Contributors' Notes Ned Balbo's Lives of the Sleepers (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), received the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize and ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Award in poetry; his first collection, Galileo's Banquet, received the Towson University Prize for Literature. He is the recipient of two Maryland Arts Council grants in poetry and has published prose as well, including "My Father's Music," an essay on adoption, ethnicity, and popular culture, in Our Roots Are Deep with Passion: Creative Nonfiction Collects New Work by Italian-American Writers (Other Press, 2006).
Isaac Cates is currently Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. His poems have appeared in Southwest Review and Southern Poetry Review, and his criticism has appeared in Literary Imagination, Confrontation, and The Hopkins Review.
Juliana Gray is the author of The Man Under My Skin; recent poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Poetry East, Backwards City Review, and other journals. She teaches English at Alfred University in western New York. During the summers she teaches a poetry workshop at the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference.
Recent poems by Michael Heffernan have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Poetry, The Southern Review, Margie, Third Coast, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, and the Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2008. Eastern Washington University Press published his seventh collection, The Night Breeze Off the Ocean, in 2005. His eighth book, The Odor of Sanctity, is in preparation with Salmon Poetry (Ireland).
Lissa Kiernan's writing has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Swell, MiPOesias, Pemmican, and The Yale Journal for the Humanities in Medicine. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is working on her first book.
Heather Kirn was born and raised in Philadelphia's suburbs. Her nonfiction was lauded by The Atlantic Monthly, and her recent work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Third Coast, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
Amit Madjudar is a Diagnostic Radiology resident in Cleveland, Ohio. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of publications. More information is available here.
Charles Martin's most recent books are Starting From Sleep: New and Selected Poems (Sewanee/Overlook) and a verse translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Norton). He is Poet-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
Shane McCrae went to school at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Harvard Law. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in New Orleans Review, Octopus, Colorado Review, African American Review and others. He lives in Iowa City with his wife and son.
Paul Nemser's work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals, among them Antioch Review, Barrow Street, Fulcrum, Pequod, Poetry, and TriQuarterly. His translations from Ukrainian appeared in Ivan Drach, Orchard Lamps (Stanley Kunitz, editor), and B.I. Antonych, Square of Angels (with Mark Rudman and Bohdan Boychuk). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Born in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1973, Aaron Poochigian attended Moorhead State University from 1991 to 1996 where he studied poetry under Dave Mason, Alan Sullivan, and Tim Murphy. He entered graduate school for Classics in 1997 at the University of Minnesota. After traveling and doing research in Greece on fellowship from 2003-4, he completed his program and earned his Ph.D. in 2006. He is currently a visiting professor of Classics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Jennifer Reeser is the author of two collections published by Word Press. Her poems, articles, and translations of Russian and French literature appear internationally in such journals as POETRY, Botteghe Oscure, Measure, The Dark Horse, The Formalist, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, Salt, and The National Review. Her work has twice received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, and (among other anthologies), has been included in Phoenix Rising: The Next Generation of American Formal Poets, as well as Longman's textbooks Introduction to Literature and Introduction to Poetry, edited by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. More of her work appears in issue 1.1.
Kim Roberts is the author of two books of poems, The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press, 2007) and The Wishbone Galaxy (WWPH, 1994). She edits Beltway Poetry Quarterly and co-edits The Delaware Poetry Review. Her website: http://www.kimroberts.org.
Nora Sturges has exhibited her work widely in solo shows at the Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, the Lancaster Museum of Art, the Bachelier-Cardonsky Gallery in Connecticut, Miami University of Ohio, Ventura College, Spaces in Cleveland, School 33 in Baltimore, and the 1708 Gallery in Richmond. Her group exhibitions have included the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, The Painting Center in New York City, Antioch College, Manhattanville College, Denison University, Maryland Art Place in Baltimore, and Acme Art Co. in Columbus, Ohio. She is the recipient of two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council. Sturges lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is Associate Professor of Art at Towson University.
Peter Swanson's work has most recently appeared or is upcoming in Epoch, The Lyric, Measure, Slant, and The Vocabula Review. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Wendy Videlock lives in western Colorado, where she is frequently assaulted by poems.
Caki Wilkinson's poems have appeared in the Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Sewanee Theological Review, and elsewhere.