mIEKAL aND lives outside the constraints of academia in the most lush and rural part of the unglaciated Driftless area of southwest Wisconsin. Choosing to focus on creating wilderness and abundance surrounded by the perfect setting for limitless imagination his course of action includes demonstrating alternatives to inbred aesthetics, delighting in the play of DIY culture, and making art and writing that is both anarchic and noisy.
Camille Bacos is a filmmaker that belongs to the new generation of Romanian filmmakers that emerged after the communist regime crashed. She experiments with the images and words to deconstruct meanings and build visual thoughts. She did several collaborations with mIEKAL aND & Maria Damon. She lives in the heartland of US, in an area that was not touch by any “recent” glaciations where she is nurturing grapes, parrots & her spirit.
Billy Cancel‘s work has recently appeared in Shampoo, Glitterpony & Cricket Online Review. He co-runs Hidden House Press. A collection The Autobiography Of Shrewd Phil was published by Blue & Yellow Dog Press last year. Sound poems, visual shorts, & other aberrations can be found atwww.billycancelpoetry.com
Evan Robert Chen is from East Amherst, NY. He is a graduate student in Creative Writing and English Literature in the PhD program at SUNY Albany. His work has appeared in Radioactive Moat, collision, Women Spy School, and most recently in #GoodLitSwerveAutumn: An Anthology of Independent Literature About Kanye West (NAP 2012). You can listen to his poems and drones HERE.
Maria Damon teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of two books of poetry scholarship, co-author of five books of poetry (with mIEKAL aND and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen), and co-editor, with Ira Livingston, of Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader.
Marcella Durand is the author of AREA (Belladonna) and Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem). She is currently working on a book-length alexandrine titled In This World of Twelve Months.
Ann Filemyr, Ph.D., Is the Chief Academic Officer at the institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe which will be offering a low residency MFA in Creative Writing beginning in 2013. She is a poet and essayist. Recent books of poetry include: On the Nature of Tides (LaNana Creek Press 2012); The Healer's Diary (Sunstone Press 2012) Growing Paradise (LaNana Creek Press 2011). She has also worked as an environmental journalist and Professor at Antioch College in Ohio.
Sarah Giragosian is a PhD student in Twentieth Century North American Poetries and Poetics at SUNY-Albany. Her poems have been published in such journals as Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, and Measure, among others. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
jil hanifan was born and raised in Central New York. She holds a D.A. (Doctor of Arts) in Poetics from the University at Albany, where she directs the Writing Center and teaches writing. She’s most recently published poems in Earth’s Daughters, 2River View, and Comstock Review, and she is active in the literary community, having served twice as Poet In Residence for the New York State Council on the Arts.
A.J. Huffman is a poet and freelance writer in Daytona Beach, Florida. She has previously published six collections of poetry all available on Amazon.com. She has also published her work in numerous national and international literary journals. Most recently, she has accepted the position as editor for four online poetry journals for Kind of a Hurricane Press. Find more about A.J. Huffman, including additional information and links to her work onFacebook and Twitter.
jim leftwich is a poet and mail artist who lives in Roanoke, Va. he is the author of Dirt, Doubt, Myesis, Sample Example, The Textasifsuch, Death Text, Short Sorties, Shrimp Teeth, Trashpo, An Ecology, SO FOR BY, Lest Puke Due Machete of Art, and Six Months Aint No Sentence. collaborative works include Sound Dirt, with John M. Bennett, Acts, with John Crouse, How To Dust A Bunny, with Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, iTopia, with Scott MacLeod, Fictions Deleted, with Steve Dalachinsky, Book of Numbers, with Marton Koppany, and THR3E, with Andrew Topel. he was the editor and publisher of the print magazines Juxta and Xtant from 1994 to 2005. since 2005 he has edited/compiled the blog zine, Textimagepoem, and the flicker collection, Textimagepoetry. since 2008 he has been involved in organizing mail art, fluxus, sound poetry, visual poetry and noise events in Roanoke.
Jill Magi works in text, image, and textile and is the author of LABOR (forthcoming from Nightboat), SLOT (Ugly Duckling Presse), Cadastral Map(Shearsman), Torchwood (Shearsman), Threads (Futurepoem), the chapbooks Die for love/furlough, Poetry Barn Barn!, Confidence and Autonomy, and numerous handmade books. Her essay “Ecopoetics and the Adversarial Consciousness” was included in the Eco-language Reader (Nightboat/Portable Press 2010). Recent work has appeared in Drunken Boat, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Common-place: Journal of the American Antiquarian Society, and is forthcoming in Rattapallax. Her visual works have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery, apexart, AC Institute, and Pace University. She was a Textile Arts Center resident in 2011, a writer-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2006-07, and is a 2012 recipient of an arts grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. In 2002 Jill founded Sona Books, a very small chapbook press, and for her publishing work she was named by Poets & Writers magazine as among the most inspiring authors of 2010. Jill teaches at Goddard College, Columbia College Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Catherine Owen is a Vancouver, BC writer. She is the author of nine collections of poetry and one of prose essays & memoirs. Her work has won the AB Book Prize and been nominated for the BC Book Prize,the CBC award, the Earle Birney Prize and the George Ryga award for Socially-conscious literature. She collaborates with multi-media artists, has written songs for an eco-musical, plays bass with metal bands and runs a photo blog. These poems are from a manuscript about the Fraser River. Her website is www.catherineowen.net.
Michael Peters is the author of the sound-imaging poem Vaast Bin (Calamari Press) and other assorted language art and sound works. As certain as he is uncertain of access to “the real,” Peters frequently tests that periphery with porous, artificial delicacy. Text and digital-based work has appeared in journals like PEEP/SHOW, Bright Pink Mosquito, unarmed, SleepingFish, Word for/Word, BathHouse Hypermedia Journal, and Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, among others. Visual-poetic manifestations are in avant-garde libraries, special collections, and have appeared in galleries, journals, and anthologies—The Last Vispo Anthology: 1998 – 2008 is the latest. Peters cut his sound-imaging teeth in the rock group Poem Rocket, and continues to explore sound-imaging in solo performances, installations, and in improvisational collaborations. He is currently working on a book about sound environment programming—a close study of the work of Charles Olson, John Cage, Sun Ra, and Jackson Mac Low in the post-1945 moment.http://www.michael-peters.com/
James Sherry is the author of 10 books of poetry and prose. He is currently finishing a book of essays and poetry on environmental poetics titled Oops!; the essay and poem in this issue is from that ms. He is the editor of Roof Books and founder of the Segue Foundation. He lives in NYC.
Jonathan Skinner founded and edits the journal ecopoetics, which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. His poetry collections include Birds of Tifft (BlazeVOX, 2011) and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). Skinner has published critical essays on Charles Olson, Ronald Johnson, Lorine Niedecker, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Bernadette Mayer, translations of French poetry and garden theory, essays on bird song from the perspective of ethnopoetics, and essays on horizontal concepts such as the Third Landscape and on Documentary Poetry. Currently, he is writing a book of investigative poems on the urban landscapes of Frederick Law Olmsted, and a critical book on Animal Transcriptions in contemporary poetry. He teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Warwick.