Gale Acuff has taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank. His poetry has been published in Ascent, Ohio Journal, Descant, Poem, Adirondack Review, Worcester Review, Florida Review, Maryland Poetry Review, South Dakota Review, Santa Barbara Review, and many other journals. He is the author of three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2009).

F.J. Bergmann frequents Wisconsin and fibitz.com. She has no academic literary qualifications, but hangs out a lot with folks who do. Publication credits include Asimov’s, Margie, Southern Poetry Review, Subtropics, and Weird Tales, as well as the 2008 SFPA Rhysling Award for the Short Poem and three chapbooks: Constellation of the Dragonfly (Plan B Press, 2008), Aqua Regia (Parallel Press 2007), and Sauce Robert (Pavement Saw Press 2003).

Pamela Annas was born in Texas into a working-class family, grew up on military bases, and now teaches at UMass Boston. She is a long time member of The Radical Teacher editorial collective. Poems have appeared recently in Istanbul Literary Review, Poiesis, Third Wednesday, nibble, Ibbetson Street, Northwoods Anthology and the anthologies Hunger and Thirst (City Works Press) and Imagination and Place.

Barry Basden lives in the Texas hill country with his wife and two yellow Labs. He writes mostly short pieces these days and has been published in a variety of online venues. He is also coauthor of Crack! and Thump: With a Combat Infantry Officer in World War II and edits the Camroc Press Review, which can be seen at www.camrocpressreview.com.

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal has published widely in the small presses. His two most recent chapbooks are: Before And Well After Midnight, from Deadbeat Press, and Still Human, from Kendra Steiner Editions.

James Bettendorf is a former math teacher, retired and enjoying my second career as a poet. His recent publications include Main Channel Voices, Free Verse, Talking Stick (Vol. 18), and Midwest Writing Center's anthology, Off Channel. He recently completed a two-year poetry internship at The Loft in Minneapolis as part of the Loft Master Track program.

Robert Bohm is a poet and culture writer. He was born in Queens, New York. His 2007 Uz Um War Moan Ode is available from Pudding House Press. Other credits include two other books, a chapbook and work published in a variety of print and online publications. More information on Bohm's work can be found at his blog, Lethal Injections for the Conditioned Mind, and his website, Unburials: The Writer as Graverobber.

Peter Branson lives in Rode Heath, a village in South Cheshire, England. A former teacher and lecturer, he now organises writing workshops. Until recently he was Writer-in-residence for “All Write” run by Stoke-on-Trent Libraries.Over the last three years he has had work published, or accepted for publication, by many mainstream poetry journals, including Acumen, Ambit, Envoi, Magma, The London Magazine, Iota, 14, Fire, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Nottingham, Pulsar, Red Ink and Other Poetry. His first collection, “The Accidental Tourist”, was published locally by The Potteries Writers’ Workshop in May 2008.

Christopher Butters is the author of two books, The Propaganda of a Seed (Cardinal Press, 1990) and Americas (Vietnam Generation, 1998).   His work has most recently appeared in Blue Collar Review, Pemmican and Cedar Hill Review.   A court reporter in New York City, his recent campaign for president of his AFSCME local won 32% of the vote.   He has also been the poetry editor of Political Affairs: A Journal of Marxist Thought. His most recent publication is The Algebra of Doing It, published by Partisan Press.

Jared Carter is a Midwesterner from Indiana. He has published three books of poems. A fourth, Cross this Bridge at a Walk, was recently issued by Wind Publications in Kentucky. The book consists of a series of narrative poems dealing with incidents in American history from the Revolution to the present. For more information please visit Jared Carter's web site at http://www.jaredcarter.com.

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in1978. His newest published books reflect this concern for the natural world. They are Waiting for the Quetzal, from March Street Press, and The Porous Desert, from Future Cycle Press. He recently had a poem included in the anthology, BIRDS, from the British Museum, and won the Ronald Wardall Poetry Prize for his chapbook The Lost River, from Rain Mountain Press.

Leonard J. Cirino is the author of 16 chapbooks and 13 full-length collections of poems from numerous presses since 1987. He lives in Springfield, Oregon, where he does home care for his 94-year-old mother. His collection, Ululations: Poems 2006, was published in 2008. His 104 page collection, Omphalos: Poems 2007 has been selected by Cervena Barva Press for 2009. Recent publications and acceptances include America (NYC), Osiris, Blue Collar Review, Pemmican, thepedestalmagazine.com, The Iconoclast, Barnwood, Grasslimb, Poesia, and others.

William Clunie is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. He can be reached at billclunie@yahoo.com.

Tony Christini is the author of Political Fiction: Ganoga, Homefront, YouthTopia and Other Works. He is the creator of the websites Political Novel and Imaginative Literature and Social Change. With Mike Palecek and Andre Vltchek, he is the cofounder of Mainstay Press.

Philip Dacey's most recent full-length book, his eighth, is THE MYSTERY OF MAX SCHMITT: POEMS ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF THOMAS EAKINS (Turning Point, 2004). Two recent chapbooks are THE ADVENTURES OF ALIXA DOOM AND OTHER LOVE POEMS (Snark, 2003) and MR. FIVE-BY-FIVE (Pudding House, 2005). He recently moved from Minnesota, his base for 35 years, to Manhattan's Upper West Side. His website is: www.philipdacey.com.

Lyle Daggett's books of poems include If There Is A Song and What Is Buried Here, both published Red Dragonfly Press, and The Idea of Legacy, published by Musical Comedy Editions. A new collection, The First Light Touches Me, is forthcoming from Red Dragonfly Press, tentatively due out in fall 2008. His poems, translations, essays and book reviews have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Main Street Rag, Free Verse, previously in Pemmican, and in other publications. His blog is A Burning Patience, http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com. He lives in Minneapolis.

Stacia M. Fleegal is the author of Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter (WordTech, forthcoming 2010) and the chapbooks The Lines Are Not My Friends (second place, Cervená Barva Press chapbook competition, forthcoming 2009) and A Fling with the Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2007). Individual poems are forthcoming in Fourth River, Skidrow Penthouse, Blue Collar Review, The Kerf, Prick of the Spindle, and Babel Fruit, and have appeared most recently in Inkwell, New Verse News, Dos Passos Review, and Protest Poems. She received her MFA in writing from Spalding University and is co-founder and managing editor of Blood Lotus (www.bloodlotus.org).

Larry Gavin is the author of two books Necessities, published in 2005 and Least Resistance published in 2007. Both books from Red Dragon Fly press in Red Wing, Minnesota. His poems have been published widely. He’s also editor of a postcard haiku magazine called Tumbling Crane published on an irregular basis. He is also is a field editor for Midwest Fly Fishing Magazine where he writes about environmental issues. He lives in Faribault, Minnesota.

Howard Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of six poetry chapbooks, most recently Tomorrowland (2008) from Achilles Chapbooks. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of the Net anthology.

Patricia Goodwin grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood outside of Boston. She was the first in her family to finish high school and go on to college. She graduated cum laude from Salem State College, Salem, MA where she earned a BA in English Literature. In the early days of the natural foods movement, she created and taught macrobiotic educational programs for the East West Foundation, Brookline, MA (now the Kushi Institute, Becket, MA). She has practiced the macrobiotic discipline for 34 years. She also teaches brown rice cooking classes to continue this work. As a publicity agent for artists and independents, Patricia has her own public relations firm, PGPR. She was Public Relations Coordinator for the Marblehead Historical Society. She co-produced and promoted Women in the Arts 2003, which raised funds for H.A.W.C. (Help for Abused Women and Children). As a writer, Patricia has written many articles of non-fiction, which have appeared in publications such as The Boston Herald, The Record American (human interest reporter and movie critic for two years), American Express OnTime (business/travel fax newsletter, writer for two years), AAA Horizons, The Marblehead Reporter and The North Shore Sunday. She created her own independent imprint, Plum Press and published three books of poetry: Marblehead Moon (Plum Press, 1993), Java Love (Plum Press, 1997), and Atlantis (Plum Press, 2006). Her historical novella, When Two Women Die was published in the muse-apprentice-guild.com literary ezine. "A Child's Christmas in Revere", a chapter from her novel, Holy Days was published in the anthology, Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America (Seal Press, 2004). She produced "American Race", a four-poet event in conjunction with the publication of Under Her Skin. She appeared in a PBS Forum, March 10, 2005 reading for Under Her Skin filmed at The Center for New Words, Cambridge, MA. Her poetry has been published in Marblehead Magazine, IndeArts, muse-apprentice-guild.com, Runes, Gone Soft (now Soundings East), and nthposition.com. She has more than ten years experience reading and speaking in public. She is currently working on another book of poetry, The Phenomenon of Day, and a novel, Oxygen. Patricia lives with her husband and daughter in an historic seacoast town in Massachusetts.

John Grey's latest book is "What Else Is There" from Main Street Rag. He has been published recently in Agni, Worcester Review, South Carolina Review and The Pedestal.

Kenneth P. Gurney lives in Albuquerque, NM. His latest published collection, Writers' Block, is available through amazon. To learn more about Kenneth, visit www.kpgurney.me

Alba Cruz-Hacker straddles borders as a Dominican-American. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was awarded the 2007 UCR Poet Laureate and the 2007 Tomas Rivera Endowment Poetry Selection. Her poetry collection No Honey for Wild Beasts is forthcoming October 2008 from Plain View Press. Alba's creative and critical work has been published throughout the Caribbean, Canada and the United States, including Poetry Magazine (Senior Editor?s Choice), The Caribbean Writer, Canadian Woman Studies, Spillway Review, Pacific Review, Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, an anthology edited by Gary Young, and the Hispanic volume of the American Encyclopedia of Ethnic Literature, among others. She teaches creative writing at the University of California Riverside.

Michael Henson is the author of Ransack (a novel), A Small Room with Trouble on My Mind (stories), and The Tao of Longing (poems). HIs most recent work is Crow Call, an extended elegy for the homeless activist Buddy Gray. His column, "Hammered: Essays on Poverty and Addiction," appears monthly in StreetVibes, the newspaper of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless. He is a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.

Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander.

Cleo Fellers Kocol has been writing and publishing prose for years. Although she didn't start writing poetry until the age of 74, six years later she is proud to be among those keeping the writing soup stirred. She has been published in a variety of journals, including Mobius, Querqus Review, Poetry Depth Quarterly, Song of the San Joaquin, Blue Collar Review and California Quarterly. She was Grand Prize Winner of the Artists' Embassy International Contest in 2003 and first place winner in 2006. Her poetry was choreographed to music and danced at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 2003.

Rebecca van Laer grew up in Georgia and New York. She is currently an MFA candidate at NYU.

Jerry Landry grew up in the bayous of Louisiana, graduated from Millsaps College in Jackson, MS, and currently makes his home in Charlotte, NC. He has previously been published in the Stylus, Central Speak and the Jackson Free Press. More information can be found at his blog at http://jerrylandry.wordpress.com.

Ken Letko's poems have been published in three chapbooks and in a number of magazines and anthologies, recently in Caesura, Natural Bridge, and Toyon. He also has work forthcoming in Alehouse, Bloodroot, Dos Passos Review and Rattle. In 1995 he founded the poetry annual the Kerf, which is published at College of the Redwoods where he teaches.

Vanessa Marfin is the daughter of Tony and Maggie, sister of Colby and Jamie, and mother of Amal and Joaquin. She is cousin to coyote, crow, and dolphin, and champion of earthworm. She lives in Seattle, Washington where she works hard to never waste a single moment. She has never been published before.

Merimee Moffitt, an expat from the West Coast, has lived in New Mexico since May 1970. A memoirist and poet, she writes and teaches writing and has published in Oasis Journal, the Harwood Anthology, Earthships Anthology, American Open Mic II, Fourth Genre, and Woman Made Gallery Calendar. She did guerilla protests with Code Pink for a couple of years locally and believes in peace as a possibility. She has four kids, four grand-kids, two dogs, a husband, and a cat. She co-edits a monthly poetry broadside, paper only, called The Rag.

Shea Donovan Mullaney is currently living in Boston while pursuing his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His first full-length collection of poems, Follow the Wolf Moon, appeared in January 2005. His poems have appeared and/or will appear in The New York Review, Soundings East, and Hoi Polloi. He is a regular contributor to Pemmican. His poetry has been featured several times as part of the Unitarian Universalist Association's celebration of marriage equality in Massachusetts. Other work has been featured on WOMR 92.1 FM, Radio Provincetown and WERS 88.9 FM, Boston. His first spoken word album, Silent Trumpeter, is available from Brave Records at www.Braverecords.com. Mullaney lives on his family's horse farm near Cape Cod.

Esther Greenleaf Mürer lives in Philadelphia. She has been a composer, literary translator, and editor. Although she has been writing poetry all her life, she started getting serious about learning the craft at 70. Her work has most recently appeared in The Externalist, The Umbrella, Unsplendid, and The Literary Bohemian.

Christina Pacosz’ most recent book is Greatest Hits, 1975 – 2001, Pudding House, 2002. Her chapbook, Notes from the Red Zone, originally published in 1983 by Seal Press has been selected by Ron Mohring of Seven Kitchens Press, as the inaugural chapbook to be reprinted in his ReBound Series. It will be available autumn, 2009. Born and raised in Detroit, she has lived in New York City, the Pacific Northwest, North Dakota, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Alaska. She has been a poet-in-the-schools and a North Carolina Visiting Artist. For a dozen years Christina has been living in Kansas City with her husband and teaching at-risk youth both sides of the Kansas-Missouri state line for most of that time.

Marek P. Parker is a Buffalo, New York based poet, writer, and special education teacher. His poetry and other writings have been published in the anthology Nickel City Nights, The Hanging Moss, The Buffalo News, OUTcome, and Bflo Journal, on which he also served as assignments editor. In 1986 He was a participant in the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament.

Mark Pawlak grew up in Buffalo, New York, and has lived in the Boston area for almost forty years. He has taught writing, science and mathematics at various levels and is presently Director of Academic Support Programs at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where he teaches mathematics. Pawlak's original poems, and his translations from the German of Bertolt Brecht and others, have appeared widely in magazines, journals, and anthologies. SPECIAL HANDLING: Newspaper Poems New and Selected is the latest of his four poetry collections. He has received awards from the Massachusetts Artist Fellowship Program and from the Fund for Poetry. He is co-editor of Hanging Loose Press based in Brooklyn, New York. Founded in 1966, Hanging Loose is arguably the oldest, continuously running, independent, literary magazine and press in the country. Hanging Loose counts among its stable of notable poets Sherman Alexie, Ha Jin, Jayne Cortez, and Hettie Jones. Last year Pawlak edited Shooting the Rat: Outstanding Poems and Stories by High School Writers, the third in a series of his anthologies drawn from the celebrated high school section of Hanging Loose magazine. Shooting the Rat is a collection of extraordinary poems and stories by 93 of the nation's most outstanding high school writers and it was recently name a 2003 top young adult non-fiction title by both VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) and by the Association of Pennsylvania School Librarians. All the work first appeared in the special high school section of Hanging Loose magazine, the standard for cutting-edge work by teenage writers since 1968. Pawlak has given hundreds of readings and performances of his work locally, across the nation, and overseas.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Rafts (Parsifal Editions) is his most recent collection. Family of Man (Pavement Saw Press) is scheduled for Fall 2009. For more information, including his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet.

Verandah Porche works as a poet in residence and writing partner in a variety of settings, schools, hospitals, nursing homes,factories, literacy and art centers around New England. Her two published books are The Body’s Symmetry (Harper and Row) and Glancing Off (See Through Books). Feminist Studies published “On N-V”. Two of her poems were included in Contemporary Poetry of New England, ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini. She worked for a year in a rural industrial town for Artists and Communities: America Creates for the Millennium. The Vermont Arts Council has given her a grant and an award honoring her contribution to the state’s cultural life.

dan raphael waits patiently for more poems to come. Besides Pemmican, current poems appear in Otoliths, Knock Journal, New Mystics, Unlikely Stories and Heavy Bear. :Last December saw the re-issue of 1985's Bop Grit Storm Cafe; most recent book of new material is Breath Test; Impulse and Warp: Selected 20th Century poems, should out by 2011. dan would like to come to your town and read/perform, as he has at Wordstock, Bumbershoot, Portland Jazz Festival and Burning Word. Otherwise, living in Portland, working at the DMV, arranging readings, reading a variety of fiction and non-, & brewing.drinking and reviewing beer.

Doren Robbins has published poetry in over seventy literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, International Poetry, Hawaii Review, Paterson Literary Review, Sulfur, New Letters, 5 AM, Exquisite Corpse, Willow Springs, Bombay Gin and Hayden's Ferry Review. Essays and book reviews have appeared in Sagetreib, Contact II, Onthebus, and The Daily Iowan. From 1975-82, he was co-editor for the Los Angeles-based journal Third Rail. In 1994 he served as a contributing editor to the Japanese-based literary journal Electric Rexroth. Robbins has received a state fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, as well as prizes, grants, and awards from The Indiana Review, River Styx, Literal Latte, Passaic Poetry Center, the Loft Foundation, The Centrum Residency Program, The Judah Magnes Museum (first prize for the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Jewish Poetry Award), The Chester H. Jones Foundation (commendation prizes in '93, '96 and '97), The Lane Literary Guild (first prize), The Seattle Arts Commission and, as an editor, from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines and The California Arts Council. His four previous collections are Driving Face Down, winner of The Blue Lynx Prize, Lynx House Press, 2001; The Donkey's Tale (Red Wind Press, 1998); Sympathetic Manifesto (Perivale Press, 1987); and The Roots and the Towers (Third Rail Press, 1980). His chapbooks are Dignity in Naples and North Hollywood, introduction by Philip Levine (Pennywhistle Press, 1996), Under the Black Moth's Wings (Ameroot, 1987); Seduction of the Groom (Loom press, 1982). In 2006, Eastern Washington University Press will publish a new book of poems, My Piece of the Puzzle. A mixed media artist as well as a writer, two of his works are currently on exhibit at the Crossing Boundaries: Visual Art by Writers exhibit, held at the Paterson Museum in New Jersey. Currently, he teaches creative writing and literature at Foothill College where he is director of the Foothill Writers' Conference.Currently, he is Professor of Creative Writing/Literature at Foothill College, where he is coordinator for The Foothill Writers' Conference.

Thomas R. Smith is a writer and teacher living in western Wisconsin. He is a Master Track instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. His most recent poetry collections are WAKING BEFORE DAWN (Red Dragonfly Press) and KINNICKINNIC (Parallel Press). He now has a web site at www.ThomasRSmithpoet.com.

Charles Springer is an award winning painter, an advertising director and an avid bicyclist. He writes from Pennsylvania. Charles is published in Apalachee Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Cold Mountain Review, Faultline, Heliotrope and Licking River Review, among others. A new poem currently appears in Oak Bend Review. He is very proud of this, his first appearance in Pemmican.

Theresa Swanson works as a legal secretary in Omaha, Nebraska. Having raised her three children, she is pursuing a master's degree in writing and English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She lives, proudly, in the same working class neighborhood in South Omaha where she grew up.

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Insatiable Psalm (Hershey, Pa.: Wind River Press, 2005) and What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn (West Lafayette, Ind.: Parlor Press, 2008; Free Verse Editions series). Visit his web site at http://www.yataub.net.

Lauro Vazquez is a twenty one year old poet . He was born in Mexico and is currently an undergraduate student at Dominican University of California and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lauro believes words are little animals that live inside poems. He believes in utopias because they are worth imagining. And writes with the conviction that writing is an act of personal and political liberation.

Rob Whitbeck is a farmer and timber thinner living in eastern Oregon. A full-length collection, Oregon Sojourn, is available from Pygmy Forest Press. A second collection, The Taproot Confessions, also from Pygmy Forest Press, was released in the summer of 2003.

Larina Warnock works for a nonprofit organization in Corvallis, Oregon. In her spare time, she volunteers for a variety of social and literary organizations and edits The Externalist, an online literary journal focused on significant social issues. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Oregonian, Eight Octaves Review, Hanging Moss Journal, Space & Time Magazine, among others. Her essay, 'You Are Here: Activism from the Edge of the World' will appear later this year in an anthology of work by presenters at PRESS: a cross-cultural literary conference, where she presented on disability rights in literature.

Joanna M. Weston M.A. has had poetry, reviews, and short stories published in anthologies and journals for twenty years. Has two middle-readers, ‘The Willow Tree Girl’ and ‘Those Blue Shoes’;
also ‘A Summer Father’, poetry, published by Frontenac House of Calgary, all in print.

Kelley White has finally made it back to NH after 25 years in Philadelphia and finds that her poor rural pediatric patients are every bit as challenged as those she knew in the inner-city.

Marilyn Zuckerman has published four books of poetry: Personal Effects (Alice James Books, Cambridge, 1976), Monday Morning Movie (Street Editions, N.Y, 1981), Poems of the Sixth Decade (Garden Street Press, 1993), and from Cedar Hill Publications,
Amerika/America, 2002, as well as a chapbook from The Greatest Hits series, Pudding House Publications, 2001. Her many poem publications include magazines such as New York Quarterly, The Little Magazine, Nimrod, Pig Iron, Mystic River Review and Pemmican (last two online) She has also received a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award.