Gerard Sarnat
Gerry Sarnat is the author of three critically acclaimed collections: HOMELESS CHRONICLES from Abraham to Burning Man (2010), Disputes (2012), and 17s (2014) in which each poem, stanza or line has 17 syllables. For Huffington Post reviews, reading dates including Stanford, publications and more, visit GerardSarnat.com.
Hannah Rogers
Hannah Rogers grew up in rural Alabama and received her Ph.D. at Cornell University. She teaches at Columbia University and the University of Virginia. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Catch & Release, Leonardo, and The Southern Women’s Review. She is a recepient of the ArtHub Writing Residency and is currently working on a manuscript, Luck with Animals.
Lindsay Daigle
Lindsay Daigle is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She holds an MFA from The New School. Her work has has appeared or is forthcoming in Barn Owl Review, Quarterly West, The Laurel Review, and elsewhere.
Nels Hanson
Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in 2010, 12, and 2014. Poems have appeared in Word Riot, Oklahoma Review, Pacific Review and other magazines. Nels received the Sharkpack Review Annual’s 2014 Prospero Prize and a 2014 Pushcart nomination.
Peycho Kanev
Peycho Kanev is the author of 3 poetry collections and two chapbooks, published in the US and Bulgaria. He has won several European awards for his poetry and been nominated for the Pushcart Award as well Best of the Net. His work has appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Hawaii Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, The Coachella Review, Two Thirds North, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review and many others.
Emily Villemaire_Artist Statement
“The parabolic fable of The Elephant Man… while based in Victorian times, seems equally apposite to our present ambivalent response to human abnormality, reminding us of what we now otherwise find it difficult to confess except in our REM sleep: That those wretched caricatures of our idealized body image, which at first appear to represent the absolutely ‘Other’ (thus reassuring us who come to gape that we are 'normal’) are really a revelation of what in our deepest psyches we recognize as the Secret Self. After all, not only do we know that each of us is a freak to someone else; but in the depths of our unconscious (where the insecurities of childhood and adolescence never die) we seem forever freaks to ourselves.”
-Leslie Fiedler, The Tyranny of the Normal
Craig Kurtz
Craig Kurtz has vexed the aesthetic establishment since the 1981 release of The Philosophic Collage. Recent work has appeared in Aerie Literary Journal, Conclave: A Journal of Character, The Criterion: An International Journal in English, Danse Macabre, Festival Writer, Penmen Review, Penumbra, Red Fez and The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry.
Peter Burzynski
Peter Burzynski is a second-year PhD student in Creative Writing-Poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He holds a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a M.F.A. in Poetry from The New School University, and a M.A. in Polish Literature from Columbia University. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming from The Best American Poetry Blog, Thrush Poetry Review, Your Impossible Voice, RHINO, Forklift Ohio, among others.
John Repp
John Repp's recent collection is Fat Jersey Blues, winner of the 2013 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press.
Deborah Blakely
Deborah Blakely lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing, freshman composition, and humanities at California State University, Northridge. She is also poetry co-editor at Redheaded Stepchild Magazine. Her past occupations have included: Melrose Avenue hairstylist, television commercial production assistant, switchboard operator, and volunteer at the Los Angeles needle exchange.
Peter Bracking
Peter Bracking tells tall tales. His words have been published by more than a dozen presses in four countries on two continents including: Maisonneuve, Empty Sink, Feathertale Review; Merida Review; Ascent / Aspirations, Thrice Fiction, Streetcake Magazine and Existere.
Jacob Appel
Jacob Appel has published short fiction in over 200 journals including Agni, Alaska Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, Subtropics, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and West Branch. He has won the New Millennium Writings contest four times, the Writer's Digest "grand prize" twice, and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom competition in both fiction and creative nonfiction. He has also won annual contests sponsored by Boston Review, Missouri Review, Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Briar Cliff Review, North American Review, Sycamore Review, Writers' Voice, the Dana Awards, the Salem Center for Women Writers, and Washington Square.
