Vo l . 2 , N o . 1 Sandra Kleven is a poet, film maker, and collage artist. Her poetry and other writing has appeared in Cirque, Alaska Quarterly Review, Oklahoma Review, Topic Magazine, F-Zine and the anthology, Cold Flashes: Literary Snapshots of Alaska. She recently produced a film, “To the Moon: A Tribute to the Poet, Theodore Roethke,” which debuted at the residency of the UAA, Creative Writing MFA Program where Kleven has been a student. Simon Langham’s fiction has appeared in the South Dakota Review and Verbsap; her poetry most recently in Issue #2 of Cirque. A playwright and variety performance artist, she lives in Homer, Alaska building Alaskan yurts for cold climates. Born in Alaska, Jonna Laster currently resides in Juneau and is enrolled in the UAA low residency MFA program. Her writing has been recognized by the Whidbey Island and San Francisco Writing Conferences and Science Fiction Writers of the Earth. Her poem Beachcombing Kotzebue appeared in Issue #2 of Cirque. Janet Levin’s poems have appeared in Cirque, Ice Floe, McGuffin, Pearl, The Portland Review, The Texas Review and other journals, and were recorded live on Alaska Poetry League’s Slam Poetry CD anthology. She lives in urban Alaska (mostly) and rural Mexico. Her photos debuted in Cirque. Sara Loewen lives on Kodiak Island with her husband and two sons. She teaches at Kodiak College and spends the salmon season in Uyak Bay. Her stories have appeared in Terrain.org, Pacific Fishing Magazine, and Literary Mama. Her Anchorage Daily News columns can be found at www.saraloewen.com
117 ing in Washington on the Canadian border. His chapbook, The Grammar of Mind, was recently published by Blue & Yellow Dog Press. Mark Muro is a poet, playwright and performer. His most recent work, “Apocalypse When I Get Around To It, or Civil War III, Part 1” was recently performed at Out North Theater in Anchorage. For 10 years Mark has hosted Stagetalk, a weekly conversation about local theater, for KSKA public radio in Anchorage. His poems have appeared in Cirque. Anne Carse Nolting has published three novels. Her nonfiction articles appear in periodicals; 2003 and 2005 Holt Language Arts textbooks, and “Measuring Up To The New Jersey State Standards in English”, published by The People’s Publishing Group, Inc. Joe Nolting lives in Palmer, Alaska and is currently working on a book of essays about his 30 years teaching in Alaska. This past spring he coedited and produced the Palmer Arts Council’s poetry anthology Voices Between Mountains. His passions include education, wilderness, and the arts. Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Women’s Review of Books and other literary journals. In 2007 she received a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award to support work on her manuscript, Steam Laundry, which is forthcoming from Boreal Books in 2012. Amy Otto lives in Palmer, Alaska with four cats, loves to travel around Alaska in the summer via motorcycle, and dipnetted for reds in the Copper River for the first time this summer. Next summer’s goal is to actually catch one. Her poetry appeared in Issue #1 of Cirque.
Robert Hill Long is the author of The Kilim Dreaming (Bear Star Press) that won the 2010 Dorothy Brunsman Prize. His earlier books include The Work of the Bow and The Effigies. His poems and flash fictions have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Poetry, Web del Sol, Sentence, Del Sol Review, Manoa, Zyzzyva, and The Prose Poem.
Wayne Owen lives in Juneau, but grew up in southern Idaho. His work has taken him around the world and around the United States where he has sought to understand the nexus of nature and humanity in a variety of cultures. Wayne’s short essays in the botanical digest Lingua Botanica are collected by the National Agriculture Library.
Linda Martin lives in Homer where she and her husband Larry own and operate a glass shop--as in glass for home, boat and auto. She is currently working on an MFA in poetry through the Rainier Writers’ Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma.
Jeremy Pataky earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Southeast Review, Left Facing Bird, Square Lake, Anchorage Press, Anchorage Daily News, Cirque and on Alaska Public Radio. He is the Executive Director of the Wrangell Mountains Center.
David McElroy works on the North Slope of Alaska as a pilot but makes his home in Anchorage. A former contributor to Cirque, his poems have also appeared in numerous journals nationwide. His book of poems, Making It Simple, was published by Ecco Press. Recently he has written articles for the local Anchorage arts and culture publication F Magazine. Ron McFarland teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Idaho. His most recent books are a critical study of regional memoir, The Rockies in First Person (2008) and The Long Life of Evangeline: A History of the Longfellow Poem in Print, in Adaptation and in Popular Culture (2010). Ron’s fourth full-length volume of poems, Subtle Thieves, is slated for publication in late 2011 by Pecan Grove Press. Buffy McKay is a poet and has lived in Anchorage for about 20 years. She is of Inupiaq and Scottish descent, and has lived in both Scotland and Alaska. She has written a poetry chapbook, Salt & Roses, and her personal mission in life is “to see the world in as many ways as possible.” John McKay moved to Alaska from Michigan in 1977. He supports his poetry habit by lawyering and teaching media law as an adjunct professor at University of Alaska Anchorage. This is his second appearance in Cirque. Jason Mercer is a life-long Alaskan, and plans to keep it that way. Fairbanks poet, John Morgan has published four collections of poetry, most recently Spear-Fishing on the Chatanika: New and Selected Poems. For more information about his work, see his website at: www. johnmorganpoet.com Keith Moul’s work has appeared for more than 40 years in the US and Canada and in Britain and Australia more recently. He is retired now, liv-
Timothy Pilgrim, Montana native and associate professor of journalism at Western Washington University, has published over 80 poems in literary journals and anthologies, such as Idaho’s Poets: A Centennial Anthology (University of Idaho) and Weathered Pages: the Poetry Pole (Blue Begonia Press). See his poems at http://hope.journ.wwu.edu/ tpilgrim Shannon Huffman Polson is a writer living in Seattle, Washington and spending as much time as possible at her cabin in Denali. She has written feature articles for Seattle Magazine and Alaska Magazine, and has an essay forthcoming in TRACHODON. Deborah Poore was born in Alaska before Statehood, and grew up on her family’s homestead beside the Kenai River at Eagle Rock. Schooled as a teacher in Alaska and Massachusetts, she is retired from the classroom. She lives along Kachemak Bay in Homer, Alaska with her husband and two sons. Doug Pope is a lifelong Alaskan who writes non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. His first poem was published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner when he was a junior in high school. More recently, his poems have appeared in the anthology 50 Poems for Alaska and in Issue #1 of Cirque. He lives in Hope with his wife Beth. Susan Pope has published essays in Pilgrimage, Alaska Woman Magazine, Damselfly Press, The Southeast Review and Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment. A lifelong Alaskan, she explores wild places ranging from the woods behind her house, to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Kalahari Desert, and the dunes of Namibia. Bronx-born Peter Porco has lived in Alaska for 30 years. “Wind Blown