Contributor Notes

Fall 2010

 

 

William L. Alton was born November 5, 1969 and started writing in the Eighties while incarcerated in a psychiatric prison. Since then his work has appeared in Main Channel Voices, World Audience and Breadcrumb Scabs among others. He has published one book titled Heroes of Silence. He earned both his BA and MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon where he continues to live with his wife and sons.

Cynthia Atkins' first collection was recently reviewed in BigCityLit by Philip Miller. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in BigCityLit, Cold Mountain Review, Harpur Palate, Descant, Gingko Tree Review, Eclipse and Valparaiso Review. She is an adjunct professor of creative writing and literature at Roanoke College, and lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, VA with her family & critters!

Patricia Brody's first poetry collection, American Desire, was selected by Finishing Line Books for a 2009 New Women's Voices Award. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Western Humanities Review, Barrow Street, The Paris Review, and on Poetry Daily, as well as the academic journals, Psychoanalytic Perspectives and Junctures, and in the anthology Chance of a Ghost. Her second collection, Dangerous to Know, is due out from Salmon (Ireland) in 2012.

Awards include two Pushcart nominations; English Speaking Union of New York, 1st Prize for a poem; Jack Zucker Memorial Prize and two Academy of American Poets prizes. Brody works as a family therapist in NYC and has taught American Literature at Boricua College in Harlem.

She would like to revive Survival of the Soul: Artists Living with Illness, an anthology of contemporary poems, prose and art.

Marion Brown, who lives with her husband in Yonkers, New York, writes reviews as well as poems that have appeared in Barrow Street, DIAGRAM, BigCityLit, The Same, Main Street Rag, Sotto Voce, Pinyon, and Kestrel. She earned a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, taught expository writing, and worked on Wall Street.

Author Talia Carner's heart-wrenching suspense novels, Puppet Child and China Doll, were hailed for exposing society's ills. Her next novel, Jerusalem Maiden, depicting a woman's struggle for self-expression against her society's religious dictates will be published by HarperCollins in June 2011. Carner's award-winning personal essays appeared in The New York Times, Chocolate For Women anthologies (Simon & Schuster), Cup of Comfort (Adams Media) and The Best Jewish Writing 2003 (John Wiley & Son). Her short stories were published in literary magazines such as Midstream, Lynx Eye, River Sedge, Moxie, Lilith, Rosebud, Confrontation and North Atlantic Review. An excerpt from Jerusalem Maiden is now short-listed as a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Short Prose Award and will appear in The Best New Writing 2011.

Evelyn Duncan's poems have appeared in BigCityLit, Cedar Key Poets, The Comstock Review, Phoebe (SUNY at Oneonta), Poem, Satire Newsletter, The New Yorker (as Evelyn Dorr), and The Second Word Thursdays Anthology. In 2008 Bright Hill Press published a chapbook of her poems, Picking Up.

Graham Duncan's poems have been published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies, including BigCityLit, Best of Wind, Blueline, Chance of a Ghost, Don't Leave Hungry, Pegasus, Pivot, Rattle, The Anthology of Magazine Verse, and The Same. He has two chapbooks: The Map Reader and Stone Circles. In 2002 Bright Hill Press published Every Infant's Blood: New and Selected Poems.

Patricia Eakins is the author of The Hungry Girls and Other Stories and The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste (a novel) which won both the NYU Press Prize for Fiction and the Capricorn Fiction Award of the Writer's Voice. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Parnassus, Conjunctions, and The Paris Review, which awarded her the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

Eakins has been awarded two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, one from NYFA, one from CAPS, and the Charles Angoff Award from The Literary Review. She was a 2010 honoree of the Uptown Art Stroll for her excellence as curator of the Sunday Best Reading series in Northern Manhattan.

In 1997, The Hungry Girls was made into a work of theatre by the performance ensemble Collision Theory, which later commissioned Eakins to write the texts and lyrics for Portrait (with horse and other). These texts appear in the Artist in Wartime Issue of Fiction International under the title "What Remained."

Eakins is the subject of Reading Patricia Eakins, a book of critical studies of her work edited by Françoise Palleau, who has also translated The Hungry Girls into French. Les Affamées is forthcoming in November 2010 from the University of Grenoble Press.

Robert Klein Engler lives in Des Plaines, Illinois and sometimes New Orleans. Many of Robert's poems and stories are set in the Crescent City. His long poem, The Accomplishment of Metaphor and the Necessity of Suffering, set partially in New Orleans, is published by Headwaters Press, Medusa, New York, 2004. He has received an Illinois Arts Council award for his "Three Poems for Kabbalah." If you google his name, then you may find his work on the Internet. Some of his books are available at Lulu.com. Visit him on the web at RobertKleinEngler.com.

Allen C. Fischer, former director of marketing for a nationwide corporation, brings to poetry a background in business. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Same and previously in BigCityLit.

David Francis has produced two albums of songs and one of poetry. In 2008 BigCityLit published his article "Utterance and Hum: The Difference Between Poem and Song." Currently David is recording a new album in England for Monochrome Records. www.davidfrancismusic.com

Wilda Gallagher is a "semi-formalist" poet, editor and musician currently working as publications manager at Brooklyn College/CUNY's School of Education. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and studied flute performance at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music prior to moving to the Hudson Valley. Although she admires the passion and immediacy of good free verse, her commitment is to embodying that passion in a form that incorporates the rhythm of music and the richness of the English language.

After a first career in mathematics, JoAnne Growney returned to poetry. Her latest collection, Red Has No Reason, is available (2010) from Plain View Press. Growney promotes math-poetry connections via a blog at http://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com. She teaches an ongoing poetry workshop at a neighborhood wellness and recovery drop-in center.

Joanne Grumet has always been fascinated with language and started her career as a dictionary editor at Funk and Wagnalls and later at Random House. She served as editor of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, North American Chapter. She taught linguistics at New York University and is now teaching writing at Baruch College. Her poetry has been published in BigCityLit and her songs can be heard at www.myspace.com/joannegrumet.

Patrick Henry: Born 1938, Yorkshire, England, Irish parentage. Customs Officer London, Royal Airforce Draftee, Cyprus, 1957-59. Wrote poetry in London, Paris, Cornwall; worked construction, farming, factory, café, bookshop jobs. Published On the Track, Peterloo Poets 1971. Published translations of Fruits of Winter, Prix Goncourt, 1970 and Women of The Celts, Cremonesi, 1975. Adult student at University of Wales, University of East Anglia, Trinity College, Hartford Connecticut during 1980s. Painting exhibition Paris, 1998. Poetry Reading Tour in New York 2001 arranged by BigCityLit. Painting Exhibition, Australia, 2003. Poetry Reading and Painting Exhibition tour New York State, 2004, arranged by The Author's Watermark and Poets & Writers. Poetry and prose featured in BigCityLit and in www.thisisull.com (UK website), 2001-2007. He is a contributing editor of the magazine.

R. Nemo Hill is the author of an illustrated novel in collaboration with painter Jeanne Hedstrom, Pilgrim's Feather (Quantuck Lane Press, 2002), a narrative poem based upon a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus Press, 2004), and a chapbook, Prolegomena To An Essay On Satire (Modern Metrics, 2006). Editor of Exot Books (www.exot.typepad.com/exotbooks), his poetry and fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including Poetry, Smartish Pace, Sulfur, Ditch, Umbrella, BigCityLit, Chimaera, Shit Creek Review, and American Arts Quarterly. He lives in New York City, but travels frequently to Southeast Asia. His travel blog, Elsewhere, can be accessed at www.rnemohill.typepad.com.

Caroline Holme is a Connecticut native who works as a copyeditor for a day job.

Kate Irving's poems have previously appeared in BigCityLit, Press 1, qaartsiluni, and recordings have aired on WBAI. A songwriter and studio singer — TV & radio jingles, movie themes, and records — she is a serious cook and a native New Yorker.

Helen Ivory was born in 1969 and lives in Norwich, England. Her third Bloodaxe Books collection is The Breakfast Machine (2010). She is an editor for The Poetry Archive and Deputy Editor for the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears http://ink-sweat-and-tears.blogharbor.com/ She is currently working towards a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia and in her spare time she makes shadow boxes.

Steve Koenig is a poet, journalist, educator, activist, and editor of AcousticLevitation.org: A Journal of Arts, Music and Culture. His collaborations with improvising musicians and Mexican painters will be published in book form and on disc in early 2011.

Dean Kostos's books include: Last Supper of the Senses, The Sentence That Ends with a Comma (required reading at Duke University), and Celestial Rust. He co-edited Mama's Boy and edited Pomegranate Seeds. His poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Boulevard, Southwest Review, Chelsea, Stand Magazine, on Oprah Winfrey's Web site Oxygen.com, and elsewhere. He teaches at The City University of New York, Wesleyan, and has served as literary judge for Columbia University's Gold Crown Awards.

Richard Levine, runner-up for the 2010 William Stafford Award for Poetry, is the author of That Country's Soul, A Language Full of Wars and Songs, and Snapshots from a Battle. A retired NYC teacher, he is learning to steward a sustainable forest: "Planting trees is a lot like teaching: you don't often get to see the long range results of the effort you put in each day, you just have to believe in what you're doing."

Rebecca Lucente graduated UConn in 2003 with a BA in English, Concentration in Creative Writing. She lived in Miami for four years where she wrote for MiamiBeach411.com and was published in the Miami New Times. She recently moved back to the shoreline of Connecticut and began freelancing for the New Haven Advocate and Yourtango.com. She is the assistant editor of PoeticMindset.com., and has published poetry in a number of literary magazines and poetry websites. Also, she is wildly impulsive.

Brant Lyon writes poetry, prose, and music. He hosts his monthly reading series, Hydrogen Jukebox, in New York City, where music and poetry are detonated together in improvisational explosions. His collaborative "poemusic" has been recorded on the CD, Brant Lyon & Friends: Beauty Keeps Laying Its Sharp Knife Against Me, and his poetry and short fiction have most recently appeared in Ganymede, Danse Macabre, and several anthologies. He co-edits Uphook Press, and is currently co-editing an anthology representing New York City poets for Spiny Babbler (Nepal).

Elisabeth Marsh was trained as a sculptor in Paris and New York. For information contact Elisabeth Marsh at: emarsh75@gmail.com.

Quitman Marshall grew up in South Carolina, moved to Barcelona, then D.C., Amherst, New York City, and Paris. For most of the 1990's, he coordinated literary events at Charleston's Spoleto Festival. In 1996, he won P&W's Writers' Exchange Award. His chapbooks include The Birth Gift, 14th Street, and The Slow Comet. His manuscripts-in-process are currently What Made Us (poems), Swampspirit (narrative), and The Bloody Point (novel). Since 2001, teaching in public schools and the local university, he has lived in Beaufort, SC, with his wife, Martine, and their children.

Stephen Massimilla is a poet, literary critic, and painter. His books and poems have won the Sonia Raiziss-Giop Bordighera Book Prize, the Grolier Poetry Prize, a Van Renssalaer Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and two Pushcart nominations. He has new work appearing or forthcoming in AGNI, Anemone Sidecar, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Review, The Cape Rock, Confrontation, Denver Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, The Hurricane Review, Karamu, Minnetonka Review, Natural Bridge, The Paterson Literary Review, Ping Pong, Poem, Quarterly West, Quiddity, Storyscape Journal, The Tusculum Review, Verse Daily and many other journals and anthologies. He received an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University, where he now teaches classics and modernist literature.

Philip Miller, a contributing editor to BigCityLit and editor of The Same, has new work scheduled in Barrow Street and the New Mexico Review and in his most recent book, due out later this year or early 2011, The Ghost of Every Day, Spartan Press.

Karen Neuberg lives in Brooklyn and West Hurley, NY. Her chapbook, Detailed Still was published in 2009 by Poets Wear Prada Press. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Columbia Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Mannequin Envy, and Switched-on-Gutenberg, among others. She's a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, holds an MFA from the New School and is associate editor at Inertia Magazine. Visit her on the web at http://www.karenneuberg.blogspot.com.

eve packer, Bronx-born, poet/performer: author of 2 books, skulls head samba & playland poems 1994-2004 (Fly By Night Press), & 4 poetry/jazz CDs with saxophonist Noah Howard. From Donald Hall: "I salute her as the Weegee poet," and from Dennis Duggan, Newsday, "...smokey & sexy in a way that makes you think of love."

Lynn Patmalnee studied at the Writer's Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and received her BA in English from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her work has appeared in The Berkeley Poetry Review, BigCityLit, Blood Orange Review, The Dirty Napkin, Neon, The Orange Room Review, The Same and Spindle Magazine, among others. A born and bred Jersey Girl, she is living her lifelong dream of having a Tilt-A-Whirl in her backyard in Keansburg, NJ. As Lynn Crystal, she hosts the long-running Carnival of Song radio show on WFDU-FM in Teaneck, NJ.

Jo Pitkin earned an MFA from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She is the author of The Measure (Finishing Line Press), and her poems have been published in Ironwood, Quarterly West, Nimrod, Little Star, Stone Canoe, Connecticut River Review, Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, In the Black/In the Red: Poems About Profit and Loss, Poets for Living Waters, and other journals and anthologies. She is currently editing Lost Orchard: Prose and Poetry from the Kirkland College Community.

Ron Price teaches at the Juilliard School. He's the author of Surviving Brothers, A Crucible for the Left Hand; and A Small Song Called Ash from the Fire was recently translated into French — it is, alas, bereft of a publisher.

Ryan graduated from the writing program at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2006. He is currently working on a novel, a collection of poems, and a comic book. His stories, "Klingon Love," and "An Android in Egypt," appeared in Spectrum magazine, one of the west coast's oldest university literary journals. His recent story, "Andrea Doria," appeared in The Dirty Napkin. He splits his time between Los Angeles and Brooklyn, where he tries not to feel like too much of an L- train writer cliché.

Kryssa Schemmerling holds an MFA in filmmaking from Columbia University. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in 2River View, BigCityLit, and The Same. Her chapbook, Iris in, was a finalist in both the 2010 Slapering Hol Press and Black River chapbook contests. She teaches screenwriting at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn.

Hilary Sideris is the author of two chapbooks, The Orange Juice Is Over (Finishing Line Press) and Baby (Pudding House Press). Her poems have recently appeared in Brooklyn Review, Confrontation, and Barrow Street.

Ian C. Smith's work has appeared in The Best Australian Poetry, Descant, Island, Magma, The Malahat Review, Southerly, and Westerly. His latest book is Lost Language of the Heart, Ginninderra (Adelaide). He lives in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, Australia.

Raleigh Thompson is a songwriter, composer, poet, and artist. Her publications include work in Three Mile Harbor and BigCityLit. A sample of her music can be heard on CD BABY.

Barry Wallenstein is the author of six collections of poetry, the most recent being Tony's World, (Birch Brook Press 2010). His poetry has appeared in over 100 journals, including Ploughshares, The Nation, Centennial Review, and American Poetry Review.

Among his awards are the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Prize, (1985), a resident fellowship to The MacDowell Colony (1995), and to Hawthornden Castle in Scotland (1999). Since 2003 he has had an annual residencies at Le Monastère in Saorge, France, where he also presents workshops at local schools. Over these years he has given readings in London, Dublin, Cape Town, Prague, Paris and Nice.

A special interest of his is presenting poetry readings in collaboration with jazz. He has made six recordings of his poetry with jazz, the most recent being Euphoria Ripens [Cadence Jazz Records CJR 1210, May 2008]. The CD was listed one of the "Best New Releases" in the journal, All About Jazz (December 2008).

He is an Emeritus Professor of literature and creative writing at the City University of New York and an editor of the journal, American Book Review.

As a Professor of English at City College he founded and directed the Poetry Outreach Center, and for 35 years coordinated the city-wide Annual Spring Poetry Festival.

Carolyn L. Whittle earned an MA in English from the University of Chicago and MBA from Columbia University. A former college teacher, environmentalist, legislator, and officer of a global bank, she writes poetry, fiction, and screenplays to prevent her left brain from taking over. She is author of two books: Conversations with the Squid (poetry collection), All Rivers Press, 2008, and A Trip to the Yosemite by Caroline G. Vander Burgh, ed. by Carolyn Lansden Whittle, Yosemite Association Press, 2002. Her poetry has been published in Margie Review: Journal of American Poetry, Byline Magazine, Tiger's Eye, Yale Poetry Circle (Vol. I and II,) and Rattapallax. Her work is included in the poetry anthology Letters to the World, Red Hen Press, 2007. She was a finalist in the Margie Award for Poetry, 2005.

Christopher Woods lives in Houston and Chappell Hill, Texas. He has published a prose collection, Under a Riverbed Sky, and a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. He shares a gallery with his wife Linda at Moonbird Hill Arts: www.moonbirdhill.exposuremanager.com.

Michael T. Young has published two collections of poetry: Transcriptions of Daylight and Because the Wind Has Questions. He received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He received a William Stafford Award and the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including The Adirondack Review, Barrow Street, Iodine Poetry Journal, The Same and Upstreet. His work is also in the anthologies Phoenix Rising and Chance of a Ghost. He lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey.