Fall/Winter 2006: Contributors Neil Aitken is the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review www.boxcarpoetry.com. His firstcollection of poetry, The Lost Country of Sight, was a 2005semi-finalist for the 2005 Brittingham/Pollak Prizes in Poetry and iscurrently making its rounds again. His work has also been nominated forthe Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in numerousjournals including Crab Orchard Review, Portland Review, PoetrySoutheast, RHINO, and Washington Square. He holds an MFA inCreative Writing from the University of California, Riverside and was aKundiman Asian American Poet Fellow in 2005 and 2006. A long timeexpatriate, Neil Aitken recently returned home to Canada and now livesand works in Port Coquitlam, BC. More information about Neil Aitken canbe found at www.neil-aitken.com. Kazim Ali is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing atShippensburg University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program ofthe University of Southern Maine. He is the author of two books ofpoetry, The Far Mosque (Alice James Books) and The FortiethDay (forthcoming in spring 2008 from BOA Editions) and a novelQuinn’s Passage was published by blazeVox books. His work hasbeen featured in many national journals such as American PoetryReview, Boston Review, Barrow Street, jubilat and MassachusettsReview. He is one of the founding editors of Nightboat Books. KeithAlthaus lives in North Truro MA on Cape Cod. He moved toCape Cod in 1969 as a Writing Fellow (the first year of the program) atthe Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He’s lived there ever since,and some of that time served on the Writing Committee of the Work Centerand was its Chairman for awhile. He has received grants from theMassachusetts Council on the Arts, and from the National Endowment. Hehas two books: Rival Heavens (Provincetown Arts Press, 1993) andLadder of Hours (Ausable Press, 2005). He has also written on artand curated several shows. Tamiko Beyer ‘s poetryhas appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Calyx,Crab Creek Review, Mizna, Gay and Lesbian Review, andTriplopia. She was a Kundiman Fellow in 2005 and will be aHedgebrook resident in 2007. In New York City, Beyer works as afreelance writer and is the publication coordinator for Women MakeMovies. She also leads writing workshops for homeless LGBT youththrough the New York Writers Coalition. She has a website: www.wonderinghome.com. Amaranth Borsuk ‘s poems have appeared inThe Antioch Review, Smartish Pace, The Los Angeles Review, andHotel Amerika. Her awards include an Edward W. Moses prize, aFalling Leaves creative writing prize, a statewide Ina Coolbrith award,a Shirle Dorothy Robbins Award, and a May Merrill Miller Award. She iscurrently a Ph.D. candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at theUniversity of Southern California where she is a co-founder of TheLoudest Voice, a poetry and fiction reading series. MelanieBraverman is the author of the novel East Justice(Permanent Press, 1996), and Red, a collection of poems (PerugiaPress, 2002). She teaches Creative Writing at Brandeis University. Olga Broumas liveswith her partner, ChristineHart, and their two dogs, Lily and Nouni, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the terrible(every angel is) luxury of NOT HAVING YET BEEN EATEN. Her 7 books ofpoetry are collected in RAVE, and her 4 volumes of translation from theGreek of Odysseas Elytis are collected in Eros, Eros, Eros, both fromCopper Canyon Press. A CD of her reading from these books is availablefrom Copper Canyon as well. She currently translates American poetryinto Greek, teaches Pilates, meditates, and practices as a bodyworktherapist. She teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program atBrandeis University. Melissa Buckheit isa poet, dancer/choreographer and a photographer. Her poems have appearedin Laurel Moon, Bombay Gin and Sonora Review, amongothers. Her manuscript, On the Back of the Animal Is the Mouth of theVase, was a finalist for the Backwaters Press First Book Prize. Sheis a recipient of the American Poets Honorary Prize and the AndrewGrossbardt Memorial Poetry Prize, among others. She holds an MFA inPoetry from Naropa University, and a BA from Brandeis University.Melissa has taught Creative Writing and modern dance at the GeorgiaO’Keeffe Museum and currently teaches writing, literature and CreativeWriting at Pima Community College, and in private workshop. Shetranslates the poet Ioulíta Heliopoulou, from Modern Greek and thepoet Olga Broumas, into French. She has performed her originalchoreography at Brandeis University, Naropa University and inprofessional venues in Tucson. This past June, Melissa co-produced,directed and performed in an evening of new dance work,Entrances. Other recent work includes, Give Me Your Name, ptiii: Mirror, through Zuzi Dance Company, Re:Configurations,an intergenerational dance production about GLBTQ partnership, with NewArticulations Dance Theatre and Narrative in Coming Backand Moving Forward, with the Brandeis Dance Collective in Boston,MA, of which she is a member. She currently lives in Tucson, AZ and is completing a secondmanuscript, Noctilucent. Wendy Burk is the author of a chapbook ofpoems, The Deer, from Finishing Line Press, and the translator ofTedi López Mills’s While Light Is Built, from Kore Press.Her translations of poems by Luigi Amara are included in the anthologyConnecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico, from Sarabande Books.She can also be heard reading her poetry and translations on thejust-released Kore Press audio anthology Autumnal: A Collection ofElegies. Wendy’s poems and translations have appeared in journalssuch as Colorado Review, Nimrod, Slipstream, and EOAGH: AJournal of the Arts. She received an MFA in Creative Writing fromthe University of Arizona, and has twice been named Artist-in-Residencewith the National Park Service. Her collaborations include a broadsidewith artist Paul Mirocha and poems and works in glass with artist/poetEric Magrane. She resides in Arizona, where the wilderness inspiresher. Kevin Coval is theauthor of Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica) which has been hailed byThe Chicago Tribune‘s Rick Kogan as the “voice of the newChicago, whose work should stand up there with Carl Sandburg”. ArtisticDirector of Young Chicago Authors, Founder of Louder than ABomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival and Curator of Chicago’sHip-Hop Theater Festival, Kevin has been writing, performing, teachingand organizing in Chicago for 10 years. His website and his press, www.em-press.com DeLanaDameron , a native of Columbia, SC spends her days inChapel Hill, North Carolina translating the world around her —forever trying to marry the historical and the literary. She is a CaveCanem fellow and a member of the Carolina African American Writer’sCollective. Oliver de laPaz teaches creative writing at Western WashingtonUniversity. He is a co-founder and a board member of Kundiman, anot-for-profit organization committed to the discovery and cultivationof emerging Asian-American poets. A recipient of a 2005 New YorkFoundation for the Arts Fellowship, his work has appeared in journalssuch as Quarterly West, Cream City Review, Third Coast, NorthAmerican Review, and elsewhere. Names Above Houses, a bookof his prose and verse, was a winner of the 2000 Crab Orchard AwardSeries and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001.His second book, Furious Lullaby will be published by SouthernIllinois University Press in 2007. For more information, visit www.oliverdelapaz.com. PatrickDonnelly‘s collection of poems is The Charge(Ausable Press, 2003), about which Gregory Orr wrote “. . .everything he writes is suffused with tenderness and intelligence,lucidity and courage.” He is an Associate Editor at Four Way Books,and has taught writing at Smith College, the New School University,Clark University, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He wasThornton writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College for Spring, 2006. Hispoems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review,The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares,The Marlboro Review, and have been anthologized in the Four WayReader #2, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century tothe Present, and elsewhere. From the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference,he received a scholarship in 2003 and a fellowship in 2004, and grantsfrom the PEN Fund for Writers in 2000 and 2001. His translations, withStephen Miller, from the Japanese Crossing the Oceanof Suffering are also in this issue. Ann Marie Fine earnedher MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars in 2002. Some of her poemshave appeared in nocturnes (re)view of literary arts, Nota Bene, Forthe Gathering, Diner, and are forthcoming in the SonoraReview and Cue. Currently she serves as the director of Casa Libre en la Solana www.casalibre.org, a writing andresidency center for writers and scholars in Tucson. Cameron K.Gearen was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1969 andgrew up in Oak Park, Illinois. She has published a chapbook of poetryentitled Night, Relative to Day and selected by Robert Pinsky(2004). Her poetry has appeared in Fence, The Antioch Review,Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, The Bellingham Review, River Styx,Quarterly West, Another Chicago Magazine, Northwest Review andelsewhere. She won the Grolier Prize in 1994, the W.B. Yeats SocietyPoetry Contest in 2001 (judged by Paul Muldoon), and placed third in the1997 Painted Bride Quarterly Poetry Contest (judged by MarkDoty). In 2001, her manuscript was selected as a finalist for the WaltWhitman Prize, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She hasgiven readings in several venues including the Aldrich Museum ofContemporary Art, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and Inthe First Place, a quarterly salon. She holds an M.F.A. in poetrywriting from Indiana University. She lives in New Haven, where sheteaches at the Educational Center for the Arts. Suheir Hammad is the author of ZaatarDiva, published by CypherPress, as well as Born Palestinian, Born Black and Drops ofThis Story, by Harlem River Press. She is an original writer andperformer of the TONY Award winning Russell Simmons Presents DefPoetry Jam on Broadway. Her website is suheirhammad.com LilahHegnauer‘s first book of poetry, Dark Under KigandaStars, a collection based on her experiences living and teaching inUganda, was published by Ausable Press in March2005 and was an honorable mention for this year’s Library of VirginiaLiterary Award. Her poems have been published in Kenyon Review,Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, St. Ann’s Review, Orion, Marginalia , IdentityTheory, versedaily.org , and Guernica . She was a featured poet on Leonard Schwartz’s radioshow, Cross-CulturalPoetics , and her poetry will be in the 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets . She was runner up for the 2007Astraea Lesbian Writers Award and lives in Charlottesville, Virginiawhere she is the poetry editor of Meridian . Tung-Hui Hu is the author of The Book ofMotion (University of Georgia, 2003) and Mine (Ausable,2007). He lives in San Francisco, where he writes on film and visualculture. LillianBaker Kennedy , author of Tomorrow After Night(Bay River Press, 2003) and Notions (Pudding House, 2004),practices law and lives in an old cape bordered by wild roses in Auburn,Maine. Kennedy’s poetry has been included in Off the Record,(James Elkins, Editor) Legal Studies Forum, 2004, an anthology of poetryby lawyers; exhibited (Earthly Beatitudes, An Exhibit of Sculpture byKerstin Engman and Poetry by Lillian Baker Kennedy), University ofSouthern Maine, Lewiston/Auburn Atrium Gallery, and included in variousjournals including Cider Press Review which nominated her poem,“The Red Radio Flyer Wagon” for a Pushcart. Ruth Ellen Kocher ‘s work has been published in Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Ploughshares, African American Review,TheGettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Washington Square Journal, CrabOrchard Review, ninth letter, as well as other literary journals,and has been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazineShe’r. Her first book of poetry, Desdemona’s Fire, won theNaomi Long Madget Award for African American Poets and was published byLotus Press in 1999. Her second book, When the Moon Knows You’reWandering, won the Green Rose Prose and was published by WesternMichigan and New Issues Poetry and Prose in 2001, who also published herthird book, One Girl Babylon. She has been a fellow at theBucknell Seminar, the Cave Canem Workshop, and Yaddo. She teaches in theMFA program at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Joseph O.Legaspi was born in the Philippines, and was raisedthere and in Los Angeles where he immigrated with his family when he wastwelve. He holds degrees from Loyola Marymount University and theCreative Writing Program at New York University. Currently, he lives inNew York City and works at Columbia University. Imago, his debutpoetry collection, is forthcoming in fall 2007 from CavanKerry Press.His poems have appeared in numerous journals, recently in the NorthAmerican Review, Bamboo Ridge, Crab Orchard Review, Puerto Del Sol,Seneca Review, The Literary Review, and the anthologiesContemporary Voices of the Eastern World and Titling theContinent. A recipient of a 2001 poetry fellowship from the NewYork Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), he is a co-founder of Kundiman www.kundiman.org, a non-profit organizationserving Asian American poets. Rachel Lehrman lives and works in London where she directsNomadic-Collaborations, an international team of artists dedicated topromoting communication and collaboration among different artisticdisciplines, places, and cultures in order to create fuller, multi-mediaand interdisciplinary works. In addition to her work as a multi-mediaand installation artist, Rachel’s poetry accompanied an installation atthe Camden People’s Theatre in London in broadside format and wasrecorded to accompany an installation in the basement of the HaywardGallery in Autumn 2004. Her awards include the UA Foundation Award forher poetry, the UA Graduate and Professional Award for Community Work,the Dorothy Blumenfield Memorial Prize, and the Knight’s Of PythiasAward. Rachel is expected to complete a practice based PhD in theCommunicative Dynamics of Collaborative Art by June 2007. Genine Lentine‘s poems, essays, and interviews have appeared inAmerican Poetry Review, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, O, theOprah Magazine, Roger, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Shecollaborated with Stanley Kunitz and Marnie Crawford Samuelson on TheWild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (W.W. Norton,2005). Currently she is shaping her manuscript of poems, Mr.Worthington’s Beautiful Experiments onSplashes. Dana Levin‘s books are In the SurgicalTheatre and Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press). A gratefulrecipient of numerous honors, Levin has recently received fellowshipsand awards from the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe and the WhitingFoundations. She teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program and at Collegeof Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. StephenMiller is assistant professor of Japanese language andliterature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is translatorof A Pilgrim’s Guide to Forty-Six Temples (Weatherhill Inc.,1990), and editor of Partings at Dawn: An Anthology of Japanese GayLiterature (Gay Sunshine Press, 1996). He lived in Japan for nineyears between 1980 and 1999, in part as the recipient of two JapanFoundation fellowships for research abroad. He is currently working on astudy of the Buddhist poetry in the Japanese imperial poetryanthologies. Anna Moschovakisis the author of I Have Not Been Able to Get Through toEveryone. JulietPatterson‘s first book, The Truant Lover, wasselected by Jean Valentine as the 2004 winner of the Nightboat PoetryPrize and was recently published by Nightboat Books. Her poems haveappeared in American Letters &, Commentary, Bellingham Review, NewOrleans Review, Washington Square, Verse and other magazines. Jon Pineda is the author of Birthmark (Southern IllinoisUniversity Press, 2004), winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series inPoetry Series Open Competition. The recipient of a Virginia Commissionfor the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, he has been a featured poetat the Emerging Writers Festival at Franklin & Marshall College inLancaster, PA, and was recently a member of the teaching faculty at theKUNDIMAN Asian American Poets Retreat. He currently teaches in theEnglish Department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. Josh Rathkamp ‘s first book of poems, Some Nights No Cars AtAll, will be published by Ausable Press in September 2007. His workhas appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals includingMeridian, Fugue, Passages North, Rhino, Indiana Review, 42opus,Puerto Del Sol, and Rosebud. He teaches at Arizona StateUniversity and Phoenix College. Barbara JaneReyes was born in Manila, Philippines and raised in theSan Francisco Bay Area. She received her MFA at San Francisco StateUniversity, and is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago,2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), for which shereceived the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.Herwork has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Asian PacificAmerican Journal, Chain, New American Writing, North American Review,Notre Dame Review, and Parthenon West Review. She is aVisiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Mills College, andshe lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, CA. Herauthor website is barbarajanereyes.com. YaelShinar was born in California and grew up in Iowa. Sinceearning a B.A. at Brandeis University in 2003, she has taught publicschool in northwest New Mexico and studied classical Semitic languagesat the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She lives in Jerusalem, whereshe works as a writer and translator and trains in vijnana yoga. Cathy Stonehousewas born and raised in the UK and emigrated in 1988 to Vancouver,Canada—the city in which she still lives, along with her husband,lively two-year-old daughter (“don’t talk to me I’m talking tomyself”) and two aged cats. She has published one volume of poems,The Words I Know, now sadly out of print, and a volume ofjuvenilia, Keys to the City. Her poetry, fiction and nonfictionhave appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies, mostly inCanada. She has studied for varying periods of time with Olga Broumas,Eleni Sikelianos and Alice Notley, and is extremely grateful to each,for their work and example. Sam Taylor spent the past several yearscaretaking a wilderness refuge in the San Juan Mountains of Northern NewMexico. He is currently the Dobie Paisano Fellow at the former writingranch of J. Frank Dobie in Central Texas. His first book, Body ofthe World, is available from Ausable Press. TCTolbert is a gender-queer feminist, photographer,thinker, and poet. He received his MFA in Poetry from the University ofArizona in 2005. Right now he’s busy cultivating his favoritelife— playing with pinholes; working at Outward Bound and Eon, thequeer youth lounge; walking up hills with his companion of 7 years,Isabella the d-o-g; creating a chosen family; and writing poems in hismost excellent outdoor chair. He is also learning to do fabulous thingswith vegetables and yarn. You can peak in on him at www.tigercakes74.blogspot.com. Frank XWalker is a native of Danville, Ky., a graduate of theUniversity of Kentucky, and completed an MFA in Writing at SpaldingUniversity in May 2003. A founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, heis the editor of Eclipsing a Nappy New Millennium and the authorof three poetry collections: Black Box (Old Cove Press, 2005);Buffalo Dance: the Journey of York (University of Kentucky Press,2003), winner of the 35th Annual Lillian Smith Book Award; andAffrilachia (Old Cove Press, 2000), a Kentucky Public Librarians’Choice Award nominee. A Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Fellowshiprecipient, Walker’s poems have been converted into a stage production bythe University of Kentucky Theatre department and widely anthologized innumerous collections; including The Appalachian Journal, Limestone,Roundtable, My Brothers Keeper, Spirit and Flame: An Anthology ofContemporary African American Poetry and Role Call: AGenerational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature andArt. He is a former contributing writer and columnist for AceWeekly and has appeared on television in PBS’s GED ConnectionSeries, Writing: Getting Ideas on Paper, in In Performance Atthe Governor’s Mansion and in Living the Story: The Civil RightsMovement in Kentucky. He co-produced a video documentary, CoalBlack Voices: the History of the Affrilachian Poets, which receivedthe 2002-2003 Jesse Stuart Award presented by the Kentucky School MediaAssociation, and produced a documentary exploring the effects of 9.11 onthe arts community, KY2NYC: Art/life & 9.11. He is the recipientof the 2006 Thomas D. Clark Literary Award for Excellence, ActorsTheatre’s Keeper of the Chronicle Award and a 2005 Recipient of a LannanLiterary Fellowship in Poetry. Walker regularly teaches in writingprograms like Fishtrap in Oregon and SplitRock at the University ofMinnesota; currently serves as a Visting Professor of Writing, Rhetoricand Communication at Transylvania University and is the proud Editor andPublisher of PLUCK!, the new Journal of Affrilachian Art &Culture, due out in spring 2007. For more information, visit hiswebsite www.frankxwalker.com KarenWhalley lives in Port Angeles, Washington, where she grewup. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Washington,and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in manyliterary journals, including Harvard Review, Blue Unicorn, PassagesNorth, Bellowing Ark, and Shades. In 2001 she was therecipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award. She has taughtEnglish at Peninsula College, and currently works in Port Townsend,Washington, for the Department of Community Development, EnvironmentalHealth Division. The Rented Violin is her first book. ArisaWhite holds a MFA from the University of Massachusetts,Amherst. A recipient of the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarshipfrom the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and, in 2006, she wasawarded a writing residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Arisais a Cave Canem fellow, currently working on a manuscript inspired byNina Simone’s song “Four Women.” Her poems appear in GatheringGround: Cave Canem 10th Anniversary Reader, Meridians, Softblow,Snowvigate.com, Failbetter.com, A Gathering of Tribes and AfricanVoices and the AIDS/HIV Anthology, Fingernails Across AChalkboard.