Poetry

Aaron Bauer lives in Fairbanks, AK with his wife, Sarah, and his daughter, Adelaide. He is currently perusing his MFA at the University of Alaska. Bauer received his undergraduate degrees in Music and English Literature from the University of Colorado.

Alberto Rios's ten collections of poetry include The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent book is The Dangerous Shirt, preceded by The Theater of Night, which received the 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, he has also written three short story collections and a memoir, Capirotada, about growing up on the Mexican border. Regents Professor and the Katharine C. Turner Chair in English, Rios has taught at Arizona State University for over 29 years.

Amanda Auchter is the founding editor of Pebble Lake Review and the author of The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award judged by Rigoberto Gonzlez and of the chapbook, Light Under Skin (Finishing Line Press, 2006). A former Theodore Morrison Poetry Scholar for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, she has received awards and honors from Bellevue Literary Review, BOMB Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, and others. Her writing appears in American Poetry Review, Court Green, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and teaches creative writing at Lone Star College-CyFair.

A lifelong Illinoisan, Andrew Galligan studied writing at Bradley University and Northwestern University. His work was twice nominated for AWP awards at Northwestern, has appeared in the Susquehanna Review, Spectrum, and Sonora Review, and was recently named a finalist for the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award. He works for a medical device company in suburban Chicago, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

Bethany Reid's poetry has recently appeared in Calyx, Signs Of Life, The Sun, Permafrost, BLACKBIRD, and Stringtown. She teaches creative writing and American literature at Everett Community College.

Eric Wertheimer is Professor of English and American Studies at ASU. Dr. Wertheimers most recent book is Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in Early America, published by Stanford University Press. He also authored Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1876, published by Cambridge University Press. He has published articles on topics in early and nineteenth century American literature in American Literature, Early American Literature, Nineteenth Century Literature, and Arizona Quarterly. Professor Wertheimer has published poetry in Exquisite Corpse, Perihelion, Diagram, Shampoo, Adirondack Review, Muse Apprentice Guild, among other journals.

Emilia Phillips is the Associate Editor of Blackbird. Her poetry has recently appeared in 42opus, Adirondack Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Conte, and elsewhere. In July 2009, she was named Cutthroats Discovery Poet, and her chapbook, Strange Meeting, was released in April 2010 by Eureka Press. Phillips is from Chattanooga, Tennessee, but now lives in Richmond, Virginia where she's an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University. Photograph by Patrick Scott Vickers, 2010.

James Hoggard's work has recently appeared in Harvard Review, Southwest Review, Translation Review, Mississippi Review, Massachusetts Review, and numerous others. Author of nineteen books, he won the PEN Southwest Poetry Award for 2007. His most recent books are Wearing the River and Triangles of Light: The Edward Hopper Poems. He's the Perkins-Prothro Distinguished Professor of English at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas.

J.C. Pankratz attends DePauw University as an English Writing major. She hails from central Indiana and recently had her first play, Gerda's Story: Memoir of a Holocaust Survivor, co-adapted with Tim Good, produced at her university.

Karen Neuberg's work has appeared in Barrow Street, Columbia Poetry Review, Diagram, and Phoebe, among others. She's a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, holds an MFA from the New School and is associate editor of Inertia Magazine. Her chapbook, Detailed Still, was published in 2009 by Poets Wear Prada Press. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn and West Hurley, New York.

Lynn Levin is a poet, writer, and translator. Her newest poetry collection, Fair Creatures of an Hour, was a 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry. Her previous collection, Imaginarium, was a finalist for ForeWord Magazines 2005 Book of the Year Award. Lynn Levins poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Boulevard, Washington Square Review, Southwest Review, Per Contra, 5 AM, Boulevard, Mad Poets Review, and on Verse Daily and Garrison Keillors radio show, The Writers Almanac. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and at Drexel University where she also produces the TV show The Drexel InterView.

Mary Carroll-Hackett took the MFA in Literature & Writing from Bennington College. Her work has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, Pedestal Magazine, Praxilla and Drunken Boat, among numerous others. Her collection of prose poems, The Real Politics of Lipstick, was released in August 2010 as the winner of the 2010 Slipstream Press Poetry competition, and she has another forthcoming, Animal Soul, from Kattywompus Press. She teaches Creative Writing at Longwood University where she also edits The Dos Passos Review, administers the Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry, and edits SPACES, an online journal of art and literature.

Meghan McClure lives outside of Seattle, Washington. She studies at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the Low-Residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. She is co-director of Zimbags, a non-profit organization empowering women in Zimbabwe to overcome extreme poverty.

Michael Schmeltzer was born in Japan and eventually moved to the US. His most current book (co-authored with Meghan McClure) is “A Single Throat Opens,” a collective memoir and lyric exploration of addiction. His full-length poetry debut “Blood Song” was a Washington State Book Award Finalist in Poetry. His writing has been published in various journals such as Black Warrior Review,Water~Stone Review, and Split Lip Magazine, among others. Schmeltzer serves as President of Floating Bridge Press and is the co-founder of One Great Things, a micro-length, macro-lensed review site.

Molly Brodak is a poet, and the author of three books of poetry. She received a BA in English at Oakland University then an MFA in Creative Writing at West Virginia University. The winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, she teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Nick Demske lives in Racine, Wisconsin, and works at the Racine Public Library. He was awarded the 2010 Fence Modern Poets Series prize for a self-titled manuscript that will be published in November of 2010. He's a curator of the BONK! Performance series, a founder of the Racquetball Chapbook Tournament and is an editor of the online venue boo: a journal of terrific things. His work has appeared in Action Yes, Conduit, Sawbuck, Artful Dodge, PinStripe Fedora and other places.

Norman Dubie is the author of more than 20 books. He has received numerous national grants and prizes, including the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association. He teaches at Arizona State University. Photograph by Matthew Valentine.

Orlando White is from Tlikan, Arizona. He is Din of the Naaneeshtzhi Tbaah and born for the Naakai Dine. He holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Brown University. His poems have appeared in The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Salt Hill Journal, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Talking Stick Native Arts Quarterly and elsewhere. He teaches at Din College and lives in Tsaile, Arizona. Bone Light (Red Hen Press, 2009) is his first book.

Philip Grosss latest poetry collections are The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009) winner of the T.S.Eliot Prize and I Spy Pinhole Eye, with photographer Simon Denison (Cinnamon, 2009), which won Wales Book of the Year. He has published ten teenage novels - most recently The Storm Garden (OUP). His books of childrens poetry include The All-Nite Caf which won the Signal Award, with a new collection Off Road To Everywhere (Salt, 2010 - a Children's Poetry Bookshelf Choice). Since 2004, he has been Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University, South Wales, UK, where he leads the M Phil in Writing programme.

Rosanna Oh has studied poetry at Yale University as an English Major in the Writing Concentration, at Cambridge University, and at Johns Hopkins University, where she is currently a poet in the Writing Seminars. Oh's poems have appeared in The Connecticut River Review, The Alleghany Review, Cha Magazine, and Memoir (and) Magazine, where she is now an editor. She has been awarded a scholarship from The New York State Writers Institute and a first place award from The Connecticut Poetry Society. Most recently, Oh has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net.

Ronda Broatch is the author of Shedding Our Skins, (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and Some Other Eden, (2005). Her work has been published in RHINO, Atlanta Review, Blackbird, and Fire On Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women's Poetry (Two Sylvias Press). Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ronda is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, and a May Swenson Poetry Award finalist. Moon Path Press will publish her next collection, due out in spring 2015. A Seattle native, Ronda is a graduate of the University of Washington. Currently, she edits the literary journal, Crab Creek Review.

Sally Ball is the author of Annus Mirabilis (NY: Barrow Street Press, 2005). She is also the associate director of Four Way Books and an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Pleiades, The Southern Review, and on Narrative.com.

Sally Wen Mao is the author of the debut fiction collection Ninetails: Nine Tales (Penguin Books, 2024). She is also the author of the poetry collections The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, August 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Prize, Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013 and 2021, The Paris Review, Granta, Poetry, A Public Space, Harpers Bazaar, The Washington Post, and others. 

Sharanya Manivannan was born in India in 1985, and grew up in Sri Lanka and South East Asia. Her first book of poems was Witchcraft (2008), which The Straits Times described as sensuous and spiritual, delicate and dangerous and as full as the moon reflected in a knife. Her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Drunken Boat, Softblow, Killing The Buddha, Full of Crow and Pratilipi; a personal column, "The Venus Flytrap, appears in The New Indian Express. She was the recipient of the Lavanya Sankaran Fellowship for 2008-2009.

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor 2014) and co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers' Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018). His poems and prose have appeared in The Normal School, Barrelhouse, Gulf Coast, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Rumpus and many other places. A Kundiman fellow, he is co-editor of Waxwing magazine and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University.

A graduate of the MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Vanessa Blakeslee attended the 2010 Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Quarterly, Illuminations, Italian Americana, The Sows Ear Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review and other places. She directs Maitland Poets & Writers, a community organization which focuses on expanding the literary arts throughout Central Florida.