Rusty Barnes lives and works in Revere, MA, but grew up in rural northern Appalachia. He received his BA from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and his MFA from Emerson College. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in over two hundred journals and anthologies. After editing fiction for the Beacon Street Review (now Redivider) and Zoetrope All-Story Extra, he co-founded Night Train, a literary journal which was featured in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and manages Fried Chicken and Coffee, a blogazine of rural and Appalachian concerns. He is the author of two collections of fiction, Breaking it Down and Mostly Redneck, a novel The Reckoning, and three books of poetry Redneck Poems, Broke, and I Am Not Ariel. His latest book is the novel Reckoning, and he’s busy trying to write a crime novel now.
Eleanor Leonne Bennett is an internationally award-winning photographer and visual artist. She is the CIWEM Young Environmental Photographer of The Year 2013 and has also won first place honors with National Geographic, The World Photography Organization, Nature’s Best Photography, and The National Trust, among others. Her work has been published in the Telegraph, The Guardian, The British Journal of Psychiatry, Life Force Magazine, British Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and as the cover of books and magazines throughout the world. Her art has been exhibited in New York, Paris, London, Rome, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Copenhagen, Washington, Canada, Spain, Japan, and Australia, among many other locations. She is the only person from the UK to have work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus run See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year of Biodiversity 2010.
Ron Burch’s fiction has been published in numerous literary journals including Mississippi Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Eleven Eleven, [PANK], and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Bliss Inc., his debut novel, was published by BlazeVOX Books. He lives in Los Angeles.
Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of The Same Terrible Storm and Where Alligators Sleep. He is the Founding Editor of Revolution John. He survives in Eastern Kentucky.
Cheryl Anne Gardner is a hopeless dark romantic, lives in a haunted house, and often channels the spirits of Poe, Kafka, and de Sade. She prefers novellas and flash fiction to writing bios because she always seems to forget what point of view she is in. When she isn’t writing, she likes to chase marbles on a glass floor, eat lint, play with sharp objects, and make taxidermy dioramas with dead flies. Her writing has been described as “beautifully grotesque,” her characters “deliciously disturbed.” Her short fiction has been published in dozens of journals including Dustbin, Hobo Pancakes, Carnage Conservatory, Pure Slush, Negative Suck, Danse Macabre, and at The Molotov Cocktail among others. She lives with her husband on the East Coast USA, and she is currently the head fiction editor at Apocrypha and Abstractions Literary Journal.
Hedy Habra is the author of a poetry collection, Tea in Heliopolis, winner of the 2014 USA Book Awards and finalist for the 2014 International Book Award, a short story collection, Flying Carpets, winner of the 2013 Arab American National Book Award’s Honorable Mention and finalist for the 2014 USA Book Awards and the 2014 Eric Hoffer Book Award. She is a recipient of the 2012 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award. Her multilingual work appears in numerous publications, including Drunken Boat, Cutthroat, The Bitter Oleander, Blue Fifth Review, Diode, Nimrod, Cider Press Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetic Diversity, Mizna, and Poet Lore. She has a passion for painting and teaches Spanish at Western Michigan University.
Rachel Kertz has been in love with taking photos for a while and discovered that other people actually enjoy her photos as well. Now she fills her days with as much photo-taking as she can. There are a million reasons why she loves photography, but the two most important: to be able to stop time and give it to others, and to show others that they are beautiful and memorable. If she can manage to do that for the rest of her life, she will be a very happy girl. Rachel is a graduate of Southeast Missouri State University, with a Bachelor’s in Communication Disorders. After graduating, she took courses in natural and studio lighting and is proficient in dark room developing procedures. Read and view more about her at Flickr , WordPress , and on Facebook.
Dennis Mahagin’s poems have appeared in Evergreen Review, Absinthe Literary Review, Exquisite Corpse, Everyday Genius, elimae, The Nervous Breakdown, Corium, Stirring, Juked and Night Train. His latest poetry collection is called Longshot & Ghazal, available now from Mojave River Press.
Antonia Maltezos is a musician, artist, photographer, and student of psychology at Dawson College in Montreal.
Corey Mesler has published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Good Poems American Places, and Esquire/Narrative. He has published 8 novels, 4 short story collections, numerous chapbooks, and 4 full-length poetry collections. His new novel, Memphis Movie, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press. He’s been nominated for many Pushcarts, and 2 of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife, he runs a bookstore in Memphis.
Joseph Mills has degrees in literature from the University of Chicago (B.A.), the University of New Mexico (M.A.), and the University of California-Davis (Ph.D). As he was working on his third one, his mother asked, “Don’t you know that stuff yet?” A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, he holds the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities. His published work includes poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism. He has published five volumes of poetry with Press 53: This Miraculous Turning, Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet; Love and Other Collisions; Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers, and Somewhere During the Spin Cycle . Joseph and his wife, Danielle Tarmey, are the authors of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries (John F. Blair, Publisher). The second edition was released in 2007. He blogs about various topics at “The Practice of Attention” and occasionally posts on Twitter @JosephRMills
Laura Jean Moore is the 2014 winner of the Cobalt Review’s Zora Neale Hurston Fiction Prize. Her poetry, essays, and stories have been featured in [PANK], the Brooklyn Rail, and Corium Magazine. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Reed College. She is suspicious of most things.
Dale Neal is the author of the novel, Cow Across America, winner of the 2009 Novello Literary Prize, and The Half-Life of Home. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Arts & Letters, Carolina Quarterly, Marlboro Review, Crescent Review, and many other literary journals. He works as a journalist for the Asheville Citizen-Times and lives in Asheville with his wife and dogs.
Roman Newell is a twenty-eight-year-old Army veteran. He grew up in the Oregon outdoors where he learned to watch and be still. He was schooled in West Point, New York, and has been afforded extensive opportunity to travel the world. He currently resides in Madison, Wisconsin, where he enjoys brisk walks, fast running, cigars, and true whiskey old-fashioneds.
Jim Nichols lives on a little river in Warren, Maine, with his wife Anne, their Springer Spaniel Brady, Brady’s new stepbrother Jesse (a flat-coated retriever), many ducks, cormorants, osprey, eagles, two hives of Italian bees, cardinals, waxwings…well, you get the picture. Jim has published work in many venues, including december, Esquire, Zoetrope ASE, Narrative, Night Train, River City, elimae, The Clackamas Review, American Fiction Vol.9, Conversely, Germ, and Portland Monthly. He is the 2014 winner of the Curt Johnson Prose Award for Fiction (December magazine), a past winner of the Willamette Fiction Prize, and a prize winner in the River City Writing Awards. His collection Slow Monkeys and Other Stories was published in 2003 by Carnegie Mellon Press, and his novel Hull Creek appeared in April 2011. Closer All The Time, a novel in stories, will appear in February 2015 by Islandport Press.
Rachel Pasch Grossman is a photographer in Illinois. You’ll find her work on Flikr.
Jay Sizemore dropped out of college and has since sold his soul to corporate America. He still sings in the shower. Sometimes he writes things down. His work has appeared online and in print with magazines such as Rattle, Prick of the Spindle, DASH, Menacing Hedge, and Still: The Journal. He’s never won any awards. Currently, he lives in Nashville, TN, home of the death of modern music. His chapbook Father Figures is available on Amazon.
Chelsea Laine Wells has been published in [PANK], The Butter, Bluestem, wigleaf, Evergreen, and Heavy Feather, among others. Recent honors include two Pushcart Prize nominations as well as one nomination for Best of the Net. She is the fiction editor for Hypertext Magazine. Currently she lives with her husband Nick and daughter Atlee Harper in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, TX, and is a high school librarian who proudly leads a stone cold pack of weirdos in a kick ass student writers’ club.
Charles Dodd White was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in both the city and the woods. He has been a Marine, a fishing guide, and a journalist. He is the recepient of the Jean Ritchie Fellowship, an individual artist grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, and is the author of the novels A Shelter of Others (2014) and Lambs of Men (2010), as well as the story collection Sinners of Sanction County (2011). He is at work on a new novel called Hurt River. He teaches English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee.
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