Tim Z. Hernandez

Tim is a writer and performer originally from Central California’s San Joaquin Valley. His written work and art have been published in various anthologies, and his performances have been featured in prestigious venues such as: LA’s Getty Center Museum, The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts, Stanford University, and at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In the past, he’s been commissioned by major groups such as the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, and the National Fanny Mae Foundation to write and perform his original plays on issues such as homelessness and poverty. He’s the recipient of several notable awards including: the American Book Award (2006) for his debut collection of poetry Skin Tax, the Zora Neal Hurston Award (2006) for writers of color dedicated to their communities, and the James Duval Phelan Award (2003) sponsored by the San Francisco Foundation. His debut novel, Breathing, In Dust (Texas Tech University Press, 2010) recently received the 2010 Premio Aztlan Prize in Fiction (2010), was a finalist for the California Book Award, and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered by Alan Cheuse.

 

Meg Tuite

Meg is the author of Disparate Pathos and Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011). She is also the fiction editor for The Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press. She writes a monthly column, “Exquisite Quartet”, for Used Furniture Review. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Visit her blog at: megtuite.wordpress.com.

 

Nicholas B. Morris

Nick is an ordained minister, born and raised in southwest Arkansas. He split his childhood between small towns and farms, was educated at Arkansas Tech University and Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and now lives in Denver, Colorado, with his partner Alyssa Piccinni. He’s the author of Tapeworm.

 

Bonnie ZoBell

Bonnie is the author of The Whack-Job Girls. She has received an NEA for her fiction, the Capricorn Novel Award, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award for a story later read on NPR, and a spot on Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Night Train, The Greensboro Review, Connotation Press, New Plains Review, PANK, Prime Number, and Cutbank. She received an MFA from Columbia on fellowship, currently teaches at San Diego Mesa College where she is the Creative Writing Coordinator, is an Associate Editor of The Northville Review, and a Roving Editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles. Her short story collection What Happened Here is forthcoming from Press 53. More of her work can be found at bonniezobell.com.

 

Mark Spitzer

Mark is the author of ten or twelve books, including Season of the Gar, CHODE!, Age of the Demon Tools, The Pigs Drink from Infinity, Chum, Bottom Feeder, Riding the Unit, From Absinthe to Abyssinia, The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille, Divine Filth, The Church,Writer in Residence, and After the Orange Glow. He has degrees in creative writing from the University of Minnesota, the University of Colorado, and Louisiana State University, and has published hundreds of essays, stories, poems and literary translations. Mark can be found on reruns of the “Alligator Gar” episode of the Animal Planet series River Monsters or in the annals of American literary history as an editor of the legendary Exquisite Corpse (both the online version and the print annual). He is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas, where he is Editor-in-Chief of Toad Suck Review.

 

Barbara Henning

Barbara is the author of  A Slow Curve as well as seven collections of poetry and three novels. Her most recent books are a collection of poetry and prose, Cities and Memory; a novel, Thirty Miles to Rosebud; a collection of object-sonnets, My Autobiography; and a book of interviews,  Looking Up Harryette Mullen. Forthcoming is A Swift Passage. Barbara grew up in Detroit and has lived in New York City since 1983. She teaches for writers.com as well as Naropa University and Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she is Professor Emerita.

 

Nate Jordon

Nate has a love/hate thing with words. He occasionally publishes those written by others. Occasionally he burns his own. He points to the moon. He’s the author of The Weekender.

 

Nancy Stohlman

Nancy is a writer and professor in Denver, Colorado. Her first book, Live from Palestine, was nominated for a Colorado Book Award in 2004. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Searching for Suzi is her first novel.

 

Jack Collom

Jack is the author of Cold Instant, among many other books. He was born in Chicago in 1931 and grew up in nearby Western Springs, where he spent much of his boyhood walking in the woods and birdwatching. After graduating from the Forestry School at Colorado A&M College, Jack joined the US Air Force and wrote his first poems in Tripoli, Libya. He lived in Germany a Zeitlang, then returned stateside and worked in factories for twenty years. Jack is currently adjunct professor at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and has worked extensively with schoolchildren for over four decades. He is the author of over twenty-five books and chapbooks as well as editor (with commentaries) of three books of writings by children and has twice been awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, in part for his experimental nature writings. He has four grown children and is married to the writer Jennifer Heath.

 

Kristi Yorks

Kristi is a writer and awkward dreamer who frequently loses herself in the mountain landscapes both within and without her imagination. A graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and a professor of English composition and literature, Kristi has immersed herself in that fantastic process by which experience becomes words, becoming knowledge—a process she strives to realize and complicate within her work. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Monkey Puzzle, Fact-Simile, and The Battered Suitcase.  in the desert is her first chapbook.

 

Brad McLelland

Born and raised in the cotton fields of L.A. (Lower Arkansas), Brad went to college in the Ozark Mountains and spent several years working as a crime, politics, and business journalist in the South. In 2008 he moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, to obtain his MFA in creative writing from Oklahoma State University. His short stories have appeared in various magazines both online and print, and one of his stories won Runner-Up in the 2010 Indiana Review Fiction Prize Contest. In 2009, Brad participated in the Canadian-based International 3-Day Novel Contest, and wrote bruisers in a Motel 6 over the Labor Day weekend. He currently lives in Stillwater. Chat with him at brad-mc@hotmail.com.

 

Min Jung Oh

Min Jung is a poet, essayist, body artist, waitress, and chatterbox. She received her BA from the University of Maine in 2009 and her MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in 2011. She is the author of Body in a Hydrophilic Frame. Her other work may be found in Sous les Paves, Matter Journal, Linchpin, Tidal Basin Review, and Monkey Puzzle, among others. She dreams of a space where the broken, yet very much alive, body is allowed and loved to be, well: just that.

 

Brandon Arthur

Raised in the flatlands of central Illinois, Brandon moved to Colorado in 1999 and graduated from Colorado University in Boulder. He then received an MFA from the Writing and Poetics Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa University. He lives in intellectual squalor somewhere in Denver, Colorado. expired Rx is his first book.

 

Alison Iglehart

Alison is the author of Seeking Asylum. She is a third-generation Floridian who began writing literary non-fiction stories at the age of fifty-two. She has a Master’s Degree in English Education from the University of South Florida and is retired from being Coordinator of the Tallahassee Community College Writing Center where she worked for nineteen years. Thirteen of her stories have been published in Florida newspapers and magazines, both in print and online.

 

Jon Leslie

Jon lives and writes in downtown Denver, Colorado. A former newspaper columnist and an award-winning copywriter, Jon studied literature and writing at Towson University and at the University of Colorado. Down in Denver (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2013), his debut novel, returns Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac to the modern-day Denver streets, where they complicate the converging lives of Everett Mann, an idealistic marketing guy in a materialistic marriage, and Evelyn Moore, a disquieted woman with visions of a former life. Visit Jon at jonleslieauthor.com.

 

Heidi Ann Smith

Heidi grew up in Illinois and currently lives in Denver, Colorado. The Clara Ann Burns Story is her first novel.

 

Travis Cebula

Travis is the author of Some Exits, Ithaca, Under the Sky They Lit Cities, and Jamaica. His poems, photographs, and stories have appeared in The Talking River Review, Apothecary, In Stereo Magazine, Bombay Gin, The Strip, and The Bathroom.

 

Katharyn Grant

Katharyn is the author of Interior Life. She is currently directing and starring in her first feature length film The Mighty King of Love, based out of Denver, Colorado. Her short films have appeared on IFC (Independent Film Channel) and various film festivals. She’s performed internationally with Armed Forces Entertainment. Her written work has appeared in Orange Coast Review, Foothills Magazine, Fast Forward Volume II, Fast Forward: The Mix Tape, and Monkey Puzzle.

 

Get in the car, Helen

Get in the car, Helen began writing shortly after discovering Helen, the woman he loved more than anything, had been secretly fucking a guy named Craig. Since being dumped by Helen, he has published a book of poetry, The Aftermath, etc., and is obsessed with Shark Week-type documentaries and zombie movies. He is methodically depressed. Drop Get in the car, Helen a line at: getinthecarehelen@yahoo.com.

 

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

Elisabeth has been an essayist, a small press editor, a college professor, a poet, a big sister, a dog-owner, a Texan, an Idahoan, and most recently, a mother. She earned a PhD in literature, writing about the intersections of fairy tales and autobiography. Her work has been published widely and she teaches writing classes in Boise and at Harvard.

 

Reed Bye

Reed is the author of Catching On, among other published  books including Join the Planets: New and Selected Poems, Passing Freaks and Graces, Gaspar Still in His Cage, and Some Magic at the Dump. A CD of original songs, Long Way Around, was released in 2005 and a new CD, Only Imagination, is in the works. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, The Angel Hair Anthology, Sleeping on the Wing, and Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action. He holds a doctorate in English from the University of Colorado and teaches poetry writing workshops and courses in classic and contemporary literary studies and contemplative poetics at Naropa University. He is presently working on a prosodic study of the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.

 

Ella Longpre

Ella is a writer and musician who lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in elimae, Everyday Genius, Summer Stock, NOÖ, Dinosaur Bees, and other locations.

 

Tim Woodall

Tim is a failed novelist and amateur professional. He is the author of The Drowners. In 2009 he co-wrote and co-directed the short comedy film HIV: The Musical, starring Martin Freeman and Julian Barratt. In 2010 he co-wrote The Girl is Mime, also starring Martin Freeman, and used the film’s success as an excuse to go on a jolly-up to the Cannes Film Festival with his friends. He now spends most evenings writing television and radio scripts, setting fire to rejection letters from the BBC and attempting to craft an original short story. Often his efforts are wasted. Tom Waits will probably sue him for plagiarism one day.

 

Michael Pogach

Michael is an English Professor and author of Zero to Sixty. He teaches at Northampton Community College, and is the founder of the school’s literary and arts magazine, The Laconic. He is also an editor at the online literary magazine, Obsession. Michael lives with his wife in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

 

Don Riesett

Don is the author of Mr. America. He writes about a life that has taken him from Baltimore’s Pigtown to New York’s Madison Avenue to London’s Saville Row, and countless other notable (and not) cities of the world as an international advertising executive. There were also some fun times as a college jock and a few pit stops in psychiatric hospitals to round the boy out and add a bit more spice to his non-fiction fodder.

His work has appeared in The Awakenings Review, Folly, Fox Cry Review, Home Planet News, ken*again, The Legendary, North Atlantic Review, Palo Alto Review, Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, The South Carolina Review, The Writers Post Journal, and Gemini Magazine. His memoir, Mad Man, is currently in search of a publisher.

Don lives in Baltimore with his wife, Sande, and their cat, Little Man, who thinks he’s a dog and is treated like a person.

Read more at donriesett.com or chat at donriesett@comcast.net.

 

Adam Perry

Adam lived the double life of a preschool teacher and rock drummer in San Francisco for six years. Now he’s a freelance writer living in your mom’s closet. Check out his blog: Beautiful Buzz

 

Jonathan Montgomery

Jonathan is the author of Taxis and Shit and he does, in fact, drive a taxi. Born in 1980 and raised in Akron, Ohio, he is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Naropa University and lives and performs in Boulder, Colorado.

 

Eric Day

Eric is the author of Miracle of Miracles. He teaches and writes in Phoenix, Arizona. He’s currently working on a novel and a collection of essays about growing up in Boring, Oregon in the 80s. It wasn’t boring. . . .

 

Diane Klammer

Diane is the author of Shooting the Moon. At one time, Diane was a counseling psychologist working with the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, and the elderly. Now she works as a naturalist in Colorado. She is married, and has two children. The previous three sentences become the kaleidoscope of her poetry.

 

John G. Rodwan Jr.

John is the author of Christmas Things and Fighters & Writers. His writing has been featured in many publications including: The American Interest, The Mailer Review, Blood and Thunder, The Oregonian, Philip Roth Studies, Palimpsest, Free Inquiry, The Humanist, and Secular World. He was raised in Detroit, Michigan, and in 2011, after fifteen years during which he lived in Geneva, Switzerland; Brooklyn, New York; and Portland, Oregon, he returned to his hometown.