CONTRIBUTORS
Lisa Nanette Allender earned her B.A. in Theatre Arts, Performance, at University of South Florida.
She enjoyed the Indiana University Writers' Conference, 2004, where she was enrolled in a workshop under the tutelage of poet Maureen Seaton. Lisa Nanette is a writer and SAG-AFTRA actress, and has held over 40 different types of jobs in her life. She had a lead role in the feature film "Unspoken Words" (2011), opposite actress Robin Givens. Lisa Nanette has been published online in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and has twice been selected Poet of the Week for Poetry Super Highway.
Her poems have been included in several chapbooks and anthologies, including Java Monkey Speaks, Volume 2.
Jennifer Balachandran lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her two daughters. Prior to moving to Georgia she lived only in states which border Canada, but being in the South has grown on her. Her first publication is here, in Flycatcher, and she has work forthcoming in Terminus. She also posts her own poems regularly on her blog.
Pamela Chatterton-Purdy graduated from New Canaan (Connecticut) High School in 1959, received an A.A. from Green Mountain College in 1961, and her B.A. from the University of New Hampshire in 1963. She married her husband David Purdy, a Methodist minister, on June 7, 1963, and received her M.F.A from the University of Massachusetts in 1966. She has taught art at Bay Path College, Springfield College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, plus the public schools of Middleboro and Brookline, Massachussetts. She has taught art for over thirty years. In 1987, her book Beyond the Babylift: A Story of an Adoption was published by Abingdon Press.
Bethany Collins is a mixed-media artist, originally from Montgomery, Alabama, now based in Atlanta. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions across the Southeast, including Drawing Inside the Perimeter at the High Museum of Art; Pre-Emergent at Aqua Art in Miami, Florida; and Pulp at Beta Pictoris in Birmingham, Alabama. Collins’s current language-based work, particularly her White Noise series, highlights the inability of language to fully capture notions of modern racial identity. Rather, text is hidden, revealed, allowed and humored, but rarely settled. In 2013, Collins was selected as a Dashboard Co-Op Artist and Walthall Artist Fellow. More recently, she was selected as an Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem to culminate in a group exhibition in 2014.
Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published author of thirty books, including the multi-award-winning book of nonfiction Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods and the classic Celtic language anthology Writing the Wind: A Celtic Resurgence. His most recent book, Postcards From Peru, was published by Brazilian publisher Sol Negro. He is the founder and publisher of New Native Press which is set to publish a first-ever translation of the Mayan poet Feliciano Sanchez Chan into English in January 2014. Living in a mountain farming community in rural western North Carolina, he has "laid by" his gardens for this year and is busy getting in firewood for the winter.
Michael Diebert is the author of Life Outside the Set, available from Sweatshoppe Publications. Recent work has also appeared in Steel Toe Review, Scythe, and Southern Poetry Review. He lives in Atlanta, where he serves as poetry editor for The Chattahoochee Review and teaches writing and literature at Georgia Perimeter College.
Rupert Fike’s collection of poems, Lotus Buffet (Brick Road Poetry Press), was named Finalist in the 2011 Georgia Author of the Year Awards. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry with work appearing in The Southern Review of Poetry, Natural Bridge, The Georgetown Review, A & U: America’s AIDS Magazine, The Atlanta Review, and others. He has a poem inscribed in a downtown Atlanta plaza, and his nonfiction book, Voices from The Farm—an account of life on a spiritual commune in the 1970s—is now in its second printing.
Originally from the flatlands of central Illinois, Justin Hamm now lives near Twain territory in Missouri. He is the the founding editor of the museum of americana and the author of the chapbooks Illinois, My Apologies (RockSaw Press, 2011) and The Everyday Parade/Alone With Turntable, Old Records (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2013). His work has appeared, or will soon appear, in Nimrod, The New York Quarterly, Cream City Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, and a host of other publications. Recent work has also won The Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Award from the St. Louis Poetry Center, been featured on the Indiefeed: Performance Poetry channel, and been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize. Justin earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2005.
Mike James's work has been widely published in magazines throughout the country. His poetry collections include Alternate Endings (2007, Foothills Press) and Past Due Notices: Poems 1991-2011 (2012, Main Street Rag). A new book of poems, Elegy in Reverse, will be published in 2014 by Aldrich Press. After years spent in Kansas City, Missouri and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he now lives in Douglasville, Georgia, with his wife and five children.
If duck-duck-goose were an Olympic sport, David Joy would have been a gold medalist. Since that dream was shattered, he spends his days chasing hellbenders and writing literary fiction just outside of Wedlock, North Carolina.
Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, Virginia with his wife Kendall and their son Alan. He is a regional editor of Virginia Bird, a publication of the Virginia Society of Ornithology, and is also a founding member of Blue Ridge Discovery Center, an environmental education organization with projects in western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia. Clyde’s poems have also been published recently in Rose Red, Bedlam Review, Cortland Review, and Dandelion Farm. A few more poems will be published soon in Now and Then, Silver Blade, and Triggerfish.
Bill King is a 1990 graduate of the University of Georgia’s M.A. program in creative writing. Currently, he teaches literature and creative writing at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia, where he directs the D&E Writers Series. He has placed work in Mississippi Quarterly, The Southern Poetry Anthology, XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Still: The Journal, Wild Sweet Notes II: More Great Poetry from West Virginia, Nantahala: A Review of Writing and Photography in Appalachia, and others. His found poem on mountaintop removal mining, "How to Destroy a Mountain," appears in Still.
John Lane's Abandoned Quarry: New & Selected Poems (Mercer University Press) was selected as the SIBA Poetry Book of the Year, and his book length narrative My Paddle to the Sea (University of Georgia Press) was a finalist for the SELC Reed Prize for Best Environmental Writing in the South. Both came out in 2011. In 2012, he edited with his wife Betsy Teter the anthology Literary Dogs and Their South Carolina Writers (Hub City Press). In 2008, the Texas Tech University library purchased his literary papers for inclusion in the James Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural World. He is Director of Wofford College's Goodall Environmental Studies Center, where he teaches environmental writing and humanities.
Lucinda Faulkner Merritt is a water advocate and writer who lives in North Florida’s springs region. Her short piece “Rum Island, Florida” appeared in the September-October 2011 issue of Orion Magazine. Her blog essay "Bad Romance: Ponce de Leon, Bathing Beauty, and Florida's Fountains of Youth" won first place in the inaugural EcoArts Awards Literature category in 2012. In 2013, she organized an event to honor four Gainesville-based Florida Book Award winners who write about water. Merritt is the staff assistant for the Ichetucknee Alliance and, given time, blogs. She studies Buddhism as it is practiced in the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibet.
Judson Mitcham’s work has been widely published in literary journals, including Poetry, Harper’s, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, and Southern Review. He has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as a Pushcart Prize. He is the only writer to win the Townsend Prize for Fiction twice. His most recent book is A Little Salvation: Poems Old and New, published by the University of Georgia Press. Mitcham teaches writing at Mercer University in Macon. In May of 2012 he was named poet laureate of Georgia, and he was recently inducted into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame.
Scott Neely works in a range of media, including painting, drawing, and writing. His method balances expression and simplicity. He explains, "I make visual poems: succinct, present, for the heart." In addition to individual work, Scott has led literary and visual community projects on issues of diversity, race, and religious pluralism. He serves as Pastoral Executive at First Presbyterian Church of Spartanburg, South Carolina, and teaches courses in comparative religions and Christian spirituality at the University of South Carolina-Upstate.
Valerie Nieman is a 2013-2014 North Carolina poetry fellow. She has also received support for her writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, West Virginia Arts Commission, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her prizes include the Nazim Hikmet, Greg Grummer, and Byron Herbert Reece poetry prizes as well as two Elizabeth Simpson Smith awards in fiction. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, the North Carolina Literary Review, New Letters, Blackbird, and many other journals as well as several anthologies, two chapbooks, and a collection, Wake Wake Wake. Her latest novel, Blood Clay, was the 2012 winner of the Eric Hoffer Award in General Fiction and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Prize. She is also the author of two earlier novels, Survivors and Neena Gathering—originally published in 1988, this post-apocalyptic novel was reissued earlier this year. She has published a collection of short stories, Fidelities, and her short fiction has appeared most recently in StorySouth and the anthology Keeping Track. Nieman graduated from West Virginia University and holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. A longtime newspaper reporter and editor, she now teaches creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University and serves as poetry editor of Prime Number magazine.
Noble Beast is a collage artist working out of Atlanta.
Andrea O'Rourke's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Barrelhouse, Raleigh Review, Slipstream, Verse Wisconsin, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is the 2013 Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize Winner. A native of Croatia, she lives in Atlanta, where she attends the MFA program and teaches composition at Georgia State University, translates, and paints-oils on cotton paper and acrylics on canvas.
Jessica Purdy teaches creative writing online through Southern New Hampshire University. She leads poetry workshops in a beautiful space overlooking the Squamscott River in Exeter, NH. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. She has a poem forthcoming in The Foundling Review. Previously, her poems have appeared in Literary Mama, Halfway Down the Stairs, "What is Home" (a publication of the 2007 Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program), Analecta, and The Beacon Street Review.
Brenda Sutton Rose lives in Tifton, Georgia, and has recently completed the first draft of her first novel. Her works have appeared in numerous online and print journals.
Karen J. Weyant's work can be read in 5AM, the Barn Owl Review, Cave Wall, Conte, The Sugar House Review, and River Styx. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Stealing Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2009) and Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt (Winner of Main Street Rag's 2011 Chapbook Contest). Her poem "The Summer I Stopped Catching Bees" was included in Sundress Publications' 2011 Best of the Net Anthology. She lives and writes in rural Pennsylvania, but teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York.