Victor D. Infante (editor-in-chief) is an award-winning poet and journalist living in Worcester, MA. His poems have appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, journals and anthologies internationally, and his first full-length collection of poems, City of Insomnia, was published by Write Bloody Publishing. He doesn’t like it when people tell him things are impossible.
Lea C. Deschenes (associate editor) received her MFA in Poetry from New England College. She has been a recipient of Worcester’s Jacob Knight Award, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes & once found a five-leaf clover during a solar eclipse. Her first full-length collection, The Constant Velocity of Trains, received honorable mention from the DIY Book Convention Awards and is available from Write Bloody Publishing. She is the co-editor of the anthology Knocking at the Door: Poems for Approaching the Other, published by Birch Bench Press.
Sam Cha (poetry editor) recently completed his MFA in poetry at UMass Boston, where he was the 2011 and 2012 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize. His work (poems, essays, fiction, translations) can be found at anderbo, Amethyst Arsenic, ASIA, decomP, Memorious, Paper Scissors, Printer’s Devil Review, and Radius. Also, in two anthologies: Knocking at the Door: Poems About Approaching the Other, and The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing. He lives and writes in Cambridge, MA.
Rachel McKibbens (poetry editor) is the author of Pink Elephant (Cypher Books 2009), the 2009 Women of the World Poetry Slam champion and a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow. She lives in upstate New York with a burly lumberjack and their five children.
Carlye Archibeque (reviews editor) is the director of publicity and special events at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California, a poet, and a journalist. A Los Angeles native, she writes poetry in the confessional vein. She is currently working on a series of autobiographical prose poems for a new book due out on Punk Hostage Press scheduled in 2014. In her time on Earth she’s held many jobs that provided inspiration for a career in writing: weapons and tactics trainer for the Navy Seabees, Bob’s Big Boy waitress, fry cook, postal carrier and visual effects coordinator for Spider-Man 2, to name a few. Her poetry has been anthologized widely with work appearing in Spillway, Beyond the Valley of the Contemporary Poets, So Luminous the Wildflowers, Social Anarchism, and News Clips and Ego Trips. Her interview with graphic artist Dan Clowes was reprinted in both the English and French volumes of Dan Clowes: Conversations. She is the author of three chapbooks: Why I Shop (Nightgaunt Press); Dry Goods (Laguna Poets Series); and Live at the Cobalt (Cassowary Press). She is two units shy of a BA degree in Sociology from the University of California at Los Angeles and will get to it when she has time.
Tara Betts (contributing editor) teaches creative writing at Rutgers University. She is the author of Arc & Hue from Aquarius Press. Her work has appeared in Gathering Ground, Home Girls Make Some Noise, Hurricane Blues, Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv and ROLE CALL. Her work has also been adapted for Steppenwolf Theatre production Words on Fire and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard – an anthology and play talking about the impact of AIDS and HIV in the Black community. She is a Cave Canem fellow and an graduate of the New England College MFA Program.
Heather Sommer (contributing editor) is a poet, teaching artist, and recent transplant to the Pacific Northwest. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and BA from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in decomP magazinE, Paper Darts, H.O.W. Journal, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Heather teaches at the Winslow Art Center on Bainbridge Island near Seattle. She lives in Mount Vernon, WA with her fiancé and kitty.
Robert Bohm is a poet and culture writer, who born in Queens, NY. His works include Closing the Hotel Kitchen, from West End Press, and the chapbook, Uz Um War Moan Ode, from Pudding House Press. He twice has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won the IPBC’s (Inter-Board Poetry Competition’s) award for best poem of 2003. Jean Macpherson writes from New England.
Tatyana Brown is the founding Captain of The Lit Slam, a San Francisco-based, live audience-curated literary journal — the only show/publication of its kind — and the Director for The Mad Scientist Writer’s Lab. Her most recent chapbook, Lucky Girl, earned her a spot on Muzzle Magazine’s “Top 30 Poets Under 30” list in April of 2013. She has toured North America as a poet, read poems to teenagers on the mountaintops of British Columbia, told tales on NPR’s true-life storytelling show, Snap Judgment, and sold instant literature ranging from short fiction to wedding vows as a street vending freelance writer in New York City. Much of the work she is most passionate about involves creating platforms to recognize excellence achieved through performance poetry — including conceiving of and editing Alight: The Best-Loved Poems of WoWPS 2013, a compliment to The Lit Slam’s annual anthology, Tandem.
Jean Macpherson writes from New England. She is a contributing writer for Radius and Late Night Library. You can also find more at her blog, Devils on Horseback.
Ray McNiece is an adjunct professor at John Carroll University and the author of six poetry collections: Dis, The Bone-Orchard Conga, The Road that Carried Me Here, Song that Fathoms Home, Wet Sand Raven Tracks -New Haiku, and Us? Talking Across America, as well as two solo theatre works and two music/poetry collaborations. He also co-edited the anthology of Contemporary Buddhist Poetry, America Zen.
Richard Modiano is a rank and file member of the Industrial Workers of the World and the executive director of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center.
Jade Sylvan is a nationally-touring poet, songwriter, speaker, and teacher. Her first full-length collection of poetry, The Spark Singer, was published in 2009 by NYC’s Spuyten Duyvil Press, and her work has appeared in Word Riot, Decomp, The Pedestal, the November 3rd Club, and OVS. She is the Co-Founder of Mass LEAP (Massachusetts Literary Education And Performance), a collective that creates teen poetry opportunities in Greater Boston. For the past couple of years, her OCD has been hijacked by the Rock n Roll icons of the 1960s and their mythological resonances. She currently works as a writing teacher and teen mentor in Somerville, MA. Her hip-hop side personality, Madame Psychosis, has a Zombie Apocalypse music video online, and she released her first album of original indie-folk music, Blood & Sand (Red Car Records) in 2011. She does a lot of other things.
Bharatbhooshan Tiwari is a software consultant by profession who occasionally dabbles in literature. He has spent the last few years shuttling between the West Coast of India and the East Coast of United States. He is translating John Berger’s Hold Everything Dear and Martin Espada’s Republic of Poetry into Hindi, as well as several other American poets, as well as a few Hindi poets into English.
Robert Wynne Robert Wynne earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. A former co-editor of Cider Press Review, he has published 6 chapbooks, and 3 full-length books of poetry, the most recent being Self-Portrait as Odysseus, published in 2011 by Tebot Bach Press. He’s won numerous prizes, and his poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies throughout North America. He lives in Burleson, TX with his wife and 2 rambunctious dogs.
Michelle Ben-Hur is a writer, government lawyer, and yoga instructor who lives in Sacramento, CA, with her husband, four cats, and two dogs. She used to be funny, but lost her sense of humor on November 8, 2016.
Amélie Frank has authored five poetry collections, including Doing Time on Planet Billy Bob (Inevitable Press). Her work has appeared in numerous local, national, and international publications, including Art/Life, Lummox Journal, Poeticdiversity (which nominated her work for the 2016 Pushcart Prize), Blue Arc West, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, Levure Litérraire, Edgar Allan Poet, Cultural Weekly and Wide Awake. Co-founder of the Sacred Beverage Press, she produced the acclaimed literary journal Blue Satellite. She has been honored by Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, the City of Venice, and the City of Los Angeles for her activism and leadership in the Southern California poetry community. She earned her degree in Creative Writing at U.C. Irvine and has served as a curator and trustee with Beyond Baroque, the Newer Poets Series, and the Valley Contemporary Poets.
Erika Jahneke – a sometime journalist, activist, and fiction writer – often feels caught in multiple worlds: Born too late to snog a Kennedy in the New Frontier, but a smidge too early (and too disabled) to sweat it out in the park with Occupy. Current ambitions include a future for her novel, a nice vacation and a legal way to keep MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in her pocket in a Jiminy-Cricket style conscience arrangement.
David Kealiʻi is a poet and librarian based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. He received his Master of Library and Information Science and Master of Arts in Pacific Islands Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His first review of poetry appeared in the New Pacific Islander Poetry portfolio of the July/August 2016 issue of Poetry Magazine. That review, and a few academic publications, have been under the name D. Keali‘i MacKenzie. His poems have appeared in Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poetry in English (Whetu Moana, Volume II), Assaracus: a Journal of Gay Poetry, and Storyboard Journal. When not dealing with literary based things, he wanders the Honolulu cityscape as a library ronin in search of a permanent library.
Beth McIlvaine stumbled into a spoken word tent at Lollapalooza when she was 13 and it changed her life. She co-hosted the once-infamous Java Gardens reading in Huntington Beach and attended the National Poetry Slam as an alternate for the Laguna Beach team. She was published in the Moontide Press, Valley of Contemporary Poets and Ugly Mug anthologies, just to name a few of her earlier publication credits. A couple decades and four degrees later she thought maybe she should do that poetry thing again. More recently, her poems were selected for the Damfino literary journal’s debut issue and the Like a Girl anthology from Lucid Moose Press. The latter included her poem Shedding which was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Marc Olmsted is a writer living in the Bay Area. Allen Ginsberg said “Marc Olmsted inherited Burroughs’ scientific nerve & Kerouac’s movie-minded line nailed down with gold eyebeam in San Francisco.” He teaches the online course “Writing Kerouac/Sitting Buddha: Spontaneous Poetics & Big Mind” at Writers.com. His book, What Use Am I WHAT USE AM I A Hungry Ghost?: Poems from 3-Year Retreat (VCP Press, 2001), has an introduction by Ginsberg.
Deepali Parmar is the author of Not a Word is Heard (Poetrywala, Mumbai 2010). An artist, poet, author, teacher, theaterist and creative counselor, over the past 3 decades she has remained engaged with the subject of space and identity through her paintings writings and creative interactions with children, urban and indigenous communities. Deepali’s poetry has appeared in national and international journals, anthology and magazines – Chandrabhaga, Kavi-Kala, Muse, Sahitya Academy and more . She is also the winner of 2 slam poetry events in Mumbai, bringing the 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a Global Movement to Pune, India, in 2011. She has taught creative writing, visual arts and performance subjects at schools and colleges in India and Italy. Deepali lives in Pune with a story-guzzling little son deeply engrossed in bringing Theater, Dance and Play into the everyday lives of urban communities and teaching theater at a Waldorf Steiner School, writing her first novel and preparing for a solo art show after 8 years.
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