Photo credit for Laura Bell: Photo by Terry Bisbee
Photo credit for Rika Lesser: Photo by Perry Cohen
Photo credit for Elisabeth Rynell: © Elias Österberg
Photo credit for Kaaren Kitchell: © 2013 Richard Beban
Photo credit for Richard Beban: © 2013 Richard Beban
Fall 2012/Winter 2013
AndreBagoo is a journalist working in Trinidad. His first book ofpoems, Trick Vessels, was published by Shearsman Books in 2012. Histumblr is at andrebagoo.tumblr.com.
Richard Beban is a photographer and writer who lives in Paris with his wife, KaarenKitchell, where they publish an online journal (www.parisplay.com) featuring hisphotographs and her writing. 
Laura Bell’s work has been exhibited in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Berlin, and elsewhere. Her collaboration with poet Ian Ganassi on the Corpse series has been influenced by and informs her own paintings, in which snapshots are often embedded in the paint. Found in both bodies of work is the sense that a state of imbalance co-exists with a collusion of culture, history, leaf, claw, and junk. Selected pieces from the Corpse series were shown in “Disciplined Spontaneity,” at Zone Contemporary Art, N.Y., which included works by contemporary artists and such antecedents as John Cage and Joseph Beuys. Laura has been an artist-in-residence at the Millay Colony for the Arts and is a recipient of an Artists Space Grant. She lives, paints, and makes Corpses in Long Island City, New York. 
Ian Ganassi’s poems haveappeared or are forthcoming in numerous literary magazines, including New American Writing, Interim, TheWarwick Review, Sawbuck, Octopus, The Journal, Map Literary, Folly, and Trickhouse. His translations from Virgil’s Aeneid haveappeared in New England Review. Hisbook length collection, Mean Numbers,has been a finalist in several national book competitions. Ian lives in NewHaven, Connecticut, where he is a writer, teacher, and percussionist. A selectionfrom his collaborationwith Laura Bell “The Corpses” is also included in this issue. 
Dave Hardin is a Michigan poet and artist. He has published work in 3 Quarks Daily, Literary Kicks, Pocket Thoughts and the Detroit Metro Times. He contributes to Scrum, a poetry and satire blog. In2012 he self-published A Ruinous Thirst, his first poetry collection. Dave’s visual art can be seen at jubileebarn.com.
Nathan Hondros is a writer, poet and publisher. He has had a numberof incarnations, but is getting close to nirvana at Regime Books where he isone of the editors of the literary journal Regime Magazine (www.regimebooks.com.au).His work has appeared in Westerly, The Australian, Masthead, and other magazines and journals. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation hasadapted his work into radio plays. He wrote and published Man andBeast, acollection of short fiction, with Australian playwright Damon Lockwood in 2009. 
Michael Jennings was born in theFrench Quarter of New Orleans and grew up in East Texas and the deserts of southwestern Iran. He is the author of eight books of poems, most recently Bone-Songs and Sanctuaries, New and Selected Poems from The Sheep Meadow Press.
Brian Johnstone is a Scottishpoet whose poems ‘evoke…a sense of spiritual immanence in their slow stillspaces’ (Scottish Literary Journal)while being ‘full of stilled moments and nicely shaped incidents’ (Scotland on Sunday). His work hasappeared throughout Scotland, in England, America and in various Europeancountries. His latest collection is TheBook of Belongings (Arc, 2009). His poems have been translated into morethan 10 different languages; in 2009 TerraIncognita, a small collection of his poems in Italian translation,was published by L’Officina (Vicenza). A founder and former Festival Directorof StAnza: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival,Brian Johnstone has appeared at numerousinternational poetry festivals from Lithuania to Nicaragua, from Sweden toMacedonia and at numerous major venues across the UK. As well as giving readings, he also works withthe poetry and jazz group Trio Verso; their CD Storm Chaser was releasedin 2010. His latest project is the poetry film How Well It Burns, partof film-maker Alastair Cook’s Absent Voices series. His next collection,Dry Stone Work, is due to be published in 2014. He is currently workingon a memoir entitled Twice Shy.
George Kalamaras is Professor of English at IndianaUniversity-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990. He isthe author of six full-length books of poetry and seven chapbooks, including Symposiumon the Body’s Left Side (Shivastan Publishing,2011), Your Own Ox-Head Mask as Proof (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), TheRecumbent Galaxy, co-authored with Alvaro Cardona-Hine, (C&R Press,2010), and Kingdom of Throat-Stuck Luck (2012), winner of the ElixirPress Poetry Prize. He recently won the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM ChapbookContest for his collection, The MiningCamps of the Mouth, which appeared in 2012. An electronic chapbook of hispoems, The Transformation of Salt,appeared in The Drunken Boat in 2002.
Kaaren Kitchell writespoetry, fiction and essays. Her book of poems, The Minotaur Dance, was published in 2003. She is currently writinga final draft of a novel about Berkeley in the ‘60s, told from the perspectivesof the Greek gods and goddesses. This spring, she will become the FictionEditor of TheScreamOnline.Sheand her husband Richard Beban have taught Living Mythically, at the C.G. JungInstitute, Esalen, and at U.C. Santa Cruz. The Getty Museum has a fine art bookof two of their poems. They have lived in Paris since 2011, where they publishan online journal www.parisplay.comfeaturing Richard’s photographs and her writing.
Luis Vasquez La Roche was born in 1983in Caracas, Venezuela. He moved to Trinidad and Tobago in2002. He later studied Visual Arts at The University of the WestIndies, St. Augustine. His drawings are explorations of personal experiences,his new adopted space and culture. He has participated in aseveral group shows such as Erotic Art Week in Trinidad (2010), Mensajes Positivos in Chile(2011), PFC (pon una foto en la calle) in Venezuela(2012) and special guest as P&E (Pinky and Emigrante) atWOMA in Grenada (2012). He has also been part of a few urbanart projects: P&E(2011), P&E untitled(2012 – 2013), Who Am I? (2012) and UrbanHeartbeat (2012). He had his first solo exhibition titled “The Search – La Busqueda” in Trinidad(2012).
Rika Lesser is theauthor of four books of poetry, mostrecently Questions of Love: New & Selected Poems and a revisededition of Etruscan Things. She has translated fifteen collections of poetry or fiction for readersof all ages, among them works by Göran Sonnevi, Gunnar Ekelöf, and Claes Andersson from Swedish, andRafik Schami, Rainer MariaRilke, and Hermann Hesse from German. Her honors include the Amy LowellPoetry Travelling Scholarship, an Ingram-MerrillFoundation Award in Poetry, The Landon Poetry Translation Prize, a FulbrightCommission fellowship, a 2001 NEA Translation Grant, and two Translation Prizesfrom the Swedish Academy. Hertranslation of Sonnevi’s Mozart’s Third Brain wasa finalist for the PEN Poetry Translation Award (2010). Her co-translationwith Cecile Inglessis Margellosof The Brazen Plagiarist by Kiki Dimoula waspublished this fall by Yale University Press (2012). With the support of a 2013 NEATranslation Grant, she has begun work on a translation of Elisabeth Rynell’s 1997 novel Hohaj.Lesser’s translations of Rynell’s poemsare included in this issue.
Marijane Osborn holds a Ph.D from Standford University and specializes in Old and Middle English Language and Literature. She teaches at UC Davis and has published works on St. John of the Cross, C.S. Lewis, and D.H. Lawrence. Her books include Landscapes of Desire, Beowulf: A Likeness, and Beowulf: A Verse Translation with Treasures of the Ancient North.
Aimee A. Norton is a research astronomer and poet. She lives in Palo Alto,California and works at Stanford University researching the Sun’s magneticfields. As part of a team that designed and launched NASA’s SolarDynamics Observatory from Cape Canaveral in 2010, she uses the telescopes tokeep an eye on our Sun. Aimee hails from the river-crossed, honky-tonkin’ HillCountry of Texas. She left home at 16 and spent over seven years livingabroad in South Africa, Spain and Australia. She married an Australianman she met on a bus. This produced some interesting side-effectssuch as dual citizenship and two awesome children. Aimee insists thatpoetry is necessary to express the ridiculous richness that infuses everymoment of our lives. She especially enjoys the parallel ways in whichphysics and poetry can compress great, big experiential truths into smallspaces. She’s published in Leviathan, Mascara LiteraryReview, Rabbit, SOFTBLOW, Literature in North Queensland (LiNQ), and Many Mountains Moving. This is her first chapbook.
Elisabeth Rynell is one of Sweden’s mosthighly regarded women writers alive today. Born in Stockholm in 1954, she has lived in London andtraveled overland through Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to India. For decades a resident of Sweden’sremote north (Älvsbyn, Lycksele,Umeå), Rynell now dividesher time between Stockholm and Delsbo, a communityfarther south in Norrland. She made her literary debut with a collection ofpoetry in 1975. Eleven more books–four of fiction, one of nonfiction, six ofpoetry–have followed. She hasbeen the recipient of five different Swedish awards for her breakthrough novel Hohaj (1997), currently being translated intoEnglish by Rika Lesser, as well as several other Swedish or Nordic literaryprizes through the years. Her 2002novel To Mervas (translated by Victoria Häggblom) is available in English (Archipelago Books,2010.) In October 2012, Rynell was awarded an honorary doctorate from theUniversity of Umeå. A new book of her essays, Skrivandetssinne (The Mind of Writing), is forthcoming inMay 2013.
TomažŠalamun lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He taught Spring semester 2011 atMichener Center for Writers at The University of Texas. His recent bookstranslated into English are The Blue Tower (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,2011) and On the Tracks of Wild Game.(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012). His Soyrealidad translated by Michael Thomas Taren is due by Dalkey Archive Pressin 2014.MichaelThomas Taren was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. His poems have beenpublished in HTMLGIANT, The Claudius App, and Fence and are forthcoming in Bestoned. He spent 9 months in Sloveniaon a Fulbright Scholarship (2010-2011). His manuscripts Puberty and Where is Michaelwere finalists for the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2009 and 2010,respectively.
Rimas Uzgiris’poetry has been published in AtlantaReview, 322 Review, Lituanus, Prime Number Magazine,The Poetry Porch, inter|rupture, Literary Laundry, riverbabble, Quiddity, The FourQuarters Magazine, Druskininkai Poetic Fall 2012(anthology), and is forthcoming in BarrowStreet, Hudson Review, Per Contra, Umbrella and The Waiting Room Reader:Stories to Keep You Company (anthology). His translations have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Spork Press, Modern Poetry in Translation, Hayden’s FerryReview, Two Lines Online, The Brooklyner, Lituanus, Druskininkai PoeticFall 2012, and are forthcoming in AGNIand The Iowa Review. His book reviewshave been published in HTML Giant,Rumpus, Words Without Borders and PostRoad. His fiction will appear in Writer’sAbroad: Foreign Encounters Anthology. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy fromthe University of Wisconsin-Madison, and received an MFA in creative writingfrom Rutgers-Newark University, where he studied poetry with Rigoberto Gonzalez and Rachel Hadas,and fiction with Tayari Jones. He has received aFulbright Scholar Grant to teach at Vilnius University, Lithuania in 2013. In addition to his poems, his translations of Judita Vaičiūnaitė appear in this issue.
Judita Vaičiūnaitė (1937,Kaunas-2001, Vilnius) was one of Lithuania’s leading poets of the second halfof the twentieth century. She graduated Vilnius University in 1959, and spentmost of her life in Vilnius. She published over twenty books of poetry, as wellas translations of poetry, poetry books for children, and plays. She worked asan editor for several leading literary journals in Lithuania. Her poetry has been translated intoEnglish, German, Russian and other languages. Her work has garnered numerous prizes, including theLithuanian Writer‘s Union Prize in 2000, and the national award of theGediminas Cross in 1997.