Ellen Akins

Ellen Akins is the author of four novels, most recently Hometown Brew, and a collection of short stories, World Like a Knife. Her work has appeared in such publications as the Southwest, Southern, Missouri, and Georgia Review(s). She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Derek Alger

Derek Alger is a graduate of the MFA fiction writing program at Columbia University and currently runs a weekly newspaper in Co-op City in the Bronx. His fiction has appeared in Confrontation, The Literary Review, Del Sol Review, and Ducts, to name a few.

[Note: In addition to the conversation with Terese Svoboda published in this issue, you can find a number of Alger’s interviews online at Pif Magazine’s One on One Archive. He has interviewed Duff Brenna, Kelly Cherry, Walter Cummins, Robert Dana, Claire Davis, Thomas E. Kennedy, Steve Heller, Lance Olsen, Molly Peacock, Peter Selgin, Gladys Swan, Gordon Weaver, and many others.]

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

Jackie Zollo Brooks

Jackie Zollo Brooks’ awards and publications include: Selected Poems (Oct. 2009, Wild Leaf Press, New Haven), Honorable Mention in the Glimmertrain Short Fiction Contest, and finalist for the Iowa Review Fiction Award for an excerpt from her novel, The Ravenala.

A short story, “Boeuf a la Madagaskara,” was published by National Geographic’s Glimpse Magazine. Other stories and poetry have been published in Omby, a literary journal in Madagascar, and literary magazines in the United States.

Currently, Ms. Brooks is at work on a novel, Stella For Star, the Life of an Actress.

T. Nicole Cirone

T. Nicole Cirone lives in Upper Darby, PA. Her work has been published in The Red River Review, Perigee, Philadelphia Stories, the Philadelphia Stories “Best of” anthology, and Bucks County Writer. She is a graduate of Rosemont College and of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

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.

Anthony DiMatteo

Anthony DiMatteo’s poems have been published in recent issues of Front Porch, Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, Main Street Rag, Cordite Literary Review, The Long Island Quarterly, and Tar River Poetry.

Recent prose has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Early Modern Literary Studies, and College Literature. He professes English at the New York Institute of Technology.

Jack Driscoll

Jack Driscoll is the author of three novels, a collection of short stories, and three books of poems. Winner of the AWP Short Fiction Award, his stories have appeared regularly in The Georgia Review and The Southern Review. He currently teaches in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program in Oregon.

Alan Elyshevitz

Alan Elyshevitz is a poet and short story writer from East Norriton, PA. His poems have appeared most recently in San Pedro River Review, Haz Mat Review, and Lady Jane’s Miscellany. In addition, he has published two poetry chapbooks: The Splinter in Passion’s Paw (New Spirit) and Theory of Everything (Pudding House).

Currently, Elyshevitz teaches writing at the Community College of Philadelphia.

Clyde Fixmer

Clyde Fixmer is a San Diego Poet and short story writer. His work has appeared in over a hundred magazines and journals. His latest book of poems, Walking in a Land of Dancers, is just out from Scopcraeft Press, Portales, NM.

John Flynn

John Flynn’s fifth chapbook, Wave And Metronome, is due out this year from Pudding House Publishers. He’s published one collection of poetry, Moments Between Cities; a book of short stories, Something Grand; and a book of translations from the Romanian of Nicolae Dabija, Blackbird Once Wild Now Tame.

His first novel, Heaven Is A City Where Your Language Isn’t Spoken, will be published in 2011 by Cervena Barva Press in Boston, under his pen name of Attam Sparx.

Flynn holds an MFA degree from the University Of Michigan.

Mathias B. Freese

Mathias B. Freese is a psychotherapist and teacher, as well as the author of The i Tetralogy, a Holocaust novel and winner of the Allbooks Review Editor’s Choice Award 2007, and Down to a Sunless Sea, a collection of short fiction, Indie Excellence Finalist Book Awards.

His nonfiction articles have appeared in The New York Times, Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, Pilgrimage, and other journals. In 2005 the Society of Southwestern Authors honored him with a first-place award for personal essay/memoir.

“Soap” is from his new collection of short stories now in progress, Working Through the Holocaust.

www.mathiasbfreese.com

Abby Frucht

Abby Frucht won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize three decades ago. She has since published five novels and has served as mentor and advisor at Vermont College of Fine Arts for fifteen years.

Her new stories and essays can be found at New Letters, Gargoyle, Narrative, Memorious, InDigest, and other magazines, as well as in the forthcoming Seal Press Anthology, HE SAID WHAT?!

Ms. Frucht lives on a lake in Wisconsin.

Frank Giampietro

Frank Giampietro’s book Begin Anywhere was published by Alice James Books in 2008. He is creator of the web poetry projects, La Fovea and Poems by Heart. His work has appeared in 32 Poems, Black Warrior Review, FENCE, Ploughshares, and Poetry Daily.

Giampietro is the 2010-2012 resident scholar at The Southern Review.

Robert Gover

Biography at Wikipedia

John Griswold

John Griswold’s writing has appeared in Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Natural Bridge, and in the anthologies The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3 (W.W. Norton) and Mountain Man Dance Moves (McSweeney’s Books).

His nonfiction book, Herrin: The Brief History of an Infamous American City, is available from The History Press. He also writes as Oronte Churm for Inside Higher Ed.

Griswold lives with his family in Urbana, where he teaches at the University of Illinois.

www.JohnGriswold.net

Matt Hart

Matt Hart is the author of the poetry collections, Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and Wolf Face (forthcoming, H-NGM_N Books, 2010), as well as several chapbooks, including The Hours (Cinematheque Press, 2010) and Late Makeup Years and Decline (1979-1983) (Hell Yes! Press, 2010), which he wrote in collaboration with Dobby Gibson.

A third full-length collection, Light-Headed, will be published by BlazeVOX in Spring 2011.

A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, Hart teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Bob Hicok

Bob Hicok’s most recent book is Words for Empty and Words for Full.

Steve Heller

“The Elephant Gang,” originally published in New Letters, appears in Steve Heller’s recent book of nonfiction narratives, What We Choose to Remember (Serving House Books). The fall issue of Flint Hills Review will include a new narrative essay and an interview with Heller, as well as a review of What We Choose to Remember.

Heller lives in Marina del Rey, California and directs the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

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.

“Old Dude in the Free State” is included in Kennedy’s collection, Last Night My Bed a Boat of Whiskey Going Down, which also appeared in 2010, from New American Press.

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. He lives in Copenhagen.

www.thomasekennedy.com

Steve Kowit

Steve Kowit is the author of In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop, one of America’s most popular books about writing poetry. His most recent full collection of poetry is The First Noble Truth, published by University of Tampa Press.

He is the recipient of a National Endowment Fellowship in Poetry, two Pushcart Prizes, and many other awards. His poetry has been widely anthologized.

Kowit teaches at Southwestern College in San Diego and lives in the back-country hills near the Mexican border with his wife and several companion animals.

Yahia Lababidi

Yahia Lababidi is the author of Signposts to Elsewhere (Jane Street Press), selected for Books of the Year, in 2008, by The Independent (UK). His new book is Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing (Common Ground Publishing, 2010).

Otherwise, Lababidi’s aphorisms, poems, and essays have appeared in publications such as AGNI, Cimarron Review, and World Literature Today, as well as in several anthologies, including Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, and the best-selling US textbook, Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.

To date, his selected poetry and prose have been translated into Arabic, Slovak, Turkish, Swedish, and Italian.

More at Poets & Writers

Deena Linett

Deena Linett’s two poetry collections were published by BOA Editions, Ltd., and new work has appeared in The Literary Review and Persimmon Tree. There are poems forthcoming in The Comstock Review, and a prose micro-esssay in Tiferet.

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 won an Eric Hoffer Best New Writing Editor’s Choice Award in 2007 for an excerpt from a memoir-in-progress. She and her husband Gary Gibbons live in the Pacific Northwest, where they design and build custom websites. Ms. MacQueen also works on-call as a Unit Secretary and Nursing Assistant in a surgical unit at Swedish Hospital.

claremacqueen [at] servinghousejournal [dot] com

www.pugetcustompc.com

Valerie Miner

Valerie Miner is the author of thirteen books, including the new novel, After Eden. Her writing has appeared in The Village Voice, Salmagundi, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, Southwest Review, and many other journals. Her work has been translated into Turkish, Danish, German, Swedish, Dutch, French, and Spanish.

A professor and artist-in-residence at Stanford University, Ms. Miner has won awards and fellowships from The Rockefeller Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation, among others. She’s had Fulbrights in India, Tunisia, and Indonesia.

www.valerieminer.com

Stephanie Mood

Stephanie Mood’s stories and poems have appeared in Salt Cedar, Poem, Cedar Rock, Green Fuse, Poetry Newsletter, Expressions, and numerous other venues. Her collection, Gold in Them Hills, was published in 2010 by Giddyup Press.

Ms. Mood is a full-time professor of creative writing, composition, and literature at Grossmont College in El Cajon, California.

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.

Sandra Rouse

Sandra Rouse has work published in The Chattahoochee Review and Snake Nation Review. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She teaches creative writing in the Certificate program at Emory University.

Her blog reviewing short stories published on the Net can be found at The Narrative Drive.

Marla E. Schwartz

A native of Toledo, OH and a graduate of Kent State, Marla E. Schwartz has been a professional journalist since she was a teenager. She’s a Senior Writer for Miami Living Magazine, and a freelance writer for CRAVINGS South Florida in Aventura, as well as AroundWellington.com (formerly Around Wellington Magazine), Lighthouse Point Magazine, and P.A.N.D.O.R.A.

An avid photographer, her images have appeared in numerous Ohio publications, as well as in AroundWellington.com (formerly Around Wellington Magazine), Lighthouse Point Magazine, Miami Living Magazine, The Miami Herald, The Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and The Palm Beach Post.

Ms. Schwartz has had numerous plays published and produced around the country. Her short play, “America’s Working?” was originally read at First Stage in Los Angeles and in the same city produced at the Lone Star Ensemble. It was then produced at Lynn University in Boca Raton, FL and taken to an Off-Broadway playhouse.

Her piece, “The Lunch Time Café,” was a finalist for the Heideman Award, Actors Theatre of Louisville. She has also written a handful of screenplays, with one opted for production a few years ago.

meschwartz1 [at] hotmail [dot] com

Chad Sweeney

Chad Sweeney is the author of three books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), and An Architecture (BlazeVox, 2007), and translator (with Mojdeh Marashi) of The Selected Poems of Iranian poet, H.E. Sayeh, The Art of Stepping Through Time (White Pine, 2011).

He edited the anthology, Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: the Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (CityLights, 2009) and is coeditor of Parthenon West Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Black Warrior, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Verse, Volt, Barrow Street, and New American Writing.

Sweeney teaches poetry and is a Ph.D. candidate at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo where he lives with his wife, poet Jennifer K. Sweeney.

Brian Turner

Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before serving for seven years in the U.S. Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division.

Turner’s poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. His books, Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise, are published by Alice James Books.

Turner received a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and is the 2009-2010 Amy Lowell Travelling Scholar.

Andrea Watson

Andrea L. Watson’s poetry has appeared in Runes, Ekphrasis, Cream City Review, Subtropics, The Dublin Quarterly, International Poetry Review, Nimrod, and Memoir (and).

Her show, Braided Lives: A Collaboration Between Artists and Poets, was sponsored by the Taos Institute of Arts and has traveled to San Francisco, Denver, and Berkeley.

Ms. Watson is co-editor of Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined.

Leslie What

Leslie What is a Nebula Award-winning writer of a novel and two story collections. Her most recent collection, Crazy Love, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.

Her stories and essays have appeared in The Macguffin, Calyx, Asimov’s, Serving House Journal, Parabola, Fugue, SciFi.com, Midstream, and other places. New work appears in the anthology, Is Anybody Out There? and in The Los Angeles Review.

Ms. What is an instructor at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. A complete bio and links to online work can be found at her website, Whatworld.