ISSUE
THREE
Sarah Busse
Sarah’s poems have appeared in many on-line and print journals, including Poet Lore, Willow Springs, Great River Review, and Perihelion, along with others. The children?s book she co-authored with her mother, Banjo Granny, was published by Houghton Mifflin in Fall 2006 and went into its second printing May 2007. She lives with her husband and two children in Madison, Wisconsin.
Erica Goodkind
Erica grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She spent four summers working on fire towers in western Idaho and eastern Oregon. She currently lives in Seattle, where she works at a sleep disorders lab, and is slowly chiseling away at the makings of her first novel.
Nicolette Kittenger
Nicolette is a Chicagoan – born and raised – who staunchly believes that ketchup does not belong on a hotdog. She is an undergraduate student and tutor in the fiction writing program at Columbia College Chicago. She has a large, varied, and embarrassing MP3 collection.
Matt Mullins
Matt lives and writes in Kalamazoo, Michigan and spends too much time chopping wood and driving around in the dark with his car stereo off. His writing has appeared in Descant, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Born Magazine, and elsewhere. He no longer has a dog.
Kristen Orser
Kristen is an MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago and an editor of Columbia Poetry Review. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Redactions, After Hours, womb, The Sylvan Echo, kaleidowhirl, babel, and The Trident.
Mark Polege
After 6 years of exploring back roads of the upper Midwest and building his portfolio, Mark returned to his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. In his return, he has also changed his photographic focus from rural to more urban, as his more recent work reflects.
Erin Pringle
Erin's story "The Only Child" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and named a Best American Notable Non-Required Reading of 2007. Short-listed for the 2007 Charles Pick Fellowship, her work is forthcoming in New York Tyrant, pacificREVIEW, and Dark Recesses.
Emily Robbins
Emily is a graduate of Swarthmore College with a concentration in creative writing. Her work has been published in Small Craft Warnings and Enie. She spends her summers walking beans on a farm in Denison, Iowa, where her mother grew up. Next year, she will be studying women’s sacred spaces on a Fulbright Grant in Syria.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
ISSUE
TWO
Tricia Barker
Tricia studied English at The University of Texas at Austin, and then went on to teach in Korea. After that, she traveled the U.S. teaching SAT courses at boarding schools. In 2001, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Currently, she teaches English for DCCCD and online Creative Writing classes.
Erin M Bertram
Erin has been a Midwesterner her whole life, despite a passing stint in New Orleans. She is a graduate fellow in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. She cannot avoid the mighty Mississippi. Her poems have been recently published in Bloom, Columbia Poetry Review, and typo. Her chapbook, Alluvium, is forthcoming from dancing girl press in 2007.
BJ Best
BJ holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. His work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The Cream City Review, Permafrost, and Nimrod. His long poem Crap is available as a chapbook from Centennial Press.
Louis E. Bourgeois
Louis lives on a wheat farm in North Mississippi. His latest book, OLGA, was published by WordTech in 2005. Currently, he is completing a story collection entitled The Gar Diaries. He is the editor of VOX.
Kristin FitzPatrick
Kristin is a Detroit area freelance writer, college writing instructor, and graduate of DePaul University's MA writing program. Her first job out of college was teaching English conversation in Japan, where she developed a preference for writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Rattawut Lapcharoensap, who illustrate the world of "foreigners."
Noah Franken
Noah just finished the undergraduate writing program at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He's been listening to the Velvet Underground a lot lately, reading biographies of Lou Reed, and looking at the artwork of Andy Warhol.
Bayard Godsave
Bayard is currently a PhD candidate in UW-Milwaukee’s Creative Writing Program, working on the completion of his dissertation. A lover of books, he can intermittingly be found at the legendary Harry W Schwartz Bookshop in Milwaukee, shelving books or secretly reading at the register. His name is authentic, and will be famous someday. His work has appeared in The Cream City Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Cimarron Review, and Red Weather Literary Magazine.
Gabe Gossett
Gabe currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife Gillian where they occupy an apartment over what used to be a printing press now turned religious bookstore. Before settling in Madison, Gabe traveled to such far away lands as China, Mongolia, Russia, Poland and Taiwan. He is presently a library page, hoping to continue his studies in the graduate Library Sciences program at UW-Madison. His work can also be found in back issues of Orbit and Furrow.
Alex Johnson
Alex is currently a writing student at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where he gained a fine appreciation for toasted ravioli and frozen custard. He believes that within the Midwest lies the solution to all world problems.
Shanley Erin Kane
Shanley was born and raised in the backwoods of Minnesota and spent her summers on its lakes. Despite transplanting to the big city to pursue writing, her work contains more references to farms than subways. Liberal use of the term "hunky-dory" also reveals her as a Chicagoan impostor.
Eddie Kilowatt
Eddie lives and works in Milwaukee. His writing has appeared in Thunder Sandwich, My Favorite Bullet, remark., and Defenestration. His first collection of poetry, Manifest Density, was released last spring by Full Contact Publishing. Last summer he used a digital voice recorder to speak his next book while riding a motorcycle around the country.
Jane Linders
Jane is an award-winning photographer whose prints are in numerous national and international collections. She has exhibited her work everywhere from her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. Her favorite subjects are the eerie beauty of historical cemeteries as well as the oddities of roadside Americana.
FB Lloyd
FB Lloyd has been awarded several grants toward completing a novel, a collection of stories, and three screenplays. Originally from Washington, D.C., he is pursuing an MFA in Fiction as a Chancellor's Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. The Black Pages recently named FB writer laureate of Saint Louis.
Jamison Spencer
Jamison was born in Richmond, Virgina. He spent his childhood wandering the South, then returned to Richmond for college. He is now living in Chicago, where he is an MFA student at Columbia College. He is a member of the bands The New Messangers and the carson mcullers, as well as the rainy day collective.
Leyna Thomas
Leyna lives in the south suburbs of Chicago. Though she has earned her Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing, She has somehow come to work at a very corporate bank. She spends her free time attempting to learn Italian for no practical purpose.
Lisa Zaran
Lisa is a poet and essayist living in Arizona. She has authored five collections, the sometimes girl, You Have a Lovely Heart, Clipped From Our Days, The Blondes Lay Content, and Subtraction Flower. Her first collection, the sometimes girl, was recently approved to be the subject of a translation course in Germany. Her current work can be found or is forthcoming in Juked, Words-Myth, SubtleTea, Rivertrout, All Things Girl, Laura Hird, Wicked Alice, the-Beat, andwerve, HiNgE, Feathertale and others. Alongside writing poetry, she also works for a brokerage and raises two teenage children.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
ISSUE 1
Jeremy Behreandt
Jeremy is working towards an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire.
Hilary Berg
Hilary Berg is an artist and bookseller born and raised in Southwestern Wisconsin. She graduated from UW-Madison in 2001 with a Bachelor of Science in Art and has since worked in bookstores both in Madison and Portland, including the legendary Powell's. She currently lives in Mazomanie, Wisconsin, where she devotes much of her free time to working on her current cycle of drawings which are mainly about seeds; incorporating elements of botany and allusions to botanical illustration, history, language and taxonomy. These drawings also explore the voices, imaginations and memories of the plants themselves.
Ryan Chapman
Ryan Chapman is currently a fiction student at Washington University. He has previously published work in Flashquake, Saga and Bayou. At present, he lives in a synagogue in midtown St. Louis with his girlfriend, four cats and Kaya, a golden retriever.
Ron Czerwien
Ron is the owner of Avol's, a used and out-of-print book store in Madison, Wisconsin. His poems have appeared in After Hours, Hummingbird, The Wisconsin Academy Review, Wisconsin Trails, and Rosebud.
Matt Friauf
Matt studied at the University of Colorado-Boulder before transferring to the UW to earn his practical Bachelors in History. Once on the path to history professor, he has now discovered his inner poet & longs to earn his M.F.A. so he can be justifiably unemployed. His work has also appeared in Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal.
Joseph Fronczak
Joseph Fronczak grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. After graduating from UW-Madison in 2002, he taught grade school and high school for a few years, including a year teaching at a Catholic school quite unlike the one detailed in this story. These days, he is fulfilling his destiny and paying his bills as a taxi driver. In the fall, he will begin graduate study at Yale University.
Paul Gaszak
Paul has lived his entire life in the suburbs of Chicago, yet enjoys pretending that he is worldly-wise. To escape the suburbs a few times each week, he is attending DePaul University in Chicago for his M.A. degree in Writing.
Karla Huston
Karla is the author of five chapbooks of poetry, most recently, Virgins on the Rocks (Parallel Press, 2004) and Catch and Release (Marsh River Editions, 2005). Her poems, reviews and interviews have been published in Cimarron Review, 5 A.M., Margie, North American Review, One Trick Pony, Pearl, Rattle, and others.
Donald Illich
Donald has published poems in The Iowa Review, Fourteen Hills, and New Zoo Poetry Review. He also has poems forthcoming in several journals including Passages, LIT, The Sulphur River Literary Review, Roanoke Review, Softblow, Eratio, CrossConnect Magazine, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives in Maryland.
Eddie Kilowatt
Eddie's writing has appeared in Thunder Sandwich, My Favorite Bullet, remark., and Defenestration. His first collection of poetry, Manifest Density, was released this spring by Full Contact Publishing. This summer he is using a digital voice recorder to speak his next book while riding around the U.S. on his motorcycle. He currently lives and works in Madison, WI.
CJ Krueger
CJ Krueger is on his way to completing a double major in Creative Writing and Theatre at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire.
Brian Nealon
Brian received the 1999 Sinclair Award for Fiction Writing for "The Next Steel" from Miami University of Oxford, Ohio, where he earned a Master of Arts degree in Literature/Creative Writing. He taught high school English in Dayton, Ohio for nearly a decade, and recently completed an enjoyable two-year teaching stint in a small town of four million in eastern China. Brian now lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he writes, catches up on junk food he's missed, and plots his next move.
Rodney Nelson
Rodney is from North Dakota and sounds like it too -- with a twist of Arizona metacowboy in testimony to many years spent away. He got into print in 1970 (Georgia Review) but fell into play and novel writing and did not touch a verse between 1984 and 2004. His work has appeared in Big Bridge, Rough Road Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Passenger May, Scene4, and many other sites.
Juli Obudzinski
Juli received her Bachelors from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She has recently fled her Midwestern roots to take a job "fighting the good fight" in the nation's capital, working for a civil liberties non-profit. She hopes to return someday, most likely when she's ready for that white pickett fence, 2.5 kids and domesticity. . The writers she most admires are Hiromi Goto for her idiosyncratic style and Dorothy Parker for her unrelenting wit and cynicism.
Jason Rozumalski
Jason grew up in the woods just outside of Bancroft, Wisconsin. He attended the University of WI-Madison, having graduated with degrees in History and Political Science. Beyond a summer job in Virginia, the great question mark of the future awaits him.
Alison Spaude
Alison is currently a junior at Northland College in Ashland, WI.
Gene Tanta
Gene was born in Timisoara, Romania in 1974 and immigrated to Chicago in 1984 with family. He has earned his MFA from the Iowa's Writers' Workshop in 2000. He also translates contemporary Romanian poetry and is a practicing visual artist. Publications include: Epoch, Ploughshares, Circumference Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Watchword, Columbia Poetry Review, and two collaborative poems with Reginald Shepherd in Indiana Review. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
Bronwen Tate
Bronwen was born in Vancouver, BC and grew up in Portland, Oregon. She lived in Italy for two years, three months of which were spent in a small apartment recovering from a vespa-inflicted broken ankle. Her poems have appeared in Lungfull, horse less review, and Brown Literary Review.
Dawn Tefft
Dawn holds an M.A. in English, recently taught composition and literature courses at Columbia College and Roosevelt University in Chicago, and is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. Much of her time is spent writing poems because it's more fun than cross-country skiing without gloves and because something, she suspects a trickster god, keeps forcing her into. Her poems have been published in The Cream City Review, Rhino, Mudlark, LitRag, The Disquieting Muses Quarterly Review, Wicked Alice, The Chicago River: A History in Pictures, among others. Her e-chapbook Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations was published through, and can be found at, Mudlark. In addition, she was a finalist in Winnow Press's Open Book Award in Poetry in 2004, and previously won the Academy of American Poets Prize at SIUC.
Susan Yount
Susan (aka Sissy) was born and raised on a 164-acre farm in Southern Indiana where she learned to drive a tractor, harvest crops, feed the chickens and hug her beloved goat, Cinnamon. Soon after receiving her BA from Indiana University in Photo-Journalism, she moved to Ohio and married a physicist. While attending Kent State University as a guest graduate, she worked at the largest flour mill in northeast Ohio where she kept those Accounts Receivables up-to-date (no small feat, that!). Not long ago at all, she moved to the South Side of Chicago where she wrestles drug dealers the break her car windows. She is the Editor of Arsenic Lobster and works (for pay!) at the Associated Press. Her poetry has appeared in several print and online magazines including Can we have our ball back?, Elixir, Bathtub Gin, Wicked Alice, Verse Daily and The Chaffin Journal. Susan is a 2003 recipient of The Lynda Hull Memorial Scholarship in Poetry.