Monkey Puzzle Magazine

Contributors to Issue #9

Alexandra Parsons

Alexandra lives, writes, teaches, and learns in Manhattan. Aside from being a middle and upper school English teacher, she obsesses about Shakespeare and hopes to have her children’s book manuscript published one day. Photography is a hobby that follows her around the world.

Andrew Antar

Andrew paints with colorful oils and turpentine; he is also a photographer and violinist who secretly writes poems. Originally from Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, now at Brown University, Andrew enjoys strong coffee and red wine. Andrew believes art, in all forms, either conveys a feeling, captures an essence, stirs emotion, inspires self-consciousness, expresses the sublime, acknowledges the outer reaches of the mind, or all of the above.

Brandon Arthur

Raised in the flatlands of central Illinois, Brandon moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1999 and graduated from Colorado University in Boulder. He then received an MFA from the Writing and Poetics Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa University. He is the author of expired Rx (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2010). He currently resides in Denver, Colorado.

Brandon Gray

Brandon was born, raised, and is still stuck in California. Known to occasionally take a great photo or write a masterpiece only a baboon would understand, he spends most of his time traveling and entertaining children through his business Wild Child Adventures.

Bryan Jansing

Bryan moved to Italy at an early age, graduated from an American high school in northern Italy then served in the US Navy. Flash Fiction has been his passion for over a decade. He’s been published in journals, magazines and newspapers in both Italy and America. He currently resides in Denver, Colorado.

Carolyn Zaikowski

Carolyn is a writer, performer, and social worker who lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. She is the author of the chapbook Ouch, Humans and work has appeared in Fact-Simile, NOÖ Journal, Apothecary, Monkey Puzzle, Meat for Tea, Doom Zine, and Scar Songs: An Anthology Articulating the Terrain of Trauma and Resilience (forthcoming, The Icarus Project).

Get in the Car, Helen

Get in the Car, Helen began writing shortly after discovering Helen, the woman he loved more than anything, had been secretly fucking a guy named Craig. Since being dumped by Helen, he has published a book of poetry, Avenge Me. (Baobob Tree Press), and is a frequent contributor to Illiterate Magazine. His new book, The Aftermath, etc., will be published in 2010 by Monkey Puzzle Press.

Jack Collom

Jack is a poet, essayist, and creative writing pedagogue. His most recent collection of poems is Cold Instant (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2010). His major collection, Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955-2000, was published by Tuumba Press in 2001. Other volumes include Little Grand Island, Arguing with Something Plato Said, 8-Ball and Entering the City. His work has been published in countless magazines and anthologies in the United States and abroad. His essays on teaching and anthologies of children’s poetry appear in Moving Windows and Poetry Everywhere.

Jeffrey Spahr-Summers

Jeffrey is a poet, writer, photographer and digital artist in Colorado. He is the editor and publisher of Poetry Victims, a contributing editor of Sketchbook (a journal for Eastern & Western short forms), the new webmaster of Simply Haiku, and part of the Linchpin Collective. Jeff has published eight books of poetry and photography (Cherry Productions). His poems and photographs have appeared in numerous print and online journals, recently Poetry Super Highway, Kritya, Media Cake, Houston Literary Review and Unlikely 2.0.

Jennifer Hamilton

Jennifer is a liver of life, a manifesting goddess who creates with the divine while passionately dancing through life, soaking up the beauty all around her. She expresses herself creatively by sharing gifts and love with others while capturing the ever-changing scenes in photographs, paintings, and words. Jennifer is a free spirit who makes the most of the moment creating happiness and following her true nature . . .

Jeremiah Johnson

Jeremiah lives on Oahu. He surfs.

Jon Olsen

Jon was born in England and grew up among rednecks in Northern California. He travels the world and makes films with inexpensive camcorders.

Jordan Antonucci

Jordan is an MFA candidate in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. An artist of multiple mediums, his textual work can be found forthcoming in Freaklung Odes out of London, Anthology of the Awkward (City Lights, 2010) and his art exhibit with collaborators Joshua Antonucci and Min Jung Oh can be found online at www.sen-sing.com.

Kade Alexander Jensen

Originally from Iowa, Kade is a Graduate Student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He holds two Bachelor’s degrees, in English and History, from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. He’s currently working on a collection of experimental translations of Matsuo Basho’s Haiku as well as a collection of poetic essays. He lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.

Kai Forrest Brown

Kai is a vivacious five year-old who loves to explore the natural world. He’s working on his first garden, and has an ever changing collection of pet bugs. Kai has always enjoyed having poetry read to him. One day he scribbled a drawing and asked his grandma to write down his poem.

Kathy Conde

Kathy’s work has appeared in Calapooya, CutThroat, Pearl, Underground Voices, Word Riot, and others. She won the Hemingway Festival Short Story Contest in 2008 and her short story collection was a semifinalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. She holds an MFA from Naropa University and is past fiction editor of Bombay Gin.

Lee Ann Grossberg, MD

Dr. Grossberg lives in Houston, Texas. She’s a forensic pathologist and mother of five. “Uncle Mort” is her first piece of fiction to be published.

Michael D. Edwards

“If you don’t know, now you know.”

Michael Cohen

Michael Cohen used to write academic books; his last was Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000). Now he writes personal essays. He and his wife Katharine live on Kentucky Lake and in Tucson, Arizona.

Ming Jung Oh

Min Jung worships the sunlight, finds empathy in water’s gaze, and dreams of becoming a male peacock in her next life. She writes because it’s the imagination of possibility in language that creates the world and because she cannot ignore the fragmented cries of the unspeakable to be spoken. Min Jung is currently an MFA candidate at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado and received her BA in English and philosophy at the University of Maine, Orono. She has works forthcoming from Tidal Basin Review and The Anthology of the Awkward (Fast Forward Press).

Nathan Antar

“That’s what she said.”

Rocky Balboa

Rocky Balboa.  Southpaw from Philly.  He didn’t contribute anything, he just belongs here.
(ed. note – it was either that or he was gonna break my thumbs)

Samuel Jablon

Born in Binghamton, New York, Samuel learned to paint and mosaic from his mother Susan, founder of both Rude and Bold Woman and Susan Jablon Mosaics. While in Binghamton, Samuel studied freeform music with avant-garde composer Eric Ross, one of Samuel’s most influential mentors. He left Binghamton for Boulder, Colorado to study poetry, meditation, and painting at Naropa University. He also studied banjo, music theory, and composition with Jayme Stone; and was a studio assistant/apprentice to artist and poet Ana Maria Hernando. Samuel resides, and has a studio in Brooklyn, New York.

Sarah Cooke

Sarah is a low-residency graduate student in Naropa University’s Creative Writing MFA program. She predominantly writes poetry. She’s an assistant teacher at the Bellwether School in Williston, Vermont. Her work has been published in journals such as the Black Mountain Review and Whrrds and is available in audio form at instereopress.com.

Suzanne DuLany

Suzanne is a poet, visual artist, and environmental activist with roots in Austin, Texas. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and Associate Editor of Bombay Gin. Her most recent projects include the blog Humans for Wolves, and an anti-memoir about her father, Endangered Memory.

Travis Macdonald

Travis’s work has appeared in Bombay Gin, Court Green, ditch, House Press: Source Material, Jacket, Otoliths, Requited, Wheelhouse and elsewhere. His experimental translation, Basho’s Phonebook, is available from “E-ratio”. His first full-length book, The O Mission Repo, an erasure of The 9/11 Commission Report is available from Fact-Simile Editions.Travis puts dental floss between his toes in the morning to keep them from getting confused with his shoes.

Contributors to Previous Issues

Aaron D. Scher

Aaron is an explorer, amateur astronomer, and a random corporeal expression of his genes in the eternal life and death struggle for existence. He also holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado for his work on electromagnetic metamaterials.

Adam Perry

Adam was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and spent the years 2002-2008 playing music in San San Francisco before moving moving to Boulder to lose himself. His new book, Fotographs of Bones, is now available from Monkey Puzzle Press. Dig his blog by clicking here: Beautiful Buzz.

Adrienne Dodt

Adrienne writes, “This is my autobiography; this is a true story. This is  y autob ograph ; this is   true st ry. This i   y auto  ograp  ; this i    true s  ry. This     y aut   ogra   ; this      true    ry. Thi      y au    ogr    ; thi       tru     ry. Th       y a     og     ; th        tr      ry. T        y       o      ; t         t       r .                          ;                     .”

Aimee Herman

Aimee spends her time counting rats in subway stations, searching for the (in)significance of push-up bras and girdles, and disemboweling the meaning of sexuality. She currently works as a contributing writer for Spectrum Culture and is a managing editor of erotica for Oysters & Chocolate. She also works as a Reading and English teacher at a Community College. Her work can be found in Cliterature Journal, Pregnant Moon Review, Origami Condom, and a recent anthology, You Say. Say. (UpHooks Press, 2009). She lives with her partner, Quetzo, and their amazing black lab, Taku.

Alex Nodopaka

Alex is very well. His intention to become what he never was before is always on the front burner. He claims to have finally reached the corner of his apogee from where the seductive smell of the great beyond is within the olfactory sensitivity of his proboscis.

Alexandra Lukens

Alexandra  / lives on I-95 / learns at Columbia University / edits Flaneur Foundry / featured in Fast Forward Vol. II / featured in Beehive Magazine / writes The Husband Manuscripts / marries Bruno S.

Amy Catanzano

Amy is an adjunct faculty member and administrative director of the Department of Writing & Poetics at Naropa University. She is the author of two books: iEpiphany (Erudite Fangs, 2008), published by Anne Waldman, and Multiversal, selected by Michael Palmer for the Poets Out Loud Prize with Fordham University Press. Amy’s poetry has appeared in literary magazines such as Conjunctions, Fence, Volt, Denver Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, and Colorado Review. She also has poetry included in the forthcoming anthology, A Best of Fence. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a BA in English from Colorado State University.

Ana Maria Martinez

Ana Maria is a mixed media artist currently living somewhere soaking up the sun and appreciating the lessons of each new day. She was raised by her large, happy, and well-fed New Mexican family in ‘Burque with many a weekend visiting Grandma Kate in Taos. She loves lots of things, mostly dancing and water. In her art she seeks to gracefully unravel the intricacies of what it means to be human.

Andrew Bethke

Andrew is working towards his BA in History from California State University, Fresno. Following that, he intends to pursue the ultimate prize: donning the tweed coat, argyle sweater, and gruff but loveable demeanor of a professor of medieval British history. As much as he loves the melancholy of residing in the city of his birth, he hopes to one day escape to anywhere.

Andrew McEwan

Andrew is from Bright’s Grove, Ontario, Canada, and currently attends the University of Toronto. He is the editor of Acta Victoriana literary journal. His work has appeared in Dandelion, and is forthcoming from Misunderstandings Magazine, Fact-Simile, and an anthology, Gulch, to be published by Tightrope Books. His first chapbook, Input / Output, is due in January from Cactus Press in Toronto.

Andrew Schelling

Andrew is a poet, translator, and essay writer. His work is steeped in natural history, wilderness explorations, ecology, and the literature of Asia. He’s published six volumes of translations from classical India’s poetry and he edited The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry. Recent titles include Tea Shack Interior: New & Selected Poetry, and a volume of essays, Wild Form, Savage Grammar. In June 2008, Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India was reissued by White Pine Press and a new book of poems, Old Tale Road (Empty Bowl Press, 2008), was recently released. He lives in the Southern Rocky Mountain bioregion and teaches poetry and Sanskrit at Naropa University.

Ashleigh Middleton

Ashe is originally from the East Coast but currently lives in Colorado while working on her MFA Degree. She enjoys singing in the shower, wasting her life online, and has discovered she has no natural talent for snowboarding. Her super powers include taming wild Clydesdales and breathing underwater.

Barbara Price

Born in Boston and raised all over, as a child Barbara saw the spirit of Nathaniel Hawthorne as she walked past the Salem Custom House, which made her very reluctant to walk past Gallows Hill. She was living in Cleveland in 1978 when Dennis Kucinich let the city go bankrupt, which is exactly why she supported him for president in 2008. Barbara is working toward an MFA at California State University in Fresno, where she lives with a very understanding husband and two patient kids. She is a Nice Mommy.

Barry Spacks

Known mainly as a poet/teacher, Barry has brought out various novels, stories, three poetry-reading CDs and ten poetry collections while teaching literature and writing for years at M.I.T. & U C Santa  Barbara. His most recent book of poems, Food for the Journey, appeared from Cherry Grove in August 2008.

Ben Olson

Ben was born and raised in north Idaho, in a small mountain town of hillbillies, realtors and hippies. He’s worked as a dishwasher, busboy, bartender, blender salesman, gas station clerk, golf pro, photographer, journalist, reclaimed lumber specialist, researcher, production assistant, producer, boat captain, propane filler, and finally, author. He used to live in a small cabin by the lake, where he wrote Wanderlost in thirty-seven days, but was evicted for non-payment of rent, and is now living in total poverty, roaming around America trying to figure out what the hell to do next.

Benjamin Dancer

Benjamin teaches English at Jefferson County Open School in Lakewood, Colorado. He is currently seeking representation for Fidelity, the novel from which “The Problem with America Today” is excerpted. Other excerpts from Fidelity have been published in Fast Forward Vol. I, G Twenty Two Literary Journal, decomP magazinE, Fast Forward Vol. II, and SFWP.org (the literary journal run by the Santa Fe Writers Project).

Brendan Hamilton

Brendan is a writer. Every day, in every way, he’s getting better and better.

Cameron Aveson

Cameron has been constructing and maintaining trails in Kings Canyon National Park as a Backcountry Trail Leader since 1993. He lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas and is working on his undergraduate degree in English at Fresno State.

Carlos Ponce-Melendez

Carlos teaches creative writing at schools and community centers. His poems have appeared in The Dreamcatcher, The Poet, Voices Along the River, Desahogate, Small Brushes, The Texas Observer, El Angel, Celebrate, several anthologies and numerous Spanish magazines.

Carly-Anne Ravnikar

Carly-Anne, aka Theo Dorable, is a professional Drag King at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. She was born and raised in the Midwest, currently living in Racine, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in The Bathroom (It’s a Good Place to Read) and she was the graphic designer for UW-P’s Straylight in the Fall of 2007.

Cecilia Kunstadter

Cecilia’s life consists of snowboarding, photographing, adventuring, and trying really hard to be a surfer and downhill biker in the off season. She grew up all over the place and now lives in Jackson, Wyoming. She’s obsessed with big mountains, oceans, and polar bears.

Christopher Schuman

Chris was born to Martian parents on Planet X. Following Planet X’s unfortunate destruction, Schuman was rocketed to Earth as an infant, where he crashed and was found by a couple kindly farmers, who raised him as their own. He now writes poetry and fiction, and occasionally takes out the trash.

Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero (January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and philosopher. Cicero is widely considered one of Rome’s greatest orators and prose stylists.

Clarissa Butler

Clarissa received her BA in Art Studio, Communications, and Fashion at IUP and finished school in Italy painting on the hillsides. She’s worked in post production, interior design, an underground music magazine, and currently works for an educational social networking site for teen girls. Her illustrations have been published in Language Magazine Volumes 5 and 6. She jumps on a plane any chance she gets and is fascinated by the human psyche, especially pertaining to addiction.

Corey Mesler

Corey is the author of two novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002) and We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006). He has two more novels due out in the coming year. His book of short stories, Listen, came out in March 2009. He’s been published in numerous journals and anthologies.  He has also published numerous chapbooks and one full-length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems.  He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize numerous times and one of his poems was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store in Memphis, Tennessee.

Dr. Cornelius

Dr. Cornelius is a chimpanzee archaeologist and historian. He and his simian cohorts were planning a coup d’etat to take over the nation and send G.W. Boosh back to La Planete des Singes until Barack Obama foiled their plans. But they’re still planning to kidnap Boosh from his posh Dallas retirement home and shuttle him to the outer reaches of the Andromeda Galaxy. He’s also a big fan of Pearl Jam. IT’S EVOLUTION BABY!

Dale Bridges

Dale is a freelance journalist and fiction writer living in Boulder, Colorado. His writing has been published in Barrelhouse, Out of the Gutter, Edit Red, The Crucible, Heads Magazine, Denver Magazine, The Daily Camera and Boulder Weekly, among others. Dale has a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s in literature from the University of Northern Colorado.

Daniel Dissinger

Daniel is an MFA graduate of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He’s moved back to New York, hoping to make a splash in the concrete ocean that is New York City, while still maintaining his position as the Editor of In Stereo Press – an online journal he co-founded in Boulder. With his approach to poetry, Daniel is interested in creating an interactive, and ever-evolving, surrealist experience for his readers. If you were to ask Daniel who makes up the audience for his poetry, he’d probably quote from Jack Kerouac: “My witness is the empty sky.”  His work can be seen on the recent online issue of 580 Split.

Daniel is an MFA graduate of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He’s moved back to New York, hoping to make a splash in the concrete ocean that is New York City, while still maintaining his position as the Editor of In Stereo Press – an online journal he co-founded in Boulder. With his approach to poetry, Daniel is interested in creating an interactive, and ever-evolving, surrealist experience for his readers. If you were to ask Daniel who makes up the audience for his poetry, he’d probably quote from Jack Kerouac: “My witness is the empty sky.”  His work can be seen on the recent online issue of 580 Split.

Daniela Beuren

Daniela was born in Vienna, where she lives and works as an author, translator and designer of crossword puzzles. She writes English, German and multilingual pieces which she collages and performs alone or with grauenfruppe, a group of four women authors based in Vienna. She got to know Monkey Puzzle at Naropa University, where she participated in the Summer Writing Program as a two-week visitor.

Dave Moyer

Dave is the author of Life and Life Only and the recently published short-story “The Tree.” Dave, who resides in the suburban Chicago area, received his doctorate from Northern Illinois University and his bachelor’s degree from University of Wisconsin where he majored in English. A school superintendent and college instructor by day, Dave is a former college baseball coach, drummer, and long-standing Bob Dylan fanatic.

Dawn Sueoka

Dawn’s work has appeared in fastforward. She is from Hawai’i but is now based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she works in a library and lives with a hamster and a band.

Dennis Caswell

Dennis lives outside Woodinville, Washington and works as a software engineer in the aviation industry. His work has appeared in Floating Bridge Review, Mute Note Earthward, Cascade, Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range, and assorted other journals and anthologies. He was a finalist for the 2009 Floating Bridge Chapbook Award.

Diane Klammer

Diane is a native of California now living in Boulder, Colorado.  She used to be a biology teacher before becoming a therapist for the chronically mentally ill.  Her first book, Shooting the Moon, was recently published by Monkey Puzzle Press. When she isn’t writing, she works as a naturalist for Boulder County Open Space or singing and playing guitar for seniors.  She loves the biosociopolitical emphasis of Monkey Puzzle.

Doug Tanoury

Doug is a Pushcart nominated poet who’s been widely published on the internet and in print. He’s been featured in New York Times Online, The Detroit News, and the Detroit Metro Times.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

Elisabeth lives in Austin, Texas, and writes poetry, essays, fiction, and plays.

Elizabeth Robinson

Elizabeth is a recipient of the 2008 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Individual Artists. Her new book, The Orphan & it’s Relations, will soon be out. She also has work forthcoming in a new Norton Anthology, American Hybrid.

Emily Owens

Emily is the result of two artists who merged during the NY West Village Folk Scene in 1988. She has been twice published, and is working on her next manuscript. Among other things, she is currently learning how to be human.

Erica Varlese

Erica has been writing since she was fourteen. She’s an activist, student, writer, artist, and that which is yet to come. She’s inspired by collective feelings, community, the word “we,” and meditation.

Ethan Brown

Ethan lives and works in the Grand Canyon. He’s an aspiring Navajo.

George Evans

George is the author of five books of poetry published in the US and England, including The New World (Curbstone) and Sudden Dreams (Coffee House Press). A bilingual collection of his poetry, Espejo de la Tierra / Earth’s Mirror, translated by Daisy Zamora, was recently published by Casa de Poesia in Costa Rica. He lives in San Francisco.

Gerard Morel Cruz

Gerard Morel Cruz is a professional thinker of thoughts. For example, he routinely plays mental checkers with friends and foes alike. Mr. Morel Cruz is a very cantankerous and shrewd theologian, or clairvoyant who often philosophizes about things that ordinary chumps could never really come up with on their own. The truth is this folks, Mr. Morel Cruz is an ordinary guy like all of us. He is Arturo Bandini: “lover of man and beast alike,” for every day is like a day in Jersey even if he ain’t in Jersey. Mr. Morel Cruz realizes there is a need to replace the neglect that has hitherto been an example of the banal callousness in the entertainment world with a fresh and classy style that is suspicious of mimes, fond of ferrets, and brings the oomph back to the clandestine world of high stakes living.

Gina Caciolo

Gina Caciolo lives in Emmaus, Pennsylvania…for now. After traveling across the country on the documentary trip ALT, she’s realized she’s ready to live anywhere. She enjoys dabbling in prose, poetry, playwriting, sewing, crocheting and cooking. Her fiction has appeared in Ophelia Street.

Henry Rasof

Born in California, Henry has lived in Colorado since 1991. His first poem was published in Beatitude (SF) in 1960-something. He holds degrees in Music, Creative Writing, and Jewish Studies. He’s a former chef, musician, book acquisitions editor, and bread-pan washer (dead pan too). He currently teaches at University of Denver and Colorado Community Colleges Online. He also writes poetry with first-to-fourth graders at the Boulder Jewish Day School. His poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Kansas Quarterly, Beyond Baroque, Bits, and elsewhere. He likes exploring genre boundaries but not sure why.

Henry David Thoreau

Mr. Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, and philosopher best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Hillary Keel

Hillary is a low-residency student at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics and is currently planning on relocating to the USA. Born in New York, she got her BA in German and English at Mary Washington College and has since lived in Austria. She’s participated at the “schule für dichtung” (Vienna Poetry Academy) and at the Paris Poetry Workshop with Cecilia Woloch.

Howard Winn

Howard holds a graduate degree from the Stanford University Writing Program where he studied with Yvor Winters and Wallace Stegner. His poetry has appeared most recently in Southern Humanities Review, Raven Chronicles, and Gander Press Review. He is a SUNY faculty member.

Howie Good

Howie, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of eleven poetry chapbooks, including Still Life with Firearms (2009), Visiting the Dead (2009), from Right Hand Pointing (2008) – all from Flutter Press, and My Heart Draws a Rough Map (2009) from Blue Hour Press. He’s been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for the Best of the Net anthology. His first full-length book of poetry, Lovesick, was released in 2009 by Press Americana.

Ian Washburn

Ian’s fiction has appeared in the online magazine Sugar Mule. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Irene Joyce

Irene is currently in her second year at Naropa University.  Her writing experience includes insomniatic jotting of incessant thoughts, transcribing songs from the wind on walks to and from, e-mails that play dress-up as poetry, and creating text for spoken elements in collaborative, multi-media performance.  Finding the “honing of academic skill” a mighty and welcome though arduous challenge, she is working to expand the beneficial reaches of weaving her words through creative studentship.

JA Kazimer

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, JA escaped at a young age, and now lives in Denver, Colorado, where she received a Master’s degree in Forensic Psychology. She’s worked as a PI, bartender, and most recently at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

James Kerley

James is a noted scholar of thermodynamics, and co-founder of Mixtape of the Month Club. He currently resides in 1988.

James Tyner

James was born and raised in Los Angeles but came to Fresno, California as a teen and still considers both places home. He grew up in neighborhoods filled with violence, but strives for the life of a pacifist, generally failing. Tyner is the recipient of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, the Larry Levis Scholarship, the Ernesto Trejo Poetry Prize, and recently won the 2009 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Contest. He thanks his wife, who is his all.

Jasmine Marshall Armstrong

Jasmine is completing her MFA at CSU Fresno in 2009. She finds inspiration in the odd moments on life’s byways. She is a teacher and researches American political poetry movements. Her poetry has appeared in Sojourners and Café Solo.

Jed Thomas

Jed is an architect for Pearson Design Group in Bozeman, Montana. When he’s not spending time with his wife Katie, he’s backpacking, hiking, kayaking, skating, and playing with his troop of highly trained orangutans.

Jennifer Phelps

Jennifer is a poet and writer currently refining her craft at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. In her spare time she writes. When she is not writing, she thinks about writing. Recently, her dreams have told her to write.

Jessey Nickells

Jessey is currently an MFA candidate at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. She received her BA at Knox College in Creative Writing with a minor in Painting and was first published last spring in 751 Magazine’s premier issue.

Jessica Surabian

Jessica is from Fresno, California. She graduated with honors from San Joaquin Memorial High School in 2007 and is a second-year Smittcamp Honors College Scholar at CSU, Fresno where she is majoring in chemistry. She enjoys spending time with her family and best friends, reading, drawing, listening to music, and recently began writing poetry.

Joel Parker

Twenty-three years old, Joel grew up in the unfortunate sprawling metro area of Phoenix, Arizona. He stumbled into poetry as a therapeutic alternative to screenwriting, which was his initial professional focus. As of late, however, the poetic word has become his primary outlet in life and art. As of this past summer he is a captive of Boulder and all its offerings. While some may find it peculiar, it was sitting on a porch in the predominately debauched part of this college town, drinking cheap red wine, where he found the inspiration for this particular submission.

John Allen Cassady

Singer/songwriter, musician and author John is the son of Neal Cassady, a writer and well known figure in the Beat and Psychedelic movements. With Beat Museum owner Jerry Cimino, John travels in the Beat Museum on Wheels, with a multimedia show that incorporates video, slides, poetry readings, music and storytelling to share the story of the Beats with colleges and universities. John is currently writing a book about his father.

John Staudt

John is from South Texas, where many of his stories are based. He teaches English at a high school just south of San Antonio.

Jonathan Montgomery

Jonathan is the author of Taxis and Shit, published by Monkey Puzzle Press in 2009. He is also the author of The MeTOO Poems Volumes I & II (Baobob Tree Press, 2008). He was born in 1980 and raised in Akron, Ohio. He is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Naropa University and lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Joyce Joseph

Joyce is a Denver native. Writing is her spirituality…she is drawn to first thoughts; unedited, raw, present moment thoughts. Through writing she tries to deconstruct reality. The fragments that remain become her own truth. When she contemplates, she realizes she is obsessed with autumn, thyme, and the dark side of the moon. She longs for the day when we could exchanged words instead of commerce.

Julie Berner

Originally from Michigan, Julie now resides in Boulder, Colorado with her wife and dog. She has an AAS in interpreting, a BA in Sociolinguistics and a MA in Environmental Leadership. When she’s not writing, she is earning her way in the world as a certified sign language interpreter and an interpreter educator teaching at Front Range Community College and forthcoming at Regis University. Julie loves marching bands, hanging laundry, and the change of seasons.

Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar (July 13, 100 BC – March 15, 44 BC) was a Roman military and political leader. He played a singular role in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. His conquest of Gaul extended the Roman Empire to the Atlantic Ocean.

Junior Burke

A lifelong musician, Junior has seen his songs performed and recorded by a range of musicians on the national scene, including Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, The Boston Pops and the Rochester Philharmonic. Junior is also a successful prose writer and dramatist. His highly original novel, Something Gorgeous, which explores the historical background of the era that spawned The Great Gatsby, was published in 2005 by Farfalla/McMillan & Parrish. In 1999, Junior won an Essay Award from New Millennium Writing, one of six writers cited nationally. He is currently chair of the Creative Writing program at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School in Boulder, Colorado, where he teaches fiction, dramatic writing, and literary studies.

Justin M. Kulyk

Justin is a 31-year-old novel writer from Raleigh, North Carolina. He currently lives in New Albany, Ohio, and is in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program at Naropa University. He is currently formulating a theory of writing, illustrating the characteristics of the Dionysian and Apollonian school of style.

Kaen Joyler

Kaen teaches at Seokyeong University in Seoul, South Korea, where he’s been flying under the radar for over a decade. He’s also the editor of the online agora journal. Recent work has appeared in The Abacot Journal, Fretpunch Press’ Corpse of Milk, Fast Forward Vol. I, fre-quen-cy, The Bathroom, Brown Magazine, and Not Enough Night.

Karen Douglass

Karen’s books include Red Goddess Poems, Bones in the Chimney (fiction), Green Rider, Thinking Horse (non-fiction), and Sostenuto (poems). The Great Hunger (poems) is forthcoming from Plain View Press in 2009. She is an associate editor for The Café Review and has an MA in English Lit from Georgia Southern College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College. She lives in Broomfield, Colorado.

Katharyn Grant

Katharyn’s writing has appeared in Fast Forward, Foothills Magazine, and Orange Coast Review. She’s toured internationally performing comedy/improv theater for U.S. military in Asia and Europe. Short films she wrote, directed, and acted in screened at BHFF in L.A. and Rome, Italy, Starz film Center, and on IFC (Independent Film Channel).  “God Hates Liars” is part of a larger creative non-fiction memoir she hopes to complete this year.

Keith Kumasen Abbott

Keith’s essay “Rhythm-A-Ning: Philip Whalen’s Rhythmic Inventions” will appear in The Beats and Philosophy from the University of Kentucky Press. Astrophil Press will reprint a revised Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, A Memoir of Richard Brautigan in 2010.

Kelly Sexton

Kelly, better known as “Mouse,” happens to be Charles Bukowski’s love child.

Kim Nuzzo

Kim is an Aspen performance poet/actor who is a co-founder and host of Live Poetry Night at the Hotel Lenado, Aspen’s longest running live poetry event. He is a member of the Aspen Poets Society and has appeared in many local theatre productions of the Hudson Reed Ensemble. He’s currently working on a two-person play using the words of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.

Kimberlie Robinson

Kimberlie is a writer and massage therapist originally from Georgia and has been slowly working her way west in hopes of living at some point in her life in a blue state. An avid reader since a child, she has recently come to know and love the craft of writing.

Kimberly Castanon

Although making the tastiest fideo and artistic cakes comes naturally, Kimberley is naturally good at mixing pigments, once blending the perfect shade of Nuprin yellow. She is happiest when writing in colored ink and is a semi-accomplished violinist. She also enjoys hangnails.

Kona Morris

Kona is currently working on her first fiction novel, she’s in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Naropa University, on the editorial board of Fast Forward Press, and was co-founder of the Write Trash writing group in Fairbanks, Alaska. She received the Redwood Empire Mensa Award for Creative Non-Fiction in 2006 and has most recently been published in Toyon, Be Brave Bold Robot, The Bathroom, Fast Forward, and Bombay Gin.

Kristi Yorks

Kristi considers herself to be a gypsy of sorts. She wanders. She writes. Which makes her, by some definitions, a poet. She seeks open spaces, snow, the color blue. She currently lives in Boulder, Colorado, working towards an MFA in Poetics from Naropa University and one day, hopes to write herself deep into the mountains.

L. Draaghtel

L. Draaghtel was born in Russia and holds a PhD from Minsk Linguistic University in Byelorussia. Since 1997 she has resided in Canada. She has been teaching linguistics and writing classes as well as ESL for over twenty years in Russia, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan. She is presently and Associate Professor in the Department of Applied English in Ming Chuan University, Taiwan.

Laura Garrison

Laura grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and currently lives in Maryland with her husband Justin. She attends graduate school in Washington, DC, where she studies American Literature and Nature Writing. Some of her other work is forthcoming in Puffin Circus and Glossolalia.

Lauren Andrews

Lauren is a writer and editor living in New York City. Upon receiving her undergraduate degree in Biology from UC Berkeley, Lauren spent extensive time out in the wild studying ducks and observing bears. Though she currently works at a literary agency, the occasional duck, bear, or monkey has been known to make an appearance in her works of short fiction and poetry.

LaVonne Natasha Caesar

LaVonne is a multilingual poet and performer currently writing and creating in Madison, Wisconsin. She recently received Honorable Mention for the New Millenium Poetry Prize judged by Nikki Giovanni. You can read her work in THE UNREADy by artist Alex Cecchetti, The Anthology of the Awkward v.1, and Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy’s writing/art zine Mirage #4/Period(ical). Her chapbook The Black Pussy Revolution, Part 1 is available on Amazon.com

Leah Rogin-Roper

Leah thinks a monkey puzzle is something that only a monkey can solve. She currently works at Red Rocks Community College and Metropolitan State College. She co-founded Fast Forward Press. She thinks it’s funny to write about herself in the third person.

Lily Scarborough Heehs

Lily graduated from the poetically prestigious Naropa University, nestled in the bosom of Boulder, Colorado.  Colorado suited Lily’s poetic process because of its pervading aimlessness, which dictated that people should definitely come and go unexpectedly; Lily wishes people would wander in and out more.

Lindsey Anderson

Lindsey loves 19th century literature and poetry. She misses you. She’s abnormally attracted to the American West and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her new puppy Mojo M’Gill Morrison.

Lisa Birman

Lisa’s chapbooks include deportation poems and o-a conversation. She is co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and her work has appeared in 26, admit2, Square One, not enough night, and Thuggery & Grace. Her new book, For that return passage: A Valentine for the United States of America, has recently been released by Hollow Deck Press. Lisa is from Melbourne, Australia, and teaches for Naropa University’s MFA in Creative Writing and Prague Study Abroad Program.

Lois Leveen

Lois is a recovering academic who writes and makes art in Portland, Oregon.  Her work has appeared most recently in the magazines/journals Bitch, Bridges, and Oregon Literary Review, the book Portland Queer, onstage at Performance Works Northwest and the Richard Foreman Festival, on the National Public Radio program LiveWire, and on the weekly-ish humor blog macaronimaniac.blogspot.com. She’s currently finishing a novel based on the true story of a former slave who became a spy for the Union army.

Lori Heflin

Lori was born in Boulder, Colorado and lived most of her life in Sunshine Canyon. The death of her father in 2004 inspired her to memorialize her relationship with him. Her own diagnosis of cancer, in 2008, inspired her to continue writing.

Luke Bennett

Luke is a photographer from Arkansas.

M. D’Alessandro

M. D’Alessandro currently lives in Kauai where he can balance the ph in 15,000 gallons of water. When he’s not there he can be found at Patty Warren’s in San Francisco. He has degrees in Architecture, Art History, and Creative Writing, has worked in varying interests from cattle rustling to inn keeping and edits the semiannual literary journal swap/concessions for Bedouin Books.

Margaret Randall

Margaret is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. Born in New York City in 1936, she has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Her book To Change the World: My Life in Cuba is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in fall 2008, and Their Backs to the Sea is forthcoming from Wings Press in fall 2009.

Mark Lamoureux

Mark is the author of Astrometry Orgonon (BlazeVOX Books, 2008) and the forthcoming Spectre (Black Radish Books, 2010).  He is editor of Cy Gist Press, a micropress focusing on ekphrastic poetry.  He teaches Composition in the CUNY system in New York.

Mark Spitzer

Mark is the author of ten or twelve books, including Season of the Gar, CHODE!, Age of the Demon Tools, The Pigs Drink from Infinity, Chum, Bottom Feeder, Riding the Unit, From Absinthe to Abyssinia, The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille, Divine Filth, The Church, After the Orange Glow, and Writer in Residence. He has published hundreds of essays, poems, stories, literary translations, etc., and has cultivated a semi-cult following as an editor of the legendary lit journal Exquisite Corpse. After earning three degrees in Creative Writing (a BA from the U of MN, an MA from CU, and an MFA from LSU) he taught Creative Writing and Literature for five years at Truman State University in Missouri.  He is now a professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Central Arkansas, where he lives on the shores of Lake Conway and checks his droplines daily for mongo one-eyed catfish, fugly prehistoric gars, and garbage-fish like largemouth bass.  He is now Managing Editor of The Exquisite Corpse Annual, and is married to the zombie writer Robin Becker.

Matt Dennison

After a rather extended and varied second childhood in New Orleans (as street musician, psych tech, riverboat something-or-other, door-to-door poetry peddler, etc.), Matt  finished his undergraduate degree at Mississippi State University where he won the National Sigma Tau Delta essay competition (as judged by X.J. Kennedy). He currently lives in a 100-year-old house with “lots of potential.” His work has appeared in Rattle, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cider Press Poetry Review, GUD, Natural Bridge, A Cappella Zoo, Marginalia, G.W. Review, and Main Street Rag, among others.

Matt Wise

Matt is originally from Texas, received an MFA from the JKSODP with a prose concentration, was the prose editor for Bombay Gin, and now resides somewhere in New York, Oregon, and all points in between.

Meg Day

Meg is a poet, spoken word artist, and arts educator hailing from San Diego but is currently earning her MFA at Mills College in Oakland and teaching young poets to hold their own at the mic with Youth Speaks in San Francisco. Her poems have appeared in PULP, The Greenbelt Review, Outspoken: An Anthology, Temper Magazine, Bellissima, and Flaneur Foundry. She lives and writes in Alameda with her sweet, dumb Dalmatian.

Megan Burns

Megan has an MFA from Naropa University and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter. She has been most recently published in Callaloo, Constance Magazine, and YAWP Journal as well as online at horseless press, shampoo, trope_5, Exquisite Corpse and BigCityLit. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She lives in New Orleans where she and her husband, poet Dave Brinks, run the weekly 17 Poets! reading series.

Megan DiBello

Born in New York, Megan is currently attending Naropa University for an MFA in Writing & Poetics. She received her BA from Marymount Manhattan College in Communication Arts and Creative Writing. She’s been published in Symposium, Fact-Simile, The Bathroom, and the forthcoming debut issue of Flaneur Foundry.

Meghann McCormick

Meghann is an aspiring poet/florist from Central New York. She is exceptional at untangling knots. She doesn’t want to be an ant.

Mel Kozakiewicz

Mel is a poet/performer in Jersey City, New Jersey. There is no place in the world she would rather be.

Melanie W. Kachadoorian

Melanie was born in Oklahoma and is currently a student at California State University, Fresno. She enjoys writing poetry and prose. She has two dos, four fish, one turtle, and one husband. If forced to choose between cake or death, she would most likely choose cake, depending on the day.

Melanie Miller

Melanie is a former multimedia choreographer/dancer and Naropa University MFA candidate who turned to visual art, blogging, and playwriting in 2008 while battling Transverse Myelitis, a rare and debilitating neurological disorder that’s turned her into a badass-cane-walking disabilities and rare disease advocate. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Broken Pencil, Main Street Rag, Guilty as Charged, Watching the Wheels: A Blackbird, and other funky journals and onlines zines. Check her out at www.neurodetour.com.

Merrill Shane Jones

Merrill is a Texan who lives in Boulder, Colorado where he studies disembodied poetics and writes fiction and poetry. He also writes hillbilly rock with his imaginary friends, Murphis and Tucker Jim.

Michael Bernstein

Michael is the author of the forthcoming chapbooks 8s, from “a heap of swords and mirrors”, the transit illuminate, and The Fire District. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines. He currently co-edits the online literary arts magazine Pinstripe Fedora.

Michael Filimowicz

Michael is a new media artist working in the areas of sound, experimental video, creative writing, net art, public art and digital photography. As a writer he has published poetry, fiction and philosophy, and as a sound designer he’s mixed soundtracks for film and television. He’s an American Midwest transplant currently living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he is on the faculty at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Michelle Naka Pierce

Michelle is the author of two books: Beloved Integer (2007) and TRI/VIA (2003), co-authored with Veronica Corpuz. She teaches at Naropa University.

Michelle Puckett

Michelle, a native of Dallas, Texas, earned her BA in Writing from Naropa University where she spent a semester abroad in Prague. She is currently working toward an MFA in Poetry from Mills College in Oakland, California. She writes about the way Texas haunts her no matter where she goes. Her work has appeared in the Naropa Summer Writing Program Journal N.U.T.S. and is forthcoming in Bang Out San Francisco #2.

Mitch Maraude

Mitch is a writer of paranoid splatter-noir with a literary bent and a fanatical vendetta against tame prose. Originally from Dirty Jersey, now living in Boulder, Colorado, he has published two chapbooks of short fiction and is currently hammering the final nails into the coffin of his first novel.

Mittie Roger

Mittie. An unruly expatriate. In her spare time she’s an elementary school teacher.

Mona Nicole Sfeir

Mona was born in New York City but raised in countries around the world. She received her BA from UC Boulder, her MA from SJSU, California and her MFA from the California College of Arts in San Francisco. Her poetry has been published in several journals and has won prizes from the Louisiana State Poetry Society and the Arlington Arts Center. She’s also a visual artist and her work has been exhibited in both the US and abroad. She was selected as one of the top seventeen students coming out of MFA programs in 2002 by Sculpture Magazine. She currently resides in Geneva, Switzerland with her husband and five year old son and is trying to avoid writing odes to cheese and chocolate.

Naomi Lore

Naomi is a writer and musician living in Brooklyn, New York.  She was the Tomaselli Award recipient for Best Poetry when she graduated from SUNY New Paltz in 2008, and is a founding member of the Intangible Arts Collective. Her poetry and short stories are forthcoming in the anthologies Static Before the Storm, published by Penmanship Books, and In Search Of… published by Codhill Press.

Nancy Stohlman

Nancy’s first book, Live From Palestine (South End Press), was nominated for a Colorado Book Award in 2004.  Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Fast Forward, Resist, The Bathroom, Zero Ducats, Snowline Poetry Journal, Counterpunch, CommonDreams, and the anthology Peace Under Fire (Verso).  She is currently completing her MFA degree at Naropa University and her first novel Searching for Suzi will soon debut from Monkey Puzzle Press.  She lives in Denver.

Nate Cook

Nate is a member of Ego Vs. Id.

Nicholas B. Morris

Nicholas recieved an MFA in Prose from Naropa University, which inadequately prepared him for things like paying rent, buying groceries, and the other harsh realities of life outside the Boulder Bubble. Fortunately, he grew up in rural Arkansas, where he was equipped with survival instincts, a blue-collar work ethic, and a drawl that gets thicker when mixed with alcohol. He currently works undercover as an oil company lackey in Denver, where he lives with his partner and fellow Kerouac School alum Alyssa Piccinni. His creative work has appeared online and in print in some of the following fine establishments: The Arkansas Literary Forum, Fact-Simile, Cliterature, Fear Knocks, The Gut, and of course Monkey Puzzle.

Nicholas Michael Ravnikar

Nicholas lives well below the poverty line in Racine, Wisconsin. His moderately evolved hominid brain has managed to squeeze out some things made of words. When he’s not pursuing such ends, Ravnikar has been known to sustain himself by working in videography, nonprofit programs, and plasma donation. Like he said: well below the poverty line.

Nick Demske

Nick may or may not have had work in Barnaby Jones, Sawbuck, The Bathroom, Queef, KNOCK, Pank, Fact Simile, Arsenic Lobster, and every other journal in the world that doesn’t suck. He lives in Racine, Wisconsin where he helps curate the BONK! performance series. Nick works at the Racine Public Library where everything is free but the late fees!

Olatundji Akpo-Sani

When not writing poetry, Olatundji runs Baobob Tree Press with friend Rob Geisen.  He lives in Colorado with his wife, Lisa, and step-daughter, Sierra.  When he’s not being bookish, he’s into good beer, good jazz, and good whiskey.

Paige Doughty

Paige is a writer and environmental educator. She teaches the Community Adventure Program at New Vista High School. She is currently writing her first book, Unwinding Myself Whole, which is the story of her recovery from an eating disorder and the journey towards a fully nourishing life. She loves dancing, the wilderness, singing cheesy 80s love tunes in the shower, and performing at children’s concerts as a honey bee.

Paul A. Toth

Paul lives in Sarasota, Florida. He is the author of three novels: Fishnet, Fizz, and Finale.The majority of his short fiction, poetry, and multimedia work can be accessed at www.netpt.tv.

Perry Lavin

Perry’s favorite qoute is, “Overcome your fear of goo. Come and taste goo goo stew.” He currently lives on Shakedown Street.

Peter M. Laffin

“I am a 26-year-old American patriot and practicing Catholic. Gotta problem with that? Want to fight about it? I play folk music. My first solo record, The Still Point of the Turning World, is available on iTunes and elsewhere. I eat a lot of steak and I recycle. I’m an elementary school teacher in Boulder.  I have a patent on a particular kind of car horn called The Happy Honk and I’m waiting for someone to make one so I can take all that person’s money. I recently began smoking again.”

Peter Rugh

Peter lives in New York City. He’s a recent graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Peter Schwartz

Peter’s photography has appeared in such online literary journals as CELLA’s Round Trip, eyeshot, and Litterbox Magazine. Poor and utterly in love with his camera, he will never give up his Kodak to the bad guys.

Philip Meersman

Philip writes in NL, EN, DE, FR, ES, multilingual and sound forms. He creates improvisational, sound and poetry installations and performances using current affairs, socio-political and environmental issues in BE, NL, FR, IT, AT, BG, MK, RO, IL, AR… He’s been translated in AR, BG, EN, ES, FR, IT, IW, JP, MK, RO, RU. He’s been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and on the web. He’s the co-founder of DAsturgistenDA and artiestencollectief JA.

Punnu Jaitla

Punnu studies English at Michigan University in Ann Arbor. He was attending University of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit and was then housed in a FEMA trailer in the arena parking lot for a year afterwards.

Rebecca Diaz

An observer from birth, Rebecca did not speak until she was three. She began with a complete sentence in support of Ronald Reagan. Two decades later, and a walk across the political spectrum, she has seen the error of Reaganomics. She’s currently working on dismantling the military industrial complex, one poem at a time.

Rebecca George

Rebecca is, was, and will be something. Someday. Whether she ends up playing center field for the Chicago Cubs, mining for gold in the foothills, or training monkeys to brush her teeth, she will be something. In the meantime, she is an educator, writer and editor, with an unhealthy obsession with college and professional sports and bright shiny objects.

Rebecca Maillet

Rebecca is a graduate of Emerson College in Boston, current resident of Northampton, Massachusetts. She spent her formative years growing up in Orange, Massachusetts and thinks living through New England winters makes people more inherently cynical. She thinks beer and books are the God(s) intended food and thanks Mom for pushing her to put some words on paper every now and again.

Richard Schwass

Richard recently received an MFA Degree in Poetry from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He once interviewed Grace Slick.

Rob Geisen

Rob is the author of eleven books of poetry. Along with friend Olatundji Akpo-Sani, he runs a weekly open mic on Wednesday nights at the Burnt Toast in Boulder, Colorado. He’s also a coeditor for Baobob Tree Press and poetry editor for Illiterate Magazine.

Rodrigo Gonzalez

Rodrigo (Mexico City, 1980). Poet and musician, Rodrigo is a dedicated writer currently enrolled in the Naropa University graduate writing program. He created and helped maintain an independent literary group in Mexico City. He contributed to the latest edition of American Environmental Leaders by Grey House Publishing. He’s an art enthusiast, meditation acolyte, and the oldest of three.

Ryan Clark

Ryan is taking a year off from doughnuts and other sweet, absolutely wonderful foods. Somewhat ironically he hopes soon to become the poetry version of Candy Cummings.

Sarah Suzor

Sarah’s poetry has been published in Hotel Amerika. She is co-curator of the 3+3 Poetry reading series.

Scott Alexander Jones

Scott is a poet from Texas, currently in the MFA program at The University of Montana. His poetic spacetime coordinates include past, present, and/or future incarnations of: Third Coast, Forklift Ohio, Bombay Gin, Camas, and The Cape Rock, as well as a travel article in Brave New Traveler. He is currently teaching himself the Tuvan art of throat singing.

Scott Larson

Scott lives, plays and writes in Colorado. He would like to take this opportunity to thank Beethoven, Dostoevsky, Van Gogh and Kerouac for their moments of lonely suffering – his world is the better for it.

Serena Chopra

Serena is a 2009 graduate of University of Colorado’s MFA program. She has upcoming work appearing in the Denver Quarterly and Fact-Simile.

Shane Clements

Born in New Hampshire, Shane is currently writing poems from the Tao Te Ching, comic books, and fortune cookies. He is a student in the Writing & Literature program at Naropa University.

Shane Joaquín Jiménez

Shane is an MFA student in the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, where he edits the literary magazines Bombay Gin and Zero Ducats. He is also the author of a chapbook of short stories, entitled It Can Be That Way Still, and has work in The Greensboro Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere.

Shane Scaglione

Shane is an Irish Italian American writer and yoga instructor who divides his time between Boulder, Colorado and India. He is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. For more on his writing and yoga teachings, dig his blogs at: truthwritenow.blogspot.com and orchidofagni.blogspot.com.

Dr. Shurooq Amin

In December 2007, Dr. Amin became the first Kuwaiti poet to be nominated for the Pushcart Prize in the USA. Dr. Amin holds a PhD in Creative Writing in which she analyzes (and disputes) the struggle between word and image in Ekphrasis. As both poet and painter, and as an Anglophone Kuwaiti, she has struggled internally with the paragon of word versus image, East versus West, all her life. Shurooq’s art, poems, and short stories have appeared in more than thirty international literary journals. Her chapbook The Hanging of the Wind has been published in 2009 by the Finishing Line Press, USA. During the day, she works as a Professor at Kuwait University; in the afternoons, she paints; in the evenings, she writes.

Stacy Walsh

Stacy enjoys daydreaming about her pseudo-rock band, devising intricate plans to travel the country living out of her car, and putting words into pleasing orders. None of these admirable endeavors, however, pay off her mounting student loan debt. Donations accepted.

Stan Flukinger

Originally from New York City, Stan was abducted three years ago and taken to Austin, Texas by a very smart woman who claims to be his wife. She has kept him hidden in a day job, abused him on a daily basis, and is suspected of having mothered his two sons. He is currently seeking to expose the entire gruesome account in a novel, the first chapter of which, “War Wounds,” can be found among these pages.

Steve Kisicki

Steve originally hails from Lincoln, Nebraska and is a recent graduate of the Jack Kerouac School. He is terrified of the ocean and has an affinity for grilling steak. It just so happens that his favorite car is orange, and he would like to paint the ceiling the same color.

Susie Huser

Susie lives in Steam Boat Springs, Colorado. She recently graduated from the Jack Kerouac School of Naropa University. Yesterday she saw a bull snake and an osprey. Neither tried to eat her. A couple weeks ago she purchased a used copy of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest.

Suzanne Savickas

Suzanne obtained her MFA from Naropa University. She’s currently writing a poetry manuscript based on Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. Suzanne resides in the Midwest where she writes poetry and works as a rehabilitation counselor. She is founder and editor of Le Pink-Elephant Press and co-editor of the press’s new subsidiary, A Trunk of Delirium.

Tim Skeen

Tim won the 2001 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry for his book Kentucky Swami which was published by BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His poems appear in recent issues of The Potomac Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Southern Review, The Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA program at California State University-Fresno.

Timothy Foss

Timothy recently arrived in Boulder after a decade immersed in the fog of the Seattle arts underground where he helped found the collective Secluded Alley Works, produced the mini-comic Seclusion, and thousands of ceramic objects featuring his cartoons. He’s currently an MFA student at CU focused on cartooning, animation, performance art, and how they all might get along.

Tiph Parrish

Tiph is a student at Naropa University working on a double major in Writing and Literature and Traditional Eastern Arts. She is originally from Houston, has lived in Hawaii, and now resides in Boulder, Colorado. She is a bi-sexual poet, artist, woman of multi-ethnic descent who is also left-handed and therefore right-brained. Her loves include the ocean, writing, activism through poetry/performance and pointing out the elephant in the room.

Tomara Kafka

Tomara is a Florida writer currently attending Naropa University’s MFA Writing and Poetics Program in Boulder, Colorado. Delighted to have added Ape Noir into her writing repertoire, she is completing her novel, The Bridal Luncheon, as well as working on a collection of short stories and, as always, composing songs.

Toshiya Kamei

Toshiya is the translator of Liliana Blum’s Curse of Eve and Other Stories (2008) and Naoko Awa’s Fox’s Window and Other Stories (2010), as well as selected works by Leticia Luna.

Travis Cebula

Travis currently resides in Golden, Colorado with his lovely and patient wife, Shannon. He is a recent MFA graduate from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a program last seen hovering somewhere above and slightly to the right of Naropa University. His poems, photographs, and stories have appeared in The Talking River Review, Apothecary, In Stereo Magazine, Bombay Gin, and The Strip, as well as recent editions of The Bathroom and Whrrds. Last spring he was honored to be named a finalist for the 2008 Third Coast Poetry Prize.  His first book, Some Exits, is now available from Monkey Puzzle Press.

Upton Sinclair

Mr. Sinclair (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was a prolific American author who wrote over ninety books in many genres and was widely considered to be one of the best investigators advocating socialist views and supporting anarchist causes.

Violet Monday

Violet is a Writer, Poet, Visionary, Expressionist, Artist, Clown, Dreamer, and Your Friend. Of her work, she says, “I’m a lyrical poet. My words are thought provoking, magical, and can carry you into another world. I believe in integrity and want to show the world I have something positive to say.”

William Benton

William’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Open City and other magazines. His books include Birds, Normal Meanings, Marmalade, and Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings. He is also the author of Madly, a novel.

William Doreski

William teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire. His latest collection of poetry is Waiting for the Angel (2009). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals.

Yasamin Ghiasi

Yasamin is a poet. She currently lives in Boulder with her daughter, Oriana, and attends the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. This is all she is willing to admit at present; stay tuned for further updates on her previously undisclosed delinquent endeavors. She still insists, however, that she was nowhere near the scene of the crime when Sylvester the guinea pig was discovered dead, having been drowned in the orange plastic tub.

Dr. Zira

Dr. Zira is a chimpanzee psychologist and veterinarian who specializes in the study of humans. She is an outspoken liberal by nature, deploring war and militancy, and eager to seek and develop intelligence anywhere it can be found. Dr. Zira is the wife of, and co-conspirator with, Dr. Cornelius.

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