2017 Presenters

RALPH ADAMO has taught at Xavier since 2007. He is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Waterblind: New & Selected Poems. He won a Louisiana Endowment for the Arts (1998), National Endowment for the Arts (2003), the first Marble Faun Prize for Poetry (1997),an Open Society Institute's Katrina Media Grant (2006). He has edited New Orleans Review (1993-99),Barataria Review (1978-80),and now Xavier Review. He graduated from University of Arkansas MFA in 1974.

LYNNE BARRETT’s third story collection Magpies received the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for General Fiction. Her handbook What Editors Want is just out from Rain Chain Press, and recent work appears in Necessary Fiction, 14 Views of Miami, The Southern Women’s Review, and One Year to a Writing Life. She is editor of the Florida Book Review and teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University. www.lynnebarrett.com

MARY ANNA EVANS is a three-time Florida Book Awards bronze medalist, the recipient of the 2011 Mississippi Author Award and a 2010 writer-in-residence at The Studios of Key West. She is an MFA candidate at Rutgers University in Camden, where she will be teaching writing beginning in Fall 2014. Her Faye Longchamp mysteries have received the Benjamin Franklin Award and the Florida Literature Award. Her research interests include mathematical and science literacy. One of her current projects, a children's book for girls interested in science, ties her love of fiction, science, teaching, and kids up in a nice, neat bow.

TANYA GRAE won the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Prize, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa. She is the author of the chapbook Little Wekiva River (Five Oaks Press, 2017), and her full-length manuscript Undoll was a finalist for the 2016 Four Way Books Intro Prize and The Brittingham and Pollack Prizes. Her poems have recently appeared in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, New South, The Los Angeles Review, New Ohio Review, Barrow Street, Post Road, and elsewhere. She teaches at Florida State University while pursuing her doctorate. Find out more at:tanyagrae.com

TOM HOLMES is the editor of Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose. He is also the author of seven collections of poems, most recently The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013 and was released in October 2014. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize seven times and Best of the Net twice, and his work has appeared a number of times on Verse Daily. His current prose writing efforts about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/.

---

DIDI JACKSON's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Green Mountains Review, The Common, Café Review, and Passages North among other publications. Her manuscript,Almost Animal, was a finalist for the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize offered by Persea Books, a semi-finalist for the 2015 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Press Brittingham and Felix Pollack Prizes. Her chapbook, Slag and Fortune, was published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in 2013. She teaches at the University of Vermont. Find out more atdidijackson.com

JEFF NEWBERRY is the author of Brackish (Aldrich Press) and A Visible Sign (Finishing Line Press). With Brent House, he is the editor of The Gulf Stream:  Poems of the Gulf Coast (Snake Nation Press). He teaches writing and literature at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He was recently named a finalist for Crab Orchard Review's Richard Peterson Poetry Prize. He is currently completing his first novel. Find him online at http://www.jeffnewberry.com.

---

MICHELE PARKER RANDALL is the author of Museum of Everyday Life (Aldrich Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Potomac Review, The Newport Review, and elsewhere. A portion of her current work was a recent finalist for the Peter Meinke Poetry Prize. She is a finalist for the 2017 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. Michele teaches at Stetson University. Find out more at:micheleparkerrandall.com

JIM MILLER received his MFA from the University of South Florida. His work has been published by Midwestern Gothic, Palooka, Prime Number, Prick of the Spindle, Stymie, Alligator Juniper, Tigertail: A South Florida Annual and is forthcoming in Fiction Fix.  He is the Co-Founding editor of ĕm: A Review of Text and Image and Graphic Nonfiction editor for Sweet: a Literary Confection.  You can visit his website at http://www.miller580.com.

KATHERINE RIEGEL is the author of two books of poetry: What the Mouth Was Made Forand Castaway. Her book of short essays, Letters to Colin Firth, won the 2015 Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at various places, most recently the University of South Florida. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Brevity, Crazyhorse, Mead, The Offing, and The Rumpus. She is co-founder and poetry editor for Sweet: A Literary Confection.

---

STEPHEN CAMPBELL  is a sophomore at the University of Alabama. Currently studying film production and criticism, he's working with Slash Pine Press to explore alternate styles of narrative story telling. He has previously written for the Games Learning Society conference in Madison.

CARRIE CHAPPELL's work has previously appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Bateau Press, Buried Letter Press, DIG Baton Rouge, and The Offending Adam. She lives in New Orleans, where she is studying poetry in the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. She currently serves as Associate Editor for Bayou Magazine.

JEN COLLINS, aka Ryder Collins, teaches at Auburn University. Her work is published or forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Monkeybicycle, Dogzplot, DIAGRAM, shady side review, and Juked among others. She has a chapbook, Orpheus on toast, forthcoming from Imaginary Friend Press.

MICHAEL COLONA is a graduate student at the University of West Florida, where he has received the Laurie O’Brien creative writing awards for graduate poetry, graduate fiction, and graduate nonfiction, respectively. His work has appeared in Qualia, No Cure For That, and the Troubadour. He was the 2011 recipient of the GCACWT award for graduate nonfiction. He teaches literature and composition and is working on his thesis, a novella based loosely on his experience as an infantryman in the 3rd Ranger Battalion.

P.S. DEAN is a third year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Mississippi. His poems have appeared in Palooka, Mary Journal, and Burnt Bridge. He lives in New Orleans with his wife.

ERICA DEVEER is from Mobile, Alabama. She is a graduating senior from Louisiana State University, receiving a Bachelor's degree in English (creative writing) with minors in French and history. She plans to attend an MFA program for creative writing in the fall.

SARAH DUFFYs poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry and the anthology Fire in the Pasture.

JOHN HENRY FLEMING teaches at USF and is the author of Fearsome Creatures of Florida, The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman, and stories in McSweeney’s, Quarterly Concern, North American Review, and  Mississippi Review.  He is advisory editor of Saw Palm.

MATT FORSYTHE teaches at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. He received his PhD from the University of Georgia, where he spent time as the Graduate Assistant at The Georgia Review. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Mid-American Review, and scholarship is forthcoming in the collection War and Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway's Early Life and Writings.

KAREN HOLLINGSWORTH GARDINER is Director of the First-year Writing Program at The University of Alabama, where she teaches composition. A native Alabamian, she cut her teeth on front-porch stories. Her poem "Fool's Puzzle," about domestic abuse and her grandmother's quilts, was recently published in The Artist as Activist in Appalachia (U Press of North Georgia). Besides having a hankering for wordcraft, she is also a photography enthusiast and sees the visual as just another way to tell a story.

MARY JANE RYALS has written a short story collection A Messy Job. She won the YellowJacket chapbook contest with Music in Arabic. She also has a collection of poetry, The Moving Waters, a textbook, Getting into the Intercultural Groove, and a novel, Cookie and Me, forthcoming in October, 2010. She also edited the poetry anthology North of Wakulla, and is fiction editor of Apalachee Review. She teaches Business Communication at Florida State University.

BLAKE GERARD teaches creative writing and literature at Auburn University at Montgomery.

ZACHARY J. GEORGE lives and writes in New Orleans. He has taught ESL in South Korea and Prague. His stories appeared regularly in Faiyo Magazine, and he has a story forthcoming in the fall issue of Inkwell Journal.

SANDRA GILES is a professor at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia, and a graduate of Florida State University''s creative writing program. She writes creative nonfiction (memoir, true crime), fiction (literary, literary/genre), and articles on writing pedagogy. She has published in a number of journals and anthologies and enjoys conferences at beach locations.

RICHARD GOODMAN is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France, The Soul of Creative Writing and A New York Memoir. His essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Creative Nonfiction, Ascent, River Teeth, Louisville Review and French Review, among others. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Orleans.

ROBERT GRAY  is the author of two books of poems, DREW: Poems from Blue Water and I Wish That I Were Langston Hughes. He has taught at several universities and is currently at the University of South Alabama.

ANYA GRONER's writing has appeared in journals including Juked, Ninth Letter, Story South, and The Rumpus. She received her MFA from the University of Mississippi where she was awarded a John and Renee Grisham fellowship in fiction. Currently she lives in New Orleans and teaches at Xavier University of Louisiana.

BRENT HOUSE, a contributing editor for The Tusculum Review and, along with Jeff Newberry, an editor for The Gulf Stream: Poems of the Gulf Coast (Snake Nation Press, 2013), is a native of Necaise, Mississippi, where he raised cattle and watermelons on his family’s farm. Slash Pine Press published his first collection, The Saw Year Prophecies (2010). His poems have appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, and Third Coast. New poems are forthcoming from The Kenyon Review and elsewhere.

BARB JOHNSON teaches fiction writing in the MFA program at UNO. She is the author of More of This World or Maybe Another, winner of the ALA’s Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and recipient of AROHO’s Gift of Freedom Award. Recent work has appeared in, among others, Oxford American, Guernica, Washington Square and Glimmer Train Stories.

MICHAEL TRAMMELL edits the Apalachee Review and teaches business writing at FSU. His chapbook Our Keen Blue House won the 2008 YellowJacket Press Chapbook Competition. In the summers he teaches for FSU at the Valencia, Spain campus. His work has appeared in New Letters, Poet Lore, Chattahoochee Review, the G.W. Review and other journals.

CAROLINE KLOCKSIEM's chapbook, Circumstances of the House and Moon, is available from Dancing Girl Press, and her poems have appeared in such journals as The Iowa Review; Hayden’s Ferry Review; CutBank; The Pinch; BlazeVox; H_NGM_N; Super Arrow; and others. She is a Swarthout Award and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship recipient. She lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

JOANNA LEAKE is a professor at UNO, where she directed their MFA program for fifteen years and is the editor of Bayou magazine.  Her  novel,  A Few Days in Weasel Creek, was a CBS television movie; she’s written several screenplays and co-authored two textbooks.

2017 Keynote Speakers

This year's keynote co-presenters will be Terri Carrión and Michael Rothenberg, editors at Big Bridge Press and co-founders of 100,000 Poets for Change.

Terri Carrión was conceived in Venezuela and born in New York to a Galician mother and Cuban father. She earned her MFA from Florida International University. Her poetry, fiction, non-fiction and photography have been published in various countries in many print magazines as well as online, including The Cream City Review, Hanging Loose, Pearl, Penumbra, Exquisite Corpse, Mangrove, Kick Ass Review, Exquisite Corpse, Jack, Mipoesia, Dead Drunk Dublin, and Physik Garden among others. Her chapbook Lazy Tongue was published by D Press in the summer of 2007. Her translation projects include the translation with Carmen Gloria Berrios, of the project “Poetry in Transit”, a citywide, visual poetry exhibit in public spaces in Santiago, Chile.

Michael Rothenberg's most recent books of poetry include Sapodilla (Editions du Cygne, Paris, France) and Drawing The Shade (Dos Madres Press). A bi-lingual edition of Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story and the journal collection Tally Ho and the Cowboy Dream/The Real and False Journals: Book 5 will be published by Varasek Ediciones (Madrid, Spain) in 2017. An Arabic edition of Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story is due out from Sefsafa Publishing House.

Past Presenters

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and author of the poetry collection, A Lesson in Smallness. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as Blackbird, Blue Mesa Review, Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, Five Chapters, Hayden’s Ferry, Hunger Mountain, Kenyon Review Online, Valapariso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and an anthology of stories by women writers from Alabama, Belles’ Letters 2. She is fiction editor for DIAGRAM and an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham.

---

Daren Dean is the author of the novel Far Beyond the Pale. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL (men’s fiction), The Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Oklahoma Review, Midwestern Gothic, Fiction Southeast, Missouri Life, Ecotone, Image, The Chattahoochee Review, StorySouth, and others. FBTP was recently reviewed in The Huffington Post. Also, see his interview on the Ploughshares blog. His story "Bring Your Sorrow Over Here" was selected as Runner-up in Yemassee's William Richey Short Fiction contest by Judge George Singleton. Another story, "Affliction," was a Finalist in the Glimmer Train Short Fiction Contest for New Writers. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. In addition, he worked in scholarly publishing in the acquisitions and marketing departments at the University of Missouri Press. He has been teaching creative writing, composition, and literature at LSU since 2012.

---

Peter Huggins is the author of five collections of poetry, AUDUBON'S ENGRAVER, SOUTH, shortlisted for the International Rubery Award, NECESSARY ACTS, BLUE ANGELS, and HARD FACTS, and he has been awarded an Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. He is also the author of a picture book, TROSCLAIR AND THE ALLIGATOR, which has appeared on the PBS show BETWEEN THE LIONS, and a middle grade novel, IN THE COMPANY OF OWLS. He teaches in the English Department at Auburn University. http://www.phuggins.com/
​

---

FREDRICK BARTON directs the MFA program at UNO and is the author of the book of essays Rowing to Sweden and the novels The El Cholo Feeling Passes, Courting Pandemonium, With Extreme Prejudice and A House Divided, which won the William Faulkner Prize. His short stories have been included in the anthologies Something in Common, Above Ground and Louisiana in Words. The New Orleans Press Club has awarded him the Alex Waller Memorial Prize, its highest honor, and its first place for criticism eleven times. His other awards include a Louisiana Division of the Arts award in literature and the Stephen T. Victory Award, the Louisiana Bar Association's award for feature writing about legal issues.

RANDY BATES's credits include a book of nonfiction, Rings: On the Life and Family of a Southern Fighter (FSG), a poetry chapbook, Dolphin Island (Finishing Line Press), and fellowships from the NEA and the Louisiana Arts Council. He has work just out or forthcoming in the Apalachee Review and the Chattahoochee Review and publications in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Grand Street, the Southern Review, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. He teaches at the University of New Orleans, where he is nonfiction editor of Bayou Magazine.

ERIN E. CAMPBELL is an associate professor of English, Honors, and Rural Studies at Abraham Baldwin College in south Georgia.  She is a native of Florida’s Gulf Coast to which she returns regularly to the delight of both her muse and her husband and children.  She has published most recently in 
Pegasus, Apalachee Review, and Hobble Creek Review.

KEVIN BROWN: Besides his novel, The Running Horse of Santa Teresa, Kevin Brown’s work can be found in Oxford American and the anthology Literary Austin. Heteaches at the University of Alabama, where he coordinates the Barbed Wire Reading Series, which features English department instructors.

STEELE CAMPBELL left his frozen Idaho mountain town for the culture and literature of the South and is  completing his graduate thesis at Auburn University on the fiction of Marilynne Robinson.

KARISSA WOMACK is an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of South Florida. Her flash fiction has appeared in The Citron Review. She is the Managing Editor for Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art and the Interview Editor for Sweet: A Literary Confection.

---

Gerry Wilson A seventh-generation Mississippian, Gerry grew up in the red clay hills of the north in the household with her maternal grandmother, a terrific storyteller. An only child, Gerry spent quiet hours immersed in the worlds of books and her own imagination.Gerry is the author of Crosscurrents and Other Stories (Press 53, 2015) and a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship for 2015.

---

C.D. MITCHELL is the author of two story collections, God's Naked Will and Alligator Stew, recently released by Southern Yellow Pine Publishing. He has an MFA in creative writing with concentrations in fiction and creative nonfiction. He resides in northeast Arkansas.

DAVID MOODY, when not seeking cursed Aztec gold, writes out of Tallahassee, FL, attends FSU for his PhD pursuit, and is assistant editor for Juked Magazine. He has also edited and worked with Florida Review, Southeast Review, and Saw Palm.

JIM MURPHY teaches creative writing at the University of Montevallo (AL), where he also serves as co-director of the Montevallo Literary Festival. He is the author of two poetry books, The Memphis Sun (Kent State UP) and Heaven Overland (Kennesaw State UP), and has translated poet Colombian American poet Juan Carlos Galeano's collection Amazonia from Spanish.

CHAD FARIES is the author of two collections of poetry, The Border Will Be Soon and The Book of Knowledge, and a memoir, Drive Me Out of My Mind. A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, he lived and taught in Central Europe for many years. Currently he is an associate professor at Savannah State University, where he also hosts a radio program on WHCJ 90.3. When not in Thunderbolt, Georgia, Faries gets lost on his motorcycle whenever he can. Above all, he is a "Yooper"—a native of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

JANET NODAR: After finishing a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama and teaching English there, Janet Nodar fled the ‘adjunct trap’ in 2006 to become a freelance writer. She is now a reporter covering the maritime trade. She has published short stories in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Stories from the Blue Moon Café and elsewhere, and she is writing a novel.

BRIAN OLIOU is originally from New Jersey AND currently teaches at the University of Alabama. His collection of Tuscaloosa Missed Connections So You Know It's Me was released by Tiny Hardcore Press. His series of lyric essays about videogame boss battles, Level End, was released by Origami Zoo Press.

P.T. PAUL received her B.A. from the University of Montevallo in 2007 and her M.A. from the University of South Alabama in 2009. Her thesis "Southerner" represented the University of South Alabama College of Arts and Sciences in the Coastal Graduate Schools Masters Thesis Competition and won the USA College of Arts and Sciences Masters Thesis Award in 2011. "Southerner" was published as To Live & Write in Dixie by Negative Capability Press in 2010. P.T. is president of the Pensters Writing Group, which has over 100 members and is celebrating its 48th year in Fairhope.

ALEX PERRY is a student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

MICHAEL PIAFSKY is an associate professor and the director of creative writing at Spring Hill College in Alabama. The Missouri native earned an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Missouri. A former editor of the Missouri Review, Piafsky has published fiction and nonfiction in journals such as Meridian, Epic, and Bar Stories, among others, and an excerpt from All the Happiness You Deserve, his first novel, was published by the Jabberwock Review and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

AMY RIDDELL is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Florida State College in Niceville, where she teaches freshman composition and serves as poetry editor for the college’s in-house literary magazine, Blackwater Review. Her chapbook, Narcissistic Injury, was recently published by Pudding House,

BETH RODGERS teaches Composition at both the University of West Florida and at Pensacola State College in Pensacola, Florida. She earned her M.A. English from UWF in 2012 where she received the Laurie O’Brien Award for both Graduate Fiction and Graduate Non-Fiction (2011). Her work has been published in The Troubadour, Emerald Coast Review, and Pensacola Downtown Crowd. Rodgers graduated from the University of Nebraska-Omaha in 1980 (B.A. English & B.S. Secondary Education) where she was selected for the Nebraska Writer’s Workshop. During her high school teaching career, she specialized in teaching both creative and academic writing to students at all levels of development and was nominated to Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers (2000, 2001, 2003). Her current writing projects include completing an e-book of instruction in the electronic method of research paper writing that she designed for her students (ENC4ENC); finishing a collection of non-fiction short stories entitled Jim Bob’s Girl; and undertaking the post-graduate Publishing and Editing certification program at Florida State University in 2014.

ROXY SEAY is a Tallahassee, Florida native currently attending the University of New Orleans MFA program with a focus in poetry. She received her bachelors in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She's an editor for the UNO journal, Ellipsis; an organizer for Gold Room, a monthly UNO MFA reading series; and is a reader for Quaint Magazine. She's a self-proclaimed, high-functioning procrastinator who spends too much time watching RuPaul's Drag Race, thinking about how huge the universe is, and hanging out in coffee shops or dive bars.

VICKI HENDRICKS is the author of erotic crime novels Miami Purity, Iguana Love, Voluntary Madness, Sky Blues, and Cruel Poetry, the latter a finalist for an Edgar Award in 2008. Her short stories appear in publications ranging from The Mississippi Review to Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica 2000 to Otto Penzler’s Murder for Revenge. A complete collection of her short fiction, Florida Gothic Stories, was published in 2010. Hendricks lives in Hollywood, Florida, and teaches writing at Broward College. Her plots and settings reflect participation in adventure sports, such as skydiving and scuba, and knowledge of the Florida environment. Love of animals, apparent in her earlier novels, comes to the forefront in Fur People, her most recent novel.

BEN SHIELDS recently completed his MFA at UNO, but he landscapes and cooks dinner for his wife more than anything else. He does not have any writing accomplishments yet, or a cat. Soon he hopes he will have both.

LAURA SMITH is an undergraduate student majoring in Creative Writing at Louisiana State University.  She is graduating in May 2010, and she grew up in Fairhope.

CARRIE SPELL has published her fiction in Mississippi Review, McSweeney's, Beloit Fiction Journal, Georgetown Review, Gulf Stream, Center, and in many other magazines and journals. She's also, at various times, served as Assistant Editor or Guest Editor of Mississippi Review, Pindeldyboz, and Opium Magazine. She has her PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers, and she currently teaches writing and literature courses at Auburn University.

CLAIRE STEPHENS is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the University of South Florida. Her thesis, currently under construction, is a graphic novel. She likes gummy bears, science fiction, and English breakfast tea, but doesn't care for grits. In the case that reincarnation is the upshot, she'd like to come back as a redwood, and failing that, a basset hound. Her poetry and graphic poetry has been published in Prick of the Spindle and The Bad Penny Review.

JENNIFER STEWART is a 2006 graduate of UNO's Low-Residency MFA in poetry. She currently works for the Low-Residency Program as the Coordinator of the Study Abroad Programs in Writing. She earned her undergraduate degree, a BA in History and English, at Emory & Henry College in 2001. Publications include Florida English, Sentence, Poets' Corner -Fieralingue, Exquisite Corpse, and Big Bridge.

JASON STUART is the editor & publisher of Burnt Bridge, an independent literary magazine and micropress (www.BurntBridge.net). His first novel, Raise a Holler (Crimedog Books), is available now. His stories and essays have recently appeared in Frontier Tales, Plots With Guns, Underground Voices, and Fried Chicken & Coffee. He also serves as the Director of Academics for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Mobile, Biloxi, & New Orleans campuses. www.JasonStuart.net

RANDOLPH THOMAS’s collection of short stories, Dispensations, won the MVP Award from New Rivers Press and is forthcoming in October 2014. His short fiction has won the Glimmer Train Stories Family Matters contest, Blue Mesa Review fiction prize, the John Gardner Memorial Fiction Award, and the Florida Review Editors’ Prize, and has also appeared in The Hudson Review, Southwest Review, Arts and Letters, Washington Square Review, Harpur Palate, and other journals. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Witness, Quarterly West, and Greensboro Review, among others. He has received state artist grants for writers from the Arkansas Arts Council and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. He holds an MFA degree from the University of Arkansas and teaches at Louisiana State University.

JEANIE THOMPSON has published four collections of poetry, White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems, Witness, How to Enter the River, and her most recent: The Seasons Bear Us.  Jeanie holds the MFA from the University of Alabama, where she was founding editor of the literary journal Black Warrior Review. Jeanie has twice been awarded an Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Since 1993, Jeanie has directed the award-winning Alabama Writers' Forum, a statewide literary arts organization in Montgomery. She also teaches part-time in the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Writing Program in Louisville, KY. 

CHRIS TUSA holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Florida. His debut novel, Dirty Little Angels, was published by The University of West Alabama in March of 2009. His debut collection of poems, Haunted Bones, was published by Louisiana Literature Press in 2006.

LAURA VALERI is the author of The Kind of Things Saints Do (U of Iowa Press) winner of the John Simmons and John Gardner Fiction Awards.  Her stories, poems and essays appear in Glimmer Train, Creative Nonfiction, Night Train, Adirondack Review, Big Bridge, Fiction Writers Review and others. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University.

PATTI WHITE teaches creative writing and American literature at The University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa.  She has two collections of poetry, Tackle Box (2002) and Yellow Jackets (2007), both from Anhinga Press.  And she is co-editor of Slash Pine Press, a new press dedicated to limited-run chapbooks and offbeat poetry events (www.slashpinepress.com).

BARBARA WIEDERMANN, professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Auburn University Montgomery, is the author of a critical study entitled Josephine Herbst’s Short Fiction: A Window to Her Life and Times (Susquehanna University Press). Her poems have appeared in Kaleidoscope, Blueline, Kerf, Feminist Studies, Paper Street, Acorn, and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks:  Half-Life of Love  (2008) and Sometime in October (2010), both published by Finishing Line Press.  In the spring of 2010, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

P.J. WILLIAMS  taught high school English in North Carolina for three years before moving to Tuscaloosa, where he is now enrolled in the MFA program at The University of Alabama. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Salamander, Crab Creek Review, Four Way Review, Nashville Review, and others. He is lead editor and co-founder of Utter.