Lara Gularte has served as poetry and art editor for Reed Magazine, San Jose State University’s literary journal. She received the 2005 Anne Lillis Award for Creative Writing and Phelan Awards for several of her poems. At the 2005 Juniper Creek/Unnamed Writer’s National Poetry Competition judged by Christian Wiman, she received honorable mention. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including the Santa Clara Review, The Montserrat Review, Kaleidoscope and Art/Life. Gularte’s poems have been translated into Portuguese by the University of the Acores and featured in the literary supplement SAAL-Suplemento Acoriano de Artes e Letras, da revista Saber/Acores. Her work was presented at an international conference on storytelling and cultural identity in June 2005 at Angra do Heroismo on the island of Terceira.

Elaine Bartlett is a Poe-Faulkner Fellow in the creative writing graduate program at the University of Virginia. Her poetry and stories have appeared in The Antietam Review, The Comstock Review, Calyx, Fourteen Hills, Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley and San Jose’s Downtown Magazine, among others. She was awarded the 2003 Yemassee prize in fiction. Her fiction is forthcoming in The South Carolina Review.

Designer

Luis Ledezma is a graduate of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering. He is currently the webmaster of Convergence, and the town of Tuxca (www.tuxca.com). Ledezma resides in San Jose.

Email: lledezma@alumni.calpoly.edu

Contributors

Grace Cavalieri

Grace Cavalieri is the author of 14 books of poetry and 20 staged plays. She’s produced “The Poet and the Poem” on public radio, entering its 28th year, now from the Library of Congress. Cavalieri holds the Allen Ginsberg Award for Poetry, the Pen Fiction Award for story, The Bordighera Poetry Award, and the CPB Silver Medal for Broadcasting.

Katia Fuentes

Katia Fuentes was born and raised in Mexico City, where she earned her degree in art and communication at the University Nuevo Mundo. After graduating in 1994, she moved to Boston, Mass., working as a still photographer for the film Gallo de Pelea, by Carlos Fuentes Lemus, and studied photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and the New England School of Photography. Since 1998 she has lived in San Francisco, where she has participated in numerous cultural events and art exhibits at Somarts, SF Photography Center, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, Fort Mason, The Mexican Museum, Artaud Gallery, Casa del Libro, Melting Point Gallery, and other venues. She also taught photography for two years at MCCLA. 

She has shown her work in Boston, Mexico, and California. She has been published by Camera Arts Magazine and numerous other publications and has worked as a journalist for Univision Noticias 14, El Latino Newspaper and Looksmart.com. She is a member of the artist organization Project Artaud. 

John Grey

John Grey is an Australian-born poet, playwright, and musician. His latest book is What Else Is There, from Main Street Rag. His work has been featured recently in Hubbub, South Carolina Review and Journal of the American Medical Association.

Email: jgrey10233@aol.com

Nels Hanson

Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm south of Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Montana, and his fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and an honorable mention in its Joseph Henry Jackson competition. His stories have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Long Story, South Dakota Review, and Zahir. He has worked as a teacher and farmer and now lives in San Luis Obispo, Calif., where he and his wife, Vicki, have an editing service.

Liz Henry

Liz Henry has published poems, translations, and articles in Lodestar Quarterly, Poetry Flash, Two Lines, Cipactli, caesura, other, Literary Mama, Convergence, and Strange Horizons. In the 1990s she edited several small zines. Through Tollbooth Press, she currently publishes a small magazine, Composite: Multiple Translations (http://www.bookmaniac.net/tollboth). Her current projects include translating poems by Delmira Agustini, Elvira Hernandez, and Nestor Perlongher.

Ellen Hopkins

Ellen Hopkins is a poet, author, and freelance writer. Her first novel, Crank, written in verse, was published with Simon & Schuster in October 2004. Her second verse novel, Burned, will be published March 2006. She is currently finishing a third. Hopkins lives near Carson City, Nev., with her husband, son, three large German Shepherds and two cats.

Website: http://www.ellenhopkins.com

Christopher Mulrooney

Christopher Mulrooney has published poems and translations in Crate, Segue, The Drunken Boat, Color Wheel, and Default, criticism in Pyramid, The Film Journal, and Parameter, and a volume of verse, notebook and sheaves (AmErica House, 2002). He lives in Los Angeles.

Website: http://www.geocities.com/christophermulrooney

Ashok Niyogi

Ashok Niyogi was born in Calcutta in 1955. He was schooled all over India in Irish Christian Brothers’ Schools and graduated with honors in economics from Presidency College. Niyogi spent 30 years in the world of international commerce. His work has taken him all over the world and he now divides his time between California, where his two daughters live, India, where he has a timber plantation, and Russia. He has three books of poetry—Crossroads, Reflections in the Dark, and Tentatively—and numerous chapbooks. His work has also appeared in magazines and anthologies in the United States, the U.K., New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

Jeanne Obbard

Jeanne Obbard lives outside Philadelphia, where she works as a medical proofreader. A 2001 recipient of the Leeway Award for Emerging Artists, her poetry has appeared in APR, Atlanta Review, and Philadelphia Stories, among others. She is also a songwriter and guitarist. 

Email: j_obbard@hotmail.com

Radames Ortiz

Radames Ortiz’s work has appeared in numerous publications. He was awarded a 2003 Archie D. and Bertha Walker fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and was nominated for a 2003 Pushcart Prize. He currently resides in Houston, Texas.

Website: http://theamplifiedbard.blogspot.com

Tracy Schmid

Tracy Schmid teaches first grade at Mark Twain Elementary School in Carson City, Nev. When she’s not tying shoes, sounding out words or blowing her whistle for playground infractions, she writes poetry. Schmid belongs to the Ash Canyon Poets of Carson City. She has two children and two dogs.

Schmid was named Mark Twain's Educator of the Year in 2003.

Email: schmids@sbcglobal.net

Varsha Shah

Varsha Shah’s poems have appeared in the Texas Observer, Borderlands, Five Inprint Poets, and Houston Review, among others, and will be forthcoming in a book, Between Heaven and Texas, by Wyman Meinzer, a University of Texas Press publication, and Time Slice, an anthology by Mutabilis Press. Shah enjoys reading translated works of Spanish language poets as well as American, Eastern and European poets; she continues to write poetry in her mother tongue, Gujarati. A first-generation Indian-American, Varsha is a financial professional currently living in Houston, Texas.

Email: Varsha_Saraiya@hotmail.com 

Davide Trame

Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English who lives in Venice, Italy. He has been writing poems exclusively in English since 1993. His poetry has been published widely, most recently in Poetry New Zealand, New Contrast (South Africa), Nimrod (United States), and Prague Literary Review. 

Ather Zia

Ather Zia is from Kashmir. She was awarded a grant by the Cultural Academy of Languages and Arts of Kashmir to publish her first collection of poems, The Frame. A journalist, she lives in Anaheim, Calif., with her husband and son.

Email: syedatherzia@yahoo.com

Website: http://www.labalabamedia.com/thecourtyard.asp