2013 Scissortail: Author Biographies

Dorothy Alexander, author of four poetry collections including Lessons From an Oklahoma Girlhood, a collection of art and poetry, is the facilitator of poetry readings at the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma, and a monthly poetry reading called First Sunday Poetry at Beans & Leaves Café in Oklahoma City. She is owns Village Books Press, Cheyenne, Oklahoma.

Rilla Askew received a 2009 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A native Oklahoman, Askew is the author of four novels and a book of stories. Her essays and short fiction have been published in a variety of venues, including World Literature Today, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.  Her novel Fire in Beulah was the 2007 selection for Oklahoma Reads Oklahoma. A PEN/Faulkner Finalist and two-time recipient of the Western Heritage Award, Askew is member of the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame, has received three Oklahoma Book Awards, and the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book.

Paul Austin’s professional life includes acting and directing On and Off Broadway, Off-Off Broadway, summer stock, and regional theatres around the nation, as well as acting for television and film, including roles on West Wing, Law and Order, Cosby, and the films, Tune in Tomorrow, and Sommersby.  Among recent stage appearances were the Foreman in Vaclav Havel’s Audience and Late Night Conspiracies, a collection of his own writings at New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, where he is a long time member.  Mr. Austin has directed first productions of a number of new plays, including Percy Granger’s Eminent Domain at the Circle in the Square on Broadway. He has written for and about the theatre in essays, poetry, plays, and Spontaneous Behavior, a book on acting. One of his  works, Dreaming Angel, was included in More Monologues for Men by Men and was also published in Newport Review. He was for many years the Artistic Director of The Image Theatre in New York, where he produced plays and taught acting. A tenured faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College for twenty years, Mr. Austin is currently Artistic Director of The Liberty Free Theatre in upstate New York. 

Alan Berecka is attending and enjoying the Scissortail Festival yet again. The yearly pilgrimage to Ada and ECU has brought the resident of Corpus Christi many friends and great memories. Since the last time he stood before a group of people here,  his latest collection Remembering the Body was recognized with an honorable mention for poetry by the Eric Hoffer Awards.

Timothy Bradford is the author of the introduction to Sadhus (Cuerpos Pintados, 2003), a photography book on the ascetics of South Asia, and Nomads with Samsonite (BlazeVOX [books], 2011), a collection of poetry. In 2005, he received the Koret Foundation’s Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award for a novel-in-progress, and from 2007 to 2009, he was a guest researcher at the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in Paris. Currently, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University.

Joey Brown’s poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in a number of literary journals including Rhino, The Mid-America Poetry Review, The Dos Passos Review, Compass Rose, Pinyon, Clare, The Chaffin Journal, Quiddity, The Oklahoma Review, storySouth, Cybersoleil Journal, and The Florida Review. Her work has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize three times. In 2010, Mongrel Empire press published a collection of her poems titled Oklahomaography. Joey holds an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Oklahoma. She is a writing professor and teaches writing workshops.

Nathan Brown is a songwriter, photographer, and award-winning poet from Norman, Oklahoma. He is serving as the current Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma for 2013 to 2014. He holds a PhD in Creative and Professional Writing from the University of Oklahoma and teaches there as well. Mostly he travels now, though, performing readings and concerts as well as speaking and leading workshops in high schools, universities, and community organizations on creativity, creative writing, and the need for readers to not give up on poetry. He has published eight books, including the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award winner Two Tables Over. His work has been published in many journals and several anthologies. He has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and his cd of original songs, Gypsy Moon, was released in 2010.

James Brubaker will graduate in May with a Ph.D. in creative writing from Oklahoma State University. James' stories have appeared or are forthcoming in publications like The Normal School, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, The Texas Review, Keyhole, and The Cupboard, among others. Additionally, James' chapbook, Pilot Season is forthcoming from Sunnyoutisde. James also edits the music section for The Fiddleback, an online journal of writing, art, and music. 

Julie A. Chappell is Professor of English at Tarleton State University and is editor/translator of The Prose Alexander of Robert Thornton: The Middle English Text with a Modern English Translation published by Peter Lang. She has co-edited two scholarly collections with Kamille Stone Stanton, Transatlantic Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011 and Spectacle, Sex, and Property in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture from AMS Press, 2013. Her poetry has appeared in the anthologies, Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapalooza 94; Agave: A Celebration of Tequila in Story, Song, Poetry, Essay, and Graphic Art; and Elegant Rage: A Poetic Tribute to Woody Guthrie. A collection of her poetry, Faultlines: One Woman’s Shifting Boundaries, will be released by Village Books Press in 2013. She is also the poetry and premodern literature editor for Lamar University Press and an editor for Ink Brush Press.

Rayshell E. Clapper is an Associate Professor of English at Seminole State College in Seminole, OK., where she teaches Creative Writing, Literature, and Composition classes. She has presented her original fiction and non-fiction at several conferences and events including: Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, Howlers and Yawpers Creativity Symposium, Southwest/Texas Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association Regional Conference, and Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Her publications include Cybersoleil Journal, Sugar Mule Literary Magazine, Red Dirt Anthology, Originals, and Oklahoma English Journal. Beyond her written works, she successfully created a writer's group in rural Oklahoma to support burgeoning writers. The written word is her passion, and all she experiences inspires that passion. She hopes to help inspire others through her words.

Richard Dixon is a long-time transplant from the coal mines of southwestern Pennsylvania who now lives in Oklahoma City. A retired high-school Special Education teacher, he is married with three adult children and four grandchildren. A life-long tennis player and coach, he recently retired from employment at a municipal tennis center pro shop, where he was known to string a mean racquet. He has had poems published in Crosstimbers and Westview, as well as numerous anthologies, including the recent Woody Guthrie tribute Elegant Rage, and the 2012 Texas Poetry Calendar. 

Native Oklahoman Margaret Dornaus is a freelance travel writer, who has published a wide variety of Japanese short-form poetry in international haiku journals. She is a winner of several awards, including: the Tanka Society of America’s 2011 International Tanka Contest; the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival’s Sakura Award; and a second-place award in the 2012 Kusamakura Haiku Competition. She currently makes her home in the Arkansas Ozarks.

Maureen DuRant, army brat, army spouse and second-generation Oklahoman, moved twelve times before finally coming home and settling on a granite mountain in the Wichita Mountains. She currently teaches English at Lawton High School and takes photographs of bison. An Oklahoma Writing Project Teacher-Consultant, Maureen advocates for the teaching of creative writing as a teaching strategy in all content areas. Her publications include poetry in Crosstimbers and a postcard history of West Point published by Arcadia Press.

Phil Estes is a PhD candidate in the Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma State University. He earned his B.A. from Wright State University and his M.A. from University of Missouri-Kansas City. He has published work in: Abraham Lincoln, Diagram, Harpur Palate, Hayden's Ferry Review, Lungfull, Sonora Review, West Wind Review, Willow Springs, and others. He currently curates the Bumpkinitis Reading Series based in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Stephani Franklin was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a graduate of Oklahoma State University. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of Nimrod Journal (University of Tulsa). She writes short fiction and recently won first prize in this category in the Tulsa City-County Library Adult Creative Writing Contest. She also writes creative non-fiction that explores her memories of growing up Catholic in Oklahoma during the Sixties and has an essay appearing in an upcoming edition of the UK journal Here Comes Everybody outlining some pretty heavy duty second grade angst (still bitter). She writes poetry and historical fiction as well. She simply loves to write. And purple.

Susan Gardner is an internationally known poet, painter and photographer who has lived and worked in Asia, Mexico and Europe as well as the United States and Canada. She has presented numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries and extensive lectures and readings. Author of four books, she has been a house builder, scholarly researcher, teacher and landscape designer. Invited to deliver the Cam Memorial Lecture at the New York Public Library, she was also honored to be granted a year in the Allen Room. She has presented programs at the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress and the Folger Library, among others.

Andrew Geyer’s latest novel is Dixie Fish (Ink Brush Press 2011). His other books are Siren Songs from the Heart of Austin, a story cycle; Meeting the Dead, a novel; and Whispers in Dust and Bone, a story cycle that won the silver medal for short fiction in the Foreword Magazine book of the year awards and a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.  His award-winning stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines and anthologies, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and recently recognized as a Breakthrough Rising Star by the USC system, he currently serves as Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Aiken.

Bayard Godsave is the author of Lesser Apocalypses, a short story collection published by Queen’s Ferry Press in 2012. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English & Foreign Languages at Cameron University, where he teaches literature and creative writing. His fiction has appeared in, among other places, the Cream City Review, Cimarron Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Confrontation, and Pleiades, and is forthcoming in the Gettysburg Review. He lives and works in Oklahoma.

Carol Hamilton has upcoming and recent publications in Atlanta Review, New Laurel Review, Tribeca Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Tulane Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Meridian Anthology, Willow Review, Connecticut River Review, Deronda Review, Licking River Review, Eclectic Muse, Red Rock Review, Main Street Rag, Ibbetson Street, and others. She has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize. She has published 15 books: children's novels, legends and poetry, most recently, Master of Theater: Peter the Great and Lexicography. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma.

Arn Henderson is Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma. His career in teaching included both writing and professional practice in historic preservation. He is a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects and recently honored by the Oklahoma Humanities Council with the Oklahoma Humanities Award for 2013. His career also embraced literature. In the early 1970s he co-founded, with Frank Parman, Point Riders Press for publication of poets of the Southwest. His books of poetry are Document for an Anonymous Indian and The Surgeon General's Collection. His poems have appeared in various journals and several anthologies. He is currently working on three books of poetry: Base Line & Meridian, The Lost Journal of the Second Trip to Purgatorie and a collection of poems titled Soapstone Prophets.

Brandon Hobson’s writing has appeared in The Believer, Puerto del Sol, NOON, Narrative Magazine, Post Road, Harper Perennial's Forty Stories, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. Brandon is currently a fourth year PhD student in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in fiction, at Oklahoma State University. He won First Place in the 2011-2012 Arrington Creative Writing Award at OSU, second place in the 2011 International 3-Day Novel Contest. He  was also a finalist in the Literarian's Short Story Contest at The Center for Fiction, and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

Jessica Isaacs is Division Chair of Language Arts and Humanities at Seminole State College, where she teaches composition, creative writing, and literature, and serves as the Director of SSC’s Annual Howlers and Yawpers Creativity Symposium. She enjoys experimenting with form in writing, often combining cross-genre techniques of playwriting, poetry, and fiction.  She believes in delving head-first into a character's voice and perspective in order to spark the writing into an active experience for the reader.  She has published several of her poems in various journals and anthologies, most recently including Elegant Rage and Sugar Mule’s “Women Writing Nature.”  She has presented her poetry at Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, the Southwest Texas Popular and American Culture Conference, Howlers and Yawpers Creativity Symposium, and Woody Guthrie Festival.  She makes her home in Prague with her one husband, two kids, two cats, and two dogs.

Hardy Jones has had thirty pieces of fiction and nonfiction published in journals such as The Straitjackets, Paradigm, Shelf Life Magazine, The Jabberwock Review, The Iconoclast, The Furnace Review, and Dark Sky. His flash story “Snow” was in the 2009 Dogzplot Flash Fiction Anthology and his short story “Bunk Beds But No Chairs” appeared in The Best of Clapboard House Literary Journal Anthology.  In September 2006, he was awarded a Research Grant for the “New Populations Project,” for which he interviewed members of Lanexang Village, a Laotian community in southwest Louisiana created in the 1980s by political refugees, about their traditional New Year’s celebration Songkran. Hardy co-founded and is the Executive Editor of the online literary journal Cybersoleil. His novel Every Bitter Thing was released in 2010. His memoir People of the Good God was awarded a grant and is forthcoming from Mongrel Empire Press. He is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Creative Writing at Cameron University. 

Jennifer Kidney is a freelance scholar and adjunct assistant professor for the College of Liberal Studies at the University of Oklahoma.  She is the author of six books of poetry; her most recent collection, Road Work Ahead, was published by Village Books Press in 2012.  Her poetry has also appeared in numerous journals and little magazines, including Sugar Mule, Crosstimbers, Picking Up the Tempo, Kudzu, The Seattle Review, and The Bellingham Review.  She has done poetry readings all across Oklahoma as well as in Texas, Wyoming, Ohio, Michigan, and at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2005.  She has twice been nominated for Oklahoma Poet Laureate—by the Oklahoma Library Association in 2006 and by the Jim Lucas-Checotah Public Library in 2008, when she was one of three finalists for the distinction.  She has a B.A. with Highest Honors in English from Oberlin College and a M.Phil. and Ph.D. in English from Yale University and more than twenty years of university level teaching experience.  She has also worked as a technical writer, poet-in-the-schools, and arts administrator. In 2007, the Oklahoma Library Association presented her with a Special Project Award for Let's Talk About It, Oklahoma, a statewide reading and discussion project that Kidney oversaw for twenty-two years.  Kidney has won awards for her poetry, technical writing, and brownie baking, and lately she has been presenting a series of programs on Chocolate! at public libraries in Eufaula, Ada, and Watonga.  She lives in Norman with three cats and her dog Lizzie.

Haesong Kwon was born in Incheon, Korea and raised in Seoul, Korea until he was eight, when he emigrated to the United States with family. He has an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is now studying for his Ph.D. in English at Oklahoma State University. His poems appear in New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, Roger, Oxford Magazine, Red Rock Review and others.

Jennifer Luckenbill is a freelancer in search of a “real job.” She has two master’s degrees, in Women’s Literature and Library Science, which are handy for making paper airplanes. She has been published in journals such as Poetry Breakfast, Poetry Quarterly, Mused, GlassFire Magazine, and The Long Islander.

J. C. "Johnie Catfish" Mahan is a husband, father, hair stylist, business owner, potter, poet, painter, photographer, chef, art promoter, poultry farmer, and a firm believer in active participation as a way of life. With the Funky Ranch Art Association, J C puts on several art shows a year which include fine art, crafts, poetry, music, and yoga. J C has self-published four books of poetry and has had poems in journals such as: Blood and Thunder, Travlin' Music, Ain't Nobody That Can Sing Like Me, Elegant Rage, and Spurrabration. He is a frequent reader at Wayward Poets, Red Dirt Poets, and the Shawnee Poets as well as attended many of the other local Oklahoma readings. J C, has been featured at the Shawnee and the Full Circle Book Store readings. This is his fourth Scissortail Festival appearance.

Kelli McBride is an Associate Professor of English and the Writing Program Advisor at Seminole State College. She is currently in the dissertation phase of a PhD in Instructional Design for Online Learning. McBride is published in Academic Leadership. She is currently working on a short story collection set in the fictional small town of Bonface, Oklahoma. She has presented tales from this work-in-progress at the 2012 Southwest Regional Pop Culture Association Conference, the 2011 Pop Culture Association and American Culture Association National Conference, and the 1^st and 2^nd Howlers and Yawpers Creativity Symposium at Seminole State.

George McCormick has published stories in Hayden's Ferry Review, Epoch, Santa Monica Review, and Cutbank.  His story "The Mexican" won a 2013 PEN/O. Henry Prize. His book of short stories, Salton Sea, was published in 2012 by Noemi Press. He teaches in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Cameron University and lives in Lawton, Oklahoma, and Cooke City, Montana.

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish is a poet and prose writer. Her 2009 poetry collection, Work Is Love Made Visible won the Western Heritage Award, the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West, and the Oklahoma Book Award. Mish’s chapbook, Tongue Tied Woman, won the national Edda Poetry Chapbook for Women contest sponsored by Soulspeak Press. Her writings have been recently published or are upcoming in Red Dirt Chronicles, Cybersoleil, Naugatuck Review, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Concho River Review and Blast Furnace. In addition to her creative publications, Jeanetta has also published literary criticism on Chicana poets Lorna Dee Cervantes and Demetria Martinez. Mish serves as Editor of Mongrel Empire Press, and the Press’s titles have won both national and state awards; the Press was recently named Publisher of the Year by Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers. Jeanetta is also a contributing editor to the literary journal Sugar Mule (www.sugarmule.com) and to Oklahoma Today. She serves as Director and as a faculty mentor for the Red Earth Creative Writing MFA Program at Oklahoma City University. www.tonguetiedwoman.com

Christian Morgan is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Composition at Seminole State College. He is a fiction writer and has presented original works at the Southwest/Texas Pop Culture Association/ American Culture Association Regional Conference, the Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference, and the “Howlers and Yawpers” creativity symposium at SSC. His works deal with the morally ambiguous conflicts that arise among the rural people of Oklahoma.

John  Graves Morris, Professor of English at Cameron University, is the author of Noise and Stories, which is still available for purchase, and he has been toiling on the Pequod scanning the seven seas for the white whale of his second collection of poetry, still tentatively entitled Unwritten Histories.  His work has appeared recently in Acreage Journal, Cybersoleil, the Concho River Review, Elegant Rage: a Poetic Press Books), and Crosstimbers.  In addition to his readings at each incarnation of the Scissortail Festival, he has read from his work as the featured reader at the now lamentably defunct monthly Chickasha reading, the Full Circle Bookstore, the Performing Arts Studio in Norman, and the annual Woody Guthrie reading. 

Benjamin Myers is a winner of the Oklahoma Book Award and the author of two books of poetry, Lapse Americana (New York Quarterly Books, 2013) and Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Nimrod, The New York Quarterly, Devil’s Lake, Salamander, DMQ Review, Measure, The Iron Horse Literary Review, Borderlands, Plainsongs, elimae, and many others. His essays on poetry have appeared in many prominent academic journals, and he frequently reviews contemporary poetry for publications such as World Literature Today, Connotation Press, and Rattle. With a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, Myers teaches writing and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University.

Brent Newsom has published poems in The Southern Review, The Hopkins Review, Best New Poets 2010, Subtropics, Cave Wall, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, and he received a Fulbright Fellowship to Hangzhou, China, to work on a novel in progress, titled Saving Face. A native of Louisiana, he holds a PhD from Texas Tech University and currently teaches creative writing and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University.

Brady Peterson was born in Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. He lives in Central Texas where he taught rhetoric at the University of Mary Hardin Baylor for thirteen years. Before that he built homes for ten years or so. He has published poems in Windhover, Nerve Cowboy, Heartlodge, and Boston Literary Magazine. He has published a chapbook, Glued to the Earth, and a book of poems, Between Stations. 

Jason Poudrier has authored two collections of poetry: Red Fields, published by Mongrel Empire Press in 2012, and a chapbook, In the Rubble at Our Feet, published by Rose Rock Press in 2011. He is a veteran Workshop leader, and in 2012 was invited to host a workshop at Eastern Kentucky University's Military Experiance and Arts Symposium, and he was selected to be a part of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library's Healing Through the Humanities event in Indianapolis, Indiana. His work has been included in several anthologies, including Ain't Nobody can Sing Like me, and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Missouri UP. His work has appeared in numerous literary jurnals, such as the CT Review, New Mexico Poetry Review, and Sugar Mule. Currently He resides on a small 20-acre ranch in Rush Springs, Oklahoma, with his wife Chelsey, and He teaches Pre-AP English at Lawton High School.

Elizabeth Raby is the author of three full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks. Her poems have been translated into Romanian and she is co-author of a Romanian/English chapbook, Oase, Carne & Blana (Bone, Flesh & Fur.)  Her poetry was selected for the anthology 8 Voices, Contemporary Poetry from the American Southwest, to be published by Baskerville Publishers, Fort Worth, TX in November, 2012.Winner of the 2010 Elmer Kelton Award, Angelo State University, she has been nominated several times for the Pushcart. A graduate of Vassar College (B.A. History) and Temple University (M.A. English/Creative Writing, Ms. Raby has lived in Santa Fe, NM since 2000.

Matt Randall is a freelance writer, editor, and social media marketer, which is a professional way of saying he writes blog posts for florists. He is also the co-founder of PegLeg Publishing, a small independent publishing company located in Oklahoma City, and co-editor of GlassFire Magazine. His work has been published in The Muse, The Rectangle, Gentle Strength Quarterly, and Entrances & Exits.

Steven Schroeder and Jim Spurr

Steven Schroeder was born in Wichita Falls and grew up northwest of Amarillo in Oldham County. He is the co-founder, with composer Clarice Assad, of the Virtual Artists Collective (vacpoetry.org), which has published five full-length poetry collections each year since it began in 2004. His most recent poetry collection (with Debby Sou Vai Keng) is a guest giving way like ice melting: thirteen ways of looking at laozi. Four Truths, a collection of three short stories and a drama in verse (with paintings by Debby Sou Vai Keng) was published by Wipf and Stock in 2011. He teaches at the University of Chicago in Asian Classics and the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults.

Audell Shelburne is associate professor of English and the chair of the Department of Languages and Literature at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. From 2002-2010, he was the editor of Windhover. He also edited one issue of New Texas in 2002. Audell has published poems in descant, the Blue Rock Review, Borderlands, Agave Anthology, Mixitini Matrix, Di-Verse-City, Thirty-First Bird Review, and a number of other publications. He also reads from his work in many places, including the Conference on Christianity and Literature, the Writers’ Festival at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor (UMHB), and the Austin International Poetry Festival, where he also served as the judge for selecting the best poems for their anthology in 2010. Dr. Shelburne was the director of the annual Writers’ Festival at UMHB from 2002-2010. He is currently working on a book-length manuscript of poems, tentatively titled Water from Rocks.

Karen Eileen Sisk received her M.A. in Literature and Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio in June of 2008. Since then, she has been working on a doctorate in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry. Her work has appeared or will appear in Permafrost, Harpur Palate, Ellipsis, Barely South, Oxford Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, PANK, Zocola Public Square, Apalachee Review, The Hollins Critic, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and Folio. 

Sandra Soli holds an honors M.A. from The University of Central Oklahoma. Former teaching artist and poetry columnist, she received an Oklahoma Book Award in 2008 for her second chapbook; her first was a finalist for that honor. Other prizes include LSU’s Eyster Poetry Prize and two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Sandy has published articles, flash fiction, and photography in addition to her poetry, which has appeared in such journals as Southern Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Ruminate, Parody, The Oklahoma Review, CyberSoleil, Sugar Mule, Ellipsis, Oklahoma Today, and War, Literature, and the Arts; and anthologized most recently in Shifting Balance Sheets: Immigration and Cultural Attachment and Broken Circles, benefiting food pantries. Her article on prose poems appeared in the 2009 edition of Poet’s Market. War and the outsider experience are recurring themes in her work.

Jim Spurr holds an undergraduate degree from Oklahoma Baptist University. His poetry has been published in several journals across the country. His book, Open Mike/Thursday Night, was a finalist in the 2008 Oklahoma Book Awards as was his book Hail Mary On Two in 2012. His book, It’s Cool at 2AM, received second place at Palettes and Quills contest in Ithaca, NY in 2010. Spurr has been a frequent reader at the Scissortail Writing Festival, the Red Dirt Writing Festival in Shawnee and the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma. He has been the feature reader at Rose State College and at ECU. Since 1993 he has co-hosted the monthly Shawnee poetry reading. A retired insurance adjuster and veteran of the 82^nd Airborne Division, Jim is married to his wife, Aline, a retired senior VP at Arvest Bank.

Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, was the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. He has published eighteen collections of poems, most recently A Murder of Crows (Virtual Artists Collective 2011) and The Red, Candle-lit Darkness (El Grito del Lobo Press 2011). His New and Selected Poems (TCU Press 2008) was long-listed for the National Book Award. Mr. Thomas has been a frequent contributor of poetry to numerous national literary journals, including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Texas Review, Southwestern American Literature, REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters, Concho River Review, descant: Fort Worth’s Journal of Poetry and Fiction, Louisiana Literature, Windhover, San Pedro River Review, and Right Hand Pointing (online).

A.J. Tierney obtained an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Currently, she teaches at Oral Roberts University and Bacone College. Her work has appeared in Foliate Oak and Narrative Magazine. In addition to being a writer, editor and teacher, she provides taxi services to her violin-toting teenager.

Hugh Tribbey’s poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Sugar Mule, the anthology Ain’t Nobody That Can Sing Like Me,  Experiential-Experimental Literature, Eratio, Moria, Cormac McCarthy’s Dead Typewriter, and Mad Hatters’ Review. He is the author of seven collections of poetry.  His most recent are Day Book and EF Zero from White Sky Books.  Hugh holds a Ph.D. in English from Oklahoma State University and teaches literature and creative writing at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma.

Terri M. Tucker, a fourth-generation Texan, teaches American literature and creative writing at Southwest Texas Junior College. Her prose and poetry have appeared in various publications including S.A. Scene Monthly, New Texas, the Concho River Review, and most recently in descant. Her memoir piece “Singular Defiance” won first place in the Frontiers in Writing Contest.

Ron Wallace is a Native son of Oklahom, born and raised in Durant. He is the author of six volumes of critically acclaimed poetry published by TJMF Publishing of Clarksville, Indiana. His first book, Native Son, was a finalist in the 2007 Oklahoma Book Awards. I Come from Cowboys … and Indians won the 2009 Oklahoma Writer’s Federation “Best Book of Poetry Award” and Oklahoma Cantos was again a finalist in the 2011 Oklahoma Book Awards, and won the 2011 Oklahoma Writer’s Federation “Best Book of Poetry Award”. His fifth volume of poetry Hanging the Curveball was released near the end of April 2012. He calls this the heart attack book; it was put together after his late November heart attack in 2011made up of Baseball-themed poems from his earlier volumes along with fifteen new baseball poems. After surviving the widow maker, he went back to work on a new volume of reworked, collected and brand new poems including an expansion of his 2010 Oklahoma Cantos, entitled Cowboys and Cantos, a collection of imagery in quatrains praising  the physical beauty of the state, completing it in October of 2012. His work has been featured in The Long Islander, Sugar Mule, Traveling Music: a Poetic Tribute to Woody Guthrie, di-verse city, Cross-timbers, The Enigmatist, Oklahoma Today, Cowboys and Indians-online and a number of other magazines and anthologies.

Retired from teaching English at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, Sarah Webb continues to edit poetry and fiction for USAO’s multidisciplinary journal, Crosstimbers.  She also co-edits an online Zen arts magazine, Just This. Her poetry collection Black is forthcoming from Virtual Arts Collective later this year.

Dan Wilcox is the host of the Third Thursday Poetry Night at the Social Justice Center in Albany, N.Y. and is a member of the poetry performance group "3 Guys from Albany".  As a photographer, he claims to have the world's largest collection of photos of unknown poets. His chapbook boundless abodes of Albany is available from Benevolent Bird Press of Delmar, NY.  You can read his Blog about the Albany poetry scene at dwlcx.blogspot.com.

Jim Wilson is a professor of English at Seminole State College in Seminole, Oklahoma. His MFA is in Creative Nonfiction (Spalding University, Louisville, Kentucky; 2007), and he will read from his short personal essay “A Study in Gray,” published in Platte Valley Review, 2012.

Clarence Wolfshohl is professor emeritus of English at William Woods University. He operated Timberline Press for thirty-five years until the end of 2010. His poetry and creative fiction have appeared  in Concho River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Colere, Rattlesnake Review, Cenizo Journal, San Pedro River Review, and Melic Review, Houston Literary Review,  Right Hand Pointing  and Red River Review online. A chapbook of poems about Brazil, Season of Mangos, was published by Adastra Press (2009) and a compilation of three earlier chapbooks, The First Three (2010) and Down Highway 281 (2011) were published by El Grito del Lobo Press. In Harm’s Way: Poems of Childhood in collaboration with Mark Vinz was published by El Grito del Lobo Press in early 2013. A native Texan, Wolfshohl now lives with his writing, two dogs and two cats in a nine-acre woods outside of Fulton, Missouri.

John M. Yozzo, a native Oklahoman from Ponca City, retired in 2010 after 34 years of teaching college English, with stops at East Central U, U of Alabama--Birmingham, and the U of Tulsa.  Currently residing in Tulsa, Yozzo continues his quest for the perfect love poem and apprentices as a farmhand on some acres near Morris OK.

Mary Kay Zuravleff grew up in Oklahoma City (and even spent time at ECU for speech tournaments), and is currently a novelist living in Washington, D.C. where she also serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Her first novel, The Frequency of Souls, was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award; that book won the James Jones First Novel Award and also the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  The Oklahoma press called her second novel, The Bowl Is Already Broken, "a beautifully sung tale of heroes and mistakes, of madonnas and demons." Her third novel, Man Alive!, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this fall.