Renée Ashley

Renée Ashley is the author of four volumes of poetry — Salt (Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press), The Various Reasons of Light, The Revisionist’s Dream, and Basic Heart (X. J. Kennedy Prize, Texas Review Press) — as well as two chapbooks, The Museum of Lost Wings and The Verbs of Desiring, and a novel, Someplace Like This.

Ashley has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and is on the core faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s low-residency Program in Creative Writing.

Duff Brenna

Duff Brenna is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, and won the AWP’s Best Novel award for his first novel, The Book of Mamie. His third novel, Too Cool, was a New York Times Noteworthy Book. His fourth novel, The Altar of the Body, was Book Editor’s Favorite Book of the Year at South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Brenna’s stories, poems and essays have appeared in Cream City Review, SQ, Agni, The Nebraska Review, The Literary Review, The Madison Review, New Letters and numerous other literary venues.

www.duffbrenna.com

Kurt Brown

Kurt Brown founded the Aspen Writers’ Conference, and Writers’ Conferences & Centers (a national association of directors). His poems have appeared in many literary periodicals, and he is the editor of several anthologies including Blues for Bill, for the late William Matthews, from University of Akron Press; and his newest (with Harold Schechter), Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems, from Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series.

Brown is the author of six chapbooks and five full-length collections of poetry, including Return of the Prodigals, More Things in Heaven and Earth, Fables from the Ark, Future Ship, and a new collection, No Other Paradise, due out in 2010 from Red Hen Press.

A collection of the poems of Flemish poet Herman de Coninck entitled The Plural of Happiness, which he and his wife translated, was released in the Field Translation Series in 2006.

Flower Conroy

Flower Conroy graduated from the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Her poetry has appeared in the American Literary Review and Oberon. She currently lives in Key West, Florida.

Walter Cummins

Walter Cummins' fourth short-story collection, The End of the Circle, from Egress Books is available on Amazon.com. In addition to publishing more than 100 stories, he edited The Literary Review for twenty years.

www.waltercummins.com

Philip Dacey

Philip Dacey’s latest of ten books is Vertebrae Rosaries: 50 Sonnets (Red Dragonfly Press, 2009). The winner of three Pushcart Prizes, two NEA grants, and a Fulbright to Yugoslavia, he has written entire collections of poems about Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Eakins, and New York City.

Steve Davenport

Steve Davenport is the author of Uncontainable Noise (poetry) and two chapbooks, Murder on Gasoline Lake (an essay, New American Press) and Nine Poems and Three Fictions (available free on-line and in The Literary Review’s Summer 2008 chapbook issue).

Recent and forthcoming activities include poetry and fiction in The Southern Review, a podcast short story at Spork Press, a lyrical essay in Northwest Review, a review essay in American Book Review, and a scholarly essay about Richard Hugo’s poetry in All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature (University of Nebraska Press).

Stephen Dunn

Stephen Dunn has written fifteen collections of poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2001 collection, Different Hours, and has received an Academy Award in Literature. His most recent book is What Goes On: New and Selected Poems.

Molly Gloss

Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who lives in Portland. She is a multiple-award-winning novelist whose most recent work is The Hearts of Horses.

www.mollygloss.com

Kathleen Graber

Kathleen Graber’s second collection of poetry, The Eternal City, is forthcoming from the Princeton Poetry Series. Her first collection, Correspondence, was the winner of the 2005 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.

Graber was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar, and has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.

H. L. Hix

H. L. Hix teaches at the University of Wyoming (USA). His recent books include Incident Light, a verse biography of the artist Petra Soesemann, and As Easy As Lying, a collection of essays on poetry. The poem published here in ServingHouse will be included in his selected poems, First Fire, Then Birds, forthcoming in fall 2010.

Tony Hoagland

Tony Hoagland is the author of four poetry collections, including Unincorporated Persons of the Late Honda Dynasty; What Narcissism Means to Me, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award. He teaches at the University of Houston.

Jamie Iredell

Jamie Iredell is the author of Prose. Poems. a Novel. His writing has also appeared in Opium Magazine, Copper Nickel, and PANK, among many other literary magazines. He lives in Atlanta with his wife.

Thomas E. Kennedy

Thomas E. Kennedy’s 25 books include story and essay collections, literary criticism, and novels, most recently his Copenhagen Quartet, four independent novels set in the various seasons of Copenhagen and each written in a different style. The first of the four to be published in the U.S. is In the Company of Angels (Bloomsbury, 2010), to be followed by another in 2011.

Kennedy’s essays and stories appear regularly in American periodicals such as New Letters, Absinthe: New European Writing and The Literary Review. His writing has won a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a National Magazine Award, among others.

Kennedy holds an MFA from Vermont College and a Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen and teaches in the MFA program at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

www.thomasekennedy.com

Gerry LaFemina

Gerry LaFemina is the author of a collection of short stories, two collections of prose poems and five books of poems. A new book, The Vanishing Horizon, will be out in 2011. He directs the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing at Frostburg State University where he also teaches.

Michael Lee

Michael Lee is a Cape Codder who served for seven years as literary editor for the biweekly newsmagazine, The Cape Cod Voice. His numerous short stories and articles appear in such publications as The Yale Review, New Letters, and The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.

A short story from Lee’s collection, Paradise Dance (Leapfrog Press, 2002), won an honorable mention for a Pushcart Prize. His collection of humor essays, In an Elevator with Brigitte Bardot, was published by Wordcraft of Oregon in 2007.

Lee is a member of PEN International, the Author’s Guild, the Norman Mailer Society, and the National Book Critics Circle. He is currently working on two novels: Dancing Man, and a novel based on his immanent return to Khe Sanh, Vietnam, where he wrote dispatches for Stars and Stripes while serving with the U.S. Marine Corps.

Paul Lisicky

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder. His work has appeared in Story Quarterly, Ploughshares, Hotel Amerika, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, Brevity, Mississippi Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere.

Lisicky teaches in the creative writing programs at NYU and Fairfield University. His novel, The Burning House, is forthcoming in Spring 2011.

Chauncey Mabe

Chauncey Mabe fell in love with reading in the small library of the elementary school in his hometown of Wytheville, VA. Combined with a love of newspapers, courtesy of his father, he may have been fated to a career in journalism.

After 23 years as the books editor and senior cultural columnist for the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, he began working with the Florida Center for the Literary Arts. He has interviewed everyone from John Ciardi to Eric Carle, Dave Barry to Margaret Atwood, Charles Willeford to Marilyn French, Tom McGuane to Edmund White, A. Manette Ansay to Joyce Carol Oates.

Before joining the Sun Sentinel, Mabe worked as a reporter and magazine editor. He continues to review books of all genres for a variety of publications and to write on his blog Open Page; and he is a Contributing Editor for ServingHouse: A Journal of Literary Arts.

flcenterlitarts.wordpress.com

Clare MacQueen

Clare MacQueen is a copy editor who won an Eric Hoffer Best New Writing Editor’s Choice Award in 2007 for an excerpt from a memoir-in-progress. She also works on-call as a Unit Secretary and Nursing Assistant in a surgical unit at a hospital, plus she and her husband design and build custom websites — while hoping to find time to update their own soon.

Jack Marshall

Jack Marshall was born in Brooklyn to parents who had emigrated from Iraq and Syria. After graduating from public high school, he worked in the New York garment district. At the age of nineteen, after traveling and working various odd jobs in the Midwest and South, he shipped out on a Norwegian freighter to West Africa. In 1968, he moved to the Bay Area where he lives today.

Of his twelve collections of poetry, the most recent are Gorgeous Chaos: New & Selected Poems (2002) and The Steel Veil (2008), both from Coffee House Press. He has received the PEN Center USA Award, two Northern California Book Awards, a nomination from the National Book Critics Circle, and a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Marshall’s memoir, From Baghdad to Brooklyn, was a PEN Center USA finalist. The two pieces in ServingHouse are sections from Trace, a book-length poem in progress.

Rick Mulkey

Rick Mulkey is the author of four books and chapbooks, including Toward Any Darkness, (2007), Bluefield Breakdown (2005) and Before the Age of Reason (1998). Previous work has appeared in Shenandoah, The Literary Review, Connecticut Review, Poetry East and South Carolina Review, plus in several anthologies, including American Poetry: The Next Generation.

In addition, Mulkey’s work has received The Literary Review's Charles Angoff Award in poetry, an Eric Hoffer award for his most recent book, and a Hawthornden fellowship for a residency in Scotland. He is currently director of the low-residency MFA program at Converse College.

Lance Olsen

Lance Olsen is author of twenty books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, Head in Flames. His novel Calendar of Regrets, from which the excerpt that appears in this issue comes, will be published this fall by FC2. Olsen teaches innovative narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.

www.lanceolsen.com

Suzanne Parker

Suzanne Parker’s recent and forthcoming publications appear in Connotations: An Online Artifact, Rattapallax, Macguffin, Cider Press Review, and others. Her creative nonfiction is published by the University of Wisconsin Press in the travel anthology, Something to Declare.

She is a winner of the Alice M. Sellars Award from the Academy of American Poets and was a poetry fellow at the Prague Summer Seminars.

Parker co-directs the creative writing program at Brookdale Community College and teaches poetry workshops at the very tip of Manhattan with the Uptown Writers Group (www.uptownwriters.com).

Lennox Raphael

Lennox Raphael lives in Copenhagen. He has written and directed several plays and musicals, and his play, CHE!, ran for over a year (’69-70) in Manhattan. He was Poet in Residence at four Wilmington, Delaware Public Schools; appeared in several poetry and fiction anthologies, including Amistad, edited by Ishmael Reed; and has written for Evergreen Review, Harper’s (cover story interview with Ralph Ellison) and other national publications.

Lennox has five books of poetry published in Denmark; he is co-author, with Maryanne Raphael, of Garden of Hope: Autobiography of a Marriage, available on Amazon.com. At the moment Lennox is doctoring a long novel, Naipal’s Country, and investigating a production for Waiting for Obama, a musical script about Hope.

Lars Rasmussen

Lars Rasmussen was born in 1955 in Denmark and runs The Booktrader, a second-hand bookstore and publishing house in Copenhagen. He has written/edited six books about South African jazz plus several volumes of short stories, the most recent of which, Come Raw, was published by Serving House Press.

Susan Tekulve

Susan Tekulve is the author of three short-story collections, My Mother’s War Stories, Wash Day and Savage Pilgrims. Her stories, poems and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, New Letters, Best New Writing 2007, The Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Beloit Fiction Journal, Crab Orchard Review, The Literary Review, Webdelsol and Black Warrior Review.

Tekulve is an associate professor of English at Converse College, where she teaches courses in the undergraduate and low-residency MFA in Creative Writing programs.

Gordon Weaver

Gordon Weaver is the author of four novels, ten story collections, and a poetry chapbook. Recognition of his work includes two NEA fellowships, the O. Henry First Prize, and numerous other awards.

Leslie What

Nebula-Award-winning writer Leslie What has also won awards for nonfiction and tap dancing while sitting.

Rick Kleffel says about her story collection Crazy Love, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award: “She can hook you with just a few words and after that, you’re on your own in the emotionally vivid worlds she creates. And for all the pain she wrests from her characters and thrusts in your face, for all the vivid anger and wrenching anguish she puts the reader through, there’s a sort of clarity here that’s positively cathartic.”

Recent work appears in Utne Reader and Is Anybody Out There? from DAW Books.

www.lesliewhat.net