~CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES~

CRYSTAL BACON's first book of poems, Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, won the 2005 A. Poulin New Poetry America Prize from BOA Editions and was published in 2004. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Antigonish Review, Cortland Review, Marlboro Review, Massachusetts Review, Ontario Review, and Tampa Review. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia.

WALTER BARGEN is the author of eleven collections of poetry, and he has had poems published widely in literary journals, including American Literary Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, New Letters, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, River City, Seattle Review, Seneca Review, and Sycamore Review. Bargen’s most recent book of poems is Remedies for Vertigo (Cherry Grove Collections, 2006). The Feast, published by BkMk Press in 2004, won the 2005 William Rockhill Nelson Award from the Kansas City Star and the Writer’s Place. Other honors he has received include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Chester H. Jones Poetry Prize. Walter Bargen is the first official Poet Laureate of Missouri.

J.P. DANCING BEAR is the author of Conflicted Light (Salmon Poetry, 2008), Gacela of Narcissus City (Main Street Rag, 2006), Billy Last Crow (Turning Point, 2004) and What Language (Slipstream, 2002).  His poems have been published in Marlboro Review,  Mississippi Review, National Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, Poetry International, Shenandoah, Verse Daily, and many others.  He is the editor of American Poetry Journal and the host of Out of Our Minds a weekly poetry program on public radio station KKUP.  

MICHELLE BITTING has work forthcoming or published in Boxcar Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Crab Orchard Review, Glimmer Train, Many Mountains Moving, Nimrod, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Poetry Southeast, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Southeast Review, and others. Thomas Lux chose her full-length manuscript, Good Friday Kiss, as the winner of the DeNovo First Book Award, and it was released in 2008. Her chapbook, Blue Laws, is available from Finishing Line Press. She is a candidate for an MFA in Poetry at Pacific University, Oregon. 

DEBORAH BOGEN's book-length collection, Landscape with Silos (Texas A&M University Press), was a 2004 National Poetry Series finalist and won the 2005 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Living by the Children's Cemetery was selected by Edward Hirsch  as winner of
the 2002 ByLine Press Chapbook Competition. Her poems and reviews appear widely in magazines, including Crazyhorse, Field, Gettysburg Review, Margie, New Letters, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Shenandoah, and Verse Daily.

JANA BOUMA's poetry has appeared in various literary journals, including 2River Review and Sow's Ear Poetry Review. She taught for eight years in the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  Bouma now lives in Madison Lake, MN, where she leads writing workshops. 

KAREN CARISSIMO's work has appeared in a number of magazines, including American Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Nimrod, North American Review, and Western Humanities Review. A graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, she teaches classes in standardized testing at high schools throughout the San Francisco Bay area.

JARED CARTER has published three books of poems with the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, most recently Les Barricades Mystérieuses (1999).  His work has appeared in many literary journals, including Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and TriQuarterly. His fourth collection, Cross this Bridge at a Walk, was released by Wind Publications in 2006.

JOHN ESTES has had recent poems appear in Another Chicago Magazine, The Journal, Literary Imagination, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, Wallace Stevens Journal, and other places.  A chapbook, Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoön, is available from Finishing Line Press.

STACIA FLEEGAL's recently released chapbook of poems, A Fling with the Ground, is available from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including  Asphodel, Blood Orange Review, Blue Moon Review, Comstock Review, Minnetonka Review, and White Pelican Review. Her work also has been published in the anthology Women. Period.: Women Writing About Menstruation (Spinsters Ink Press, 2008). She is co-founder and co-editor of the online literary journal Blood Lotus, a poetry editor for New Sins Press, and the coordinator of the journals department at the University of Nebraska Press.

GREGG HERTZLIEB is the Director of the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University.  He has been awarded the Edward L. Ryerson Traveling Fellowship by the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and a Conant Writing Award for Poetry from Millikin University.  His artwork has been exhibited widely, including at the Aron Packer Gallery, August House Studio, the Central School of Art and Design in London, Columbia College, Elgin Community College, the Goodman Theater, and Struve Gallery.

ANN HOSTETLER is the author of Empty Room with Light: Poems (Pandora Press, 2002) and editor of A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2003). Her work has appeared in American Scholar, Cream City Review, The Mid-America Review, Perspectives, and other publications.  She teaches English and Creative Writing at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, where she serves as English Department Chair.

JOSEPH HUTCHISON's books include The Rain At Midnight (Sherman Asher Publishing, 2000); Bed of Coals (winner of the 1994 Colorado Poetry Award and published by the University of Colorado Press, 1995); House of Mirrors (James Andrews & Company, 1992); and The Undersides of Leaves (Wayland Press, 1985). He also has published five chapbooks, including the Colorado Governor’s Award volume, Shadow-Light. His poems have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Hudson Review, Mississippi Review, The Nation, Ohio Review, and Poetry, as well as several anthologies.

RHODA JANZEN is the author of Babel's Stair (Word Press, 2006). Her works also have appeared in various literary journals, including Beloit Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Southern Review, and Yale Review. She teaches creative writing and American literature at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

RUSS KESLER teaches writing at the University of Central Florida.  His collection of poems, A Small Fire, was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2001.

CLAIRE KEYES, Professor Emerita at Salem State College, is the author of The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Calyx, Georgia Review, Orbis, Rattle, and The Women's Review of Books, among others. Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition.  A new book of poems, The Question of Rapture, will appear in fall 2008 from Mayapple Press.

ATHENA KILDEGAARD's poetry has appeared widely in such journals as Cream City Review, Faultline, Malahat Review, Poetry East, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. Her book, Rare Momentum (Red Dragonfly Press, 2006), is a series of fibonaccis.

DIANE LOCKWARD is the author of What Feeds Us (Wind Publications, 2006), which was awarded the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Eve's Red Dress (Wind Publications, 2003) and a chapbook, Against Perfection (Poets Forum Press, 1998). Her poetry has been published in several anthologies, including Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times. Her poems have recently appeared in such journals as Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, and Spoon River Poetry Review. A former high school English teacher, Diane now works as a poet-in-the-schools.

AL MAGINNES's new collection, Ghost Alphabet, won the White Pine Poetry Prize and will be published in fall of 2008 by White Pine Press. He has published three full-length collections of poetry: Film History (Word Tech Editions, 2005), The Light In Our Houses (Pleiades Press, 2000), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Award, and Taking Up Our Daily Tools (St. Andrews College Press, 1997). His most recent publication was Dry Glass Blues, a single poem published as a chapbook by Pudding House Publications in 2007. His poems have appeared widely in journals, including American Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, Mid-American Review, Pennsylvania Review, Southern Poetry Review, and others. Maginnes lives in Raleigh, NC, and he teaches at Wake Technical Community College.

MOLLY MELLINGER's poems have been published in Connecticut Review, Dogwood, Long River Run, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere. She has received the Academy of American Poets Tamara Verga Poetry Award and won first prize in the Dehn Poetry Competition.

JULIE L. MOORE's chapbook, Election Day, was published in 2006 by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Apple Valley Review, Christian Century, Christian Science Monitor, Christianity and Literature, The Cresset, The MacGuffin, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Sou'Wester, Willow Review, and others. An assistant fiction editor for Antioch Review, Moore lives in Cedarville, Ohio, where she directs the Writing Center at Cedarville University.

STEVE MYERS is the author of Memory's Dog, a collection of poetry released by FootHills Publishing in 2004. His poems also have appeared in various literary journals, including Atlanta Review, Dark Horse, Gettysburg Review, Poetry East, Sentence, and Southern Review, as well as Common Wealth, an anthology featuring contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Myers is a professor of English at DeSales University.

MIL NORMAN-RISCH was the winner of American Poetry Journal’s 2007 American Poet’s Prize. She has published poetry in Amelia, Avatar Review, Sojourners, White Pelican Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere, as well as in Agha Shahid Ali’s anthology, Ravishing DisUnities, (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). She teaches and writes in Richmond, Virginia.

ELISE PASCHEN is the author of Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts. A new collection, Bestiary, which includes the poems in VPR, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in the spring of 2009. Her poems also have been published in New Republic, Ploughshares, and Shenandoah, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies, including Reinventing the Enemy’s Language:  Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America; A Formal Feeling Comes:  Poems in Form by Contemporary Women; Poetry 180:  A Turning Back to Poetry and  The POETRY Anthology, 1912—2002.  She is editor of The New York Times best-selling anthology Poetry Speaks to Children and co-editor of Poetry Speaks Expanded, Poetry Speaks, Poetry in Motion, and Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

TAD RICHARDS has published extensively. He is president and artistic director of Opus 40 (www.opus40.org).

STEVEN D. SCHROEDER's first full-length collection of poems, Torched Verse Ends, is forthcoming from BlazeVOX in spring 2009. His recent poetry also is available or forthcoming from Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Court Green, Laurel Review, Margie, Pleiades, Verse, and Verse Daily. He edits the online poetry journal Anti-, and he works as a certified professional résumé writer.

NIC SEBASTIAN's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroitly Placed Word, Avatar Review, Blue Fifth Review, Lily, Mannequin Envy, Poems Niederngasse, River Walk Journal, and elsewhere. Nic blogs at Very Like A Whale: (http://verylikeawhale.wordpress.com).

PETER SERCHUK is the author of Waiting for Poppa at the Southtown Diner (University of Illinois Press).  His poetry has also appeared in numerous literary journals, including American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Margie, Mid-American Review, North American Review, Paris Review, Poetry, and Texas Review, as well as in the recent anthology, The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present (Scribner, 2008), edited by David Lehman.

VINCENT SPINA is a Spanish professor at Clarion University. His first book of poems, Outer Borough, was recently published by Pecan Grove Press.

ALEXANDRA TEAGUE's work has recently appeared in Epoch, Notre Dame Review, Slate, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University who also has taught at City College of San Francisco. 

LARRY THOMAS has had a number of poetry collections published, including The Fraternity of Oblivion (Timberline Press), The Woodlanders (Pecan Grove Press), The Lighthouse Keeper (Timberline Press), and Amazing Grace (Texas Review Press).  His latest book of poetry is New and Selected Poems, published earlier this year by Texas A&M University Press. His poetry also has appeared in many literary journals, including The Journal of the American Medical Association, Midwest Quarterly, Poet Lore, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Writers' Forum. Thomas was named the Poet Laureate of Texas in 2008.

SUSAN VARNOT's work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among other journals.  She teaches at the University of California-Merced.

VALERIE WALLACE recently received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. She is the editor of Deep Dish, a poem-a-week blog featuring writers with literary ties to Chicago.

ROSEMARY WINSLOW teaches at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.  Her book of poems, Green Bodies, was published in 2007 by The Word Works Press.  Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in many places, including: journals—Cafe Review, Crux, Gargoyle, Poet Lore, Southern Review, and 32 Poems; and anthologies—Voices from Frost Place II, The Why and Later: Poems on Recovery, Letters to the World, and The Farmer's Daughter. She has won three Larry Neal Awards for Poetry, a writer's grant from The District of Columbia Arts Commission, a residency grant from the Vermont Studio Center, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and other foundations for writing programs. 

JENNIFER YAROS recently received her M.A. in Liberal Studies, Concentration: English, from Valparaiso University, and she currently teaches high school English. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in various literary publications.