Natalie Amiama is finally a PhD student in English after teaching and procrastinating for years. Although troubled by Heidegger's notion of projection, she reluctantly accepts that if Being extends through space, then by the de-severing of distance she remains in the places she has been, has already reached where she is going, and, in some form, resides where she will never arrive.
Jay Besemer’s most recent poetry collections are A New Territory Sought (Moria) and Aster to Daylily (Damask Press). As Jen Besemer, he also authoredTelephone (Brooklyn Arts Press), Quiet Vertical Movements (Beard of Bees) and Object with Man’s Face (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions). His work is also included in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat). Other poem projects, performance texts, and critical essays have appeared or are forthcoming in TENDE RLOIN, Monsters & Dust, Nerve Lantern, Rain Taxi Review of Books, great weather for MEDIA, PANK, Jacket2and other venues. Jay is a teaching artist at Chicago’s Spudnik Press Cooperative and tweets @divinetailor.
Lydia Davis is the author of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), a translation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary (Viking Penguin, 2010), a chapbook entitled The Cows (Sarabande Press, 2011), and a poem entitled "Our Village" in Two American Scenes (New Directions, 2013). In 2013, she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction, and her most recent collection of stories Can't and Won't was published in April 2014 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Brandon Getz has an MFA in fiction writing from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers in Spokane, WA. His work has appeared in Versal, Burrow Press Review, The Delmarva Review, and other journals. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with his dog, Marlo, and is currently working on a novel set in Pittsburgh's Little Italy. Read more at www.brandongetz.com
Piotr Gwiazda is the author of two books of poems, Messages (2012) and Gagarin Street (2005). He has also published two critical studies, US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979-2012 (2014) and James Merrill and W.H. Auden (2007). His translation of Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Kopenhaga appeared in 2013. He teaches at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).
ryanKauffman is a poet, musician, and aspiring visual artist who resides in Pittsburgh, PA. A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, his manuscript Ode To Recession was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2012. Past host of a reading series Poesis which invited poets to incorporate visual media into their readings. Find more of his work at http://ryankauffman.net
Nancy Klepsch has published in Oberon, Up the River, Sinister Wisdom (upcoming), The Alter Collective (upcoming), 13th Moon, Poetry Magazine,Salvage, 200 Proof and Chronogram among others, and online on Barzakh and Albany Poets. She is the co-host, with Dan Wilcox, of the Second Sunday @ 2 open mic for poetry and prose in Troy, NY.
Muriel Leung was a finalist for Kelsey Street Press' FIRSTS! Contest judged by Myung Mi Kim. Her poetry can be found in The Collagist, Jellyfish Magazine, inter|rupture, and others. She is a recipient of a Kundiman fellowship and is a regular contributor to The Blood-Jet Writing Hour poetry podcast. Currently, she is a MFA candidate in poetry at Louisiana State University.
Tara Emelye Needham writes poems, essays and indie pop songs. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Belleville Park Pages and J Journal: New Writing on Justice. She writes songs and performs with Brooklyn-based The Chandler Estate, teaches college courses on twentieth century world literature, had a previous career in non-profit independent literary publishing, and in another lifetime co-founded the grrrl zine Cupsize (with Sasha Cagen).
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. Text and digital-based works have appeared in journals like GAFF, Polis, The Equalizer, PEEP/SHOW, Bright Pink Mosquito, unarmed, SleepingFish, Word for/Word, BathHouse Hypermedia Journal, and Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, among others. Text, image, and sound works are forthcoming in the Poets for Living Waters Anthology as well as Pine Hills Review. Visual-poetic manifestations are found in avant-garde libraries, special collections, and have appeared in galleries, journals, and anthologies such as The Last Vispo Anthology. Having cut his sound-imaging teeth in the rock group Poem Rocket, Peters continues to explore sound-imaging in solo performances, installations, and improvisational collaborations. He is currently working on a book about sound environment programming. www.michael-peters.com/
Christopher Rizzo is a writer, scholar, and editor whose investigative poetics writes across cultural issues of class, gender, and ethnicity to explore the diversity of their lived relationships. His most recent collection, Of Love & Capital, was selected to receive the Bob Kaufman Prize for Poetry by judge Bernadette Mayer. His next book of poetry, Near Point Balance, is forthcoming from Skysill Press. His critical work on contemporary innovative poetry has appeared most recently in Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, Pierre Joris – Cartographies of the In-between, andJacket. The founding editor of Anchorite Press, Rizzo currently lives in Albany, NY.
Michael Ruby is the author of five full-length poetry books: At an Intersection (Alef, 2002), Window on the City (BlazeVOX, 2006), The Edge of the Underworld (BlazeVOX, 2010), Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010) and American Songbook (UDP, 2013). His trilogy, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012), includes Fleeting Memories, a UDP web-book, and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep, an Argotist Online ebook. He is also the author of four Dusie chapbooks, including The Star-Spangled Banner (2011), and is the co-editor of Bernadette Mayer’s just-published collected early books,Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill). He lives in Brooklyn and works as an editor of U.S. news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.
Brandon Tankersley is a PhD student at SUNY Albany studying English, modernism, and psychoanalysis. He studied poetry as a Creative Studies student at UC Santa Barbara, before getting his Masters at Northeastern University. He specializes in the metaphysics of poultry, showers most days, and brushes his teeth often.