CONTRIBUTORS TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE, ‘IN WALT MCDONALD COUNTRY’
Jeffrey C. Alfier is the founder and co-editor of San Pedro River Review. In 2010, he was nominated in for the UK’s Forward Prize in Poetry. His full-length book of poems, The Wolf Yearling, will be published in 2012 by Pecan Grove Press. [NOTE: Since McDonald was influential in the development of my poetry, I have included two Southwestern regional poems. This will be the ONLY time my work will appear in SPRR]
Doug Anderson’s most recent book is Keep Your Head Down, a memoir about Vietnam and the sixties published by W.W. Norton. He teaches in the Trinity College and Pacific University of Oregon MFA programs.
Wendy Barker’s fifth book of poetry is Nothing Between Us, a novel in prose poems that was runner-up for the Del Sol Prize and was published by Del Sol Press in 2009. Her third chapbook, Things of the Weather, was also published in 2009, by Pudding House Press. Her poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Gettysburg Review. She has received NEA and Rockefeller fellowships, and is Poet-in-Residence at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Alan Birkelbach was the 2005 Poet Laureate of Texas. He has 9 collections of poetry including a photo-poetry collaboration with 2010 Texas Poet Laureate Karla K. Morton. He has been published in journals such as Descant and The Langdon Review. He is serving as the editor for the forthcoming Dark Inspiration: Selected Poetry of Robert E. Howard.
Jerry Bradley is Professor of English at Lamar University, and poetry editor of Concho River Review. He is the author of five books including The Movement: British Poets of the 1950s (criticism, Twayne), The Importance of Elsewhere (poetry, Ink Brush Press), and Simple Versions of Disaster (poetry, University of North Texas Press), which was commended by the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Author of over two hundred stories, poems, essays, articles and reviews, he has received more than forty grants, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation, and the New Mexico Arts Division. His poetry credits include New England Review, American Literary Review, Modern Poetry Studies, Poetry Magazine, and Southern Humanities Review. He was the featured poet in the February, 2011, issue of Red River Review. He founded and edited for sixteen years New Mexico Humanities Review. He is also past-president of the Conference of College Teachers of English, the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers, and the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Bradley was chosen as the 2000 Joe D. Thomas Scholar-Teacher of the Year by the Texas College English Association, and he received the 2005 Frances Hernandez Teacher-Scholar Award by the Conference of College Teachers of English. He was named Outstanding Alumnus from Midwestern State University’s College of Liberal Arts in 2002. He has served on the literature panel of the Texas Commission on the Arts, and in 1996 he received the British Literature Award from the College Conference of Teachers of English.
Christine Butterworth-McDermott is an Associate Professor of English at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she teaches courses in poetry, literature, and fairy tales. She is also the poetry editor of REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters. Her poetry and fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Bellowing Ark, Cabinet de Fées, California Quarterly, North Atlantic Review, Portland Review, RATTLE, and Tales of the Unanticipated. Her chapbook, Tales on Tales: Sestinas was published by Finishing Line Press (2010) and her full-length collection Woods & Water, Wolves & Women is forthcoming.
Rick Campbell is the director of Anhinga Press and teaches English at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida. His newest book of poems is Dixmont, from Autumn House Press. His other books are The Traveler’s Companion (Black Bay Books, 2004); and Setting The World In Order (Texas Tech 2001) which won the Walt McDonald Prize and A Day’s Work (State Street Press 2000);. He’s won a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and two poetry fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. He’s published poems and essays in many journals including The Georgia Review, The Florida Review, Prairie Schooner and many others.. He was born on the Ohio River twenty miles downriver from Pittsburgh and now lives with his wife and daughter in Gadsden County, Florida.
Jerry Craven has published 23 books including three novels and four collections of poetry. His two dozen short stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies as well as in the major science fiction journals. He has taught for seven universities in three countries. Currently he lives in what once was the Big Thicket in East Texas where he serves as director of a literary press (inkbrushpress.com) and editor-in-chief of an ezine (amarillobay.org). He is also a member of the writing faculty of Lamar University and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. There is more information on him here: jerrycraven.com.
Sherry Craven has taught college English and creative writing and high school Spanish. She has retired and lives in Jasper, TX in Deep East Texas. She has published poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction and read poetry for NPR. Her poetry has appeared in English and Spanish in journals such as AmarolloBay, Muse2, New Texas, Two Southwests, The Witness, Windhover, descant, The Langdon Review, RiverSedge, The Texas Review, Concho River Review, El Locofoco, and she is included in the anthology Quotable Texas Women. Her poetry appears in the anthology of Texas writers Texas Poetry 2, and her nonfiction in Writing on the Wind, a collection of essays by West Texas women writers. She won the Conference of College Teachers of English 2005 poetry award. She is currently an editor for the literary press Ink Brush Press. Her book of poetry, Standing by the Window, was published the press Virtual Artists Collection in 2010.
Chip Dameron’s latest book is Tropical Green (Wings Press, 2005). More than a hundred of his poems have appeared in such literary magazines as Mississippi Review, Taos Review, and Southwestern American Literature. He teaches writing and literature at The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.
William Virgil Davis’s most recent book is Landscape and Journey (2009), winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize and the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Poetry. He has published three other books of poetry: One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize; The Dark Hours, which won the Calliope Press Chapbook Prize; Winter Light. His poems appear regularly in leading journals. He has published in Poetry, The Nation, The Hudson Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The New Criterion, The Sewanee Review, The Atlantic Monthly, TriQuarterly, The Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Southwest Review, and in many other journals. He has also published half a dozen books of literary criticism, most recently R. S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology, as well as scores of critical essays. He is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Baylor University.
Carol DeCanio, recipient of The Santa Barbara Arts Fund Individual Award in Poetry and published poet for 30 years, is poetry columnist for CASA Magazine. She organizes local poetry events and has had art shows of her poetry paired with her photography.
Jeffrey DeLotto is Professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth where he teaches creative writing, Shakespeare, British literature, and contemporary world literature written in English. He has also taught at Texas Tech University, Yarmouk University (in Jordan), and as a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Plovdiv in Bulgaria. He is poetry editor for the international on-line journal Amarillo Bay, general editor for Texas Wesleyan University Press, and editor for SCOL: Scholarship and Creativity On Line, A Journal of the Texas College English Association. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies, and he has published a chapbook entitled Voices at the Door, the Southwest Poets Series winner from the Maverick Press, and Days of a Chameleon: Collected Poems. He also a grower of vegetables and skipper on his mutinous family sailboat.
Aleathia Drehmer makes a life noticing the small things. She is the founder and editor of Durable Goods. She believes in the power of connection through poetry and photography. Aleathia lives in upstate New York.
Millard Dunn is currently Professor of English, Emeritus, at Indiana University Southeast, where he taught for thirty-three years. He has conducted creative writing workshops in the public schools of both Indiana and Kentucky and at West Texas A & M University in Canyon, Texas. In 1983, his chapbook Engraved on Air was published by the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives. He has co-authored, with Australian author Ken Watson, This Powerful Rhyme: A Workshop Approach to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Phoenix Education: Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, 2005). A recent collection of his poems, Places We Could Never Find Alone, is published by Inkbrush Press (2011). His poetry has appeared in many literary magazines, among them Concho River Review, Film and History, Kansas Quarterly, The Louisville Review, The Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Sandhills-St. Andrews Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, Stand, and Tar River Poetry. He lives with his wife, Carole, in Louisville, Kentucky.
W. D. Ehrhart teaches at the Haverford School in suburban Philadelphia. He and his wife Anne recently celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary in Hoi An, Vietnam. His most recent book is The Bodies Beneath the Table (Adastra Press, 2010).
Bob Fink is the W. D. and Hollis R. Bond Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene, Texas. He has five books of poetry including, most recently, Tracking The Morning (Wings Press, San Antonio, Texas, 2005). His collection of literary nonfiction Twilight Innings: A West Texan on Grace and Survival was published in 2006 by Texas Tech University Press. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including, TriQuarterly, New England Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, IMAGE, The Texas Review, Crab Orchard Review. Since 1996, he has been the poetry editor of Texas Tech University Press’s Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry.
Paul Inge Forfang (1920 – 1998), artist, emigrated from Trondheim, Norway soon after the end of World War II (he had served in the underground). Inspired by the writings of Zane Grey and Jack London, Paul sought out the wilderness, old mines, ghost towns, and the myth of the cowboy, traveling the continent extensively, and documenting his journeys in pen-and-ink, watercolor, and oil. Paul also imparted to those who knew him well a love for history, animals, and the English language—of which he was an undisputed master. His paintings can be found in the Kennedy Library as well as some places in Europe.
John Garmon currently resides in Nevada, where he teaches part-time and writes poetry and fiction. He has held numerous positions in educational leadership, administration, and teaching over the last forty years, including campus academic officer at the Carlsbad campus of New Mexico State University, president of a small community college in Berkeley, California, and professor of writing. literature, and English in the San Francisco Bay Area and other regions. He is a widely published poet whose work has appeared over four decades in such journals as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, and many others. His more recent books include The Joys of a Good Life, The Book of Geronimo and Cochise, and West by Southwest: Verbal and Visual Snapshots from the High Plains, a collaborative project with his daughter, which presents “views of life in unique areas of a land that is still relatively untamed ...with places that have almost successfully resisted human settlement.”
Andrew Geyer is assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina at Aiken. Born in Austin, Texas, he grew up on a working cattle ranch in Southwest Texas. He earned his PhD in American Literature and Creative Writing from Texas Tech University in 2003, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Carolina-Columbia in 1992, and BAs in English and Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988. His latest novel is Dixie Fish (Ink Brush Press 2011). His other books are Siren Songs from the Heart of Austin (Ink Brush Press 2010); Meeting the Dead (University of New Mexico Press 2007); and Whispers in Dust and Bone (Texas Tech University Press 2003), which won the silver medal for short fiction in the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards and the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. Geyer's work has appeared in Texas Review, South Dakota Review, Southwestern American Literature, and many other literary magazines and anthologies, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He was recently named Featured Fiction Writer for the 2010 Batchelor Emerging Writers Series at Barton College.
Ken Hada is a professor in the Department of English and Languages at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma where he directs the annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival (held each April) and teaches courses in literature and humanities. In addition to his scholarly work in ethnic literature, western regionalism and ecocriticism, Ken has three books of poetry in circulation: The Way of the Wind (Village Books Press, 2008) and Spare Parts (Mongrel Empire Press, 2010). Spare Parts was recently awarded the National Western Heritage Award from the Western Heritage Museum and Cowboy Hall of Fame. The book was also a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award, and four poems from that collection were featured on Garrison Keillor’s nationally syndicated radio program, The Writer’s Almanac. Ken’s third poetry collection, The River White: A Confluence of Brush and Quill (Mongrel Empire Press, 2011) is a collaboration with his brother Duane’s water colors tracing the White River from its source in northwest Arkansas, 700 miles downstream to its confluence with the Mississippi River.
Marian Haddad was born and raised in El Paso. A lecturer, manuscript consultant, freelance writer, and visiting writer in public and private schools and universities, Haddad is a Pushcart-nominated poet, and the author of Wildflower. Stone, the first hardback published by Pecan Grove Press (2011). Her previous full-length collection of poems, also from Pecan Grove Press, is Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home (2004), now in its fifth printing. Her poems, essays, reviews, and articles have been published in various literary journals and anthologies within the United States and Belgium and have been invited for publication in the Middle East. An NEH recipient, she participated in graduate work in philosophy at The University of Notre Dame and studied The Prose Poem at Emerson College. She holds a B.A. in creative writing from The University of Texas - El Paso and an M.F.A. from San Diego State, where she was associate editor for Poetry International, Vol. III. She has taught Creative Writing at Northwest Vista College, Our Lady of the Lake University, and International and American Litera ture at St. Mary’s University. Her works in progress include a collection of essays about growing up Arab American in a Mexican American border town. She often blogs for the San Antonio Express News.
Jerry Hamby has published in several journals, including Concho River Review, Palo Alto Review, New Texas, Descant, Windhover, and The Texas Poetry Calendar. His collection Letters Drawn in Water was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2004. Jerry has twice won the Conference of College Teachers of English Creative Writing Award, and was a Featured Poet at Houston Poetry Fest 2011. Jerry teaches English and humanities at Lee College in Baytown, Texas. Hamby’s poems were inspired by All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems, by Walt McDonald and Janet M. Neugebauer (Texas Tech University Press, 1992).
Carol Hamilton served as the Oklahoma State Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997. A five-time Pushcart nominee, she is the recipient of the Oklahoma Book Award for a chapbook of poetry, Once the Dust, in 1992. She received a Southwest Book Award in 1988 for a children’s novel, The Dawn Seekers and a Cherubim Award for another children’s novel, The Mystery of Black Mesa. Other published books are, Breaking Silence (Winner of the Chiron Chapbook Award, 2000); Gold: Greatest Hits (Pudding House Invitational Series), and Vanishing Point (Editor's Choice Chapbook from Main Street Rag Press. Recent releases from Finishing Line Press are Shots On and Contrapuntal, both finalists for Oklahoma Book Award. In the last year, three works were published, including Umberto Lost His Gun (Pudding House) – a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award, Lexicography (March Street Press), and from Finishing Line Press, Master of Theater: Peter the Great. She received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Central Oklahoma for 2007. Recent publications have been in South Carolina Review, Atlanta Review, Pinyon, Southern Poetry Review, World Literature Today, New Orleans Review, Nimrod, New York Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Xavier Review, Potomac Review, Main Street Rag, Westview, Cumberland Poetry Review, International Poetry Review, River Oak Review, Southwest American Literature, Literature and Belief, Chaffin Poetry Journal, Wisconsin Review, Homestead Review, White Pelican, Avocet, and others. She has won the Byline Literary Awards for both short story and. She received the David Ray Poetry Award in 2000 and the 2002 Warren Keith Wright Prize for Poetry. She has been featured poet in Voices International, Piecework, Chiron Review, Potpourri, Westview, Drury's Gazette, Newsletter Inago, and Prisa. More may be found at http://www.carolhamilton.org/
Michelle Hartman has been published in Raleigh Review, San Pedro River Review, Pacific Review, Concho River Review, Main Street Rag Journal, Texas Poetry Calendar, Eclectica, Sojourn, Aries, descant, RiverSedge, Mirror Dance, Illya’s Honey and the anthologies, The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press), Big Land, Big Sky, Big Hair, (Dos Gatos Press) and Above Us Only Sky and Venom Kiss, both from Incarnate Muse Press. Overseas, she’s appeared in The SHOp, Ireland, Blue Print Review, Germany, and was a juried poet in the 2009 Houston Poetry Festival. She holds a BS in Political Science-Pre Law from Texas Wesleyan University and a Certificate in Paralegal Post Grad studies. She is the editor for Red River Review.
James Hoggard is the author of twenty books, most recently the novel The Mayor’s Daughter (Wings Press, 2011) and the highly acclaimed Triangles of Light: The Edward Hopper Poems (Wings Press, 2009). His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Harvard Review, Mantis (Stanford), Southwest Review, Arts & Letters, Translation Review, and others. His awards include the PEN Southwest Poetry Award, an NEA fellowship, the Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for literary translation, and the Lon Tinkle Award for Excellence Sustained Throughout a Career, Twice president of The Texas Institute of Letters, he is the Perkins-Prothro Distinguished Professor of English at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas.
Ann Howells serves on the board of Dallas Poets Community—a 501 (c ) (3) literary non-profit. She has edited their journal, Illya’s Honey for thirteen years. She was a finalist in 2008 NavWorks Poetry Competition and 2007 Southern Hum’s Women of Words. Her chapbook, Black Crow in Flight, was published by Main Street Rag. Her work appears in Borderlands, Concho River Review, Magma Poetry (UK), RiverSedge, San Pedro River Review, Sentence, Spillway and Third Wednesday among others.
Roger D. Jones teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Texas State University. He is author of two previous collections, and his work has appeared regularly over the past thirty years in various journals, including Iowa Review, Southern Poetry Review, Hawaii Review, Texas Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Modern Haiku, and many others. He is married, with two children, and lives in New Braunfels, Texas.
karla k. morton, the 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, a graduate of Texas A&M University, and a Board Member of the Greater Denton Arts Council. Described as “one of the most adventurous voices in American poetry,” she has been featured on Good Morning Texas, NPR, ABC News, CBS News and in countless newspapers, blogs and magazines. A Betsy Colquitt Award Winner and twice an Indie National Book Award Winner, she has been widely published in literary journals, and is the author of seven books of poetry, her latest two are Names We've Never Known (Texas Review Press), and No End of Vision: Texas as Seen by Two Laureates (Ink Brush Press), which is an ekphrastic collaboration of Morton's black and white photography with fellow Texas Poet Laureate Alan Birkelbach's poems. A native Texan, Morton has long loved the poetry of Texas Poet Laureate Walt McDonald, always traveling with his books in hand, and has trekked thousands of miles across Texas and beyond -- bringing poetry and the arts into schools, colleges, universities, civic groups, cancer support groups, and festivals in communities all across the states.
David M. Parsons, 2011 Texas State Poet Laureate, has been recipient of an N.E.H. Dante Fellowship to the SUNY, the French-American Legation Poetry Prize, the Baskerville Publisher’s Prize and was inducted into The Texas Institute of Letters in 2009. Parsons grew up in Austin, after which, he joined the Marine Corps Reserve, where he served as a Squad Leader in a rifle company and a Recon-Scout Boat Team Leader. He attended The UT Austin and Texas State University, where he holds a BBA. After several years in business, advertising, and coaching at Bellaire High School, Parsons graduated from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. Dave Parsons’ first collection of poems, Editing Sky, was the winner of the 1999 Texas Review Poetry Prize and a Violet Crown Book Awards Special Citation. Parsons teaches Creative Writing and Kinesiology (Racquetball/Handball) at Lone Star College-Montgomery. He is founder and Co-Director of the MCLAC Writers in Performance Series and Chairman of the Greater Conroe Arts Alliance. Parsons has four grown children and lives with wife Nancy, an award winning Artist. Feathering Deep, his latest collection is forthcoming from Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press Consortium. www.daveparsonspoetry.com
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker , San Pedro River Review, The Nation and elsewhere. As an 8th Air Force bomber pilot during World War II, he earned several combat medals and the Presidential Unit Citation. For more information, including his essay ‘Magic, Illusion and Other Realities’, and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
Cleatus Rattan, a former Marine, is Frank W. Mayborn Chair of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. The author of five collections of poetry, Rattan’s most recent books are Take Your Time Coming Home, Texas Review Press (2005), and Funerals for Sparrows, Trilobite Press (2007). His book The Border, Texas Review Press 2002 was selected by the Texas University Interscholastic league for study by high school students across the state for state-wide academic competition in Literary Criticism in 2003. Rattan is the first living poet to be so honored. Previous poets studied by the UIL have been Frost, Wordsworth, Tennyson, ee cummings, and Edna St. Vincent Millay among others. National Public Radio interviewed Dr. Rattan and asked him to read four of his poems for the second inauguration of President Bush. Selected as the Poet Laureate of Texas for 2004-2005, Rattan was also selected as a Distinguished Alumnus of Texas A&M University –Commerce in 2004. Rattan holds degrees from Southern Methodist University, University of North Texas, Hardin-Simmons University, and Texas A&M University-Commerce. In his sophomore and junior years in high school he was voted "Most Handsome Boy.” In his junior year he played the part of Nanki Poo from The Mikado. Some say the strains of "A Wandering Minstrel I" continue to waft through the old non-venerated building. The reviews were inconclusive, however. That same year, 1952, he was voted "The Man Most Likely to Hit the Ball Carrier After He Was Down" by senior teammates. His eyes grow moist at the thought of such an honor even now.
The poems and essays of Carol Coffee Reposa have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, The Formalist, The Texas Observer, Southwestern American Literature, Blue Mesa Review, Coal City Review, and other journals and anthologies. She has three collections of poetry: At the Border: Winter Lights, The Green Room, and Facts of Life. Nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, she also has received three Fulbright/Hays Fellowships for study in Russia, Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico. A professor emeritus of English at San Antonio College, she delights in her five grandchildren, swimming, gardening, writing (of course) and every kind of music except heavy metal. She makes her home in San Antonio, Texas.
Susan Rooke lives in Austin, Texas. Her poems have appeared recently in San Pedro River Review, Texas Poetry Calendar 2012, The Christian Science Monitor, Stone Telling, The Orange Room Review, and other journals. She edits the Austin Poetry Society’s monthly MuseLetter, and has just completed her first novel, a fantasy.
William Pitt Root’s numerous collections include the forthcoming Welcome Traveler: Selected Early Odes of Pablo Neruda, Wings Press, 2012, and, most recently, White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West, Carolina Wren, 2006. In 2005, Carnegie Mellon re-issued The Storm and Other Poems (originally Atheneum, 1969) in their Contemporary Classics series. Trace Elements From a Recurring Kingdom (a Notable Book for 1994, The Nation) recollected Root's first five books. He's been a US/UK Exchange Artist and Fellow of the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, Stanford University, and National Endowment for the Arts. Translated into 20 languages, his poems, repeatedly nominated for the Pulitzer, have won three Pushcart Prizes, Editor's Choice in the 2008 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition, the Stanley Kunitz Poetry Award, the Guy Owen Poetry Prize and a $500 award from Winning Poets Best War Poem contest 2006. Besides being broadcast over Voice of America and Liberation Radio, he has read his work worldwide and is often a featured writer at the Prague Summer Program and the Meacham Writers Conference in Chattanooga. He's just accepted the John C. Hodges Distinguished Visiting Writer chair at UT-- Knoxville for Fall 2011.
Paul Ruffin is Texas State University System Regents Professor and Distinguished Professor of English, Sam Houston State University, Texas. He served as the 2009 Texas State Poet Laureate. His books include two novels, three collections of short stories, two books of essays, six collections of poetry, and eleven edited or co-edited books on such topics as Southern fiction, New England poetry, William Goyen, and John Steinbeck. In 2010 TCU Press released his New and Selected Poems as part of their Texas Poet Laureate Series, and Louisiana Literature Press published his third collection of essays. More may be found at www.pauldruffin.com
Steven Schroeder received his Ph.D. in Ethics and Society from the University of Chicago in 1982. He is the co-founder, with composer Clarice Assad, of the Virtual Artists Collective (a “virtual” gathering of musicians, poets, and visual artists), which has published five full-length poetry collections each year since it began in 2004. He teaches at the University of Chicago in Asian Classics and the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in After Hours, AmarilloBay, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Concho River Review, the Christian Science Monitor, the Cresset, Druskininkai Poetic Fall 2005, Georgetown Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Karamu, Macao Closer, Mid-America Poetry Review, Poetry East, Poetry Macao, Rambunctious Review, Rhino, Shichao, Sichuan Literature, Texas Review, TriQuarterly and other literary journals. He has published two chapbooks, Theory of Cats and Revolutionary Patience, and five full-length collections, Fallen Prose, The Imperfection of the Eye, Six Stops South, A Dim Sum of the Day Before, and (with Debby Sou Vai Keng) A Guest Giving Way Like Ice Melting: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Laozi. His most recent book (three short stories and a verse drama) is Four Truths.
Jan Epton Seale has been appointed by the Texas Legislature as the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate. She received a B.A. from The University of Louisville and a M.A. from North Texas State University. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry, the latest being Nape, published by Ink Brush Press. She has also authored two books of short fiction, three volumes of nonfiction, and nine children's books. Her work is published nationally in such venues as The Yale Review, Texas Monthly, and Newsday. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing. Her poetry has received the Kathryn Morris Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of Texas, and the Bill Burke Award and Dolly Sprunk Memorial Award from the New York Poetry Forum. Her stories and poems have been broadcast over National Public Radio. Seale teaches memoir and creative writing workshops both in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where she lives, and nationally for writing groups and learning centers.
Naomi Shihab Nye lives in San Antonio and has been a Walt McDonald fan for decades. Her books forthcoming fall 2011 are Transfer (poems) and There is No Long Distance Now (very short stories).
Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor and Editor of Connecticut Review, Vivian Shipley teaches at Southern Connecticut State University. In 2010, her eighth book of poetry, All of Your Message Have Been Erased, was published by Southeastern Louisiana University and her sixth chapbook, Greatest Hits: 1974-2010, was published by Pudding House Press. Raised in Kentucky, with a PhD from Vanderbilt University, she was inducted into the University of Kentucky Hall of Fame for Distinguished Alumni in April, 2010.
Brett Taylor is a writer and photographer who lives in Mossy Grove, Tennessee. His photos have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Big Muddy, and Redivider.
Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, has published sixteen collections of poetry, the most recent of which is A Murder of Crows (Virtual Artists Collective 2011). His seventeenth collection (The Red, Candle-lit Darkness) is currently in press and will be issued by El Grito del Lobo Press in late summer 2011. Thomas retired in 1998 after a three-decade career in social service and adult criminal justice. His New and Selected Poems (TCU Press 2008) was long-listed for the National Book Award.
Called by The Bloomsbury Review, “one of the most insightful and spirited poets today,” Pamela Uschuk is author of five books of poems, including Wild in the Plaza of Memory, forthcoming from Wings Press . Meanwhile, Without the Comfort of Stars will be reprinted by New Delhi’s Sampark Press. Her 2009 book, Crazy Love (Wings Press), won the 2010 American Book Award. Her work is published around the world and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. She teaches creative writing at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. In Spring 2011, she will hold the Hodges Chair as Visiting Writer at University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
William Wenthe’s books of poetry are Words Before Dawn (LSU Press, forthcoming 2012), Not Till We Are Lost (LSU Press) and Birds of Hoboken (Orchises Press). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Tin House, Poetry Daily, among many others; and he has received fellowships from the NEA, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and Pushcart Prizes. Born and raised in New Jersey, he teaches poetry at Texas Tech University.
Clarence Wolfshohl is professor emeritus of English at William Woods University. He operated Timberline Press for thirty-five years until the end of 2010. His poetry and creative fiction have appeared in Concho River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Colere, Rattlesnake Review, Cenizo Journal, and Melic Review, Muse2, Houston Literary Review and Right Hand Pointing online. Recently, a chapbook of poems about Brazil, Season of Mangos, was published by Adastra Press (2009) and a compilation of three earlier chapbooks, The First Three (2010) and Down Highway 281 (2011) were published by El Grito del Lobo Press. A native Texan, Wolfshohl now lives with his wife, his writing, two dogs and two cats in a nine-acre woods outside of Fulton, Missouri.
Christopher Woods has published a prose collection, Under a Riverbed Sky, and a collection of stage monologues, Heart Speak. His photographs appeared recently Narrative Magazine, and he was a contributor to the inaugural issue of San Pedro River Review. He shares an online gallery with his wife, Linda, at http://www.texanareviewgallery.com.
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