contributors

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Gary Beck (“The Chess Match”) has spent most of his adult life as a theater director. His original plays and translations of Molière, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His short stories have recently appeared in numerous literary magazines.

Julie Bogart (“A Story of Old Age”) is currently enrolled in the Creative Writing MFA program at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. Before moving to the northeast, she worked for four years as an editor at the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) in Alexandria, Virginia. She earned her bachelor's degree in English and Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri.

William J. Cobb (“The Burning”) is a novelist, essayist, and short fiction writer whose work has been published in The New Yorker, The Mississippi Review, The Antioch Review, and many others. He is the author of two novels—The Fire Eaters (W.W. Norton, 1994) and Goodnight, Texas (Unbridled, 2006)—and a book of stories, The White Tattoo (Ohio State UP, 2002). He lives in Pennsylvania and Colorado.

Gabriel DeCrease (“The Buffalo Dancer”) is a graduate of the poetry-writing program at Allegheny College. He is currently completing an MFA in poetry writing at The University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, where he lives and works.

Benjamin Doty (“How to Be an American Hero”) is a first-year fiction writer in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota. He is currently finishing a novel and several short stories. He has won scholarships to various summer workshops and is a financial analyst by training.

Harold Dieterle is a chef and entrepreneur working and living in New York City. Born in West Babylon, New York, Dieterle was named the winner of Bravo TV’s reality series Top Chef in 2006. He recently opened his own restaurant, Perilla, which features an Asian-inspired menu.

Laury A. Egan (“Fergus”) has received awards/publication in New York Stories, The Ledge Magazine, The Atlanta Review, Icarus International, the Emily Dickinson Awards Anthology, Grasslimb, and Sea Stories. Egan has completed several novels and a short fiction collection, Fog and Other Stories.

David Finkelstein (“The Rise and Fall of the House of Blackwood’s Magazine”) is Research Professor of Media and Print Culture at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. His research interests include media history, print culture studies, and the history and cultural influence of the Edinburgh publishers William Blackwood and Sons. His publications include The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002), and the co-authored An Introduction to Book History (2005). He is editor of Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (2006), which was awarded the Robert Colby Memorial Book Prize for the publication in 2006 that most significantly advanced the understanding of the nineteenth-century periodical press.  

Michael Flatt (“The Moraine” and “Control”) was born in Syracuse, raised in Tully and also calls Buffalo his home. He currently studies and teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Ira Joel Haber (“House Plans”) was born and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, and teacher. His work is in collections of New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, drawings and collages have been published in many online and print magazines. Over the years, he has received three National Endowments for The Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants and, most recently in 2004, received The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Currently, Haber teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.

Lynn Marie Houston (“Roethke’s Truth”) received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 2003. She now teaches courses in American literature, World literature, Women's literature, and Modern Poetry in the English department at California State University, Chico.

R. Dean Johnson (“Bluff”) has had his essays and stories appear in Ascent, New Orleans Review, Santa Clara Review, and The Southern Review. An excerpt from his novel manuscript, Californium, is forthcoming in the anthology, Tribute to Orpheus (Kearney Street Books). He lives in Oklahoma with his wife, the writer Julie Hensley, and teaches Creative Writing at Cameron University and online for Gotham Writers' Workshop.

Graham Joyce (“Under the Pylon”) is an English writer who has received numerous awards for his novels and short stories, including four World Fantasy Awards and the French Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. Joyce grew up in a small mining village outside of Coventry, received a B.Ed. from Bishop Lonsdale College in 1977, and an M.A. from the University of Leicester in 1980. He now lives in Leicester with his wife and children, where he teaches Creative Writing to students at Nottingham Trent University.

Sean McHenry (“Scrubbing”) is an independent filmmaker and a 25-year veteran of the television broadcast industry. A native of the Columbus area, McHenry works as a studio systems engineer when he is not working on film projects on Super 8, 16mm, and video. He has six children and five grandchildren.

Thierry Meyssan (“Operation Northwoods”) is a French journalist and political activist whose has conducted many controversial investigations, such as those into the Catholic Church and discrimination of homosexuality. He is best known for his incendiary book 9/11: The Big Lie, which presented a conspiracy theory challenging the official account of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Michael Mullowney ("Hunting") is a multimedia artist working in Chicago. He was born in West Michigan and grew up all over the U.S., spending much of his later adolescence in suburban Phoenix, Arizona. He trained at the Herberger School of Art at Arizona State University and the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences. He has been self-employed as an illustrator, designer, and audio engineer since 2001. He is currently working on illustrations for children's literature.

K. H. Ontai (“Broken Glass”) lives in Mililani, Hawai'i. In addition to poetry, Ontai also writes plays. She is currently at graduate student at the Manoa campus of the University of Hawai'i where she studies Creative Writing.

Matthew Rader (“On First Looking into Larkin’s Aubade,” “The Weather Makers,” and “The Western World”) has compiled two books of poems: Miraculous Hours (2005) and Living Things, which is forthcoming in 2008. Both were released by Nightwood. Rader will soon appear at the Queensland Poetry Festival in Brisbane. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Charles Salmons (“Pacific Coast Highway Blues”) works as an assistant editor for McGraw-Hill Education and teaches composition for Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio. He enjoys listening to jazz and blues, Italian cooking, and Humphrey Bogart films. His poems have previously appeared in The Offbeat and the Best of Ohio Poetry Day 2006.

Vienna Teng is a pianist and singer-songwriter whose albums Waking Hour, Warm Strangers, and Dreaming Through the Noise have all received critical acclaim. A native of Saratoga, California, Teng has appeared on Late Show with David Letterman and CNN’s NewsNight with Aaron Brown, as well as opening for such musical acts as Joan Baez, Shawn Colvin, and Madeleine Peyroux.

J.D. Tuccille (“High-Desert Barbecue”) has authored columns on hotly debated topics including the environment, government excess and the war on drugs have appeared in publications including The Arizona Republic, The Denver Post, The Providence Journal and The Washington Times. The former editor of a popular civil libertarian website, Tuccille has appeared on Court TV and numerous radio shows to comment on current issues, and has been quoted saying unkind things about government policies in the pages of The New York Times, Salon, and other publications. Tuccille is an enthusiastic explorer of the American Southwest's deserts, mountains and forests. He lives in rural northern Arizona with his wife, Wendy, a pediatrician, their son, Anthony, and their two dogs.

Casey VerBerkmoes ("Storyboards") is a production illustrator specializing in storyboards and character design.  He is originally from Michigan where he attended Grand Valley State University.  He has worked on such films as Kemo Sabe (2007), A Moment of Grace (2004) and When Autumn Leaves Fall (2005).

Darcy Vorhees is a freelance artist who has been working with animation, design, and illustration since 2000, when she was still a student at Pratt in Brooklyn. Since then, she has worked in various capacities on projects such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV series, Disney's Lizzie McGuire Movie, and on various other commercials, pilots, and independent films. She has also acted as producer on several animated projects in conjunction with the New York City-based animation organization Animators, Ink, which she also helped to run until 2006.

Jill Yamasawa (“First, No Memory”) was raised in Kona on a coffee farm. She currently studies creative writing at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. She also teaches math to special education students at McKinley High School in Honolulu.

Karen Zvarych (“The Discovery”) is a Creative Writing graduate student at Hollins University. She received her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia and for the year following, volunteered at an elementary school on the Northern Cheyenne Indian reservation in Montana. Now living in both Williamsburg and Roanoke, Virginia, Zvarych's story "The Discovery" is influenced by all of her friends who go to work in colonial costume.