coast, Kestrel, Permafrost, Slipstream, American Journal of Nursing, The MacGuffin, Writer's Digest, and Playgirl. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art. www.JoanMazza.com
Susan McLean
is a professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University. She is the recent winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and her book The Whetstone Misses the Knife, selected by Dick Davis, will be launched at the twentieth-anniversary West Chester University Poetry Conference. Her poems have appeared in Per Contra, Blue Unicorn, Lighten Up Online, Light, and the European Journal of International Law. A book of her translations of 503 epigrams by the Latin poet Martial will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2014.
Sally Nacker received her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University in January, 2013. She has since been selected as a finalist for the Fairfield Book Prize--as well as a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard Review's Series in Poetry--for her collection Vireo. Her paper, "Wings and Windows: My Letter to Amy Lowell," introduced by poet Annie Finch on Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog, is published as a web-based project on Winona Media. She has three poems in the spring, 2014 issue of The Wayfarer: A Journal of Contemplative Literature. She resides in Connecticut with her husband and their two cats.
Judith Schaechter has lived and worked in Philadelphia since graduating in 1983 with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design Glass Program. She has exhibited widely, including in New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, The Hague and Vaxjo Sweden.
She is the recipient of many grants, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Crafts , The Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, The Joan Mitchell Award, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts awards, The Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a Leeway Foundation grant.
Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Hermitage in Russia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Corning Museum of Glass, The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution and numerous other public and private collections.
Judith's work is noted in two survey-type history textbooks, "Women Artists" by Nancy Heller, and "Makers" by Bruce Metcalf and Janet Koplos.
Judith has taught workshops at numerous venues, including the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, the Penland School of Crafts, Toyama Institute of Glass (Toyama, Japan), Australia National University in Canberra Australia.
She has taught courses at Rhode Island School of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy, the New York Academy of Art and at The University of the Arts, where she is ranked as an Adjunct Professor.
Judith's work was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, a collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2012 and she is a 2008 USA Artists Rockefeller Fellow.
Janice D. Soderling is a previous contributor to Mezzo Cammin. She has recent and forthcoming work at Rattle, Hobart, Per Contra, Raintown Review, One Sentence Poems, B O D Y, Poetry Storehouse, Alabama Literary Review, Measure, and The Evansville Review. She reads her poems at TransAtlantic Poetry Online. Janice D. Soderling is assistant fiction editor at Able Muse and poetry editor at Frostwriting.
A.M. Thompson's poetry, essays, and vignettes have been published in Europe (Acumen, Staple, Vine Leaves, Best of Vine Leaves 2013) and the U.S. (ARDOR, Blast Furnace, Leopard Seal, Philosophy After Dark, Tupelo Press 30/30, Best New Writing 2014). She was short-listed for the 2014 Robert Frost Foundation contest (poetry), and was a 2014 Eric Hoffer Award finalist (fiction). Thompson's upcoming publications include poetry in The North (UK, Oct 2014) and Tupelo Press' Best of 30/30 Anthology (TBD 2014). Over 30 years, her salaried positions have ranged from graphic design to massage therapy. She lives with her husband and daughter outside Washington DC, where she edits certification exams for the American Nurses Credentialing Center.
Cara Valle has published poems previously in The Coachella Review, Language and Culture Review, and Epiphany Magazine. She earned her B.A. in English from Hillsdale College in 2010 and went on to become an English teacher and design and teach a high school course devoted to formalist verse. She grew up in southwest Ohio, attended college in Michigan, and currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband and brand new son.
Following her mother's death in 2011, Megan Vered penned a family story that she sent to her siblings every Friday. Her essays are part of that collection.
Raised in Berkeley in the 60's in an unconventional Jewish family, Megan extracts emotion, humor and meaning from her life's stories, inviting the reader to become part of her family.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the "First Person" column of the San Francisco Chronicle, Amarillo Bay, Crack the Spine, The Diverse Arts Project, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Existere Journal of Arts and Literature, and The Oklahoma Review. She is among the authors featured in the "Story Chairs" short story installation at Jack Straw Productions in Seattle.
Recent books by Marly Youmans are: an adventure in blank verse, Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012); several collections of poems, The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press, 2012) and The Throne of Psyche (Mercer University Press, 2011); and a novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer, 2012 / The Ferrol Sams Award + Silver Award, ForeWord BOTYA.) Forthcoming novels include: Glimmerglass and a reprint of Catherwood in 2014 and Maze of Blood in 2015 (Mercer).
Photo credit: Rebecca Beatrice Miller, 8/2013
Australian-born, Seree Cohen Zohar's art, poetry and flash fiction are influenced by the landscapes of Australia, and by two decades of farming in Israel. Seree, mother of four, currently lives in Jerusalem; lectures in Europe on Biblical texts with focus on the intersection of literal and esoteric in Genesis; and collaborated with Alan Sullivan on Psalms-of-King-David, a recently published new versified translation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in diverse print and online venues. When not trying to force words where some fear to tread, she might be found foisting flash-recipes on her unsuspecting family.
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