110 His primary focus is filmmaking and photography. He always endeavors to capture the essential image whether in still life, landscape or portrait. You can find out more about his work at: www. michaelkleven.com Jerry Kraft is a playwright, poet and journalist. He has published poetry in many journals and stashed much more in undisturbed corners of his study. He lives in Port Angeles, Washington. Carolyn Kremers lives and writes in Fairbanks, Alaska. Her books include Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup’ik Eskimo Village (a memoir), The Alaska Reader: Voices from the North (literary anthology, co-edited with Anne Hanley), and Upriver (poems). Patrick Lane is one of Canada’s preeminent poets, author of 30 books of poetry, a novel, short stories and a memoir. Visit his website at www.patricklane.ca Barbara Lee is a freelance writer who lives in Eugene, Oregon. Barbara is currently in Yellowstone National Park working as a seasonal volunteer at the park’s north edge. Charles Leggett is a professional actor based in Seattle whose recent publications include Graze Magazine, Words and Images, and Ellipsis…Literature and Art; he has work forthcoming in Palimpsest. Charles’s poetry also appeared in Cirque, Vol. 3, No. 2, for which publication he was proud to help facilitate the “Seattle Celebrates Cirque” reading at ACT Theatre in August of 2012. Kim-An Lieberman is a poet of Vietnamese and Jewish American descent, born in Rhode Island and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of Breaking the Map (Blue Begonia Press, 2008). Olga Livshin’s work has appeared in The Mad Hatters’ Review, Jacket Magazine and other journals. She lived in Anchorage, where she worked as a professor of Russian, from 2008 to 2012. Rosalie Loewen is a writer who lives in Haines, Alaska with her husband and their two daughters. For more of Rosalie’s writing, please visit http://alaskarosalie.tumblr.com A retired teacher and librarian and now a part-time editor, Marie Lundstrom is presently working toward an MFA in creative writing with emphasis on poetry at UAA. Her poems have appeared in Cirque, Braided Streams, and 50 Poems for Alaska. She was the featured local poet at Poetry Parley at Out North in September 2012, and she belongs to the poetry reading, writing and critiquing group Ten Poets. Linda Infante Lyons was raised in Anchorage and earned a degree in Biology at Whitman College, WA. She later studied painting in Chile at the Vina del Mar Fine Arts Institute. She has been painting and showing her work in Anchorage for 15 years and is part of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center’s Alaska Contemporary Artists permanent collection. She has produced murals and paintings for the 1% for Art public art program and has resided as Artist in Residence with the Alaska State Council on the Arts Artist in School program producing collaborative murals with local students and in remote Alaska villages. She currently teaches painting at the Anchorage Museum and in her studio at Magpie Artworks.
CIRQUE Brandon McElroy is the founder and director of Progressive Media Alaska, a video and multi-media production company in Anchorage. He has enjoyed the experience of spearheading several documentary projects in Alaska, especially those that are agents for positive social change such as suicide prevention in Barrow, Alaska. Working in Cuba with Dr. Jill Flanders Crosby, Brandon has overseen the academic & aesthetic media documentation of the Arará communities in Matanzas. In Alaska, he is most proud of working with the Smithsonian Institution to document oral history narratives, and traditional skills & knowledge, with Alaska Native elders from around the state. David McElroy lives in Anchorage with his wife Edith and works in the Arctic as a commercial pilot. He has been published before in Cirque, national journals, and has a book called Making It Simple. He and his family travel extensively in Alaska and the world. Pecan Grove Press published Ron McFarland’s fourth full-length book of poems, Subtle Thieves, in spring of 2012. He is currently working on a book about biographical fictions involving Ernest Hemingway as a major character. He teaches at the University of Idaho. Suzanne Miles: I began writing poetry in Peoria, Illinois, at 15; 53 years later, in Alaska’s magnificent Last Frontier, poetry is everywhere I look. Alaska is an artist’s paradise where everything seems to bear a special weight of meaning and importance. I’ve always been an artist; all that changes is the way I communicate my vision, presenting with either words or a pictorial medium. John Morgan has published four books of poetry, most recently Spear-Fishing on the Chatanika: New and Selected Poems. His collection of essays, Forms of Feeling: Poetry in Our Lives, came out earlier this year. Keith Moul has had both poetry and photos in Cirque. He’s published widely for many years, with two recent chapbooks: The Grammar of Mind (2010) from Blue & Yellow Dog Press and Beautiful Agitation (2012) from Red Ochre Press. Broken Publications will shortly release a longer work, Reconsidered Light, consisting of poems he wrote inspired by photos he took, or in some cases digital versions of his daughter Ianthe’s paintings. Keith is retired, living in rural western Washington. Mark Muro is a poet, playwright and performer who lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska. Sheila Nickerson, a former Poet Laureate of Alaska, lives in Bellingham, Washington. Her nonfiction titles include Disappearance: A Map and Midnight to the North, with a book forthcoming on the history of sledge dogs in the Arctic. Joe Nolting recently moved to Bellingham, WA, after spending the past 35 years in Alaska. He misses the Alaskan writing community, especially Ten Poets from Alaska, but is embracing the rich Bellingham literary scene. Monica O’Keefe paints both distant vistas and close-up views of the natural world, using color and detail to illustrate her feelings about the outdoors around us. Getting outdoors is very important to her artistic process, and it is while hiking that she comes up with many of her inspirations and concepts for paintings.