2018 Scissortail Biographies

Dorothy Alexander is a poet, memoirist, storyteller, author of five poetry collections, two multi-genre memoirs, and two volumes of oral history. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Sugar Creek Review; Malpais Review; Sugar Mule Literary Review; Cooweescoowee: a journal of art and literature; Blood & Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine; Dragon Poet Review; Oklahoma Humanities Journal, and others. She has curated poetry readings at the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma, for 13 years, and monthly readings at various venues in Oklahoma City and Cheyenne, Oklahoma. Dorothy reads and performs her poetry throughout Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and New Mexico. She is a recipient of the Carlile Award for Distinguished Service to the Oklahoma literary community. 

Sly Alley is a writer of poetry and short-fiction whose work has appeared in The Muse, Dragon Poet Review and included in the anthology Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way (Village Books Press, 2017). His work has been featured at the annual Howlers and Yawpers Creativity Symposium at Seminole State College, Poetry at The Paramount in Oklahoma City, Woody Guthrie Poets, Oklahoma Voices First Sunday Poetry at IAO Gallery, Second Sunday Poetry at Tidewater Winery and the September Poetry Series at East Central University. His debut collection of poems titled Strong Medicine (Village Books Press, 2016) won the 2017 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry. He writes on a vintage Royal typewriter in a fortified shack in Tecumseh, Oklahoma. 

Rilla Askew is the author of four novels, a book of stories, and a collection of creative nonfiction, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place. She’s a PEN/Faulkner finalist, recipient of the American Book Award, Western Heritage Award, Oklahoma Book Award, and the Willa Award from Women Writing the West. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Riot, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award in 2001. Askew’s essays and short fiction have appeared in Tin House, World Literature Today, Nimrod, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. In 2009 Askew received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She 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. Late Night Conspiracies, a collection of his writings was performed with jazz ensemble at New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, where he is a long time member. He has written for and about the theatre in essays, poetry and plays. His work has appeared in such publications as This Land, Sugar Mule, Oklahoma Review and Newport Review. He  recently a collection, Notes for Hard Times.  He’s currently working on three other collections Actors, Mother and Son and Persons of Influence.

Roy J. Beckemeyer is an author and editor from Wichita, Kansas. He became a co-editor of Konza Journal in 2017 and will also be on the Editorial Board of the online journal River City Poetry in 2018. He was co-editor of two recent poetry collections: 365 Days: A Poetry Anthology (2016, 365 Days Poetry, Kansas City, Missouri), and Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (2017, Little Balkans Press, Pittsburg, Kansas). His poetry book, Music I Once Could Dance To (2014, Coal City Press, Lawrence, Kansas), was selected as a Kansas Notable Book for 2015. His work has appeared in a half-dozen or so anthologies as well as in such print and online journals as Beecher’s Magazine, The Bluest Aye, Chiron Review, Coal City Review, Dappled Things, The Ekphrastic Review, Flint Hills Review, I-70 Review, Kansas City Voices, The Light Ekphrastic, The Midwest Quarterly, Mikrokosmos, Mockingheart Review, The North Dakota Quarterly, Pif, River City Poetry, The Syzygy Poetry Review, Thorny Locust, Tittynope 'Zine, and Zingara.

Alan Berecka’s newest book is The Hamlet of Stittville (Tale Feather’s Press - a subsidiary of Village Press Books). It is a collaboration with his childhood friend and cartoonist John Klossner. The title comes from the unincorporated dot on the map in the township of Marcy. New York. Berecka currently lives in Sinton, Texas and earns his keep in Corpus Christi as a reference librarian at Del Mar College. This year is his twelfth Scissortail conference, and as always, he’s glad and grateful to be back.

Paul Bowers 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. Honors include Pushcart nominations for fiction and poetry, and the Herman M. Swafford Award for Fiction. Recent publications include a book-length poetry collection, The Lone, Cautious, Animal Life (purple flag press, 2016).

Joey Brown writes poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in several literary journals including Dragon Poet Review, Louisiana Review, The Oklahoma Review, Cybersoleil, The Mid-America Poetry Review, and San Pedro River Review. She has recently been invited to read her work at the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, The Chikaskia Literary Festival, and the Langdon Review Literary Weekend. She’s written two collections of poems,Oklahomaography and Feral Love. She’s reading today from an in-progress collection dealing with memory titledContent Subject to Change. Joey teaches professional and creative writing at Missouri Southern State University. She lives in southwest Missouri with her husband, prose writer Michael Howarth, and their congenial pack of rescue dogs in their somewhat-renovated house.

Nathan Brown is an author, songwriter, and award-winning poet living in Wimberley, Texas. He holds a PhD in English and Journalism from the University of Oklahoma, and he served as Poet Laureate for the State of Oklahoma in 2013/14. Nathan has published seventeen books. Most recent are An Honest Day’s Confession; Apocalypse Soon… The Mostly Unedited Poems of Ezra E. Lipschitz; and Don’t Try, a collection of co-written poems with Austin Music Hall of Fame songwriter, Jon Dee Graham. Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier book, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award. Naomi Shihab Nye said about Nathan’s book, My Salvaged Heart: “…attraction and romance, ineffable magnetism, mysterious as ever – but doused with a savory dose of Nathan Brown humor, a tilted long-ranging eye that sees the next bend in the road even when he’s standing right here, firmly planted.”

Yvonne Carpenter writes from her western Oklahoma wheat farm. She has three books, including Red Dirt Roads, which won the Oklahoma Book of the Year, 2016.  Her work has appeared recently in Concho River Review, Blood and Thunder, Dragon Poet, Dos Gatos, and Red Earth Review.

Robin Carstensen has a first-place award-winning chapbook, In the Temple of Shining Mercy, published in Spring 2017 from Iron Horse Review Press. Her work can also be found in BorderSenses, Atlanta Review, Southern Humanities Review, and many others. She is the recipient of annual poetry awards from Many Mountains Moving and So to Speak: a Feminist Journal of Language and Art. Her work has received finalist recognition from Terrain.org, Calyx, and Baltimore Review. Poems are included in the Fall 2016 anthology from Demeter Press: Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland. She is the creative writing coordinator and professor at Texas A&M University and advises the Windward Review: a journal of the spirit and history of South Texas. She is also co-founder and editor of The Switchgrass Review, a journal of women's history, health, and empowerment. Her latest work explores histories of the Karankawan Indians along the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Julie Chappell is Professor of English at Tarleton State University in Texas where she teaches medieval and early modern literature and creative writing. Her scholarly writing has focused primarily on women’s lives and texts from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and she is author or co-editor of six books of scholarship, including the monograph Perilous Passages: The Book of Margery Kempe, 1534-1934 (Palgrave 2013) and the collection of essays, Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film (Palgrave 2017). Her poetry and prose have 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; The Call of the Chupacabra; Our New Orleans; Cybersoleil: A Literary Journal; Malpaïs Review; Writing Texas; Voices de la Luna; Dragon Poet Review; Red River Review; and Concho River Review. In 2013, Village Books Press published her poetry collection, Faultlines: One Woman’s Shifting Boundaries. She has also co-edited an anthology of creative poetry and prose entitled, Writing Texas (Lamar University Press 2014). In 2017, she was the featured writer in Cameron University’s Visiting Writers Series. 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. She has read her creative works widely from California to Texas.

Village Books Press published Terri Lynn Cummings’ first poetry book, Tales to the Wind, in 2016, and chapbook, An Element Apart, in 2017.  She is a Frequent Contributor to Songs of Eretz Poetry Review. Her poetry appears in Contemporary Rural Social Work, Oklahoma Humanities Magazine (online), Red River Review, Dragon Poet Review, Illya’s Honey, Melancholy Hyperbole, Eclectica, and elsewhere, in addition to anthologies: Blood and Thunder 2016 and 2017, Absolute, and Oklahoma Poets/Malpais Review. She is a 2015-2017 Woody Guthrie Poet, 2016-17 Mark Allen Everett Poet, hosts Oklahoma Voices: First Sunday Poetry readings/open mic in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and presents her work at Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, Howlers & Yawpers Creativity Symposium, Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference, and elsewhere. She has studied poetry, fiction, and non-fiction at Creative Writing Institute and holds a B.S. Sociology/Anthropology from Oklahoma State University. Terri continues to explore cultural humanity, while she and her husband travel the world.

Robert L. Dean, Jr.’s recent work has appeared in Flint Hills Review, I-70 Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Illya’s Honey, Red River Review, River City Poetry, and Heartland!. He was the featured poet in the August 2016 issue of Red River Review, and is the featured poet in the Fall 2017 issue of River City Poetry, for which he was also interviewed on his writing process and his approach to ekphrasis. Three of his collaborations with the artist Skyler Lovelace were chosen for inclusion in the Wichita Broadsides Project in October of 2017. In April of 2017 he organized a program of poetry and improvised music, performed at Fisch Haus in Wichita and co-produced by the Kansas Authors Club, of which he is a member, and Fisch Bowl, Inc. His haibun took first place at Poetry Rendezvous 2017. He was a finalist in the 2014 Dallas Poets Community chapbook contest. His haiku placed second in the 2016 Kansas Authors Club competition, and his short fiction third in the 2016 Astra Arts Festival. He has been a professional musician, and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives in Augusta, Kansas.

Richard Dixon is a retired high-school Special Education teacher and tennis coach living in Oklahoma City. His poems and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Crosstimbers, Westview, Walt’s Corner of the Long Islander, Texas Poetry Calendar, Cybersoleil, Dragon Poet Review, Red River Review and Oklahoma Today as well as a number of anthologies including the Woody Guthrie compilations in 2011, 2012, and 2017, and Clash by Night, an anthology of poems related to the 1979 breakthrough album by the Clash, London Calling. He has been a featured reader at Full Circle Bookstore in Oklahoma City, Benedict Street Marketplace in Shawnee, Norman Depot, Howlers and Yawpers Creative Symposium in Seminole, OK, Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in Ada, OK as well as Northern Oklahoma College in Tonkawa, OK and the Woody Guthrie poetry readings in Okemah, Oklahoma City and Tulsa, OK. In 2017 his book of poems, Leaving Home, saw publication.

Michael Dooley, aka Woodstok Farley, is an assistant professor at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. Having migrated from south Florida to Texas, Michael remains more comfortable in sandals than boots. His fiction reflects a deep yearning to return to the seacoast. The first chapter of a novella “As the Wave Rose,” was published in the online literary journal Cybersoleil and is among the many stories set in south Florida that will become an episodic collection entitled Surf, Swamp, and Stone. Michael’s latest story from that collection is entitled “Drowning the Monsters.”

Oklahoma-born Margaret Dornaus holds an M.F.A. in the translation of poetry from the University of Arkansas. An award-winning poet and non-fiction writer, her food and travel articles are published in a variety of national publications and her short-form and free verse poems appear regularly in international anthologies and journals, including: Dos Gatos Press’ Weaving the Terrain, and Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems; Red River Review; and The Texas Poetry Calendar.. Her first book of poetry, Prayer for the Dead: Collected Haibun & Tanka Prose, released through her small literary press Singing Moon, received a 2017 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America.

Maureen DuRant : After visiting her one-hundred-year-old cousin in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, and her ninety-nine-year-old aunt in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Maureen concluded, “Perhaps, there is time, after all, to be a poet.” Maureen received an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte last May and teaches at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma. Her publications include poetry in Crosstimbers, Red River Review, Westview, The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors and a postcard history of West Point published by Arcadia Press.

Chris Ellery is a widely-published poet, whose books include The Big Mosque of Mercy and Elder Tree. 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.

Alan Gann facilitates writing workshops for under-served youth at Texans Can Academy, and wrote DaVerse Works, Big Thought’s performance poetry curriculum. A multiple Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominee, Alan is the author of 2 volumes of poetry: That’s Entertainment: Field Notes on Love, Politics, and Movie Musicals (Lamar University Literary Press 2018), and Adventures of the Clumsy Juggler (Ink Brush Press 2015). His nonexistent spare time is spent outdoors: biking, birding, and photographing dragonflies.

Andrew Geyer'slatest book is the alternate history/time travel novel Parallel Hours (Angelina River Press, 2017), which he co-authored with Jerry Craven. He co-authored the hybrid story cycle Texas 5X5 (2014) with Jerry Craven, Jan Seale, Terry Dalrymple, and Kristin vanNamen. This collection of twenty-five interconnected short stories by five Texas writers, was named a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award in the Short Stories category, and Geyer's short story "Fingers," the opening story 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(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.

Aaron Glover is co-executive director of The Writer’s Garret, a 23-year old literary non-profit located in Dallas, TX. His first chapbook Bio Logic is available now via INF Press. His works have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Red River Review, Chicon Street Poets, Illya’s Honey, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in acting from the University of Houston, and was on faculty in the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University. 

William Peter Grasso’s novels explore the concept, "change one thing…and watch what happens." Focusing on the WW2 era, they weave actual people and historical events into a seamless and entertaining narrative with the imagined. His books have spent several years in the Amazon Top 100 for Alternative History and War. A lifelong student of history, Grasso served in the US Army and is retired from the aircraft maintenance industry. These days, he confines his aviation activities to building and flying radio-controlled aircraft.

Simon Han is a current writer fellow with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. His short stories have won the Indiana Review Fiction Prize and the Texas Observer Short Story Contest, and have also appeared in Guernica, West Branch, and Narrative. His non-fiction has been published in The Atlantic and Heavy Feather Review. He received his MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he served as Fiction Editor of Nashville Review. He’s currently at work on a novel and a collection of stories.

Michael Howarth received his M.F.A. In Creative Writing from the University of Alaska at Anchorage and his Ph.D. In English 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. 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, was published in 2016 by Lamar University Literary Press.

Ann Howells’s poetry appears in Switchgrass, Spillway, and THEMA among other journals, and in the anthologies: Goodbye, Mexico and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VIII: Texas (Texas Review Press), also Pushing the Envelope and Texas Weather Anthology  (Lamar University Press). She has edited Illya’s Honey since 1999, recently going digital (www.IllyasHoney.com). In 2001, Ann was named a “Distinguished Poet of Dallas” by the city. Her publications are: Black Crow in Flight (Main Street Rag, 2007), Under a Lone Star (Village Books Press, 2016), Letters for My Daughter (Flutter Press, 2016), Cattlemen & Cadillacsanthology of D/FW poets that she edited (Dallas Poets Community Press, 2016), and Softly Beating Wings (Blackbead Books, 2017).  Ann has four Pushcart nominations.

Although Maryann Hurtt lives in Wisconsin, she is heart deep in Tar Creek on the Oklahoma-Kansas border—a place some have called "the worst environmental disaster no one has heard of."  Her grandfather worked there in the lead and zinc mines and her grand and great-grandmother worked at the Quapaw Indian Agency. Tar Creek has become a second home to her and since retiring she has had the time and energy to research and complete a manuscript Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices. In 2016, Aldrich Press published her chapbook, River. It is a collection of poems concerning resiliency, the natural world, and death and dying that reflects her work as a hospice nurse. This fall, The Water Poems was published by Water's Edge Press—a water poem anthology by six fellow women poets. Her poetry has been included in a variety of print and online journals including Verse Wisconsin, Stoneboat, Blue Heron, Portage, Wisconsin People & Ideas, and others. She has read her water and Tar Creek poems throughout Wisconsin, the Tar Creek Environmental Conference, and recently at Busboys and Poets in Washington DC.

Cindy Huyser’s work has been published in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, Red River Review, Illya’s Honey, and a number of other journals and anthologies, and has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and once for a “Best of the Net” award (2017). Her chapbook, Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems (Blue Horse Press, 2014) was named co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. She edited the Texas Poetry Calendar from 2009 – 2014 for Dos Gatos Press, and will edit the 2019 Texas Poetry Calendar for Kallisto-Gaia Press. Huyser also co-edited Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the Will Rogers Medallion Award in 2017. She has been a juried and featured reader at the Houston Poetry Fest, a featured reader for Houston’s Public Poetry series, and a Special Guest poet at the Austin International Poetry Festival. She holds a B. A.in English from Tri-State University (now Trine University), and an M. S. in Computer Science from Texas State University-San Marcos.

Hank Jones teaches English composition and literature at Tarleton State University. He has read his poetry and creative non-fiction at various venues including the Woody Guthrie Festival stages in Oklahoma City and Okemah, Oklahoma; The Langdon Review Weekend in Granbury, Texas; the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in Ada, Oklahoma; and at the conferences for SCMLA, SWPACA, and CEA. His poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in Cybersoleil: A Literary Journal (2013, 2014), Voices de la Luna (2014, 2015), Dragon Poet Review (2014, 2015), Concho River Review (2016), and the Red River Review (2017). He contributed two poems to The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology from Lamar University Literary Press (2016), and has a poem in the just released Stone Renga Anthology from Village Books Press. He recently enrolled in the Red Earth MFA program out of Oklahoma City University.

Paul Juhasz writes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. He has read at dozens of conferences and festivals across the country, and his work appears in the journal bioStories and Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way: Celebrating Woody Guthrie, Poems of Protest and Resistance. His mock journal, Fulfillment: Diary of an Amazonian Picker, chronicling his seven-month term as a Picker at an Amazon Fulfillment Center, has been published in abridged form in The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and is currently being serialized in Voices de la Luna. Currently, he is working on Daddy Issues, a collection of short stories, and has just completed his first novel, Junk, based on his experiences riding a truck for 1-800-GOT-JUNK for two and a half years.

Abigail Keegan holds a Ph. D. British Literature teaches at Oklahoma City University. Keegan served as an editor for a women’s poetry journal, Piecework. She has published a book on the British Romantic poet, George Byron. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Pilgrimage Magazine, Red Truck Review: A Journal of Southern Literature and Culture; The Blue Rock Review, Crosstimbers, and Sugar Mule’s special issue on Women Writing Nature as well as in several anthologies:  Ain’t Nobody Can Sing Like Me: New Writing in Oklahoma; A Peace Poetry Anthology; and Woody Guthrie Tribute anthologies edited by Dorothy Alexander. She has published three books three books of poetry:  The Feast of the Assumptions, Oklahoma Journey, and her book, Depending on the Weather, was selected as finalist for the 2012 Oklahoma Book Award by the Oklahoma Center for the Book.

Roxie Faulkner Kirk writes from her home, a hundred-year-old farmhouse in Morris, Oklahoma, which she shares with her husband Terry, and a varying number of kids, cats, bees, and dogs. A former feature writer for the Alva Review-Courier, some of her work has appeared in the Eclectica Literary Journal and Cowboy Jamboree Magazine. She is currently represented by Lauren Spiellor of Triada US Literary Agency. This is her second appearance at Scissortail.

Eddie Malone is a former journalist and a Ph.D. graduate in fiction from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. His work has appeared in various literary journals including Kartika Review, The Ottawa Object and The Truth about the Fact, and in 2011 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2016, he was a General Contributor in fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He teaches English at the University of Oklahoma.

Preston Marshall is the author of the epic science fiction series The Lion-Blade Saga, originally debuted in the 2012 ECU Originals Literary Magazine with his piece Wallace Wilkinson. He later went on to have a second piece, No Escape, featured in the 2013 volume of Originals. In October 2016, Preston published his first full-length novel When Darkness Reigns through GenZ Publishing. His second novel in the series, Remembrance, was released in July 2017. The third thrilling chapter in the Lion-Blade Saga, Regicide, was released this Spring.

Bill McCloud, an adjunct professor of American History at Rogers State University, placed two books on The Oklahoman’s "Oklahoma Bestsellers" list for the week of December 17, 2017. One was his new book of Vietnam War poetry, The Smell of the Light (#1 for Fiction), published by Balkan Press. His earlier book, What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam? (#3 for Nonfiction), published by the University of Oklahoma Press, was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. All of his Vietnam papers have been purchased by Harvard University. Dozens of his Vietnam War poems are used as part of the official curriculum in both English and American History classes at the University School of Milwaukee, WI, one of the nation's leading private college preparatory schools. One of his poems was chosen to be posted inside a Tulsa Transit city bus and he is a 2017 Woody Guthrie Poet. His poems have appeared in Conclave, The Maverick, the Hattiesburg (MS) Post, Ain't Gonna Be Treated This Way: Poems of Protest and Resistance (Village Books Press, 2017) and are upcoming in Red Dirt Forum and eMerge Magazine. In March of 2018 he will be inducted into the Northern Oklahoma College Hall of Fame. 

Daniel Miller holds degrees from Oklahoma Baptist, Duke, and the University of Edinburgh. He has published one book, Animal Ethics & Theology (Routledge, 2012). His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary journals such as Alfie Dog Fiction, Amarillo Bay, Cleaver, Entropy, Gulf Stream, Riding Light Review,Rock & Sling, Short Story Sunday, and The Tishman Review. He lives in Amarillo, TX with his wife, several horses, and various other domesticated and wild animals

Gary Worth Moody is 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 on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the anthologies, Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller’s Cabin, 1984-2001 (Word Works Press) and Weaving the Terrain (Dos Gatos Press). He is the author of Hazards of Grace (Red Mountain Press, 2012), Occoquan (Red Mountain Press, 2015), shortlisted for the international Rubery Book Award in poetry. Gary’s 3rd manuscript, The Burnings, has been accepted for publication by 3: A Taos Press. He is currently developing a 4^th manuscript entitled Lolita, the Bird and the black-Tongued Dog. A falconer, Gary lives in Santa Fe with the artist and writer, Oriana Rodman, two dogs, and Plague, a male red-tail hawk.

John Graves Morris, in his thirtieth year at Cameron University, and in his twentieth year as Professor of English, is the author of Noise and Stories (Plain View Press, 2008). John teaches American literature, film, and creative writing. He hopes to be sending out the manuscript for his new collection, still tentatively entitled "Unwritten Histories," by the end of the year. His poems have appeared recently in The Chariton Review, Red Earth Review, Red River Review, Westview, and the Great American Wise Ass Anthology.  He lives in Lawton.

   

Christopher Murphy's work has been published in Gulf Coast, This Land, The Jellyfish Review, deComp Magazine, and Five Quarterly among others. He received his MFA in Fiction from the University of Arkansas. He currently teaches creative writing at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK.

Tom Murphy’s poetry book American History (Slough Press), plus the co-edited Stone Renga (Tail Feather Press) were published in 2017. He has a chapbook, Horizon to Horizon (Strike Syndicate, 2015). and two CDs: “Live from Del Mar College” (2015) and “Slams from the Pit” (2014). Recent poetry and photography credits are in Ain't Gonna Be Treated This Way: Celebrating Woody Guthrie; Poems of Protest & Resistance; 3lements; Illya’s Honey; Nothing Journal, The Langdon Review, The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, Red River Review; Outrage: A Protest Anthology for Injustice in a Post 9/11 World; 2016 Texas Poetry Calendar; Beatitude: Golden Anniversary Edition; Centrifuge; Nebula; Strike; Switchgrass Review; Voices de la Luna and Windward Review. Murphy is a committee member of the People’s Poetry Festival—Corpus Christi.

Laurence Musgrove is Professor of English at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, where he teaches creative writing, literature, comic studies, and mindfulness. His collection of poetry, Local Bird, is from Lamar University Literary Press.  His poems have appeared in Southern Indiana Review, Concho River Review, Buddhist Poetry Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Windward Review, Drunken Boat, Ink Brick, riverSedge.  He is co-editor with Terry Dalrymple of Texas Weather, an anthology of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction on the power and beauty of the weather of the Lone Star State.  His new collection of aphorisms One Kind of Recording is forthcoming from Lamar University Literary Press.  Laurence also blogs at www.theillustratedprofessor.com.

Gay Pasley is a professional nurse, an award winning community leader and photographer whose artistry is featured in Loud Zoo, Abstract Magazine and Maintenant 11: A Journal of Dada Writing and Art.  She is a recent graduate of the Oklahoma City Red- Earth MFA Program and has presented as lecturer for organizations such as the Society for Photographic Education, the Ralph Ellison Foundation and the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation. Gay has publications appearing or forthcoming in Thread Literary Magazine, Hard Crackers Press, Elsewhere Magazine, Amistad, Transitions, Snapdragon: A Journal of Healing, Morkan’s Horse the Minola Review and Obsidian; Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora. Ms. Pasley’s photography and writing seek to capture the under-reported experiences and challenges of what it is to be a working class woman of color.

Brady Peterson lives near Belton, Texas where for twenty-nine years he worked building homes and teaching rhetoric. His poems have appeared in Windhover, Nerve Cowboy, Boston Literary Magazine, The Journal of Military Experience, all roads will lead you home, Blue Hole, Red River Review, Illya’s Honey, and the San Antonio Express-News.  He is the author of Glued to the Earth, Between Stations, Dust, and From an Upstairs Window.

 
Jason Poudrier is a novelist, essayist, poet, and Purple Heart recipient of the Iraq War. He is currently an instructor with Cameron University and serves as the director of events for Military Experience and the Arts. He is the award-winning author of two poetry collections, Red Fields (Mongrel Empire Press, 2012), and the chapbook In the Rubble at Our Feet (Rose Rock Press, 2011). His poems have recently appeared in World Literature Today and Blue Streak. His fiction has been listed as a finalist for the New Plains Review Sherman Chaddlesone Flash Fiction contest, semifinalist for American Short Fiction’s American Short(er) Fiction contest, and honorable mention for Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Volume 6.

The poems, reviews, and essays of Carol Coffee Reposa have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, The Texas Observer, Southwestern American Literature, The Valparaiso Review, and other journals and anthologies.   Author of four books of poetry—At the Border: Winter Lights, The Green Room, Facts of Life, and Underground Musicians—Reposa was a finalist in The Malahat Review Long Poem Contest (1988), winner of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center Poetry Contest (1992), and  winner of the San Antonio Public Library Arts & Letters Award (2015).  She has received four Pushcart Prize nominations in addition to three Fulbright-Hays Fellowships for study in Russia, Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico.  A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and of the editorial staff at Voices de la Luna, she has been named 2018 Texas Poet Laureate.

Sally Rhoades, a former Capital reporter in Albany, N.Y., began writing poetry in the late 1980’s. She was featured in Poetry Spoken Here, a podcast directed by interviewer/poet Charlie Rossiter this past September. Her poetry appears in the latest issue of Misfit Magazine, edited by Alan Catlin. She has also been published in Dragon Poetry Review, 2, Elegant Rage, a poetic tribute to Woody Gutherie, the Highwatermark Salo[o]n performance series by Stockpot flats, Up the River, by Albany Poets and in Peerglass, an anthology of Hudson Valley. She is also a performance artist and will be showcasing a new work, Surrender Blue, next September in Oslo, Norway. She has written a new play, My Utica, which is being considered by various theaters. She lives in Albany, N. Y. with her husband, Hasan Atalay.

Steven Schroeder is a poet and visual artist who spent many years moonlighting as a philosophy professor at universities in the United States and China. He currently lives and works in Chicago. More at stevenschroeder.org.

Christopher Stephen Soden received his MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts in January of 2005. He teaches craft, theory, genre and literature. He writes poetry, plays, literary, film and theatre critique for sharpcritic.con, EdgeDallas and John Garcia’s the Christopher’s poetry collection, Closer

was released by Rebel Satori Press on June 14th, 2011. He received a Full Fellowship to Lambda Literary's Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices in August 2010. His performance piece: Queer Anarchy received The Dallas Voice's Award for Best Stage Performance. Water and A Christmas Wish were staged at Bishop Arts and Every Day is Christmas. In Heaven at Nouveau 47. Other honors include: Distinguished Poets of Dallas, Poetry Society of America's Poetry in Motion Series, Founding Member, President and President Emeritus of The Dallas Poets Community. His work has appeared in: G & L Review, Chelsea Station, Glitterwolf, Collective Brightness, A Face to Meet the Faces, Resilience,

Ganymede Poets : One, Gay City 2, The Café Review, The Texas Observer, Sentence, Borderlands, Off the Rocks, The James White Review, The New Writer, Velvet Mafia, Poetry Super Highway, Gertrude, Touch of Eros, Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians, Windy City Times, ArLiJo, Best Texas Writing 2.

Don Stinson lives in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, and teaches at Northern Oklahoma College.  He holds two degrees from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah and a doctorate in English from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. His poems have appeared in literary magazines such as Hamilton Stone Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Southwestern American Literature, and many others, as well as in Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way, a 2017 anthology of poems celebrating the spirit and legacy of Oklahoma’s own Woody Guthrie. From May 2009 to May 2010, he maintained The Jenkins St. Poetry Project, a poem-a-day blog. He has read his work in various venues in Oklahoma as well as in San Antonio, Chicago, and Minneapolis. 

Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, has published several critically acclaimed and award-winning collections of poetry.  His most recent book-length collection is As If Light Actually Matters: New & Selected Poems which received a 2015 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards Finalist citation. Among the literary journals in which his work has recently appeared are Louisiana Literature, Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies, Callaloo, San Pedro River Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Oklahoma Review, and Right Hand Pointing. 

Rebecca Hatcher Travis, an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, often writes of her indigenous heritage and the beauty of the natural world. Her poetry book manuscript, 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, literary journals and online. Ms. Travis is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers and lives in south central Oklahoma, near the land her ancestors settled in Indian Territory days. She is currently completing another book of poetry and continues to give poetry presentations at Oklahoma venues such as the Chickasaw Cultural Center and the ARTesian Gallery, in Sulphur.

Ron Wallace is an Oklahoma native of Scots-Irish, Choctaw, Cherokee and Osage descent. He is currently an instructor of English at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, and is the author of eight books of poetry, three which have been finalists in the Oklahoma Book Awards. He has been recently published in Oklahoma Today, San Pedro River Review, Red River Review, Oklahoma Poems and their Poets, Concho River Review, Oklahoma Humanities Magazine, Poetry Bay, and a number of other magazines and journals. Wallace is a 2016 “Pushcart Prize” nominee and the winner of the 2016 Songs of Eretz Poetry Review Prize.

Sarah Webb is the former poetry and fiction editor of Crosstimbers, a multicultural, interdisciplinary journal from the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma.  Her collection Red Riding Hood's Sister was published this spring by Virtual Artists Collective. Her earlier collection Black (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013) was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and for the Writers' League of Texas Book Award. She leads workshops in writing for self exploration and is co-leader of an ongoing writing group for Zen and Writing. 

Clarence Wolfshohl has been active in the small press as writer and publisher for nearly fifty years.  He has published poetry and non-fiction in many journals, both print and online, most recently, the e-chapbook Scattering Ashes (Virtual Artists Collective, 2016). Wolfshohl lives in the suburbs of Toledo, Missouri, with his dog and cat.

John M. Yozzo is a retired professor of English residing in Tulsa.  A Woody Guthrie poet, Yozzo has published in the Concho River Review, Malpais, Oklahoma Poems & Their Poets, and Arcadia.  Yozzo is the author of Only Wonder (2017), a collection of love lyrics and epitaphs, from Village Books Press.