43rd Contributors

Nick Admussen is an assistant professor of Chinese literature at Cornell University. He is the author of three chapbooks, including Movie Plots from Epiphany Editions, and his work has appeared in Fence, Blackbird, the Boston Review and the Kenyon Review Online. He is an active translator from the Chinese and his translations of the Sichuan poet Ya Shi appear in recent issues of the New England Review and Chinese Literature Today. His first scholarly book, on contemporary Chinese prose poetry, is forthcoming from the University of Hawaii Press.

 

Wesleigh Anderson, a law student at Yale, still indulges his first love, poetry, on the side. He is a Bay Area native and New England transplant, where he is experiencing for the first time the joy of having four real seasons.

 

Daniel Aristi was born in Spain. He studied French Literature as an undergrad at the French Lycée in San Sebastian. He now lives and writes in Switzerland with his wife and two children. Daniel’s work is just out in Meat for Tea and is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review and Cleaver Magazine. Daniel is a Pushcart nominee (Dirty Chai).

 

John Ashbery’s new collection of poems, Quick Question, was released in December, 2012. He recently received a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House.

 

Tricia Asklar received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She currently lives with her wife, daughter, and toddler twins in Sharon, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Bateau, Boxcar Poetry Review, Cold Mountain Review, juked, Neon, Poet Lore, The Portland Review, Redactions, Red Wheelbarrow, So To Speak, and Verse Daily, among other publications.

 

Amin Banani , Ph.D., (1926-2013) was Emeritus Professor of History and Persian Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a former Chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and a former Acting Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. He received his B.A. (1947) and Ph.D. (1959) from Stanford University and his M.A. (1949) from Columbia University. He was the author of The Modernization of Iran (1961) and editor and contributing author of The Epic of Kings (1967), Islam and Its Cultural Divergence (1971), Iran Faces the Seventies (1971), Individualism and Conformity in Classical Islam (1977), Communications Policy for National Development (1977), State and Society in Iran (1978), Nation and Ideology (1981), The Bride of Acacias: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (1982), Mysticism and Poetry in Islam: The Heritage of Rumi (1987), Persian Literature (1988), Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry (2005), and numerous articles and reviews on the history and culture of Persia. Professor Banani served on the Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, the Executive Council of the Society for Iranian Studies, and as Vice President of the American Association of Iranian Studies.

 

Jessica Rae Bergamino is the author of The Desiring Object or Voyager Two Explains to the Gathering of Stars How She Came to Glow Among Them (Sundress Publications, 2016), The Mermaid, Singing (dancing girl press, 2015), and Blue in All Things: a Ghost Story (dancing girl press, 2015). Individual poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, West Branch, Crab Orchard Review, The Journal, and elsewhere. She is a doctoral student in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, where she serves as poetry editor for Quarterly West.

 

Charles Bernstein’s Pitch of Poetry, new essays, will be out this Spring from University of Chicago Press. His most recent book of poems is Recalculating (Chicago, 2013). He is Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. More info at epc.buffalo.edu.

 

Jenny Mary Brown’s work has either been featured in or is forthcoming from The Monarch Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Sugar House, among others. She is currently the poetry editor at The Mondegreen. She lives in Arcata, CA, where she reads comics, plays the piano, and teaches at Humboldt State University.

 

Chris Carosi is from Pittsburgh and then escaped to study at the University of San Francisco Creative Writing Program between 2009 and 2011. He is the author of two chapbooks, bright veil (New Fraktur Press, 2011) and FICTIONS (The Gorilla Press, 2015). Other work has appeared in Spring Gun, Switchback (where he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Your Impossible Voice, and a few others. He lives in San Francisco with Rebecca where he’s worked as a copy editor, sportswriter, bookseller, proctor, and file clerk and now works for City Lights Booksellers and Publishers as a publicist and digital marketing coordinator.

 

Leonard J. Cirino (1943-2012) was the author of more than twenty chapbooks and fourteen full- length collections of poetry since 1987 from numerous small presses. Towards the end of his life, he lived in Springfield, Oregon, where he cared for his elderly mother and worked full- time as a poet. His 104-page collection, Omphalos: Poems 2007, was published by Pygmy Forest Press—Leo’s own press—in 2010. A 64-page selection, Tenebrion: Poems 2008, was published by Cedar Hill Publications in summer 2010. His full- length collection, Chinese Masters, came out with Street Press in 2009. He was the featured poet at the Outsiders’ Art Festival, Lincoln, NE, in August 2010. He is remembered by his friends and fellow poets for his generosity of time and spirit. “A Parallel Universe” was originally published as a broadsheet by Pygmy Forest Press. [Editor’s note: Leo was one of the first people to correspond with me (and send me books, drafts, revisions, etc.) as a clueless young poet looking for guidance almost a decade ago, something for which I’ll always be grateful. —Andrew David King]

 

Brendan Ian Cohn-Sheehy is a UC Berkeley alum and UC Davis MD/PhD student studying medicine and neuroscience who maintains his passions for words and music daily in the Sacramento-Davis sprawl.

 

Na Hui-Dok was born in Nonsan (South Ch’ungch’ong Province), South Korea, in 1966. She has published several collections of poetry. She was awarded the 1998 Kim Su-yong Literary Award. She favors a style marked by aphorism and suggestive turns of phrase.

 

Angel Dominguez is a Latinx Los Angeles born writer and performance artist forming Dzonots with notebooks along the California coast. He is the author of Black Lavender Milk (Timeless Infinite Light, 2015), an experimental lyric-novel that functions as an extended meditation on writing in relation to the body, time, loss, ancestry, ritual, and dreaming. His work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review, Bombay Gin, and online at Open House and spiralorb.com, with work forthcoming in Fence. He was the co- founding editor of Tract/Trace: an investigative journal, and presently curates the ongoing series: Bodies/Pages. Along with Hannah Kezema, he co- founded the performance art collaborative: Dream Tigers.

 

William Dow is Professor of American Literature at the Université Paris-Est (UPEM) and Professor of English at The American University of Paris. He is an Associate Editor of Literary Journalism Studies (Northwestern University Press) and has published articles in such journals as Publications of the Modern Language Association, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Twentieth-Century Literature, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Critique, The Hemingway Review, MELUS, Revue Française D’Etudes Américaines, Actes Sud, Prose Studies, and Etudes Anglaises. He is the author of the book, Narrating Class in American Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), co-editor of Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary (Bloomsbury, 2014). He is currently completing a book- length study on American Modernism and radicalism entitled Reinventing Persuasion: Literary Journalism and the American Radical Tradition, 1900-2000 and is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to American Literary Journalism.

 

Lawrence Eby is the author of two books of poetry, Flight of August, winner of the 2014 Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and Machinist in the Snow, ELJ Publications 2015. His work can be found in Forklift, Passages North, Fourteen Hills, Thrush Poetry Journal, and others. He is the editor in chief of Orange Monkey Publishing, a poetry press in California.

 

John Olivares Espinoza’s poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, East Bay Review, Miramar, New Letters, and ZYZZYVA. He lives with his wife and two children in San Jose, California.

 

Danni Gorden is a social worker in Portland, Oregon.

 

Allen Grossman (1932-2014) was an American writer, literary critic, and academic. A noted poet—his sizable catalogue beginning with A Harlot’s Hire (1959) and ending with Descartes’s Loneliness (2007)—he also made inestimable contributions to criticism and the study of poetry, including The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (with Mark Halliday, 1991) and The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle (1997). A professor first at Brandeis University and then at The Johns Hopkins University, he received the Bollingen Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, among many other awards. His poem in this issue, “The Piano Player Explains Himself,” appeared in The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected (1979-1991) (New Directions, 1991), and is reprinted here with the kind permission of his wife, Judith Grossman.

 

Robert Hass teaches in the English department at UC Berkeley. His most recent book is What Light Can Do (Ecco), a collection of essays. Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, teacher, and translator. Her academic work is addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. Her most recent book is The Unfollowing (Omnidawn Books, 2016). Other volumes include The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn Books, 2012) and The Wide Road, written in collaboration with Carla Harryman (Belladonna, 2010). And in fall 2013 Wesleyan republished her best-known book, My Life, in an edition that includes her related work, My Life in the Nineties. Wesleyan is also the publisher of A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field 1982-1998, and the related Poetics Journal Digital Archive, both co-edited by Hejinian and Barrett Watten. She is currently the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets, and the co-editor (with Jane Gregory and Claire Marie Stancek) of Nion Editions, a chapbook press.

 

Janis Butler Holm lives in Athens, Ohio, where she has served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal. Her prose, poems, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her sound poems have been featured in the inaugural edition of Best American Experimental Writing, edited by Cole Swensen.

 

Yaul Perez-Stable Husni lives, reads, and writes in San Francisco. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2015 with a B.A. in Comparative Literature. His favorite words include “still,” “of,” and “perhaps.”

 

Michael Ives is a writer, musician, and sound/text performer whose poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and journals in the United States and abroad. He cofounded the sound/text performance trio, F’loom, in 1995. He is the author of The External Combustion Engine, (Futurepoem, 2005), and wavetable, (forthcoming from Dr. Cicero Books) and has taught in the Written Arts Program at Bard College since 2003.

 

Major Jackson is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Roll Deep (Norton: 2015). A recent Guggenheim Fellow, he is the editor of the Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is the Richard Dennis Green & Gold Professor at the University of Vermont.

 

Mary-Catherine Jones was born and raised in the south and now divides her time between working in Manhattan and raising a family in New Hampshire, where she and her husband live on the Contoocook river with two children, one dog, and seven chickens. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry International, elimae, Cultural Society, Scapegoat Review, Zone 3 and others. Her photography has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and TedX. She’s the founder and director of the Datum:Earth reading series in Peterborough, NH, now in its fifth year of programming.

 

Len Kr isak’s latest books (both translations) are Ovid’s Erotic Poems and Catullus’s Carmina. With work in the Hudson, Sewanee, PN, Antioch, and Southwest Reviews, he is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Frost Prizes, and a four- time champion on Jeopardy!

 

Kayla Krut is an MFA candidate at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared most recently in Contemporary Verse 2, White Stag, and American Chordata. www.kaylakrut.blogspot.com.

 

Anthony A. Lee, Ph.D., is a lecturer of history at UCLA and at West Los Angeles College, specializing in African American history, African history, and the African Diaspora in Iran. He was awarded the Nat Turner Poetry Award (Cross Keys Press) for 2003. He received the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award (Lotus Press) for 2005, and the Merton Institute’s “Poetry of the Sacred” Award in 2012. His first volume of poems, This Poem Means (Lotus Press), was published in 2005. He collaborated with Jascha Kessler (UCLA) and Amin Banani (UCLA) to translate the volume Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry: Selected Poems of Qurratu’l-’Ayn (Kalimát Press, 2005). His translation with Amin Banani, Rumi: 53 Secrets from the Tavern of Love: Poems from the Rubiayat of Mevlana Rumi (Islamic Encounter Series) is forthcoming (2014). His poems have been published in various journals in the United States and Europe, including: ONTHEBUS, Warpland, The Homestead Review, Härter, Beyond the Valley of the Contemporary Poets: 2003 Anthology, and Knocking at the Door: Poems about Approaching the Other (Birch Bench Press, 2011).

 

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe 2002) and What the Sea Earns for a Living (Quaci Press 2014). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. She earned an M.F.A. from Brown University and Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Lee is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle.

 

Monica Lee was born in Seoul, Korea and has lived in California since 1979. She has two daughters. Currently, she resides in Southern California.

 

Daniel W.K. Lee is a Seattle-based writer whose work has been seen in various online and print publications. He is also a cultural critic, sex- relationship advice writer, and puppy-daddy to an insanely beautiful whippet puppy known formally as His Lordship, the Earl Camden. Daniel and Camden can be reached at strongplum@yahoo.com.

 

Henry Wei Leung is the author of a chapbook, Paradise Hunger (Swan Scythe 2012), and the recipient of Kundiman, Soros, Fulbright, and other fellowships. He is now at UH Manoa working toward a PhD.

 

Ben Mazer was born in New York City in 1964, and was educated at Harvard, where he studied with Seamus Heaney and William Alfred, and at the Editorial Institute, Boston University, where his advisors were Christopher Ricks and Archie Burnett. His most recent collections of poems are The Glass Piano (MadHat Press) and December Poems, out this spring from Pen & Anvil Press. He has recently edited a critical edition of The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom (Un-Gyve Press, 2015). He also discovered the forgotten Berkeley Renaissance poet, Landis Everson, and edited his Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the Editor of The Battersea Review.

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment(BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annualottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer- in- residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices atrobmclennan.blogspot.com

 

Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and Esquire/Narrative. He has published 8 novels, 4 short story collections, and 5 full- length poetry collections. His new novel, Memphis Movie, is from Counterpoint Press. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart many times, and 2 of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife he runs a 145 year-old bookstore in Memphis. He can be found at https://coreymesler.wordpress.com.

 

David Moffat is a writer and historian who works at The House of the Seven Gables. He studied English with a concentration in Creative Writing at Bucknell University, and has published poetry in journals such as The Berkeley Poetry Review and Spillway. In 2015, he coauthored A Gracious Host: Visiting the Gables through the Years, an exhibit and companion book on The House of the Seven Gables as a tourist destination. He has lectured locally on the lives and work of Joseph Priestley, Samuel Johnson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Dickens, as well as the history of American Unitarianism. He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Salem Historical Society and the Editor- in-Chief of the Essex Genealogist.

 

Laura Mullen is the author of eight books, most recently Complicated Grief. Recognitions for her poetry include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. She lives and works in Louisiana.

 

Peter Adam Nash is the author of a recently published biography called The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor, Arcadian Knight and of a novel called Parsimony, soon to be published by Fomite Press (2016). Additionally, he has published poems and stories in Desideratum, The Avalon Literary Review, and The Minetta Review. In 2012, he co- founded and now writes a bi-weekly post for a literary blog called Talented Reader: http://talentedreader.blogspot.com/. He lives in New Mexico with his wife and two sons.

 

Born and schooled in Chicago, Gerald Nicosia is a biographer, historian, playwright, and novelist, whose work has been closely associated with the Beat Movement as well as the 1960s. He came to prominence with the publication of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac in 1983, a book that earned him the Distinguished Young Writer Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters while it was still a work- in-progress. It was highly praised by writers as diverse as John Rechy, Irving Stone, William Burroughs, Bruce Cook, and Allen Ginsberg, who called it a “great book.”  Nicosia spent several decades in both the Chicago and San Francisco literary scenes, making a name for himself as both a post-Beat poet himself and an organizer of marathon literary events, often in conjunction with the San Francisco Public Library and the Friends of the Library. He edited major poetry collections by both Bob Kaufman (Cranial Guitar) and Ted Joans (Teducation). He was also involved in several video and film projects, including the public television documentary West Coast: Beat and Beyond, directed by Chris Felver, and the movie version of On the Road, directed by Walter Salles. A lifelong friend of peace activist Ron Kovic, Nicosia spent decades studying, working with, and writing about Vietnam veterans in their long process of healing from that war. His definitive work on that subject, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement, was picked by the Los Angeles Times as one of the “Best Books of 2001,” and has been praised by notable Vietnam veterans like John Kerry and Oliver Stone and also by veterans of America’s later wars, such as Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead, and leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War. Among his other books on a Beat theme, he has published Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory and One and Only: the Untold Story of On the Road. He has taught Beat literature, the Sixties, and the Vietnam War literally around the world, including in China, where he adopted his daughter Wu Ji. His experiences in China have found their way into a forthcoming book of poetry, Night Train to Shanghai, which was published by Grizzly Peak Press in 2013. He is also working on a book about racism and the death penalty in America, Blackness Through the Land, as well as a biography of Ntozake Shange called Beautiful, Colored, and Alive, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press. He spoke at the First International Beat Conference in the Netherlands, September 5-7, 2012; and more recently, he organized and MC-ed a marathon Beat poetry reading at Bob Weir’s Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, California, on January 8, 2013, which went on for almost four hours with over twenty poets and musicians. In June 2009, he was given an Acker Award “for avant-garde excellence” in his writing.

 

Linda Norton’s first book, The Public Gardens: Poems and History (Pressed Wafer, 2011; introduction by Fanny Howe) was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Oakland and works at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. In 2014 she received a Creative Work Fund grant and the Phillip Dickey Fellowship from SFSU. The poems published here are from a new manuscript called Wite-Out. Other work from the manuscript has appeared in Zen Monster, Eleven Eleven, New American Writing, and is forthcoming in Amerarcana, Hanging Loose, OccuPoetry, and Fourteen Hills. She appends the following notes to her work in this issue: “In My Girlish Days”: “All of my playmates is now surprised / I had to travel before I got wise. / I didn’t know no better / Oh boy / In my girlish days.” —Memphis Minnie. “I eat men like air.” —Sylvia Plath. “Disambitious” —John Berryman

 

Robert Peake (English, ’99) is an American-born poet living near London. He created the Transatlantic Poetry series, bringing poets together from around the world for live online poetry readings and conversations. He also collaborates with other artists on film-poems, and his work has been widely screened in the US and Europe. His newest collection The Knowledge is now available from Nine Arches Press.

 

  1. A. Powell is the Tin House Writer- in-Residence at Portland State University and a 2016 Civitella Ranieri fellow in Italy. His most recent books are Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012), recipient of the National Book Critics Circle award in Poetry.

 

Born in Miami, Florida, Max Goudie Pujals earned his B.A. in English at University of California Berkeley in 2013 where he took an interest in translating Spanish Caribbean poems hoping to improve the perception of writers who are important to the education of American immigrant culture. His experiments in inversions of form take their cue from attempts to invoke art with the same energy as nature. He has gone on to direct his writing to communities of cooperative farmers in Latin America.

 

Andrew Reyes likes grammar and etymology. He has a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Philosophy from UC Berkeley, which perhaps helps qualify him for his current job of teaching English and Spanish things to kids in his hometown of Chino, CA.

 

Margaret Rhee is the author of chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Literary fellowships include positions as a Kundiman Fellow, Squaw Valley Poetry Fellow, and the Kathy Acker Fellow at Les Figues Press. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic and new media studies, and a BA in creative writing and English from the University of Southern California. Currently, she is a visiting assistant professor in Women and Gender Studies Department at the University of Oregon. A portion of “The University Dreams” appeared as “Lecture Poems” in the June 2013 issue of comma, poetry.

 

Andrew Ridker is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. His work has appeared in Guernica, Boston Review, The Believer Logger, St. Louis Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere.

 

At fourteen, Larry Ruth and a friend set out from Yosemite and hiked the John Muir Trail. They spent the last night on Mount Whitney in a snowstorm in July. Larry now works as consultant in natural resource and environmental policy. For many years he taught, conducted research and handled programmatic responsibilities at the University of California. Recent research focuses on wildland fire, environmental assessment and the sustainability of natural resources and ecosystems. Publications include articles of federal wildland fire policy, ecosystem management, forest policy in the Sierra Nevada, and adaptive management.

 

Aaron Shurin is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the MFA program at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan, 2016) and Citizen (City Lights, 2011). His honors include the Gertrude Stein Award, the Bay Area Art Award, the Gerbode Poetry Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council.

 

Alex Taitague is a poet and resident of the East Bay who graduated from UC Berkeley in 2013. Though continuing to write, he now works in San Francisco in the field of advertising and analysis and enjoys working with the precision of numbers that writing often eludes.

 

Mark Tardi is the author of the books Euclid Shudders and Airport music. A former Fulbright scholar, he earned his MFA from Brown University. Previously on faculty at the Department of American Literature and Culture at the University of Lodz, Poland, he is currently a lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Nizwa, Oman. His newest book, The Circus of Trust, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press in 2017.

 

Bryce Thornburg is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.

 

TEE Kim Tong [Zhang Jinzhong in pinyin romanization system] has published a number of fiction and non-fiction books in the Chinese language. He lives in Kaohsiung, Taiwan ROC, where he teaches at the National Sun Yat-sen University and directs the Center for the Humanities.

 

Richard Tuttle’s art is represented by the Pace Gallery in New York. Major exhibitions of his work have taken place, recently at the Fabric Workshop & Museum, Philadelphia, and the Tate Modern, London. A retrospective of his work was presented in 2005 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

 

G.C. Waldrep is the author most recently of Testament (BOA Editions, 2015) and a chapbook, Susquehanna (Omnidawn, 2013). He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

 

Rob Sean Wilson has published poems and reviews in Bamboo Ridge journal since 1979, and in various other journals from Tinfish, Taxi, Manoa, and Central Park to New Republic, Ploughshares, Partisan Review and Poetry. He is a western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He is at work on two forthcoming collections of poetry: Ananda Air: American Pacific Lines of Flight; and Automat: Un/American Poetics, and still plays basketball, pool, and meditates (prays), each day, in the great void of being and creative bliss. As Jack Kerouac put it in Dharma Bums, “Equally holy, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha!”

 

Changming Yuan is a 9-time Pushcart nominee and author of 7 chapbooks. Growing up in a remote village, Yuan began to learn English at 19 and published monographs on translation before moving out of China. With a PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver, and has poetry appearing in Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review and 1159 others across 38 countries.

 

Matthew Zapruder is the author most recently of Sun Bear, Copper Canyon, 2014. Why Poetry, a book of prose, is forthcoming from Ecco Press. An Associate Professor in the English Department and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also Editor at Large at Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, CA. “Poem on the Occasion of a Weekly Staff Meeting” originally appeared in Faultline and “Little Demon of Kiss” in The Rumpus.

 

Samuel Garrett Zeitlin is a PhD candidate in Political Science and a student member of the Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at UC-Berkeley. He has published translations of Rilke and Brecht and a recent translation and edition (co-edited with R.A. Berman) of Land and Sea: A World-historical Meditation (Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing, 2015). Raúl Zurita, Chilean poet and recipient of the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 2000, published his first works under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. In the tradition of Dante, Zurita’s poetry seeks Paradise, but finds it out of reach. His works include Purgatorio, Anteparaíso, La vida nueva, and INRI.