2016: Scissortail Biographies

Dorothy Alexander is a poet, memoirist, storyteller and co-editor/publisher, along with her wife, Devey Napier, of a small independent press. Author of four poetry collections, and a memoir in prose and poetry, Dorothy is a founding member of the Woody Guthrie Poetry Readings in Okemah, Oklahoma. She is inspired by the agrarian literary tradition and the populist political movements in the rural United States. She embraces primarily the narrative form, what she calls “narcissistic” narrative, and “selfie” poetry. The Oklahoma Center for the Book selected Dorothy as recipient of the Carlile Distinguished Service Award for her services to the Oklahoma literary community in 2013.

Rilla Askew is the author of four novels and a book of stories. She’s a PEN/Faulkner finalist, recipient of the Western Heritage Award, Oklahoma Book Award, and a 2009 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Riot, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award in 2002, and was selected for Oklahoma’s One Book One State reading program. Askew’s essays and short fiction have appeared in Tin House, World Literature Today, Nimrod, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and elsewhere. Her recent novel, Kind of Kin, is published by Ecco Press, and her collection of essays, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place will be forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press in 2017. She is married to actor/writer Paul Austin, and they live in Norman, where Askew teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma.

Paul Austin has acted and directed 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, Palookaville, Thirteen Conversations, Tune in Tomorrow, and Sommersby.  Among recent stage appearances were the title role in Krapp’s Last Tape, the Foreman in Vaclav Havel’s Audience , Neils Bohr in Copenhagen to celebrate the Centennial of the OU Physics Department 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 recent 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.  In addition to teaching privately in NY, he has also taught at the University of Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute and was a tenured faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College for twenty years. He recently received the Teachers who Make a Difference award from the Creative Coalition at the Sundance festival.

Walter Bargen has published nineteen books of poetry.  His most recent books are: Days Like This Are Necessary: New & Selected Poems (2009), Endearing Ruins (2012), Trouble Behind Glass Doors (2013), Quixotic (2014), Gone West (2014), and Three-corner Catch (2015).  He was appointed the first poet laureate of Missouri (2008-2009).  His awards include a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship (1991), Quarter After Eight Prose Prize (1996), the Hanks Prize (1996), the Chester H. Jones Foundation prize (1997), the William Rockhill Nelson Award (2005), Short Fiction Award– A cappella Zoo (2011). His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in over 300 magazines. www.walterbargen.com.

Alan Berecka has published poems in such places as The Texas Review, The Christian Century, The American Literary, The Red River Review, and the San Antonio Express. His fifth collection of poems, With Our Baggage, was published by Lamar University Press in 2013

Paul Bowers lives with his wife on a ten-acre farm in Ringwood, Oklahoma. He earned a B.A. from The University of Tulsa, M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Oklahoma State University, and he currently teaches writing and literature at Northern Oklahoma College in Enid. He has published a number of short stories in literary journals, including Southwestern American Literature, Mid-American Review, and Indiana Review, among others, and critical essays on James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and the contemporary Irish poet, John Montague. Honors for his fiction include a Pushcart Prize nomination and the Herman M. Swafford Award for Fiction. His collection of short stories, Like Men, Made Various, was published by Lost Horse Press in March 2006. His most recent publications include poetry in ’Ain’t Nobody That Can Sing Like Me’, an anthology featuring Oklahoma writers, as well as in the literary journals Sugar Mule, The Adirondack Review, and Poetry Quarterly, among others.

Debbi Brody is an avid attendee and leader of poetry workshops throughout the Southwest. She has been published in numerous national and regional journals, magazines and anthologies of note. She judges poetry contests around the nation and has served as the accuracy judge for the NEA's Poetry Outloud New Mexico State Finals for many years. Debbi’s strong voice ranges from narrative to lyric, short to lengthy, grief filled to joyous, inner to outer landscapes and politics. The deep influences of the surrealist, modernist and beat poets sing through her collections of clear, tough, tender and fantastical poems. Her new full length poetry collection, In Everything, Birds, is her second book published by Village Books Press. Ms. Brody was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. She received a B.A. in Sociology from Southern Illinois University in 1979, the same year she married. She and her husband have one grown son and a daughter-in-law. They have resided in New Mexico since 1991. Debbi works at a small scientific research and development laboratory in Santa Fe.

Joey Brown is a prose writer and poet who grew up in southwest Oklahoma. Her writing has appeared in a number of literary journals including the Louisiana Poetry Review, Mid-West Poetry Review, Oklahoma Review, storySouth, and the Florida Review. She's currently working on a few different prose projects, and experimenting with mixing genres into larger works. She teaches professional and creative writing at Missouri Southern State University.

Nathan Brown is an author, songwriter, and award-winning poet from Norman, Oklahoma. He served as Poet Laureate of Oklahoma for 2013/14. He holds a PhD in English and Journalism. Nathan has published eleven books. Most recent is To Sing Hallucinated: First Thoughts on Last Words. Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the 2013 Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier book, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award. And the proceeds from his anthology, Oklahoma Poems, and Their Poets (a finalist for the 2015 Oklahoma Book Award), have raised over $3,000 for the Oklahoma Humanities Council. He has two Pushcart Prize nominations, and his CD of all-original songs, Gypsy Moon, came out in 2011.

Robert Herman Broyles is a biomedical scientist by day and poet by night. He owes his interest in writing to Thelma Ryan Conley, his senior high school English teacher who introduced him to Chaucer, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Will Shakespeare. Robert’s poems have appeared in Blood and Thunder, a journal of art and literature published by the OU College of Medicine, in the Dragon Poet Review, in the Wicked Banshee Press’  'Death and Rebirth' Issue (under the pseudonym Tumbleweed), and in a poetry anthology titled A Capella, edited by Carol Koss and Deborah Shinn, published by the Poetry Group of the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City. Robert and his alter-ego Tumbleweed - a female blue healer dog whose pedigree is part coyote - are likely to turn up at The Paramount, the Benedict Street Market, the Full Circle Bookstore, and other venues where Oklahoma poets gather.

Like a cabinet of teas, Yvonne Carpenter’s poetry delivers the essence of life lived on an Oklahoma farm, blended with wide reading, brewed in meditation. She has published in Grain (a Canadian literary journal), Concho River Review, and Westview as well as anthologies and ezines. She has published three books:  Red Dirt Roads (with the Custer County Truck Stop Poets. Haystack Publishing), Barbed Wire and Paper Dolls (Village Press) and To Capture Fine Spirits, (Haystack Publishing).

Robin Carstensen teaches and coordinates the creative writing program at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. She has published widely in major literary journals, especially in journals that emphasize borderlands; women, gender, and sexuality; and environmental themes. Her poetry manuscript, Rivers Murmuring Sea and Every Winged Thing, was awarded the Women’s Faculty Council Research Award at Oklahoma State University and continues to receive enthusiastic readings from national press editors, as it seeks publication.  She has won annual poetry awards from Many Mountains Moving and So to Speak: a Feminist Journal of Language and Art. Her finalist poems have been published and/or recognized by Terrain.org and Calyx. Recent work is forthcoming in Demeter Press: Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland and The Tishman Review, and is published in the Atlanta Review, BorderSenses, Southern Humanities Review, Connotations Press, and many more.  She is co-founder and editor of The Switchgrass Review: a literary journal of women’s health, history, and transformation.

Julie Chappell’s creative writing has appeared in several anthologies and journals including Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapalooza 94; For Jayhawk Fans Only; Agave: A Celebration of Tequila in Story, Song, Poetry, Essay, and Graphic Art; Elegant Rage: A Poetic Tribute to Woody Guthrie; Cybersoleil: A Literary Journal; Malpaïs Review; Voices de la Luna; Dragon Poet Review; Red River Review; and Concho River Review. Her first poetry collection, Faultlines: One Woman’s Shifting Boundaries, was published by Village Books Press in October 2013. She also co-edited an anthology of creative works, entitled Writing Texas, published in March 2014 by Lamar University Press. She is currently working on a second volume of poetry, Mad Habits of a Life, and a memoir of her years as the sheriff’s daughter, The Jail/House Rocked.

Rayshell E. Clapper is an Associate Professor of English at Seminole State College in Oklahoma 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 Pop and American Culture Association Regional Conference, and Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Her publications include Dragon Poet Review, Cybersoleil Journal, Sugar Mule Literary Magazine, Red Dirt Anthology, Originals, The Muse, and Oklahoma English Journal. She is also the co-editor of Dragon Poet Review. 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.

Jenny Yang Cropp is a Korean American poet who grew up in Lawton, Oklahoma. Her debut collection, String Theory, was published by Mongrel Empire Press in 2015. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals including Boxcar Poetry Review, Ecotone, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Eclipse. Several of her poems were recently anthologized in the 2015 Nodin Poetry Anthology. She received her M.F.A in creative writing from Minnesota State University-Mankato and is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of South Dakota where she served for two years as the managing editor of South Dakota Review. She teaches English at Cameron University and lives in Lawton with her husband and son.

Terri Lynn Cummings is a 2015 Woody Guthrie Poet and will soon host the monthly Poetry @ the Paramount readings and open mic in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Village Books Press will publish her first collection of poetry, (working title) A New Season in early 2016. Terri’s work has appeared in Red River Review, Illya’s Honey, Melancholy Hyperbole, Ancient Paths Online, and elsewhere. Her poems are forthcoming in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, Dragon Poet Review, and Still Crazy Literary Magazine. She is a finalist in the 2016 Songs of Eretz Poetry Contest and will present her poetry at the 2016 Southwest Popular and American Culture Association. Terri has studied poetry, fiction, and nonfiction at Creative Writing Institute. She holds a BS in Anthropology/Sociology from Oklahoma State University and continues to examine social and cultural humanity around the world.

Terry Dalrymple's publications include four books of fiction, including the recently published collection Love Stories (Sort Of); thirty or so stories in anthologies and literary journals; and a collection he edited called Texas Soundtrack. He founded the long-running literary journal Concho River Review as well as the Fort Concho Museum Press Literary Festival held in San Angelo, TX, for ten years. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. He teaches literature and writing at Angelo State University in San Angelo, TX.

Chip Dameron is the author of a travel book and seven collections of poetry, including two published in 2015: Waiting for an Etcher (Lamar University Press) and Drinking from the River: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2015 (Wings Press). His poems, as well as his essays on contemporary writers, have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S. and abroad.  He is a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. A professor emeritus of English at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, he lives and writes in Brownsville, Texas.

Michael Dooley is an assistant professor at Tarleton State University. He has taught in the Department of English and Languages for fourteen years. Michael also is a long time sponsor of Sigma Tau Delta and a founding advisor of TSU’s Academic Advising Center. Having submitted regularly to faculty chapbooks, Michael has branched out and began attending local and regional conferences to present original creative short stories in such venues as SCMLA, Langdon Review, SWPCAC, and Scissortail. Recently, Michael had his first short story, “As the Wave Rose,” published in the online literary journal Cybersoleil. After completing an episodic trilogy of short stories entitled Surf, Swamp and Stone, Michael has created a new character—Spurious Gustafurd Hendershot, a cowboy whose life is fading from view.

Chris Ellery is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The Big Mosque of Mercy, poems of the Middle East. He is co-translator of Whatever Happened to Antara by award-winning Syrian writer Walid Ikhlassi. He has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, and the Betsy Colquitt Award. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Ellery teaches literature, creative writing, and film criticism at Angelo State University.

Chuck Etheridge grew up on the Texas/Mexico border, where his story “The Brenner Pass” is set. After finishing a stint in the Navy, he did various odd jobs including pumping gas, selling men’s clothes, and working as a Rent-A-Poet. Eventually he fell into low company and became a college professor; he now teaches English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He is the author of two novels, Border Canto and The Desert After Rain.  “The Brenner Pass” is part of My Father’s Songs, a sequel to The Desert After Rain.

Mary Anna Evans is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches fiction and nonfiction writing. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Camden and her literary fiction and nonfiction have appeared recently or will soon appear in The Atlantic, decomP, Spartan, Saw Palm, Monkeybicycle, EarthLines, Bitch, and Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. Her crime novels have earned recognition including the Mississippi Author Award, the Benjamin Franklin award, the Patrick D. Smith Florida Literature Award, three Florida Book Awards bronze medals, and a writing residency at The Studios of Key West. More information on her work can be found at http://www.maryannaevans.com.

Todd Fuller grew up in Indiana where he participated in the clichéd rituals of youth. Since then, he completed his Ph.D. in English from Oklahoma State University and published his first book, 60 Feet Six Inches and Other Distances from Home: the (Baseball) Life of Mose YellowHorse (Holy Cow! Press), which was released in 2002. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals across the country, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, American Literary Review, Apalachee Review, Barnwood Magazine, Cimarron Review, Crazyhorse, Hawai’i Review, New York Quarterly, Poet Lore, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, RE:AL: The Journal of Liberal Arts, Red Earth Review, South Dakota Review, Southwest American Literature, Spoon River Poetry Review, Third Coast, Weber Studies, Wicazo Sa Review, and William and Mary Review. In addition, his work has also been anthologized in The Great Plains: A Cross-Disciplinary Reader and the Encyclopedia of Native Americans and Sports. In 2004, he helped found Pawnee Nation College and served as the school’s first president until 2011. He currently serves as an Associate Director for Research Development at the University of Oklahoma.

Alan Gann, a retired electrical engineer in the midst of his second career as a teaching artist, facilitates creative writing workshops at Texans Can Academy and wrote DaVerse Works, a performance poetry curriculum for secondary schools. He also authored a collection of poetry, Adventures of the Clumsy Juggler from Ink Brush Press. As president of the Dallas Poets Community, Alan has become the guiding force behind their peer workshop series. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award nominee, Alan spent a year co-editing the online journal Red River Review. Some of the journals that have published his work include Red Fez, Main Street Rag, The Texas Poetry Calendar, and Cybersoleil. Alan fills the rest of his time with folk music, bike riding, bird walks, and photographing dragonflies.

Andrew Geyer’s latest book project is the hybrid story cycle Texas 5X5, a collection of twenty-five interconnected fictional narratives by five Texas writers that was published in 2014 by Stephen F. Austin University Press.  His story “Fingers,” the opening piece in the collection, won the 2015 Spur Award for Best Short Fiction from the Western Writers of America.  He is the co-editor of the composite anthology A Shared Voice, published by Lamar University Press in 2013.  His individually authored books are 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 a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he currently serves as Professor and Chair of English at the University of South Carolina Aiken and as fiction editor for Concho River Review.

Bayard Godsave is the author of two collections of short fiction, Lesser Apocalypses and Torture Tree. His work has appeared recently in This Land, Pleiades, Boulevard and The Gettysburg Review. He lives in southwest Oklahoma and teaches writing at Cameron University.

As a lifelong student of history and lover of alternative historical fiction, William Peter Grasso’s novels explore the concept change one thing…and watch what happens. The results are works of fiction in which actual people and historical events are weaved into a seamless and entertaining narrative with the imagined. Grasso’s seven novels—East Wind Returns, Unpunished, Long Walk To The Sun, Operation Long Jump, Operation Easy Street, Operation Blind Spot, and Operation Fishwrapper—continue to reside in the Amazon Top 100 for Alternative History and War. Retired from the aircraft maintenance industry, he is a veteran of the US Army and served in Operation Desert Storm as a flight crew member with the Civil Reserve Air Fleet. These days, he confines his aviation activities to building and flying radio controlled model aircraft.

Chera Hammons is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College in Plainfield, VT. Her work has recently appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Borderlands, Rattle, San Pedro River Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other fine journals. Her chapbook Amaranthine Hour received the 2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Award, and her manuscript Recycled Explosions is forthcoming from Ink Brush Press. She is a member of the editorial board of poetry journal One. She lives in Amarillo, TX and teaches at Clarendon College.

Michelle Hartman’s work was featured in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and appears in Slipstream, Plainsongs, Carve, Crannog, Poetry Quarterly, The Pedestal Magazine, Raleigh Review, San Pedro River Review, Concho River Review and RiverSedge as well as over sixty other journals and thirty anthologies.  Her work appears in multiple countries overseas.  Her books, Disenchanted and Disgruntled, and Irony and Irreverence from Lamar University Press, are available from Amazon. She is the editor for the online journal, Red River Review and holds a BS in Political Science-Pre Law from Texas Wesleyan University.

Dr. Michael Howarth received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska at Anchorage and his Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His primary teaching areas include children's literature, young adult literature, and film studies. He directs the Honors Program at Missouri Southern State University where he is an associate professor of English. He is on the editorial board for Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, as well as on the advisory board for Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration. His critical text Under the Bed, Creeping: Psychoanalyzing the Gothic in Children's Literature was published in 2014 by McFarland Press. His young adult novel, Fair Weather Ninjas is forthcoming in 2016 from Lamar University Press.

Ann Howells edited Illya’s Honey since 1999, taking it online two years ago (www.IllyasHoney.com) and taking on a co-editor with whom she alternates issues. She has served on the board of Dallas Poets Community, a 501-c-3 non-profit, since 2001, as president from 2009-2012 and again in 2014. She has been read on NPR, interviewed on Writers Around Annapolis television, and nominated four times for a Pushcart, twice for a Best of the Net, and was named a “Distinguished Poet of Dallas” in 2001. In addition to her upcoming, Under a Lone Star, illustrated by Dallas artist, J. Darrell Kirkley (Village Books Press, 2016) and her chapbook, Black Crow in Flight (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2007) still available on that website,.her work appears in many small press and university journals including: Borderlands, BorderSenses, Calyx, Colere, Concho River Review, Cybersoleil, Crannog, Ellipsis, Harbinger Asylum, Iconoclast, Iodine, Little Patuxent River Review, Magma, Main Street Rag, Red Truck, RiverSedge. Rockhurst Review, San Pedro River Review, Red Rock Review, Schuylkill Valley Review, Spillway, Third Wednesday and Voices de la Luna and several anthologies: Goodbye Mexico and The Southern Poetry Anthology-VII, Texas (Texas Review Press), Awakenings (FutureCycle Press), Lifting the Sky and The Anthology of Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press), Pushing the Envelope, Texas Weather Anthology and Wise Ass Anthology (Lamar University Press), and The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press).

Maryann Hurtt first saw Tar Creek in northeast Oklahoma and thought some crazy vandals had sprayed neon orange paint up and down the creek. She is now heart deep in the creek's stories and has almost completed a collection of persona-historical poems about this environmental disaster-Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices. Her poetry has been published in a variety of journals, including Verse Wisconsin, Stoneboat, Fox Cry Review, Echoes, a few anthologies, and on-line. Aldrich Press will be publishing her chapbook, River, this coming summer. She received scholarships to study poetry at Charles University in Prague, Fishtrap, and Bread Loaf-Orion. Prior to retiring, Maryann was a hospice nurse for thirty years and co-authored a book about hospice care planning. In the fall of 2015, she read her Tar Creek poetry at the Tar Creek Environmental Conference in Miami, Oklahoma.

Jessica Isaacs is an English professor at Seminole State College, where she serves as the director of SSC’s annual Howlers & Yawpers Creativity Symposium. She was recently awarded the 2015 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry for her first full-length book of poems, Deep August (Village Books Press, 2014). She has presented her writing at several regional and national conferences, and she has published her poems in various journals and anthologies, including One Sentence Poems, My Life with a Funeral Director, Cybersoleil Literary Journal, All Roads Lead Home Poetry Blog, SugarMule’s Women Writing Nature, The Muse, Elegant Rage, Short Order Poems, September 2014, and Scissortail Commemorative CD, 2014. She is the current chair of the coordinating committee for the Woody Guthrie Poets, and she is also the founder and co-editor of Dragon Poet Review, an online literary journal.

Hank Jones teaches English composition and literature at Tarleton State University. 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 and New Orleans; PCA/ACA in San Antonio; Southwest PCA/ACA in Albuquerque; and the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in Ada, Oklahoma. His poetry and creative non-fiction have also appeared in Cybersoleil: A Literary Journal (2013, 2014), Voices de la Luna (2014), and Dragon Poet Review (2014). He will have two poems appearing in the The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology from Lamar University Press, forthcoming 2016; and a poem in the forthcoming Stone Renga anthology from Red Hat Press.

Hardy Jones is a two-time Pushcart Nominee and the author of the novel Every Bitter Thing (Black Lawrence Press, 2010) and the memoir People of the Good God (Mongrel Empire Press, 2015). His creative nonfiction has been awarded two grants. His short stories were anthologized in the 2009 Dogzplot Flash Fiction Anthology, The Best of Clapboard House Literary Journal, Southern Gothic: New Tales of the South, and Summer Shorts II. He is the co-founder and Executive Editor of the online journal Cybersoleil (www.cybersoleiljournal.com), and he is the Flash Fiction Editor for Sugar Mule (http://www.sugarmule.com/index2.htm). Hardy Jones is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Creative Writing at Cameron University (hjones@cameron.edu). His website is www.hardyjoneswriting.com and he is on Twitter @HardyJonesWrite. Hardy splits his time between Lawton, Oklahoma and Si Sa Ket Province Thailand.

Jennifer Kidney is an 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 appeared in numerous journals and little magazines, including Sugar Mule, Crosstimbers, Picking Up the Tempo, Kudzu, The Seattle Review, Malpais Review, The Bellingham Review, Dragon Poet Review, as well as in several anthologies, including Lamar University Literary Press's Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology. 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 also won awards for her poetry, technical writing, teaching, and brownie baking.

Haesong Kwon was born and raised in Incheon, Korea and immigrated to the United States with his family when he was eight years old. He recently completed his Ph.D. in English Studies at Oklahoma State University. His poems appear in CutBank, Michigan Quarterly Review, Confrontation, Louisville Review and others. Currently, he teaches English at Little Priest Tribal College in Winnebago, Nebraska. 

Jennifer Long has a BA in English and an MA in Classics, from Texas Tech University. She is a free-lance journalist, a poet, a singer/songwriter who enjoys gardening and hiking. She has published in several E-zines worldwide, and has self-published 2 chap books of poetry.

JC Mahan - “Johnie Catfish” is a local Oklahoma City street poet. He reads and has been the featured poet at many of the Oklahoma poetry readings, including  the Norman Train Depot, Full Circle Book Store and the Shawnee Saint Benedictine Poetry Meeting. J C's art and poetry has appeared in several journals , including Blood and Thunder, the Woody Guthrie Anthologies, and some of the Oklahoma poets Anthologies. Catfish has self-published nine poetry collections and has several CDs of his poetry reading recorded. JC is a salon owner- hair stylist at JC's Funky Hair Ranch in Edmond, Oklahoma where he has hosted many concerts, art shows, and poetry readings. Along with his wife, Karla, he lives in the country and raises chickens, ducks, geese, and peacocks. He has six children, eight grandchildren, so far, three dogs and five cats. Johnie Catfish loves to cook, so stop by for dinner, there's always plenty of food.

A.W. Marshall has lived in Oklahoma for the last nine years, but grew up on the beaches of Southern California.  His work is published or forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, Appalachian Heritage, Red Wheelbarrow, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, theNewerYork, Fiction Attic, Austin Review, and The Vestal Review.  His story, “The Lover,” published in the Vestal Review was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014.   His collection of short stories, Simple Pleasures, was published in 2015 by ELJ Publications.  In 2005, he wrote and directed the professional theater production of his play, Pan, with the Long Beach Shakespeare Company, and Mead-Hill published this play in 2015. In 2003, his play, Emptier, was produced at the Hudson Theater in Hollywood and directed by Kristin Hanggi.  He received his MFA in playwriting from USC and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. For the last five years, he has been writing a novel, Hendo, about a half man, half rabbit hybrid who survives in 1850’s California by assimilating with Chinese Immigrants.

George McCormick is the author of the short story collection Salton Sea and the novel Inland Empire. A recipient of a 2013 O. Henry Prize, his work has appeared most recently in Arcadia and This Land. He currently lives in Lawton, Oklahoma, and teaches in the department of English at Cameron University.

Gary Worth Moody's first collection of poems, Hazards of Grace was published by Red Mountain Press in 2012. His second collection, Occoquan, (short listed for the International Rubery Book Award in Poetry) also published by Red Mountain Press in March 2015, depicts the struggles of women for emancipation and suffrage in the environs of Virginia's piedmont region and the infamous Occoquan Workhouse. A graduate of St. John's College and of the George Mason University MFA Program, Gary has worked as a forest fire fighter, a farrier, a cowboy, and building a town for coal miners in Siberia’s Kuzbass Region. His poems have appeared in myriad journals and in the anthology, Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller’s Cabin, 1984-2001 (Word Works Press). He is currently assembling a third manuscript entitled The Burnings which has at its core the burning of the Aztec aviaries by Hernan Cortes. A falconer, Gary lives in Santa Fe with the artist and writer, Oriana Rodman, two dogs, and PLAGUE, a passage male red-tail hawk.

John Graves Morris, Professor of English, is the author of Noise and Stories (Plain View Press, 2008) and is rapidly putting the finishing touches on a second collection, Unwritten Histories.  His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming from The Concho River Review, The Red Earth Review, The Red River Review, Westview, and The Wise Ass Anthology.  He was one of the featured writers at the 2015 Westview Writers Festival, the third time he has been so honored.  He endeavors to be kind to students and stray cats, and he tries never to lapse into the passive voice, use plural pronouns to refer to singular antecedents, and employ words like prioritize, utilize, impact as a metaphoric verb, and journey as a metaphor for anything.

karla k. morton, the 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, is a Councilor of the Texas Institute of Letters, member of the Western Writers of America, and graduate of Texas A&M University. Described as “one of the most adventurous voices in American poetry,” she is a Betsy Colquitt Award Winner, twice an Indie National Book Award Winner, a North Texas Book Award Festival Winner, and Finalist for the Montaigne Medal. Morton is the recipient of the Writer-in-Residency E2C Grant and has ten collections of poetry. She is widely published, is a nominee for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and established an ekphrastic collaborative touring exhibit titled:  No End of Vision, pairing photography with poetry.  Morton’s work has been used by many students in their UIL Contemporary Poetry contests, and her forthcoming collection, Accidental Origami: New and Selected Works by karla k. morton is due out Spring 2016 from The Texas Review Press. Recently, Morton has become one of the first twelve inductees to Denton, Texas Arts Walk of Fame, along with Norah Jones, O’Neil Ford, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Pat Boon and others.

Tom Murphy’s chapbook Horizon to Horizon was published in 2015 by Strike Syndicate. His manuscript American History is being considered for publication. Recent work has been in 2016 Texas Poetry Calendar, Beatitude: Golden Anniversary Edition, Windward Review, Centrifuge, Nebula, Strike, Red River Review, Switchgrass Review and Voices de la Luna. Murphy has a poem forthcoming in each, The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology and the Chupacabra Anthology, plus two in Outrage: A Protest Anthology for Injustice in a Post 9/11 World. Co-editor of the Stone Renga Poem that he hopes is forthcoming in 2016. He lives with his wife and daughters and teaches at Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi.

Brent Newsom is the author of the poetry collection Love’s Labors (CavanKerry Press, 2015). His poetry and prose have appeared in This Land, The Southern Review, Cave Wall, PANK, Pleiades, The Oklahoma Review, and elsewhere. A native of Louisiana, he holds a PhD in English from Texas Tech University and teaches creative writing and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University.

Shaun Perkins is a poet, freelance writer, teacher and director of the Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry (ROMP) in Locust Grove. She is a graduate of OSU and OU, a teacher at the high school and college levels for over 25 years, and a writer for Oklahoma Magazine and Currentland. As an Oklahoma Arts Council Teaching Artist, Perkins regularly conducts workshops, readings and performances, and her one-woman show POEM LIFE is currently touring in the region. Her poetry and stories have been published in numerous journals, including Slipstream, The Phoenix, Touchstone, Midland Review and Storytelling Magazine.

Brady Peterson was born in Ft. Still Oklahoma and currently lives near Belton, Texas where he once built houses and taught rhetoric.  He now writes poetry and makes soup.  His poems have appeared in Windhover, Nerve Cowboy, Boston Literary Magazine, Blue Hole, the Enigmatist, all roads will lead you home, Southern Anthology, and San Antonio Express-News. He is the author of Glued to the Earth, Between Stations, and Dust.

Jason Poudrier is an Iraqi Freedom veteran and Purple Heart recipient. He is a writer, lecturer, workshop leader, instructor, and is the director of events for “Military Experience & the Arts” and recently directed the second national “Military Experience & the Arts (MEA2) Symposium” at Cameron University in Lawton. He is currently an instructor with the Office of Teaching and Learning at Cameron University and is the faculty adviser for Student Veterans of America and Circle K International. He is also an award winning author and his poems have recently appeared in World Literature Today and Blue Streak.

Elizabeth Raby is the author of a four-generation memoir in prose and poetry, Ransomed Voices, (Red Mountain Press, 2013), four full-length poetry collections including This Woman, (vacpoetry.org.), a finalist for the 2013 Arizona-New Mexico Book Award, and four chapbooks.  Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals.  She received the Elmer Kelton Award from Angelo State University in 2010.  She has lived in Santa Fe, NM since 2000 where she and her husband, Jim Raby, conduct an open poetry reading at Teatro Paraguas the first Monday of each month.

After completing her Ph.D. from L.S.U., Charlotte Renk settled in Athens, Texas to teach English and Creative Writing. For thirty years, she has written poetry and short stories inspired by natural settings and local folk surrounding life in her small cabin nestled among tall pine woods, hickories, oaks, and wildflowers. Eakin Press published her prizewinning collection of poetry, These Holy Hungers: Secret Yearnings from an Empty Cup, 2009, Poetry in the Arts published her book, Solidago, an Altar to Weeds, 2010, and Blue Horse Press published The Tenderest Petal Hears, 2014, co-winner of San Pedro River’s national chapbook competition. 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, Re: Arts and Letters, Poetry Society of Texas’ Book of the Year, and Southwest Review and Her Texas: Story, Image, and Song, 2015. Among state and national competitions, she received the National Storyteller Award for fiction. Still writing, publishing, and conducting workshops, she explores universal subjects as they manifest amid the local.

Sally Rhoades, a poet, playwright and performer, has been published in  2, an Anthology of the Second Sunday open mic reading series,  Dragon Poets Review, an on-line journal, 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: Here, and Happy, NYC, 2015, Excavations with Tom Corrado, Albany, NY, 2015, “I am Wing,” she said. “I am Wing”, presented at the Yes! Poetry and Performance series, Albany, NY(2014), ReWind, NYC(2013), Howl, a Poet Dances, performed at the Arts Center of the Capital Region(2013), Beyond the Birch, the Birch Beyond,NYC(2011), Pomegranates and Roses, a Love Story, shown at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival(2008). She is in a Chemeki/Lerner Performance video shown at Empac in Troy, NY, 2015. She has performed in Luis Lara Malvacias’, Sooner than you think at the 92nd street Y's Harkness Festival, NYC(2009). She received her MA in Creative Writing in 1995 from the University of Albany, Albany, N.Y.

Steven Schroeder is a poet and visual artist who was born in Wichita Falls, grew up in the Texas Panhandle, studied at Valparaiso University and the University of Chicago, and spent many years moonlighting as a professor of philosophy and religious studies in Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin,

Shenzhen, and Chicago (after a stint in community organizing and social work in Amarillo and Pampa). He has written, co-written, or edited thirty books (though some readers have concluded that it's really thirty variations on a single book). Still fine tuning, he has a new collection of poems and a collection of interdisciplinary lectures forthcoming from Lamar University Literary Press in 2016. More at stevenschroeder.org…

Lucie Smoker's imagination grew up in A Little House on the Prairie and at 221B Baker Street. Her first crime novel, Distortion, reached the Kindle Top Ten in Crime Fiction - Murder (Feb. 2014).  Featured in this month's new release, Veils, Halos and Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women (April 2016, Kasva Press) and The Best Advice in Six Words (Nov. 2015, St. Martin's), Lucie's nonfiction has appeared in Salon, BrainChild, Your Teen, Smith Magazine's Six-Word Memoirs Project, The Blood-Red Pencil and OutsideIn Literary Travel Magazine amongst many. She writes regularly for Art Focus Oklahoma and ionOklahoma Magazines.

Kerri Vinson Snell earned an MFA degree in Poetry in 2015 from Ashland University. Her poems have appeared in Relief Journal, Mikrokosmos, and Burnside Writers. Two poems “ECT” and “Here is how,” from her thesis manuscript, Topography of the Light-Filled, were published in the Sept. 2015 issue of Foothill: a Journal of Poetry. “Here is how” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Topography of the Light-filled was named a semi-finalist in Crab Orchard Review’s First Book Contest. A native of Oklahoma, Snell grew up in Allen, OK, and graduated from Allen High School. Her thesis manuscript, influenced by the poetry of Maurice Manning, celebrates both personal and Native American history of this area through persona poetry. Snell currently teaches writing courses at McPherson College, McPherson, KS. Prior to her poetry life, she worked for 15 years as a journalist.

Larry D. Thomas retired from a career in social service and adult criminal justice in 1998, and has since that time devoted full time to his poetry. His award-winning poetry includes the recently released anthology, As If Light Actually Matters: New & Selected Poems (Texas A&M University Press Consortium). In addition, his work has received two Texas Review Poetry Prizes (2001 and 2004), the 2003 and 2015 Western Heritage Awards (National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum), and the 2004 Violet Crown Book Award (Writers’ League of Texas). His poetry was also nominated for the 2007 Poets’ Prize (West Chester University/Nicholas Roerich Museum), five Pushcart Prizes, a Best of the Net award, and has received seven Spur Award Finalist citations from Western Writers of America. Larry is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and served as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. (see www.larrydthomas.com).

Rebecca Hatcher Travis, an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, often writes of her indigenous heritage and the wonder of the natural world. Her poetry book Picked Apart the Bones won the First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas and was published by the Chickasaw Press. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including several years of Texas Poetry Calendar, literary journals, the Chickasaw Times and online. Ms. Travis is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. She often reads at venues in Oklahoma, such as the Chickasaw Cultural Center and the ARTesian Gallery in Sulphur.

Ron Wallace is an adjunct professor of English at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and an Oklahoma Native of Choctaw, Cherokee and Osage ancestry. He is the author of seven volumes of poetry published by TJMF Publishing of Clarksville, Indiana and a three time finalist in the Oklahoma Book Awards. He is also a three time winner of The Oklahoma Writer’s Federation Best Book of Poetry Award. His work has been recently featured in Oklahoma Today, The Long Islander, Concho River Review, cybersoleil journal, Cobalt, Red Earth Review, Dragon Poets Review, Sugar Mule, Songs of Eretz Review, Gris-Gris, Oklahoma Poems and Their Poets and a number of other magazines and anthologies. Copies of his books may be purchased at WWW.RonWallacePoetry.com.

Sarah Webb first encountered Rock on a ledge by Lake Buchanan in the Texas Hill Country, where she lives.  She had told the stories of other essential beings--Crow, Raven, Vulture--in her poetry book Black (virtual artists collective, 2013) and when she came upon a massive stone with pebbled lips and shell eyes, she knew she had found another. Sarah is the former poetry editor of Crosstimbers, the interdisciplinary journal of the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, on the editorial committee for All Roads Will Lead You Home, and co-editor of Just This, a magazine of the Zen arts.  Black was a finalist for the 2014 Oklahoma Book Award and the 2014 Writers' League of Texas Book Award. Sarah can be reached at bluebirdsw.blogspot.com.

Clarence Wolfshohl is professor emeritus of English at William Woods University. His poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in many small press journals both in print and online. He has published several chapbooks and small collections of poetry, including Season of Mangos, poems about Brazil (Adastra Press, 2009), In Harm’s Way:  Poems of Childhood in collaboration with Mark Vinz  (El Grito del Lobo Press, 2013), and most recently Chupacabra (El Grito del Lobo Press, 2015).  In late 2014, his chapbook Equus Essence was published online by Right Hand Pointing. Wolfshohl lives with his writing, two dogs and one cat in a nine-acre woods outside of Fulton, Missouri

John Yozzo is a retired professor of English, living in Tulsa. Including a 23-year stay at East Central in Ada, Yozzo taught college English for 34 years. Currently, he spends his days farm- & ranch-handing, urban trail-biking & fretting to write the penultimate perfect love poem.