Oscar Bermeo is the author of the self-published poetry chapbooks Anywhere Avenue, Palimpsest, Heaven Below and To the Break of Dawn. He is a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own), CantoMundo, IWL (Intergenerational Writers Lab) and VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) writing fellow. Oscar has taught creative writing workshops to inmates in Rikers Island, at-risk youth in the Bronx, foster teens in San Jose, bilingual children in Oakland, and in the Oakland Public Library’s Oakland Word program.
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.
Tony Brown, 51, has been doing this poetry thing for a very, VERY long time. He’s learned enough to be published now and then, and is asked to read and perform his work relatively often in a variety of venues. If you want actual boring details, read the various pages of his personal poetry blog, Dark Matter. He’s making a quixotic life work there, posting his entire poetic output online — drafts, finished pieces, crash and burns, etc. Includes links to tracks from his poetry and music project with Steve Lanning-Cafaro, “The Duende Project.”
Sam Cha lives in Cambridge with his partner, Dawn, a racket (or a mess? both collective nouns are apposite) of children, a gaggle of books, and a cat who steals strawberries. He’s an MFA candidate (poetry) at UMass Boston. Stuff by him’s appeared here and there, but that’s neither here nor there. He usually gets carded for liquor, and sometimes for smokes.
Rachel McKibbens 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.
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.
Laura E. J. Moran is the 1992 recipient of the Jean Garrigue Award and has received her MFA from Wilkes University. She tours throughout the country and abroad and headlines at universities, festivals, women’s organizations, literacy groups, coffee houses, and nightclubs. Her pieces appear in such publications as Defined Providence, Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapalooza 1994, Chokecherries: SOMOS Series Anthology 2002,The Unlikely Success of the Albuquerque Poetry Slam (2008, UNM Press), and forthcoming in Redactions: I-90 Revolution. In 2004, she received a New York Foundation of the Arts grant for Emerging Writers at the Center for the Book Arts in New York City. She is also the curator of the First Fridays Contemporary Writers Series in residency at the Western Sullivan Public Library in Narrowsburg, NY for six years.
Lisa Sisler is the co-editor of Knocking at the Door: Approaching the Other, a poetry anthology forthcoming from Birch Bench Press, an imprint of Write Bloody Publishing in April 2011 and a guest editor of the online journal, OVS. She received her MA in English from Rutgers University and her MFA in Poetry from New England College. She teaches Writing and Literature at Kean University and at various other colleges in New Jersey where she resides with her boyfriend and their cat army.
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.
G. Murray Thomas is best known as the editor of Next … Magazine, a poetry calendar/newsmagazine for Southern California, which was published from 1994 and 1998. He currently edits a monthly listing of poetry events and is the Reviews Editor for Poetix.net. His poetry and reviews have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Chiron Review, Pearl, Caffeine, Spillway, OC Weekly, Panik, Skratch, Ground Control, Poetic Diversity and The Independent Reviews Site. His first full length collection of poems, Cows on the Freeway, was published by iUniverse in 2000, and he has published five chapbooks, Death to the Real World, Opposite Oceans, Poetry Spilled All Over the Carpet, A Rare Thing and Songs of Inappropriate Desire. In 2005, iUniverse reprinted Paper Shredders, an anthology of surf poetry Thomas first published in 1993.
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.
Lenore Weiss is an award-winning writer who has made her home in New York City, Chicago, and now Oakland, California. She edited From the Well of Living Waters: Voices of a 21stCentury Synagogue (2011), and awaits two poetry collections also to be published this year: Tap Dancing on the Silverado Trail, from Finishing Line Press, and Mother and Other Love, West End Press.
Robert Wynne earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. He is the author of six chapbooks, and three full-length books of poetry. His first full-length collection, Remembering How to Sleep, was the recipient of the Poetry Society of Texas’ 2006 Eakin Book Award. His second full-length collection, Museum of Parallel Art, was published in February 2008 by Tebot Bach Press. Tebot Bach will be publishing his third collection, Self-Portrait as Odysseus, in 2011. He has won numerous prizes, and his poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies throughout North America. He lives in Burleson, TX with his wife and three rambunctious dogs.