2014 Scissortail: Author Biographies

Dorothy Alexander is a poet and storyteller from Cheyenne, Oklahoma. She has authored four poetry collections, including Lessons From an Oklahoma Girlhood, an ekphrastic collection of poems and visual art, and two volumes of oral histories. Her poems and non-fiction prose pieces have appeared in Sugar Creek Review, Blood & Thunder, Cooweescoowee, Sugar Mule Review, A&U Magazine, Oklahoma Today, Imaginary Family, Malpais Review, and others. She is a publisher of poetry and she facilitates poetry readings at the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma, and the Poetry @ the Paramount readings in Oklahoma City. Dorothy gratefully accepted the 2013 Carlile Distinguished Service Award bestowed by The Oklahoma Center for the Book and Friends of the Libraries in Oklahoma in recognition of her services to the Oklahoma literary community.

Alan Berecka’s poetry recently appeared in the San Antonio Express, and then shortly thereafter at the bottom of countless bird cages. His latest book With Our Baggage was released by Lamar University Press in July 2013. He is not sure he can claim that he works for a living, but he puts in his time as a reference librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.

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. His poems have recently appeared in Upstairs at Duroc, Interim, and The Fiddleback, and he has been a visiting writer/lecturer at Marist College and in the Red Earth MFA program at Oklahoma City University during the past year. Currently, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University.

James Brubaker is the author of Pilot Season, a collection of flash prose pieces published by Sunnyoutside. His manuscript, a collection of short stories called Liner Notes, won the 2013 Subito Press Book Prize in Prose, and will be published later in 2014. James’s stories have also appeared or are forthcoming in Zoetrope: All Story, Michigan Quarterly Review, Web Conjunctions, Hobart, The Normal School, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Indiana Review, among others. James is currently teaching as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University, where he is also the Interim Associate Director of the First Year Writing Program.

Julie A. Chappell is a professor of medieval and early modern literature and creative writing at Tarleton State University. Besides numerous academic books and essays, her poetry has appeared in several anthologies including 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. She also has published flash fiction in Cybersoleil: A Literary Journal. Her first poetry collection, Faultlines: One Woman’s Shifting Boundaries, was published by Village Books Press in October 2013. Her memoir, The Jail/House Rocked, is in progress.

Kevin M. Clay is an Associate Professor at Tarrant County College-SE. He has a BA and MA in English from Tarleton State University, and a PhD in American Literature from the University of North Texas. He won the Hoepfner Prize in 2006 from the Southern Humanities Review for his short story "Cowboys." His fiction and poetry have appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, The Sulfur River Literary Review, the William and Mary Review, and the British journal Staple. He lives in Arlington, Texas with his wife Elizabeth.

Michael Dooley is an Assistant Professor of English at Tarleton State University for the last 12+ years. For the last 10 of those 12 years he has submitted regularly to the Department of English and Languages Faculty Chapbook short stories such as: “Kugelmass Revisited,” “Peeing on the Chairman of the Board’s Shoes,” “Elvis Has Left the Highway,” and “We’re Off to See the Pinball Wizard.” Most recently Michael is working on his new character Woody Farley—Literary Detective. He recently read the “The Case of the Unhappy Life of Francis Macomber” at SCMLA in New Orleans (2013) and “The Case of Bad Country People” at Southwest Popular Culture and American Culture Associations conference in Albuquerque (2014). There is also a new publication for TSU’s faculty chapbook entitled “The Case of the Murder of a Salesman.” Michael is also a founding member of TSU’s Academic Advising Center and a long-time sponsor of Sigma Tau Delta English honor society.

Native Oklahoman Margaret Dornaus is a freelance travel writer, whose Japanese short-form poetry appears in numerous international haiku journals and anthologies. 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 second-place honors in the 2013 Robert Spiess’ Memorial Haiku Award Competition and the 2012 Kusamakura Haiku Competition. She currently makes her home in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she is working on a collection of haibun called Prayer for the Dead.

After visiting her one-hundred-year-old cousin in Broken Bow, Maureen Oehler DuRant thought, “Perhaps, there is time, after all, to be a poet.” So, the former army brat and army spouse, and third generation Oklahoman writes poetry under a blue roof in the shadow of Mount Scott. She teaches at Cameron University and presents writing workshops for Oklahoma teachers and students as an Oklahoma Writing Project Teacher Consultant. Publications include poetry in Crosstimbers, poetry and fiction in The Oklahoma Writing Project 2011 and 2013 anthologies, and a postcard history of the United States Military Academy at West Point published by Arcadia Press.

Phil Estes’ work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Diagram, Everyday Genius, Georgetown Review, Inter|rupture, Oklahoma Review, and Westwind Review. He runs Bumpkinitis, a reading series in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and is a PhD student in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Steve Garrison is currently a professor in the English Department at the University of Central Oklahoma, where he directs the creative writing program. His novel Shoveling Smoke was published under the pseudonym “Austin Davis” by Chronicle Books in 2003. He is currently working, at a glacial pace, on a new novel.

Andrew Geyer’s newest book project is the story anthology A Shared Voice, published by Lamar University Press in 2013. He is the author of Dixie Fish (2011), a novel; Siren Songs from the Heart of Austin (2010), a story cycle; Meeting the Dead (2007), a novel; and Whispers in Dust and Bone (2003), a story cycle that won the silver medal for short fiction in the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards and the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. His award-winning stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines and anthologies, and have 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 and as fiction editor for Concho River Review.

Bayard Godsave is the author of the short story collection Lesser Apocalypses, and his second collection, Torture Tree, will be published by Queen’s Ferry Press in fall 2014. 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 the Cream City Review, Pleiades, and the Gettysburg Review.

William Peter Grasso is a lifelong student of history and lover of alternative historical fiction. His novels explore the concept change one thing…and watch what happens. Grasso’s four novels—East Wind Returns, Unpunished, Long Walk To The Sun, and Operation Long Jump—have spent many months in the Amazon Top 100 for Alternate History and War. Long Walk To The Sun and Operation Long Jump comprise books 1 and 2 of the Jock Miles WW2 Adventure series. Retired from the aircraft maintenance industry, Grasso is a veteran of the US Army and served in Operation Desert Storm as a flight crew member with the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF). These days, he confines his aviation activities to building and flying radio-controlled model aircraft.

Michelle Hartman has been published in Crannog, Poetry Quarterly, The Pedestal Magazine, Raleigh Review, San Pedro River Review, Pacific Review, Concho River Review, RiverSedge, and Illya’s Honey as well as over forty other journals and twelve anthologies. A multiple Pushcart nominee, her work also appears overseas in Ireland, Germany, Australia, Canada and Nepal. Hartman’s book, Disenchanted and Disgruntled, was published by Lamar University Press in 2013. She is the editor of Red River Review and hold a BS in Political Science-Pre Law from Texas Wesleyan University and a Certificate in Paralegal studies from Tarrant County College.

Arn Henderson is an architect and Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma.

His discovery of the poetry of William Carlos Williams when he was in graduate school established another dimension of his artistic interests. He co-founded Point Riders Press with Frank Parman in the early 1970s to serve poets of the Southwest. He has published Document for an Anonymous Indian and The Surgeon General’s Collection and co-edited, with Parman, The Point Riders Great Plains Poetry Anthology. He is currently working on a new collection of poetry titled Base Line and Meridian and another work titled The lost Journal of the Second Trip to Purgatorie.

Sy Hoahwah is Yapaituka Comanche and Southern Arapaho. Born in Little Rock, he was raised in both Arkansas and Lawton, OK. Hoahwah holds a M.F.A from the University of Arkansas. His poetry has appeared in such publications as Florida Review, and Indiana Review. He is the author numerous poetry collections, including Velroy and the Madischie Mafia, Night Cradle, Black Knife, and Split. Earlier this year, Hoahwah was one of 40 poets nationwide honored with a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a past recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award.

LeAnne Howe is the author of novels, plays, essays, screenplays, and poetry. Her latest book, Choctalking on Other Realities, Aunt Lute Books, 2013 is a memoir about her travels abroad. In 2013 she also co-edited Seeing Red, Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film, MSUP Press. An enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, her first novel Shell Shaker, received an American Book Award in 2002 from the Before Columbus Foundation. The French translation Equinoxes Rouge was the 2004 finalist for Prix Medici Estranger, one of France's top literary awards. Evidence of Red, Salt Publishing, UK, 2005 won the Oklahoma Book Award for poetry in 2006.  Her recent awards include: the 2012 USA Artist Ford Fellowship, a $50,000 grant from United States Artists, a not for profit organization. http://www.usafellows.org/fellow/leanne_howe. In 2012 she was also the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas http://www.wordcraftcircle.org/featured.  In 2010-2011 Howe was a William Fulbright Scholar at the University of Jordan, Amman. She’s a Professor in the MFA program, and American Indian Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Theatre Department at the University of Illinois.  She makes her home in Ada.   

Jessica Isaacs’ poetry has been published in several journals and anthologies, most recently including Cybersoleil, Sugarmule, and Elegant Rage, and she was a featured “Guest Poet” on All Roads Lead Home poetry blog.  She has presented her poetry at the National and Regional Pop Culture / American Culture Conferences, Scissortail Creative Writing Festivals, Full Circle Bookstore, Woody Guthrie Festivals, and Howlers & Yawpers Creativity Symposiums. She is an English and Humanities Professor at Seminole State College, and makes her home in Prague, Oklahoma with her one husband, two kids, two dogs, four cats, three fish, and a variety of snails. Her current book-in-progress is titled Deep August.

Hank Jones has taught English composition and literature at Tarleton State University for the past thirteen years and has found none of this conducive to writing poetry. But he has started writing again anyway. He has read his poetry and creative non-fiction at various venues including Woody Guthrie Festival stages in Oklahoma City and Okemah, Oklahoma; The Langdon Review Weekend in Granbury, Texas; The Winter Gathering Festival in Stephenville, Texas; South Central MLA in Fort Worth; PCA/ACA in San Antonio; and Southwest PCA/ACA in Albuquerque (for three consecutive years). His poetry and creative non-fiction have also appeared in Cybersoleil: A Literary Journal (2013, 2014).

Hardy Jones’ novel Every Bitter Thing was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2010, and his memoir People of the Good God is forthcoming from Mongrel Empire Press. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in numerous journals. His short stories have been anthologized in the 2009 Dogzplot Flash Fiction Anthology, The Best of Clapboard House Literary Journal, and Southern Gothic: New Tales of the South. He is the co-founder and Executive Editor of the online journal Cybersoleil (www.cybersoleiljournal.com). He is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Creative Writing at Cameron University. 

Abigail Keegan is a Professor of British and Women’s Literature at Oklahoma City University. She has published essays on literature and study of gender and sexuality in the Oriental Tales of English Romantic poet, Byron. Keegan is a poet and former editor of Piecework: a Poetry Magazine for Women.  She has published three books of poetry: The Feast of the Assumptions, Oklahoma Journey, and her book, Depending on the Weather, was a finalist for the 2012 Oklahoma Book Award. She is currently working on a multi-genre book of poems, interviews and photography entitled, Transport.

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, Malpais 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, Watonga, and Checotah. She lives in Norman with three cats and her dog Lizzie.

Haesong Kwon was born and raised in Incheon, Korea and immigrated to the states with family when he was eight. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst is currently a doctoral student in English Studies at Oklahoma State University, where he teaches courses in composition, creative writing, literature and second language acquisition. His poems appear in Mid-American Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Louisville Review, and others.

Jennifer Luckenbill is a freelance writer and editor living in Oklahoma City. She has degrees in literature and library science. She has been published in journals such as Poetry Breakfast, Poetry Quarterly, Mused, GlassFire Magazine, Black Heart Magazine, Night Industry, and The Long Islander. Her work was also featured in an anthology, Entrances and Exits, published in 2013 by PegLeg Publishing.

Johnie Catfish, (J.C. Mahan) has been a street poet in the Oklahoma City Metro area for the last 15 years. The Truth About The Truth is his sixth self-published chapbook. His poetry as well as some art work has been published in many local journals including Blood and Thunder, the Woody Guthrie tributes with Village Press, and the Oklahoma-themed journals by Mongrel Press. J. C. has competed in Slam poetry contest and as a performance poet he has featured at many of the local readings; Full Circle, Shawnee, Red Dirt Poets. Through his business J. C.’s Funky Hair Ranch, he has hosted local art shows and poetry readings. Catfish is great at raising poultry, styling hair, and making sort of weird asymmetrical pottery. He enjoys cooking, painting, photography, and gardening at which he is not very good. However, he believes life is in the process and not necessarily the end results.

George McCormick's first book Salton Sea was published by Noemi Press in 2012. He is a winner of a Contance Saltonstall Foundation fiction grant and his work most recently appears in the 2013 O. Henry Prize Stories and in the anthology 40 Years of Cutbank. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Cameron University and lives in Lawton, Oklahoma and Cooke City, Montana. 

John Graves Morris, Professor of English at Cameron University, teaches classes at that university in freshman English, American literature, film, and creative writing.  He is the author of Noise and Stories (Plain View Press, 2008),and has finished the manuscript for a second collection to be entitled Unwritten Histories and hopes that he can persuade, cajole, or threaten someone to publish it.  His poems have appeared in Westview, the late and lamented Crosstimbers, The Concho River Review, The Chariton Review, The Great Plains Journal, and others.

Benjamin Myers is a winner of the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry and the author of two books, Lapse Americana (New York Quarterly Books 2013) and Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press 2010). His poems may be read in The Yale Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, Salamander, DMQ, The New York Quarterly, Tar River Poetry, Borderlands, Measure, and many other journals. His work has been featured on the Verse Daily website, and he is a frequent reviewer of contemporary poetry for World Literature Today and other publications.  With a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, Myers teaches poetry writing and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he is the Crouch-Mathis Associate Professor of Literature.

Brent Newsom traveled to China on a Fulbright grant to research and write his novel Saving Face. His poetry and prose have appeared in journals including The Southern Review, Cave Wall, PANK, New Letters, and Relief: A Christian Literary Expression. His debut poetry collection, Love’s Labors, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. A native of Louisiana, he holds a PhD in English from Texas Tech University and currently teaches creative writing and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University.

Brady Peterson was born in Ft. Still, Oklahoma. For the past twenty-eight years he has lived near Belton, Texas where he worked building houses and teaching rhetoric.  In July he travels to Hermosa Beach, California where he strolls with rolled trousers on the sand next to the surf.  He grows tomatoes and makes soup. He has published poems in Heartlodge, Windhover, Boston Literary Magazine, and Nerve Cowboy. He has also published a chapbook, Glued to the Earth, January 2012, and a full length collection of poems, Between Stations, January 2013.  He is working on a prose manuscript currently entitled Pelican Money and a collection of poetry mostly composed while hiding out in Las Vegas, New Mexico.  

Jason Poudrier is an Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient. He has authored two poetry collections, Red Fields (Mongrel Empire Press, 2012) and a chapbook, In the Rubble at Our Feet (Rose Rock Press, 2011). In 2013 Red Fields was awarded the Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal, short-listed for the Hoffer Grand Prize, and awarded an honorable mention in the poetry category. Poudrier has been selected twice to participate in the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library’s “Healing Through the Humanities” event.

Elizabeth Raby: In addition to her multiple generation memoir, Ransomed Voices (Red Mountain Press, 2013) Raby is the author of three full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which, This Woman (Virtual Artists Collective), is a finalist for a 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. She was one of eight poets selected for the anthology, 8 Voices: Contemporary Poetry of the American Southwest (Baskerville Publishers, 2012).

Charlotte Renk’s poems and short stories arise from reflections on long walks in woods behind her cabin. Thirty years of teaching English, Creative Writing, and Humanities in Athens, TX, and in her writing, she expresses compassion for people and reverence for nature. She has published in such journals as Kalliope, Mochila Review, New Texas, Concho River Review, Sow’s Ear, Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Southwest Review. Eakin Press published a prizewinning collection of her work, These Holy Hungers: Secret Yearnings from an Empty Cup, 2009, and Poetry in the Arts published her book, Solidago, an altar to Weeds in 2010.  Five new poems will appear in Her Texas this year. What matters most? Love of family, nature, teaching, hiking, wildflowers, birds, mountains, streams, and writing.

The poems and essays of Carol Coffee Reposa have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, The Formalist, The Texas Observer, Coal City Review, The Valparaiso Review, and others. She has published four collections of poetry: At the Border: Winter Lights, The Green Room, Facts of Life and Underground Musicians. Thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and twice a finalist for Texas State Poet Laureate, she also has received three Fulbright-Hays Fellowships for study in Russia, Peru, Ecuador and Mexico. She now works as nonfiction editor for Concho River Review and as poetry editor for Voices de la Luna, having become a professor emerita of English at San Antonio College in 2010.

Sally Rhoades, a North Country artist, is a poet, playwright and performer. She has been published in UpThe River, an anthology of the Hudson Valley, Elegant Rage , an Anthology on Woody Gutherie’s centennial, the Highwatermark Salo[o]n Series of Stockport flats, Peer Glass, an anthology of Hudson valley and on 8T3 at swankwriting.com.  Her first play, Cradle Arms, was invited to the New York State University Playwriting Festival at Brockport, NY. Tina Howe, the keynote speaker, called it, "...a brave new work." It had a twentieth anniversary performance in 2012. Her other play, Moon Over Manhattan , was produced at the Johnstown Colonial Theatre in 2007 and brought to the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2008. Performance work includes: ReWind, shown in NYC(2013), Howl, a Poet Dances, performed at the Arts Center of the Capital Region(2013), Beyond the Birch, the Birch Beyond, NYC (2009), Pomegranates and Roses, a Love Story, shown at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival (2008). She has performed in Luis Lara Malvacias’ Sooner than you think at the 92nd street Y's Harkness Festival, NYC(2009).

Rob Roensch holds an MFA from Cornell University. He won The International Scott Prize for Short Stories in 2012 from Salt Publishing for his collection titled The Wildflowers of Baltimore and was long-listed for the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is an assistant Professor in the English Department of Oklahoma City University.

Regina Schroeder is a printer and papermaker who works out of a community studio space in Charlestown, Massachusetts. She's been continuing the work of Clarence Wolfshohl's Timberline Press since 2011, and has released two fine press chapbooks as well as occasional broadsides. The most recent title is Jonas Zdanys's Cormorants. She has also taught papermaking and printing, worked in a recreation of an 18th century printing office, and built papermaking tools.

Steven Schroeder is a poet and visual artist who has spent many years moonlighting as a philosophy professor – most often in interdisciplinary settings, most recently at the University of Chicago Graham School. He studied at the University of Chicago where he received his Ph.D. in Ethics and Society and Valparaiso University where he received his B.A. in Psychology. Steve grew up on the High Plains in the Texas Panhandle, and that is where he first learned to take nothing seriously. Emptiness plays an important role in both his poetry and his painting: he often finds himself spending as much time on what is not there as on what is. This usually means focusing on a single image and letting the whole composition spring up around it – not a narrative but an all at once that evokes a here and now that is, here, now, neither. A likely story is likely to grow out of this when readers and viewers encounter it, but it is his hope that his art always invites more than it contains. More about Steven’s work may be viewed at http://stevenschroeder.org/

Carl Sennhenn, retired professor of English and Humanities at Rose State College, is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma (2001 to 2003), and two-time  recipient of the Oklahoma Center for the Book award in poetry for Travels in Enchanted Woods and for Noctures and Sometimes Even I. Preparing a current book, Trespass in Ephesus, he currently teaches Creative Writing for Senior Adults in Continuing Education at Rose State and hosts the monthly poetry readings at the Performing Arts Studio in Norman and reads his poetry at Norman, Oklahoma City, and Shawnee venues.

Karen Eileen Sisk is a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University focusing on poetry. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications including Permafrost, Harpur Palate, PANK, Paper Darts, The Hollins Critic, Folio, Painted Bride Quarterly, Slipstream, and Zocola Public Square.

Jim Spurr’s books, Open Mike/Thursday Night (2008) and Hail Mary On Two (2012) were both finalists for the Oklahoma Book Award. His book It’s Cool at 2AM  (2010) received second place at Palettes and Quills contest in Ithaca, New York. Since 1993, Spurr has cohosted the popular Shawnee poetry reading. He has been a frequent reader at poetry venues around the state, including the Scissortail, the Red Dirt Writing Festival in Shawnee, and the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah. Last September he was featured at East Central University and at Rose State in 2012. Spurr has poems in Array, Avocet, Blood & Thunder, Broomwood Journal, California Quarterly, Clark Street  Review, Crosstimbers, Iconoclast, Poetry Depth Quarterly, Main Street Rag, Nerve Cowboy, Rattle and Sugar Mule. He has an undergraduate degree from Oklahoma Baptist University, is a retired insurance adjuster, honorably discharged veteran of the 82 Airborne. He lives in Shawnee with his wife Aline, a retired senior VP at Arvest Bank.

Constance Squires is the author of Along the Watchtower (Riverhead/Penguin) which received the 2012 Oklahoma Book Award for Fiction, and the recently completed Live from Medicine Park. She has published short stories in The Atlantic Monthly, This Land, Bayou, the Dublin Quarterly, the Arkansas Review, Eclectica, New Delta Review, and numerous other magazines. Her nonfiction has appeared most recently in The New York Times, Salon, The Village Voice, Largehearted Boy, and on the NPR program Snap Judgment. She has also written a short documentary, Grave Misgivings, in collaboration with Sundance fellow and indigenous filmmaker Jeffrey Palmer, which is in production.

Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, served as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate.  He has published several award-winning poetry collections.  The poems he will present at this year’s Scissortail were selected from The Lobsterman’s Dream (Poems of the Coast of Maine), which was published earlier this year in a handset letterpress edition (with original woodcut illustrations) by El Grito del Lobo Press (Fulton, MO).  His New and Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2008) was a semi-finalist for the National Book Award.  Thomas’s Web site address is www.larrydthomas.com

Hugh Tribbey’s poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Experiential-Experimental Literature, Eratio, Moria, Cormac McCarthy’s Dead Typewriter, and Mad Hatters’ Review. He is the author of eight collections of poetry. His most recent is Wrinkle and Mechanism forthcoming from White Sky E-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.

Ron Wallace is an Oklahoma Native of Choctaw, Cherokee and Osage ancestry and currently adjunct professor of English at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. His work has appeared in Oklahoma Today, Walt’s Corner of The Long Islander,  Crosstimbers, Cowboys and Indians Online Magazine, Traveling Music, Sugar Mule, Oklahoma Edge, Grandmother Earth and a number of other journals and anthologies. Ron has published six volumes of poetry, and three times his books have won the Oklahoma Writer’s Federation Best Book of Poetry: I Come from Cowboys... and Indians in 2009, Oklahoma Cantos in 2011 and Hanging the Curveball in 2013. He has also been a finalist in the Oklahoma Book Awards three times, including his first book, Native Son, in 2007.

Sarah Webb taught English at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma and retired there. She served as poetry editor for USAO's interdisciplinary journal Crosstimbers for the twelve years of its existence. She is presently co-editor for Just This, a Zen arts magazine in Austin, Texas. Most recently her poetry has been published in Spherical Tabby, Texas Poetry Calendar, The Enigmatist and the anthology A Ritual to Read to Each Other: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford. Her poetry collection, Black, was released from Virtual Artists Collective in December, 2013.

Jim Wilson is a professor of English at Seminole State College in Seminole, Oklahoma. His MFA is in Creative Nonfiction from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. He will read from "Beirut Spring," the final chapter of his memoir in-progress, Love in the Time of Civil War.  Jim's reading is based on his return to Beirut late in the spring of 2011, after a 24-year absence. 

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, The Cape Rock and (online) Melic Review, Houston Literary Review, Right Hand Pointing, Spherical Tabby, Cybersoleil,  and Red River Review. A chapbook of poems about Brazil, Season of Mangos, was published by Adastra Press (2009), and 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 one cat in a nine-acre woods outside of Fulton, Missouri.

John M. Yozzo is a native of Ponca City, OK, and a graduate of the University of Tulsa.  He is a retired professor of English after 34 years teaching at the University of Tulsa, the University of Alabama--Birmingham, and East Central University in Ada.  Yozzo resides in Tulsa, farmhands on acres near Cassville MO and Morris OK, writes daily, and occasions a deep thought as he kayaks, trailbikes, and elsewise savors retirement.