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.
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.
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.
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