Bio Notes
	Peter Bruveris was born in Riga in 1957, and after graduating from the Department of Art and Culture at the Latvian State Conservatory worked as a literary consultant to the newspaper Latvijas Jaunatne (Latvian Youth) and as the director of the literary department of the newspaper Literatura un Maksla (Art and Literature).  Eight collections of his poetry have been published: Black Thrush, Red Cherries (1987), Amber Skulls (1991), Sitting On A Park Bench (1994), Black Bird's Nest in the Heart (1995), Flowers for Losers! (1999), Love Me God (2000), The Landscape of Language (2004), and Behind Glass (2006). His poetry has been published in Lithuanian, Russian, Swedish, German, Slovenian, Ukrainian and English translation. He has received the Klavs Elsbergs Award (1987), the Publisher Preses Nams Award in Literature in 2000 and 2001, the Days of Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005, the Award in Literature from the Baltic Assembly in 2004, the Ojars Vacietis Poetry Prize (2006) and the National Prize for Best Book (2007). Jennifer Berney's work has appeared in the Coe Review and Wheelhouse Magazine.  She received her MFA from the University of Washington.  She currently lives in Olympia, Washington and teaches writing at South Puget Sound Community College. Katherine Bogden is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY and has studied poetry at Lafayette College with Lee Upton and in NYC with Sharon Dolin and Jeanne Marie Beaumont. Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in Texas. She is the author of Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Press, and After Happily Ever After(2River Chapbook Series, #15). Her work appears in print and on-line.   Rochelle Cashdan is a fiction writer and poet living in Guanajuato, Mexico after three decades in the Pacific Northwest. “Therapy” first appeared in Talus & Scree #2, Waldport, Oregon, and more recently as “Terapia” in El Correo, Leon, Mexico. Inara Cedrins is an American artist, writer and translator who went to China in 1998 to learn to paint on silk, and remained for five years to teach writing and lecture on art at universities including Tsinghua University and Peking University in Beijing, as well as to the People's Liberation Army and students at the Central Academy of Fine Art. Two chapbooks of her poetry were published by the Chinese Literature Press in Beijing, about China and Egypt. A collection of poetry titled Fugitive Connections was published last year by the Virtual Artists Collective. Her poems, stories and translations from the Latvian have appeared in The North American Review, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner, The Minnesota Review, The Massachusetts Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Atlanta Review, New Letters, The Hawaii Review and The Chariton Review, among others. Online poetry journals include Writing Macao, poetrybillboard.com, Omega 3, 4, 5/Howling Dog Press, The Atlanta Review, and The International Cities of Refuge Network webzine. Kevin Conder lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, daughter and a Jack Russell Terrier. His poetry has appeared in several literary magazines such as The Pedestal Magazine, North American Review, 42Opus, Snow Monkey and The Pacific Review. Among other jobs, he has taught English to a variety of students from China, Yugoslavia and Russia while living in Stockholm, Sweden. B.J. Hollars of Fort Wayne, Indiana is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama where he serves as nonfiction editor and assistant fiction editor for Black Warrior Review. Halvard Johnson lives in New York City and San Miguel de Allende with his wife, the prize-winning fiction writer and painter, Lynda Schor. Organ Harvest With Entrance of Clones, available from Hamilton Stone Editions or Amazon, is his latest book of poems Amanda Laughtland teaches English part-time at Edmonds Community College. Her chapbook, I Meant to Say is available from overhere Press . The poems here are part of a new series (tentatively titled) Everywhere; additional poems from this series appear in Mirage #4/ Period[ical] and are forthcoming in Wildlife . Robert Lietz's poems have appeared in numerous print and web journals in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.  His eight published collections include, Running in Place, At Park and East Divsion, The Lindbergh Half-century, Storm Service, and After Business in the West. When he is not writing, Lietz can be found making and post-processing, and printing digital photographs. Matt Maxwell writes: I am a schizophrenic writer, a haphazard photographer, an obsequious malcontent—tripping and sprinting and moshing to my own multi-limbed drummer. Some of my fiction can be found at Mad Hatters' Review, Noo Journal, Sein und Werden, The Green Muse, Defenestration, Eyeshot, Flashquake, and The Scrivener's Pen. I am also a fiction editor at Mad Hatters' Review. Sid Miller's poetry has appeared in numerous places, including Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Southeast, Margie, Goodfoot, Bateau and Portland Review. He is a multiple Pushcart Prize nomine and the author of two chapbooks, Quietly Waiting (White Heron Press, 2004) and Sunbathing in the Ukraine (Finishing Line Press, 2007). His full length collection, Nixon on the Piano, will be published in 2009 by David Robert Books. He is the founding editor of the poetry journal Burnside Review. John Morgan lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. He has published three poetry collections and a number of chapbooks. He recently received a $12,000 Artist Fellowship from the Rasmuson Foundation. Martin Ott writes: My poetry has appeared in over 50 magazines and anthologies, including The Adirondak Review, FORPOETRY.com, The Greensboro Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Puerto Del Sol, Seattle Review, and other magazines. I have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and my manuscript "Magician's Heaven" has been a finalist or semi-finalist for a half dozen different poetry prizes. My chapbook “Misery Loves” was published on Red Dancefloor Press. Sam Pereira’s newest book of poetry, A Café in Boca, is recently out from Tebot Bach.  The poems included here are from an, as yet, untitled manuscript.  Pereira’s blog can be found at litsam.blogspot.com.  He lives and teaches in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Edward Salem is a Palestinian-American currently living in Michigan. This fall Edward begins his MFA in Writing candidacy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Peggy Shumaker's memoir Just Breathe Normally is available from University of Nebraska Press.  Her newest book of poems is Blaze, a collaboration with Alaskan painter Kesler Woodward.  She has new work coming out in Prairie Schooner and Flyway, and in Junctures, a magazine in New Zealand.  She'll present work at the 2008 Poetic Ecologies Conference in Brussels. Gail Louise Siegel's writing can be found places such as Ascent, StoryQuarterly, Post Road, Salamander, Juked, Quay, Pindeldyboz, Brevity and many issues of the Salt River Review.  Her piece "The Telemarketer's Point of View," which first appeared here, has been chosen for the Snow*vigate Press print anthology of web pieces, "The Best of the First Ten Years." Known mainly as a poet/teacher and painter, Barry Spacks has two novels out, various stories and  poetry CDs. He teaches at UCSB, was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, has published nine poetry collections. His tenth, Food For The Journey, arrives from Cherry Grove Collections in August 2008. b. NYC 1939 at the end of the dirty thirties Lynn Strongin is very much a child of her time. She will have fourteen published books by mid 2008. A five- time Pushcart Prize nominee, her anthology The Sorrow Psalms will be paired with Crazed by the Sun: Poems of Ecstasy. Most recently books are Rembrant's Smock (Plain View Press) and The Girl With Copper Colored Hair (Conflux Press) in the U.S. and "Lace-Circled Darkness" (Erbace) U.K. Forthcoming from Plain View Press are her short stories Albino Peacock: A Jewish Girl in the South, and from Erbace Press Amanda Flamer Goes, as well as Nikko's Child from Conflux Press. While Strongin makes Canada her home, and has for the past twenty-eight years, she considers herself an American poet. Lisa Veyssiere has studied fiction with the Stanford Writer's Studio. She works as a  public health research specialist, and lives with her family in Northern California. Her short fiction has been published in Ascent and Lily Review. She is currently revising a novel about a year of finding lost things in Lower Manhattan.