David
Baxter was a regular contributor to No Depression magazine during its
last daysin print, and his short story "The Last Noel" was included
in the inaugural MOTIF anthology. He lives in Bowling Green, KY, where
he teaches elementary school students who are gifted in science and
mathematics.
Jeffery Beam's Invocation, a limited
edition hand-made chapbook (Country Valley Press) has just been released. He
and Richard Owens (Damn the Caesars)
edited a Jonathan Williams feature for Jacket magazine in late 2009 – which they hope will evolve into a book. The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer
Poems 1969 – 2007 (White Crane Wisdom Series), On Hounded Ground: Home and the Creative Life, an essay with poems
(Bookgirl Press, Japan), and A Hornet's
Nest, a quote book of Jonathan Williams - (editor, The Jargon Society) were published in 2008. His many award-winning works include Visions of Dame Kind (The Jargon Society), An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold (Horse and Buggy), The Fountain (NC Wesleyan College
Press), and the online book, Gospel Earth (Longhouse). His spoken word CD with multimedia, What We Have Lost: New and Selected Poems 1977-2001, was a 2003 Audio
Publishers Award finalist. An
expanded Gospel Earth (Skysill Press,
England) will be published in early 2010. The song cycle, Life of the Bee, with composer Lee Hoiby,
continues to be performed on the international stage. The Carnegie Hall premiere with Beam reading and the songs
performed can be heard on Albany Record's New
Growth. On December 1, 2008
(World AIDS Day) in Boston, MA, composer / counter-tenor Steven Serpa premiered a cantata Heaven's Birds: Lament and Song based on three of Beam's poems from The Beautiful Tendons. Beam continues to work on The Life of the Bee, an opera libretto
based on the Demeter/Perspehone myth, and a commonplace book on poetry and the
spirit entitled They Say. The Broken Flower: Poems seeks a
publisher. Beam is poetry editor of the print and online literary journal Oyster Boy Review and a botanical
librarian in the Biology-Chemistry Library at UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina. www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/index.html.
Alan
Brasher teaches English at East Georgia College, works with Emanuel
Arts Council, and plays music whenever the opportunity presents itself. The
Central Alabama woods he grew up in haunt his mind as well as his poems.
Brooke
Calton is originally from Hooper's Creek in the western North Carolina Blue
Ridge mountains. She now lives on a farm in central North Carolina with her
husband and son. Calton has written one novel, A Living Thirst, and is
currently at work on a second.
Casey Clabough serves as English
Department Chair at Lynchburg College and as literature editor for the Virginia
Foundation for the Humanities’ Encyclopedia Virginia. He is the author
of several book-length scholarly studies as well as the creative nonfiction
book The Warrior's Path: Reflections Along an Ancient Route.
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is
assistant professor of English at Cornell University. She is the author of the
poetry collection Black Swan, winner
of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and coauthor, with Elizabeth Alexander, of
the chapbook Poems in Conversation and a Conversation.
W. Cameron Dennis has been an exhibiting photographer for over twenty
years. He is the recipient of a 1993 Photography Fellowship from the Southern
Arts Federation and a 2000 North Carolina Arts Council Visual Artist
Fellowship. He also received a project grant from the North Carolina Arts
council in 1993. Cameron earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from Clemson
University in 1990 he also studied art and photography at Parsons School of
Design and Appalachian State University. He has exhibited extensively, earning
many awards in both regional and national juried competitions. His work has
been published in the NC Literary Review, The Sun magazine and The Photo
Review. He has work in several private and public collections including the
University of NC Chapel Hill, School of Law.
Robert B.
Cumming is owner and publisher of Iris Press, located in Oak Ridge, TN. He is
also a poet and essayist.
Dr.
Victor M. Depta has published nine books of poetry, three novels,
two volumes of comedic plays, a collection of essays on poetry and mysticism,
and over two-hundred poems in magazines and journals. He has a Ph.D. in
American literature from Ohio University, an M.A. in English from San Francisco
State University, and a B.A. in English from Marshall University.
Holly Farris, twice nominated for a Puschcart Prize, published
her first collection of short stories in 2007. Lockjaw, from Gival
Press, was named Appalachian Book of the Year in 2008, and was a finalist for a
Lambda Literary Award.
Thomas F.
Fehr was born just outside New York City, where a friend
once said that he was a city boy with a country heart. Tom is now a
husband and dad living in Bristol, Tennessee and often rides his bicycle to
work at East Tennessee State University. Though he has grey in his beard,
Tom wants to be a farmer when he grows up.
Frankie Finley is an active member of the Southern
Appalachian Writers Cooperative, and the editor of Pine Mountain Sand &
Gravel. Three years ago, she bought a house in Lexington,
Kentucky, and it's the longest she's ever lived in one place. Frankie
works as a writer and enjoys kayaking, traveling, and spending time with her
partner and daughter.
Kate Hauk was an English
major, yet only in the last 15 years has her education in the early ‘70s at the
Universities of Colorado, Ohio Wesleyan, and seminary begun to
"take," like a delayed vaccine, and become something she truly
savors. The poetry she’s memorized
over the years has blossomed in her work as a writer, speaker, artist and
spiritual counselor (i.e., someone who listens to others on purpose). Ordained in 1979 as a Congregational
minister, Kate has worked in a variety of multi-faith settings, most recently
as a hospice chaplain and with those facing addiction recovery, grief and loss.
Using creative writing, music, and silence, Kate keeps discovering the
power of poetic imagery to draw us into that “field,” where we can meet, and
where restoration is possible.
“Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”
( Jalaluddin Rumi)
Leah Miranda Hughes is a Southern poet who
began studying etymology and diction after reading Whitman.
Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry emigrated in1994 from Moscow to
the United States. She lives and
works in the Appalachian mountains of southwestern Virginia. She holds an M.A. in English from
Radford University and is currently in the M.F.A program at Hollins
University. Her fiction
seeks to chart and dramatize the often difficult, often beautiful lives of
ordinary Russian people from the Soviet era, through the time of perestroika, to the current period of
the so-called New Russia. In the past five years her stories have appeared in Timber
Creek Review, Pangolin Papers, Gulf Stream, North Dakota Quarterly, Arts
& Letters, The Del Sol Review, Words of Wisdom, Rattapallax, Feminist
Studies, Nimrod, and Phoebe: Gender and Cultural Critiques and are forthcoming in Talking River
Review, Apostrophe, and The Southern Review.
Ken Hassell graduated with an MFA degree in
photography from the University of Wisconsin and subsequently taught at the
Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Drexel University and Delaware County
Community College. Currently, he is a tenured Associate Professor and chair of
the Art Department at Elon University, a liberal arts
college located in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. He developed and
heads a thriving photography program and founded the digital art program.
Jane Hicks is a teacher, poet, and
fiber artist from upper East Tennessee. Her first book, Blood and Bone Remember won the Poetry
Book of the Year 2006 Award from the Appalachian Writers
Association. She is presently at work on a novel.
Jennifer Horne grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, and has lived in
Alabama since 1986. The author of a poetry chapbook, Miss Betty’s School of Dance (1997) and the forthcoming collection
of poems Bottle Tree (2010), she is
also the editor of Working the Dirt: An
Anthology of Southern Poets (2003) and co-editor, with Wendy Reed, of All Out of Faith: Southern Women on
Spirituality (2006). Descended
from families who moved from Alabama and Tennessee to Arkansas, she grew up on
Appalachian folk songs and wisdom and is still trying to learn all the verses
to “Old Joe Clark” while wondering
whether a rabbit really did run over her grave.
Ron Houchin was raised in Huntington,
WV, and educated at Marshall University. He is the author of Among Wordless
Things, the Appalachian Book of the Year in poetry, Birds in the Tops of Winter Trees, and Death and the River. Houchin lives in Burlington, Ohio.
Oritsegbemi Emmanuel Jakpa lives in
Ireland. His poetry has been published in a number of online and print journals
including the African American Review,
and The Echoing Years: an Anthology of
Poetry from Canada and Ireland. He is a Yeats' Pierce Loughran Scholar. He writes: “Appalachia amazes. I find
the natural way of life of the people very unique, very humane. Nature still in
his wild elegance. Meditating on this a while, I put it in verse:
“Appalachia”
for Rob
Merritt
While memories renew
with wind
with music that tallies old-time
tunes
While tourist ink their pen
to write of the way of life
and of the friendliness of
neighbour
While marvels are conjure up
from this mountains
that challenge the Twelve Ben
I want you to tell everyone
through trumpets played with the
fragrance of roses
here contrasts the affairs of our
modern life.
Kate
Larken hails from Western Kentucky and is a widely respected singer-songwriter
who also writes, acts, and is the publisher of Motes Books. Larken’s
music can be found on her solo album Muddy
Water, as well as with the band, Public Outcry, a group dedicated to
fighting mountaintop removal coal-mining. She lives in Louisville.
Allison
Linder is a native of Southwest Virginia. She has worked as a children’s librarian,
waitress, art teacher and preschool director—just to name a few
jobs. Currently, she is a
librarian and adjunct English teacher at Virginia Intermont College. At night, she works in retail. Her work in nonfiction has been
published in the Sun and Marquee magazines.
Denton
Loving is the 2007 recipient of the Gurney Norman Prize for Writing. His work
has been published in Kudzu, Birmingham Arts Journal and in numerous
anthologies. His story A Sorrow of Mothers won the 2008 Alabama Writers
Conclave Fiction Prize. He serves as Director of Prospect Research at Lincoln
Memorial University and lives in Speedwell, Tennessee.
Sylvia
Lynch is an East Tennessee native whose short fiction has appeared in Kudzu magazine, The Louisville Review and a number of anthologies. She was
the winner of the 2008 Gurney Norman Prize for Fiction. She is a high school
principal and is currently working on her first novel.
Sue
Massek plays banjo for the Reel World String Band and is a prolific
songwriter. Originally from Kansas, Massek now lives in Washington
County, Kentucky and works for the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
Donna
McClanahan grew up on the banks of the Kentucky River in
Estill County and still lives within a stone’s throw. She writes fiction,
non-fiction and the occasional poem and has been published in all three genres.
She is a founding member of the Gap House Writers who meet in Cumberland Gap,
Tennessee.
T.W. (Terry) McNemar is a
humor, short story and novel writer from Stonewood,
WV. His work reflects the humanity, humor, and conscience of everyday life,
often in a strong Appalachian style. His work has been featured in The
Johns Hopkins University’s Scribble Press; Gerald R. Ratliff’s Drama Textbook, Young
Women’s Monologues from Contemporary Plays; Mountain Echoes; and Traditions,
the literary journal of Fairmont State University. In July of 2007, Booklocker Publishing released Ragdoll Angel, the story of a kidnapping in a small mountain
village in 1952. He currently
serves as president of West Virginia Writers, Inc.
Lisa
Parker is a poet,musician and photographer living in Centreville, Virginia,
born and raised in Fauquier County, VA. Parker received her MFA in Creative
Writing from Penn State in 1998 and has published in numerous literary
magazines, journals, and anthologies such as Southern Review, Louisville
Review, Flint Hills Review, and Bedford/St. Martin's The
Bedford Introduction To Literature.
Tim
Peeler of Hickory, NC, has published five books of poetry and three of local
and regional history. Checking Out,
a poetic narrative about a small-town independent motel is forthcoming from Hub
City Press.
Doug Pope currently
resides in Western North Carolina. He is working on his first novel.
Betzi Richardson grew up in Bluefield, West Virginia, and
regularly visits her large extended family in North Carolina, Virginia, and
West Virginia, and yet has been living in LA long enough to have a sense of
deep roots in both East and West. She has a Masters in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis from
Loyola Marymount University LA, was named “Poet of the Year, 2007-2008” in that
program, and was inducted into the Jesuit Honor Society, Alpha Sigma Nu. She
has taught poetry workshops at Beyond Baroqueand at Santa Monica College.
A graduate of Hollins University, Mara Eve Robbins lives and writes in Floyd County, Virginia. She is
poetry editor of Floyd County Moonshine: Local Color Literature (floydshine@gmail.com). A founding member of The Floyd Writer’s Circle and an avowed spoken word
enthusiast, she organizes and promotes readings and workshops in Floyd County.
Her poetry has appeared in Cargoes, The Album, Katuah, and the We’moon
Journal, and she has work forthcoming in Concrete and New York
Quarterly.
Stephen Morrow Roberts grew up in the eastern foothills
on the Southern Appalachians in Winston-Salem, NC, the home of RJR
tobacco. He received his MA in English and Creative Writing at Hollins
University outside Roanoke, Va, by the Appalachian Trail.
Still hiking the AT, he continued live and work in Charlottesville,
Va. before going coastal and moving to Wilmington, NC. He is the author of a full-length
collection of poems, A Space inside a Space, St. Andrews College
Press, 1999.
Kelli Rush is a
senior communications specialist working in employee health and retirement
benefits in Winston-Salem. She has a master’s degree in European history and is
raising two boys. Her poems appeared recently in Wicked Alice.
George Scarbrough was born in a small sharecropper's clapboard shack in Polk County, Tennessee in 1915. Unusually gifted in reading and writing, due partly to the influence of his literate mother, he attended The University of Tennessee, University of the South, and Lincoln Memorial University, from which he holds both a B.A. and an Honorary Doctorate. He is the author of five books of poetry and one novel. He died in December 2008, firmly recognized as one of the most unique and accomplished poets from the southern mountains.
