Wally Swist’s forthcoming book, Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as a co-winner in the Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Competition, and will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in August 2012. An audiobook of 65 of his poems, Open Meadow: Odes to Nature, was released by Berkshire Media Arts in April 2012. His previous book, Luminous Dream, was selected as a finalist in the 2010 FutureCycle Poetry Book Award. The Friendship of Two New England Poets: Robert Frost and Robert Francis, a scholarly monograph, was published by The Edwin Mellen Press in 2009. His new book, Winding Paths Worn through Grass, will be published by Visual Artists Collective, of Chicago, Illinois, in early 2013. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Lowell Uda has taught English at the U. of Hawaii and the U. of Montana, and worked in Montana state government. After that, he became a United Methodist minister, pastoring churches in Colorado and Montana. His short story, The Cherry Tree, won first prize in the 2011 Common Review Short Story Prize contest. Stories and poems of his have appeared in literary and other magazines, including in The North American Review, Hawaii Review, TransPacific, and more recently in Assisi (forthcoming), 5x5, In Our Own Voice, Divide: Journal of Literature, Arts and Ideas, Poems Across the Big Sky, Moonrabbit Review, and The Other Side. He is presently at work on a memoir. Sonya Sergeyevna Deulina was born in Moscow, Russia. She immigrated to North Carolina with her family in 1994, when she was five years old, to flee religious discrimination. She earned her bachelor’s in psychology and English with a concentration in creative writing from North Carolina State University in 2012. Recently her pursuits in poetry have extended to engaging adults with mental illness in the art of creative writing and teaching a creative writing workshop through the North Carolina Art Therapy Institute. She is attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall to earn her masters in social work. For Sonya, nature has meant not only respite through hard times, but has been a constant source of inspiration and enlightenment poetically, spiritually and holistically. Daniel Robinson fought wildfires for 14 years—12 on hot shot crews and 2 as the Crew Supervisor of the Pike Hot Shots; he fought fire in 11 states and 2 Canadian provinces. His essay Fire Scenes featured in Written River comes from the experiences he had on fires as does his first novel, After the Fire [Lyons Press 2003.] In 2009 Daniel won the Clay Reynolds Novella Award for The Shadow of Violence, which was published by Texas Review Press in 2010. He is a graduate of the writing program at the University of Denver. He presently lives in Fort Collins, CO. Greg Hlavaty lives in Elon, NC where he teaches at Elon University. His essays have also appeared in Arts and Letters, Yale Anglers’ Journal, and Barrelhouse.
J.K. McDowell is an artist, poet and mystic, an Ohioan expat living in Cajun country. Always immersed in poetry, raised in Buckeye country by a mother who told of Sam I Am, Danny Deaver and Annabel Lee and a father who quoted Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam. In the last decade a deepened study of poetry and shamanism and nature has inspired a regular practice of writing poetry that blossomed into the works presented in this collection. Lately, mixing Lorca and Lovecraft, McDowell lives twenty miles north of the Gulf Coast with his soul mate who also happens to be his wife and their two beautiful companion parrots. Nina Pick is a 28-year-old writer, teacher, and translator from rural Western Massachusetts. She studied Comparative Literature as an undergraduate at NYU and a graduate student at UC Berkeley, where she studied with Lyn Hejinian and Robert Alter and read in the prestigious Holloway Poetry Series. In June she will finish a second masters degree, in Jungian-oriented Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, for which she recently completed a creative thesis on intimacy and place. Her poetry is shaped by my Zen meditation practice, long walks in the woods, authors such as Annie Dillard and Anne Carson, and my interest in myth and spiritual eco logy. Jenny Ward Angyal lives on a small organic farm in Gibsonville, NC, with her husband and one Abyssinian cat. She grew up wandering woods and fields in Connecticut and wrote her first poem at the age of five. After attending a one-room schoolhouse, she spent a number of years studying and writing about biology, and a number more teaching nonverbal children how to communicate. Now retired and braiding up the strands of her life, she can give more time to trying to communicate through poetry and to exploring the relationships between poetry and science, between psyche and Gaia. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of print and online journals including Anatomy & Etymology, Atlas Poetica, Avocet, Earthspeak, The Ghazal Page, Lynx, Magnapoets, Moonbathing, Multiverses, Pinesong, Ribbons, Tanka Splendor, and Written River. Jamie K. Reaser has a deep fondness for the wild, intimate, and unnameable. Her writing explores themes related to Nature and human nature in this magical, yet challenging, time of the Great Turning. She is the editor of the Courting the Wild Series, as well as the author of Huntley Meadows: A Naturalist’s Journal in Verse and Note to Self: Poems for Changing the World from the Inside Out. Jamie is a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers. She makes her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Basically a transient, Carol Shillibeer currently lives in Vancouver, BC. She writes, reads, blogs, thinks and works when necessary. She has been published in Other Voices, The Malahat Review, Foliate Oak, Room, Ditch Poetry and Poetry Repairs (forthcoming).