Brooke Bennerup was raised in Connecticut.  She attended high school at Deerfield Academy as well as the Diocesan School for Girls (in Grahamstown, RSA),  and eventually received her BA in Film/television production with the University of Southern California. For the last ten years she has lived in a house, nestled between the Apuan Alps and Apennine mountains, outside of a small hill town named Barga, with many Italian cats, dogs and goats. She is also lucky to share her time with a lively (almost) three year old son, and two almost-step daughters, (with thanks to Francesco Liberali).  She is a masters candidate in Creative writing/poetry with the University of Edinburgh. This is the first poem she has published since she was 12, (a long time ago).


Youmna Chlala is an artist and writer and the Founding Editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. She is the  recipient of the Joseph Jackson Award for her poetry manuscript, The Paper Camera. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, the MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies, XCP: Journal of Cross Cultural Poetics, and for the NPR Project for the 2008 Whitney Biennial. She is currently Associate Professor in Humanities/Media Studies & Architecture at the Pratt Institute in New York.

 

Nadia Colburn's writing has been published in more than fifty publications including The New Yorker, Grist.org,The Boston Review, Slate.com, The Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and an AB from Harvard University. She has taught at MIT and at writing and healing workshops throughout New England. She is the mother of two, a devoted practitioner of yoga and Buddhist meditation and committed to social activism and deep ecology.


Oliver de la Paz is the author of three books of poetry and his most recent book Furious Lullaby was the winner of the 2010 U. of Akron Poetry Prize. He is the co-editor of A Face to Meet the Faces and he co-chairs the Kundiman advisory board. He teaches at Western Washington University.

 
April Dobbins is a self-taught photographer. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in a number of publications, among them Calyx, Cimarron Review, Thema, Marr’s Field Journal, GOOD (online), Philly Fiction 2, the Philadelphia City Paper, and Harvard University’s Transition magazine. She dreams one day of having gallery representation.  She is a member of FitzHitz Music Group, LLC, an arts collective based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She lives in Miami, Florida.


Elisabeth Frost is the author of a book of poems, All of Us (White Pine Press, 2011); a critical study, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa, 2003); and two chapbooks: Rumor (Mermaid Tenement Press, 2009) and A Theory of the Vowel (Red Glass Books, forthcoming 2013). She also co-edited Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (Iowa, 2006). Her text-image collaborations with the visual artist Dianne Kornberg have been exhibited in many venues across the U.S. She is an associate professor of English and Women's Studies at Fordham University, where she directed the Poets Out Loud Reading Series for a decade and, since 1998, has edited the POL Prize book series from Fordham University Press.

 
Steve Mueske is the author of Slower than Stars (forthcoming mid-2013) and A Mnemonic for Desire.  His poems have been published in The Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Fulcrum, Third Coast, Court Green, Hotel Amerika, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/steve.mueske

 
Roger Sedarat is the author of two poetry collections: Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which won Ohio UP's 2007 Hollis Summers' Prize, and Ghazal Games (Ohio UP, 2011). He teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York. 

 

 

Sanchari Sur is a Bengali Canadian who was born in Calcutta, India. A graduate student of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston, she is currently working on her first novel tentatively titled, Blood Red Sky. Her photography, poetry, and short fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Map Literary, Barely South Review, Pyrta, nthposition, Urban Shots—Crossroads (India: Grey Oak/Westland, 2012), and elsewhere. Her short story, “Those Sri Lankan Boys,” was selected to be a part of Diaspora Dialogues Youth Mentoring Program in Toronto in 2012. She blogs at http://sursanchari.wordpress.com.

 

Peter Vanderberg served in the US Navy for four years and received a MFA in Poetry from CUNY Queens College.  His work has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Ozone Park, Modern Haiku and Newtown Literary among other journals.  Peter lives and teaches on Long Island and is a member of the Oh! Bernice Writers Collective in Sunnyside, Queens.  

  

Kron Vollmer is a writer and performance artist. She creates site-specific pieces, theater works, radio plays, collages, and short films which have appeared in various festivals. To see more of her work, please visit www.kronvollmer.com


Changming Yuan, 4-time Pushcart nominee and author of Allen Qing Yuan, holds a PhD in English, works as a private tutor in Vancouver, where he edits Poetry Pacific. Yuan's poetry appears in 639 literary publications across 24 countries, including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry (2009, 2012), BestNewPoemsOnline, Exquisite Corpse and London Magazine. Poetry submissions welcome at yuans@shaw.ca.