Brief Biographies

Paul Beckman is a real estate salesman, a writer, snorkeler, traveler and photographer. Sometimes his fiction writing sneaks into his real estate ads. He’s had a collection of short stories published; “Come! Meet My Family and other stories” and chap books published by Web del Sol & Silkworm Ink. His philosophy on life is: “It's not a lie if you want it to be true.”

Sander Blome (b. 1956) writes about inner thought and the complexities of making life decisions. Born in Baltimore, MD, and raised in Toledo, OH, Sander has made SW Florida his home for the past 23 years. He earned a Mechanical Engineering degree from University of Michigan and a law degree from the University of Toledo. Poetry has always been an important part of Sander’s life, but only in this decade has he composed it in earnest. Sander’s poetry is published or will be published soon online in The Van Gogh Complex, The Houston Literary Review, outwardlink.net, and Abandoned Towers.

Caleb JW Brasset lives in Toronto.

Chris Crittenden: I teach Environmental Ethics for the University of Maine and do much of my writing in a hut in a spruce forest. Some recent acceptances are from Brink Magazine, Vox Humana, The Centrifugal Eye and Portland Review. I was recently featured in the Moonday Poetry Reading Series, and Tom Hanks walked by during the session ... (No one else seemed fazed except me).

Jim Davis: In addition to my career as a teacher, poetry and painting are my greatest passions. I received my B.A. in Studio Art from Knox College and I am currently studying poetry through Yale University. In addition to the arts, I am also an international semi-professional football player who has traveled around the world in athletic and artistic pursuits – a unique combination of interests that fuels much of my work. My first collection is going to print with Mi-te Press. The first selections from my sophomore project, tentatively titled Grind, have appeared or are forthcoming with Red River Review, Chiron Review, The Penwood Review, Town Creek Poetry, Caper Literary Journal, Orange Room Review, Willows Wept Review, and Smash Cake Magazine, among many others.

After a rather extended and varied second childhood in New Orleans (street musician, psych-tech, riverboat something-or-other, door-to-door poetry peddler, etc.), Matt Dennison finished his undergraduate degree at Mississippi State University where he won the National Sigma Tau Delta essay competition (as judged by X.J. Kennedy). He currently lives in a 100-year-old house with “lots of potential.”

Richard Donnelly publishes poetry in a variety of venues including Chronogram, Buffalo Carp, and The Dos Passos Review. During the day he slaves away at a desk in Minneapolis, MN. Slave might not be the word, but the coffee is very bad.


Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932 but with a Czech- and Yiddish-speaking grandmother in Cicero raising him, he might just as well have been born in (“Pass the sauerkraut!”) Prague. His father was an ex-violinist turned into an M.D. by Hughie’s $-starving mom who herself should have been a film-star (looked and sounded exactly like Bette Davis)...so they soaked little Hughie in violin playing, piano, art, ballet, opera and when he went down to the U. of Illinois for his Ph.D. in American Lit, he married Peruvian poet Lucia Ungaro de Zevallos and started a process of total Latin Americanization...three wives, the Peruvian, a Kansas Cityian, for thirty years a Brazilian MD, barely able to crawl at age 78 but fingers still working on the computer keyboard...110 books published, another 110 on the shelves.

Jim Fuess works with liquid acrylic paint on canvas. Most of his paintings are abstract, but there are recognizable forms and faces in a number of the abstract paintings. He is striving for grace and fluidity, movement and balance. He likes color and believes that beauty can be an artistic goal. There is whimsy, fear, energy, movement, fun and dread in his abstract paintings. A lot of his abstract paintings are anthropomorphic. The shapes seem familiar. The faces are real. The gestures and movements are recognizable. More of his abstract paintings, both in color and black and white, may be seen at http://www.jimfuessart.com/

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of 21 print and digital poetry chapbooks and the full-length poetry collections Lovesick, published in 2009 by Press Americana, and Heart With a Dirty Windshield, published in 2010 by BeWrite Books. With Dale Wisely, he is the co-founder of White Knuckle Press, http://www.whiteknucklepress.com

Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press. His work has appeared in Rattle, The Wilderness House Literary Review, Istanbul Review, Iodine, Muddy River Review, and many others. His latest collection of poems is “Poems from the Left Bank: Somerville, Mass.” (Alternating Current Press-2010) He teaches writing at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. This poem was written during his tenure at McLean Hopsital, which has been declared a national literary landmark with poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, all spending time there. For ten of his twenty-seven years there he ran poetry groups for psychiatric patients.

Oritsegbemi Emmanuel Jakpa was born in Warri, Nigeria, and currently lives in Ireland. His poetry has been published widely, including The DIAGRAM, Echoing Years, Barnwood, and Edison Literary Review. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes three times, and he received the 2008 W. B. Yeats Pierce Loughran Award.

Zeke Jarvis (I’m switching over from EC because the Toucan has advised me that Zeke is cooler) is an Assistant Professor at Eureka College. His work has appeared in Bitter Oleander, KNOCK, and The Superstition Review, among other places. In high school, he watched a classmate wander down the hall with a chainsaw, and he was disturbed by the fact that nobody stopped this kid. Yikes!

Cavenaugh Kelly's writing has been accepted for publication in Slice, The MacGuffin, The Connecticut Review, Puckerbrush Review, and Barrier Islands Review. He works as a home health occupational therapist and lives with his wife, Rosemary, and son, Dane, in Holden, Maine.


From her perch in south-central Alaska, Emily Kurn has maintained a steady presence in the world of folk music. After ten years of working as an award winning singer/songwriter and having a song featured in a music documentary featuring Jackson Browne and Iris DeMent, among others, Emily has put her 60-year-old Martin guitar down for a short nap so that she can become friends again with the unsung word.

Grant Loveys lives in St. John's, Newfoundland - a small city clinging to Canada's eastern edge. His work has appeared in dozens of literary publications in North America and Europe. In early 2010, he was awarded the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts & Letters Award for poetry.

Starting in Cincinnati, still entrenched in the Midwest, Michael M. Marks was schooled during the cold war/fallout shelter era evolving to anti-Vietnam war college days, from Elvis to the Rolling Stones. The first of the baby-boomers, he is the middle child of five born in a six-year span, always fighting to be heard. Now seriously younger than each of his own five children, he recently celebrated his fifteenth birthday for the forty-ninth time. With about forty poems published in the last few years, he is nearing his first poetry book tentatively titled “The Peanutbutter Chronicles.”

Craig Medvecky teaches Creative Writing, Literature, and Composition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he is currently a dissertator in English. Having earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Emerson College, much of his creative work emphasizes imagism, the photographic, collage, and the lyric with a healthy dose of post-modern information anxiety. Recent work can be found in Gnovis, Contemporary Literature, Poetics Sentence: A Journal of Prose, The Burnside Review, and Shady Side Review among other places. He is currently working on a historical novel that bridges his scholarly and creative interests through a dramatic exploration of the role of fine arts in the Cold War politics of the 1950s.

Thomas Mundt lives in Chicago. His recent work has appeared in Thieves Jargon, Wigleaf, NANO Fiction, and Hobart. His whole megillah can be found at www.dontdissthewizard.blogspot.com.

Kristine Ong Muslim has been published in hundreds of publications worldwide. Her poems and stories have appeared in A cappella Zoo, Boston Review, Coe Review, Fifth Wednesday, GlassFire Magazine, Grasslimb, Hobart, Minnetonka Review, Narrative Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, Other Poetry, Pank, Southword, and Tipton Poetry Journal. She has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and four times for the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Rhysling Award..

John Rachel has a B. A. in Philosophy, has traveled extensively, is a songwriter and music producer, and a left-of-left liberal. Prompted by the trauma of graduating high school and having to leave his beloved city of Detroit to attend university, the development his social skills and worldview were arrested at about age 18. This affliction figures prominently in all of his creative work. He is author of two full- length novels, "From Thailand With Love" and "The Man Who Loved Too Much". He is currently living in Japan.

John J. Trause is a library director. His chapbook of poetry Seriously Serial is published by Poets Wear Prada, and his earlier chapbook Latter-Day Litany has been staged Off-Off Broadway and elsewhere by Daniel P. Quinn since 1998. His translations, poetry, and visual work appear or are forthcoming in many journals including Sensations Magazine, Cover, Global City Review, Xavier Review, Radix, Now Culture,
The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, Off the Coast, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Lips, Xcp, Offerta Speciale, Plainsongs, Brevitas, Third Wednesday, U. S. 1 Worksheets, Conclave, Ditch, Otoliths, and the artists' periodical Crossings, published by the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. In 2009 Marymark Press published a broadside of his visual poetry. In 2005 he co-founded the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, N. J., where he serves as programmer and host and in 2009 and 2010 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Aside from his professional interest in literature and the arts, Mr. Trause also enjoys film, dance, juggling, hiking, Chinese footbinding, and Afrin ® nasal spray. For the sake of art Mr. Trause hung naked for one whole month in the summer of 2007 on the Art Wall of the Bowery Poetry Club, NYC.

Gertrude Van Dyke procrastinates far too often and is terrible at math. She loves Andean condors, which she’d like to remind you are substantially bigger than toucans. She considers poetry more disease than gift.

Jonathan Warren: I am a thirty-year-old musician. I moved to the northwest in 2007 from Knoxville, Tennessee in search of work as a wilderness guide. I now reside in Boise, Idaho, and spend most of my time writing and playing in my band Jonathan Warren and the BillyGoats. Thanks for reading.