Daniel Romo’s work appears or is forthcoming in Gargoyle, The Los Angeles Review, MiPOesias, Yemassee, and elsewhere. His first book of poetry, Romancing Gravity, is forthcoming from Pecan Grove Press. His second book of poetry, When Kerosene’s Involved, is forthcoming from Black Coffee Press. He teaches creative writing, and lives in Long Beach, CA. More of his writing can be found at danielromo.wordpress.com.

Thomas Griffin’s poetry has appeared in Pudding Magazine, The Pitkin Review, This Wood Sang Out anthology, Pivot anthology, Lotus.zine, Holly Rose Review, The Aurorean and others, as well as in the chapbook collection, Ordinary Life. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award and was recently nominated for a Pushcart prize for “The Passing.” You may find more about him at www.thomasgriffinarts.com. [Photo: Indra Tracy]

Roland Goity lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he writes in the shadows of planes coming and going from SFO. His stories can be found in Fiction International, The Raleigh Review, Word Riot, Compass Rose, PANK, and more recently in The MacGuffin, Menacing Hedge, Bluestem, and Underground Voices. He edits fiction for the online journal LITnIMAGE.

Patrick Kelling is a doctoral student in the Creative Writing program at the University of Denver and is the fiction editor for the literature magazine Gambling the Aisle. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and to Best New American Voices.

Thad DeVassie’s poems and prose poems have appeared in numerous publications including New York Quarterly, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, North American Review, Poetry East, West Branch, NANO Fiction, PANK Magazine, Fifty-Two Stories and Sycamore Review. A graduate of The Ohio State University and lifelong Ohioan, he operates a communications consulting firm in Columbus. He can be found among the Cowbird writing community by simply searching his name or his equally handsome portrait. (Handmade portrait credit: Holden DeVassie, age 8)

Other fiction by Daniel Maclaine can be found in Whistling Shade literary journal (print and online). He was a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Kids’ Reading Room before the fiction portion was discontinued. He has an 8,000-word short story (“The False Waking of Gwalchgwyn”) forthcoming in October in the science fiction and fantasy anthology Aoife’s Kiss. He is querying a novel and building a blog in his spare time. Write to him at danmacl84(at)hotmail.com. [Photo courtesy of Daniel Maclaine]

M. V. Montgomery is a professor at Life University in Atlanta who is equally prolific as a poet and fiction writer, having published a hundred fiction pieces and a hundred poems in a hundred different journals. He is the author of eight books, the most recent of which are What We Did With Old Moons (poetry) and Beyond the Pale (stories), both scheduled to be published soon by Winter Goose Publishing in Sacramento. Please see his sites at Winter Goose and WordPress.

Susan Pashman is a philosophy professor and the author of the novel The Speed of Light. Her essays, poems and stories have appeared in such journals as The Texas Review, The Portland Review, Dan River Anthology, Midway Journal, Burning Word and The Battered Suitcase. Her most recent story will appear in the next issue of The Indiana Review.

Tom Daley teaches poetry writing at the Online School of Poetry and the Boston Center for Adult Education. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Massachusetts Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, 32 Poems, and Diagram and has been anthologized in Hacks: The Grub Street Anthology and Poets for Haiti. He recently reviewed Leslie Williams’ Success of the Seed Plants here. He performs his play, Every Broom and Bridget: Emily Dickinson and Her Servants, as a one-man show. [Photo: Nicole Terez Dutton]

Molly Bonovsky Anderson comes from Saint Cloud, Minnesota. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Northern Michigan University in 2009. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Passages North, Flashquake, Crab Orchard Review, and other print and online journals. Until she can make a career out of listening to records and taking photographs of other people’s lawn ornaments, she will continue writing. She currently resides on the shore of Lake Superior, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Sarah Wilson lives an often chilly life in Anchorage, Alaska. She is the author of two previously published short fictions, which are available for reading at the Every Day Fiction ezine. In her free time, she writes eclectically, reads more than is probably healthy, and attempts to dodge the moose.

Timothy L. Marsh is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, Wales. Recent honors include writing fellowships from the CAMAC Centre d’Arts and the Can Serrat International Arts Center. His works have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Los Angeles Review, The Evansville Review, Dark Sky Magazine and The New Quarterly, and are indexed at timothylmarsh.com.

Naomi Krupitsky Wernham holds a B.A. in creative writing, aesthetics, and sensory experience from NYU’s Gallatin School. Her fiction, poetry, and academic writing have been published in various literary journals, in print and online. She lives in New York. For more, please see www.nhkw.net.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a crisis center, which you can read about here. He is also the author of numerous chapbooks, including The Devil’s Fuzzy Slippers from Flutter Press and Personal Myths from Writing Knights Press. He has two other chapbooks forthcoming, Fog Area from Dog on a Chain Press and The Death of Me from Pig Ear Press.

Dan Crawley grew up in Southern California and now lives in Phoenix, AZ. His fiction was awarded an Arizona Commission on the Arts fellowship in fiction and nominated for Best of the Web. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the North American Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Emerge Literary Journal, Fiction Fix, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He has taught fiction workshops at various colleges and universities, including Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University. He now teaches writing at Ottawa University.

Mira Martin-Parker is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared in various publications, including the Istanbul Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mythium, and Zyzzyva.

Writer, musician, photographer, model, Brad has published poetry in Cream City Review, Alchemy, Fireweed, “gape seed” (published by Uphook Press), Front Range Review, theNewerYork Press, and Mercury. His essays have been published in Brainstorm NW and N, The Magazine of Naturist Living; his erotica has appeared in Oysters & Chocolate, Clean Sheets and MindFuckFiction. A musician/lyricist since 1969, Brad was a 2003 Regional Semi-Finalist in the USA Songwriting Competition, and Honorable Mention in 1980 and 1981. He has exhibited paintings in galleries and coffee houses in the Portland area, and was showcased in the Cascade AIDS Auction catalogue in 1999. Living observation, in any genre, is poetry.

Chad Tracy is a writer and musician based in Austin, Texas. He has spent the last year sparring with a Texas Golden Gloves Champion, raising a five-year-old daughter and a cat named Moose, working on his third novel, The Governor Of Texas, and trying to find an agent and publisher for his second novel, The Boxer. He sings and plays guitar with the rock group American Roulette, the jazz groups The 34th Street Jazz Band and The Modern Trio, and teaches through the Informal Classes program at the University of Texas.

Michelle Joy is managing editor in chief of the Yale Journal of Humanities in Medicine, with publications therein as well as in Hektoen International, The Examined Life, and Connecticut Medicine. She has edited several published books, has written scientific articles and a pending novel, and was the 2011 Connecticut Geezers Book Award winner.

Eric Shonkwiler is a writer preoccupied with ruination. His latest work is published in [PANK] Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, and Peripheral Surveys. More of his writing can be found at ericshonkwiler.com.

Henry Marchand’s fiction has appeared in Paradigm, The Seattle Review, The Laurel Review, The King’s English, Rosebud, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Review Americana, and elsewhere. He is the author of Writing Short Stories (a high school text), and of essays published in The New York Times, The International Herald-Tribune, Common Dreams News Center, and The Boston Globe. A New Jersey native and longtime resident of northeast Ohio, he now teaches creative writing at California’s Monterey Peninsula College.

William Cass has had thirty-seven short stories accepted for publication in mostly smaller literary magazines and anthologies. He is a former resident of Ohio, but currently lives and works as an educator in San Diego, California.

Patty Somlo was born in Cleveland, Ohio, where “Digital Camera” is set, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, was a finalist in the Tom Howard Short Story Contest and is the author of From Here to There and Other Stories. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, the Santa Clara Review, the Jackson Hole Review, WomenArts Quarterly, Guernica, Slow Trains and Fringe Magazine, among others, and in several anthologies.

Jeffrey Hammond grew up in Findlay, Ohio, and is Reeves Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His work has won two Pushcart Prizes, Shenandoah’s Carter Prize for Essay, and the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize. His books include Ohio States: A Twentieth-Century Midwestern (Kent State University Press, 2002), Small Comforts: Essays at Middle Age (Kent State University Press, 2008), and Little Big World: Collecting Louis Marx and the American Fifties (University of Iowa Press, 2010).

Tom Barlow is an Ohio writer. Other stories of his may be found in several anthologies including Best New Writing 2011 and numerous magazines and journals including Redivider, Temenos, The Apalachee Review, Hobart, Needle, The William and Mary Review, and Hiss Quarterly.

He writes because conversation involves a lot of give and take, and he’s always thought of himself as more of a giver.

Visit Tom at his web site, www.tjbarlow.com.

Holly Kabat is a graduate of the College of Wooster, where she completed an Independent Study which culminated in a collection of original short fiction and poetry. Selections of her work have been published in the college’s annual literary magazine, The Goliard, and a poem was chosen as the first place winner of the Vonna Hicks Adrian award. She is 22 and lives in Northeast Ohio, where she works in a public library and is pursuing her M.L.I.S.

Ann Batchelor Hursey’s work has appeared in the Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, Chrysanthemum, and Pontoon, among others. Ann has been awarded writing residencies with the Jack Straw Writers Program (Seattle, WA), Hypatia-in-the-Woods (Shelton, WA.) and Soapstone: A Writing Retreat for Women (Oregon). Besides collaborating with visual artists and musicians, she has written poems to compost and hand-made-things. This summer she graduates with an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop @ Pacific Lutheran University. Born and raised in Ohio, she now calls Washington State home.

Stephanie Seguin received a B.A. in English and French from the University of Florida that remains in her closet protected by the cardboard tube it was mailed in. Her humor blog, www.stephaniesays.net, features relevant topics such as fake collectible primate babies, chubby girls running marathons, and rubber truck testicles. Her online journals about her battle with thyroid cancer are read by people from all over the world. She currently lives in Gainesville, Florida where she writes, mothers, and conspires to overthrow tyranny.

John Aylesworth teaches handicapped kids in Southeast Ohio. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in Comparative Arts from Ohio University and an M.A. in teaching children with learning disorders from Ohio State. After school, he stayed in the Hocking Valley and lives with his wife and two dogs in Athens. He’s had poems published in The Tule Review, Caesura, and The South Carolina Review recently.

Byron Barton received his Ph.D. from the University of Vermont in 2007 and is currently living in Santa Cruz, Aruba. He is putting the finishing touches on his debut novel, Saving Grace.

Theresa Williams has published stories and poems widely in such magazines as Chattahoochee Review, DMQ Review, Gargoyle, Hunger Mountain, Lingerpost, Paterson Literary Review, The Sun, Thrush, and Weave. Her chapbook, The Galaxy to Ourselves, will be available June 2012, and her novel, The Secret of Hurricanes, was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize. She’s the recipient of an Individual Excellence Grant from the Ohio Arts Council and was selected for a summer residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She has lived in Northwest Ohio since 1987.

Jeremy Hauck is currently pursuing an M.F.A. degree at Temple University and lives in Philadelphia. He is the managing editor of Temple University’s online literary journal, TINGE Magazine. His fiction has most recently appeared in the third issue of TAV, and he reviews literary journals and interviews editors for The Review Review. He is a native of Clinton County, Ohio.

Ginger Knowlton is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in publications such as 5 trope, the Bark, Marginalia, Many Mountains Moving, Segue, Sentence, Tarpaulin Sky and Surface Design Journal. Her paintings and drawings are held in private collections across the United States and in New Zealand. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received awards from the Academy of American Poets and Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute. For more, please see gingerknowlton.com.

Brendan M. Regan was born in Iowa and grew up in Northwest Ohio. On his way to Seattle, he lived in Toledo and Denver. His work has appeared in Chronogram, Prairie Margins, Syntax, and other publications. He also writes and plays folk music which can be heard at youtube.com/raincityceltic.

You can download a free version of his chapbook of NW Ohio-themed poems, Swamp, River and Ditch, here.

Byron Edgington capped a forty-year aviation career in 2005 to write and to return to college full time. He will graduate from The Ohio State University in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, then will pursue an MFA in creative writing. His work in progress includes a novel, Waitin’ for Willie Pete: a Helicopter Novel of Vietnam, and an aviation memoir entitled The Sky Behind Me. His essays have appeared in Gemini, The Evening Street Review, The Lantern, and The Chrysalis Reader.

Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, Maggie Glover earned a BA from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and an MFA from West Virginia University, where she was awarded the James Paul Brawner Poetry Award in 2007. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry has appeared in Verse Daily, The Journal, Ninth Letter, Smartish Pace and other literary journals. Currently, she lives in San Francisco, CA.

Duy Nguyen is a Bostonian living in Los Angeles, where she works as a freelance television production coordinator. Her short stories “My Lover Is a Former Fat Kid” and “Where Will You Be When You Are Reading This” were finalists in Hunger Mountain’s 2010 and 2011 Howard Frank Mosher Short Story Contests. “My Lover Is a Former Fat Kid” appeared in Hawaii Women’s Journal.

Tim Kahl is the author of Possessing Yourself (Word Tech, 2009) and The Century of Travel (Word Tech, forthcoming). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup and the poetry video blog Linebreak Studios. He is also editor of Bald Trickster Press and Clade Song. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He currently houses his father’s literary estate—one volume: Robert Gerstmann’s book of photos of Chile, 1932.

Daniel Coshnear – coshn@sonic.net – lives in Guerneville, California, works at a group home for men and women with mental illnesses, teaches in a variety of SF bay area university extension programs, and is author of Jobs & Other Preoccupations (Helicon Nine 2001), winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Award. He hopes to publish a new collection of short fiction in 2012 with Kelly’s Cove Press, tentatively titled You Can Put Your Name On It If You Want To.

Laura Grace Weldon is a writer, editor, and occasionally useful farm wench. She lives with her family on Bit of Earth Farm (www.bitofearthfarm.com) where they raise cows, chickens, bees, and the occasional ruckus. Her newest book is Free Range Learning (Hohm Press). Her essays have recently appeared in L’Initiation, Geez, New Awareness, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Natural Life, Farming, Grit, and Lilipoh and she twirls ideas around in what she hopes is an optimistic manner on her blog.

Lauren E. Watkins holds a BA in English and Political Science and is currently pursuing an MFA at Texas State University. She has been published in Persona, the Texas State University literary journal, and USA TODAY College. She is currently working on a debut novel as well as a collection of short stories she hopes to have published. When not reading or writing, she can be found wakeboarding at the lake. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her giant golden retriever, Tyler.

Ed Hamilton is the author of Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York’s Rebel Mecca (DaCapo, 2007). His fiction has appeared in various journals, including Limestone, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, River Walk Journal, Exquisite Corpse, and Modern Drunkard. His non-fiction has appeared in The Villager, Chelsea Now, the Huffington Post, and, more recently, in the Czech Republic’s Host, Germany’s Zwiebelfisch, and the anthology Experienced: Rock Music Tales of Fact and Fiction (Vagabondage Press, LLC 2011). Follow his blog here.

Donald Dewey has published 30 books of fiction, nonfiction, and drama for such houses as Little, Brown and HarperCollins, as well as contributed scores of stories to magazines and other periodicals. His latest novel, Wake Up and Smell the Bees, will be published in July.

Paul Alan Fahey is a writer who resides in Nipomo, California. His short stories have recently appeared in Gertrude, The African American Review, Long Story Short and in the Sisters in Crime anthology, Somewhere in Crime. He is currently editing an anthology of personal essays called THE OTHER MAN wherein noted gay writers describe being the other man, suffering the other man or having their lives affected by infidelity. Paul is a member of NightWriters, the premiere writing organization of the central California coast.

Nick Sweet’s short stories have appeared in Descant, issues 117 and 118 of the Evergreen Review, Cutthroat, Fertile Source, Bartleby Snopes (twice), Shelf Life, SN Review, Offcourse Literary Journal, Paper Skin Glass Bones, Forge, Sliver of Stone, Ink Tank, and an anthology of Asian stories. Two more stories are to appear in an anthology from the Liberated Muse Productions (Volume II). His novel Gemini Games, available from Amazon, was praised by acclaimed authors DM Thomas, DJ Taylor and Andrew O’Hagan.