Andrew Bales lives in Wichita, Kansas, where he is the Barr Fellow in Wichita State University’s MFA program. His stories have been awarded second place in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers contest and have appeared or are forthcoming in Bateau, NANO Fiction, Johnny America, Midwestern Gothic, and other journals.

Paula Brancato is a poet and filmmaker on faculty at the University of Southern California and Stonybrook Southampton. She has been published by Mudfish, Bomb Magazine, Georgetown Review, Litchfield Review, Southern California Anthology, GeorgiaReview and Harvard Press, among others. Her first book Club Paradise was a 2008 May Swenson and Holland Prize finalist.  In 2008 poet Ilya Kaminsky selected her first chapbook, Dar a Luz, for publication by the pacificREVIEW. In 2010, Finishing Line Press published her second chapbook Painting Cities. For My Father is her third book. Paula is the recipient of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, the Brushfire Poet Award, and first prize from the Chester H. Jones Foundation. Her films have won the Karlovy Vary and Angelcity film festivals, and the Organization of Black Screenwriters, SCIFF Family Focus and WINFEMME awards. She has twice been a Sundance finalist. Paula earned her MBA from Harvard Business School and is a graduate of the Los Angeles Film School and Hunter College.

Kevin Casper is a PhD student at Louisiana State University studying postmodern rhetoric. He plays drums in the Americana band Flatbed Honeymoon and loves to travel, especially with his dachshund Lefty. A lifelong amateur photographer, this is his first published work.

Feng Sun Chen lives in Minneapolis. She is the author of chapbooks Ugly Fish (Radioactive Moat) and blud (forthcoming from Spork Press). Her book Butcher’s Tree will be published by Black Ocean in 2012, and she is a contributor to montevidayo.com.

Karin C. Davidson is originally from the Gulf Coast and now lives in the Ohio River Valley. Her stories have recently appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Precipitate, and Prime Number, and have been shortlisted in several writing competitions, including the 2010 Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition. Her writing can be found at thunderonathursday.blogspot.com.

Mark Folse lives and writes in and often about New Orleans. His poetry and prose has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Metazen, Atlantis Now, NolaVie, The Rumpus and the forthcoming New Laurel Review; the collections Carry Me Home, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited). He blogs about New Orleans and literature at ToulouseStreet.net (Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans). His Katrina blog Wet Bank Guide was written up by National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times and French National Radio and is cited by David Simon as among the inspirations and sources for the HBO Series, Treme.

Andrew Grace’s third book of poems, Sancta, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2012. Other sections of Pin it on a Drifter are forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly and PANK.

Dave Greber creates vibrant, revelatory video installations inspired by socio-cosmic phenomena. He studied time-based media at Middle Bucks Institute for Technology, Temple University, Universiteit van Amsterdam, and currently at Tulane University. Since 2005, he has lived New Orleans, Louisiana, where he produced documentaries for non-profits and musical acts, regional advertisements, and independent films. In 2009, he began creating loop-based video installations for fine-art galleries and museums. His work has been screened across the country and internationally in film festivals and art events. He currently exhibits/curates as a member of the Front artist collective.

Jonathan Greenhause is a Pushcart Prize nominee, his poetry appearing or scheduled to appear in The Believer, Cream City Review, Nimrod, Reed, The South Carolina Review, and Water~Stone Review. His first chapbook, Sebastian’s Relativity, is being released this autumn through Chicago’s Anobium Books.

Derek Gromadzki lives in Iowa City, where he is an MFA and PhD student at the University of Iowa. Most recently, his poems have appeared in Seneca Review, Black Warrior Review, and are forthcoming in Nimrod.

Dustin Junkert is a musician, writer, and small-time gardener living in Portland, OR. He and a friend recently started up a small literary journal of their own called Cartographer: A Literary Review. Dustin recently had an essay published in the New York Times, a short story in Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and poems in The Journal, South Carolina Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, Chaffey Review, Georgetown Review, Willow Review and Barbaric Yawp.

Kristie Kachler lives in Germany, where she is busy doing things to ensure that she will have something really exciting to say for herself in the future. Other poems can be found at BlazeVOX, Sentence and the 52project.

Alyse Knorr is the poetry editor of So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, based out of George Mason University, where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry and teaching undergraduate English. Alyse’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Salamander, The Minnesota Review, elimae, Moria, Dark Sky Magazine, and others, and she was a finalist for the 2011 Bethesda Literary Festival Prize.

Eric LeMay lives in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains in Southeast Ohio. More of his work is available at www.ericlemay.org.

Celeste Pottier‘s fiction has appeared in the journals Short Story and The Dos Passos Review, and she has work forthcoming in Mslexia, The Chaffey Review, and Fractured West. She teaches literature and writing classes at Charleston Southern University in Charleston, South Carolina.

Power gardener, pickle enthusiast, food writer and poet, Jono Tosch lives in Northampton, MA.  You can follow his moods and see what he eats for lunch at Oilchanges: The Anti Food Blog Food Blog.