Lara Gularte, M.F.A., has received several Phelan Awards and the Anne Lillis Award for Creative Writing. Her poetry is forthcoming in Bitter Oleander, and has appeared in journals such as The Fourth River, Santa Clara Review, Watershed, and Kaleidoscope, and has been translated into Portuguese by the University of the Acores. Her work was presented at an international conference on storytelling and cultural identity in June 2005. She is an assistant poetry editor for Narrative Magazine and is a former poetry and art editor for Reed Magazine, San Jose State University’s literary journal.

Elaine Bartlett’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Antietam Review, The New Orleans Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, The South Carolina Review, and The South Dakota Review, among others. Her story "Sugar, Magic, Grace" received the 2003 Yemassee prize in fiction. She is a former Poe-Faulkner Fellow at the University of Virginia, where she is now in the third year of the M.F.A. program. She is the fiction editor of the literary journal Meridian.

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 Little Village Counseling Center (www.thelittlevillagecc.com). Ledezma resides in San Jose.

Email: lledezma@alumni.calpoly.edu

Contributors

Arlene Ang lives in Spinea, Italy. Her poetry has recently appeared in alice blue, Blood Orange Review, Mimesis, and Umbrella. She received the 2006 Frogmore Poetry Prize and serves as a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. Her most recent chapbook, Secret Love Poems, was published by Rubicon Press. More of her work may be viewed at www.leafscape.org.http://www.leafscape.org.

Michael Baker, once from Ohio, now New Jersey, is an award-winning poet, a teacher of university composition classes, a frequent contributor to Trouser Press and Zisk, and a writer of extended Perfect Sound Forever essays on The Kinks, Cleveland in the 1970s, and Alex Chilton. He is working on essays about Rita Dove, Family, John Ashbery, and the use of doorways in the films of John Ford. He has a perfect son.

Wes Benson lives in Port Orchard, Wash., with his wife, Lisa. He is the poetry editor of Cranky Literary Journal. Prior to being hired at Cranky, he was published there, among other places.

Isabelle Carbonell is a documentary filmmaker and photographer. Half Belgian and half Uruguayan, she was born and raised in the United States. Based out of Washington, D.C., she recently graduated from the University of Michigan with degrees in environmental and social science, photography and filmmaking. Her skills have taken her to countries such as Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Argentina. She is currently featured in a nationwide commercial of the Michigan Difference campaign for her volunteer documentary work in Vietnam, and she has an exhibit in Havana Village, in the Adams Morgan area of Washington, D.C.

Email: Isabelle@izaca.com
Website: http://www.izaca.com

Doug Ramspeck was awarded the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry for his collection Black Tupelo Country. The book will be published in the fall of 2008 by BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City). He teaches at The Ohio State University at Lima, and a few hundred of his poems have appeared in journals that include West Branch, Confrontation Magazine, Connecticut Review, Seneca Review, Rattle, and Hunger Mountain. He lives in Lima with his wife, Beth, and his daughter, Lee.

Oliver Rice has received the Theodore Roethke Prize and was twice featured on Poetry Daily. His poems appear in three recent anthologies: Ohio Review’s New and Selected, Bedford/St. Martin’s Introduction to Literature, and Random House/Billy Collins’ 180 More, also available on a Library of Congress Web site.

Rebecca Seward has a B.A. in environmental perspectives and spent several years managing an organic farm. She is currently working at a sustainable agriculture non-profit in Washington, D.C. and has a running love affair with farming and language.

Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English, born and living in Venice, Italy. He has been writing poems exclusively in English since 1993. His work has been published internationally in about three hundred literary magazines since 1999, including Poetry New Zealand, New Contrast (South Africa), Nimrod (U.S.), and Prague Literary Review. His poetry collection Re-Emerging was published by Gatto Publishing in 2006.

John David West’s work has appeared in Gentle Strength Quarterly, Venice Beachhead and PoetryMagazine.com. This year he won placement in the Reader’s Digest 2007 Poetry Contest Awards. He lives in New York City, where he is a student in The New School’s M.F.A. program in Creative Writing.