Rebecca Black is the author of Cottonlandia, winner of the Juniper Prize. A 2009 NEA fellow and former Stegner fellow, she lives in San Francisco. She directs the creative writing program at Santa Clara University and is a student in the Iyengar Yoga Institute’s advanced studies program.

Aaron Burch has stories forthcoming in New York Tyrant, Barrelhouse, and PANK. Other “Overcast” shorts have appeared in elimae and Dogzplot. His chapbook, How to Predict the Weather, should be out by the end of the year from Keyhole Books and he is the editor of Hobart.

Thomas Cooper is a PhD student in the Florida State University creative writing department and has work currently appearing in New Orleans Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Quick Fiction, Lake Effect, and Night Train, among other journals. Cooper’s short story collection, Phantasmagoria, won Keyhole Press’s chapbook contest, judged by Michael Martone, and will be published this summer.

Adam Day’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Salmagundi, and elsewhere. He helps coordinate the Sarabande Reading Series and the Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia. He has received a grant from the Kentucky Arts Council, and he won the 2008 Madison Review’s Phyllis Smart Young poetry prize and the 2008 St. Louis Poetry Center prize.

Jeff Encke has been published in Barrow Street, Bat City Review, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art, Fence, Octopus Magazine, Salt Hill, Tarpaulin Sky, and 3rd Bed. He has taught writing and criticism at Columbia University in New York and the Richard Hugo House in Seattle.

K. A. Hays’s first book is Dear Apocalypse (Carnegie Mellon, 2009), poems from which have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2009, Best New Poets 2007, Southern Review, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She currently holds the Emerging Writer Fellowship at Bucknell’s Stadler Center for Poetry. Poems from her in-progress second book have appeared lately or will soon appear in Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, and other venues.

Brenda Hillman has published seven books and three chapbooks of poetry, including the first two books in a tetrology exploring the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire: Pieces of Air in the Epic, (Wesleyan, 2005), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Cascadia.  The third in this series, Practical Water, has just been released by Wesleyan Press. Loose Sugar (Wesleyan, 1997) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bright Existence (Wesleyan, 1993) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The Colorado Review, FENCE, the American Poetry Review, and Slate.   She is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California.

Dennis Hinrichsen’s recent books are Kurosawa's Dog, winner of the 2008 FIELD Poetry Prize, and Rip-tooth, winner of the 2010 Tampa Poetry Prize.  He has new work in Basalt, Hunger Mountain, Sou'wester, and Third Coast.

Eva Hooker is Professor of English and Writer in Residence at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. The Winter Keeper, a hand bound chapbook (Chapiteau Press, 2000), was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in poetry in 2001. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The New England Review, Agni, The Harvard Review, Salmagundi, Witness, Drunken Boat, and Best New Poets 2008.

Liz Linder has photographed well-known musical artists such as Aerosmith, Jimmy Buffett, and Carly Simon as well as indie and emerging artists such as Letters to Cleo, Howie Day, and the North Mississippi Allstars. She has also worked with corporations such as John Hancock, EMC and Millenium Pharmaceuticals; and with institutions like Harvard University, MIT and Berklee College of Music. Her commercial work has appeared in dozens of leading publications, including Rolling Stone, The New York Times and People Magazine, and she has appeared on On Point Public Radio and ABC World News Tonight. Her personal work is exhibited and collected throughout the U.S. and Europe. See more of her work at www.lizlinder.com.

Rachel Mallino lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and daughter. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 42opus, Weave Magazine, BOXCAR Poetry Review, Stirring, Pebble Lake Review, and others. She is the founding editor for Tilt Press. Her first chapbook, Inside Bone There's Always Marrow, was published in April 2009 by Maverick Duck Press.

A. McHugh studies creative writing at the University of Arkansas, where she is currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing. She has received scholarships from Sewanee Writer’s Conference and the West Chester University Poetry Conference. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Crab Orchard Review, and Unsplendid, as well as other publications. In addition, she is a co-editor of Linebreak, an online literary journal, which can be found at linebreak.org.

Phoebe Reeves teaches at the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont College, where she advises the student literary magazine East Fork. Her poems have recently appeared in failbetter, Cream City Review, Dislocate, and Quarterly West.

F. Daniel Rzicznek’s books include Divination Machine (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, forthcoming in 2009), Neck of the World (Utah State University Press, 2007) and Cloud Tablets (Kent State University Press, 2006). He is also coeditor, with Gary L. McDowell, of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice, forthcoming from Rose Metal Press in 2010. He currently teaches English composition at Bowling Green State University.

Ralph Sneeden’s work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, POETRY, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Slate, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and other magazines. The title poem of his first book, Evidence of the Journey (Harmon Blunt, 2007), received the Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry Magazine/Poetry Foundation.  Recently, he was the Chubb/LifeAmerica Fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Bergeron Fellow at the American School in London. He teaches English and directs the Writer-in-Residence/George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Rodney Wittwer’s poems have appeared in many literary journals, such as Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Diagram, Pleiades, and Ploughshares. His first book, Gone & Gone, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press; an online chapbook, Border Reports, featuring a selection of poems from that book, can be found on Web del Sol: chapbooks.webdelsol.com.

Xu Xi (www.xuxiwriter.com) is the author of seven books of fiction and essays.  Recent titles are Evanescent Isles: from my city village (personal essays), Overleaf Hong Kong: Stories & Essays of the Chinese, Overseas, and The Unwalled City (a novel).  Xu is on the prose faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.  A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, she now inhabits the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong, and the South Island of New Zealand.