Edward Simon is the founder of the Thirty First Bird Review. He is an adjunct instructor of English composition and literature at several institutions of higher education in the Pittsburgh area. Simon received a Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie-Mellon University, and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Renaissance Studies from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. His area of expertise is the intersection of religion and literature, and he has presented at academic conferences throughout the United States. He has written several volumes of prose, poetry and drama, which will be available from the Thirty First Bird Review and Press website. A lifelong Pittsburgher, Simon is committed to the cultural life of his native city.
Murray Alfredson (BA, Melb., MLib, Wales) is a retired librarian and lecturer. His specialisations were information retrieval and research methods. He was also for some years a Buddhist Associate to the Multi-faith Chaplaincy Service at Flinders University of South Australia.
He has published essays on Buddhist meditation and on inter-faith relations in Theravada, The middle way, In the round, and Eremos; and he has published poems and translations from the German in journals in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.
His collection, ‘Nectar and light’, appeared early in 2007 in a shared volume, number 12 of the New poets series jointly published in Adelaide by Friendly Street Poets and Wakefield press.
He was awarded the High Beam Poetry Prize in 2004 and the Poetry Unhinged Multicultural prize in 2006. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2008.
Édgar Omar Avilés was born in Morelia, Michoacán, in 1980. He is the author of La noche es luz de un sol negro (2007) and Guiichi (2008). His stories have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including the 2004 and 2005 editions of Los mejores cuentos mexicanos (The Best Mexican Short Stories). English translations of his stories have appeared in Big Muddy, Monkeybicycle, NANO Fiction, Sleepingfish, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere.
Meghan Brinson is a native of Charleston, SC. She holds a MFA in poetry from Arizona State University, where she served as poetry editor for Hayden's Ferry Review and and international teaching fellow at the National University of Singapore. She has poems appearing or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Puerto del Sol, The Greensboro Review, Pebble Lake Review, and The Southern Women's Review.
Anne Brooke’s fiction has been shortlisted for the Harry Bowling Novel Award, the Royal Literary Fund Awards and the Asham Award for Women Writers. She has also twice been the winner of the DSJT Charitable Trust Open Poetry Competition. Her latest novel is The Bones of Summer, a romantic thriller about religion, murder and the chance for a new beginning. Her work is represented by agent, John Jarrold, and she has a secret passion for birdwatching. More information can be found at www.annebrooke.com and she keeps a terrifyingly honest journal athttp://annebrooke.blogspot.com/.
Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published throughout the small and literary presses. His work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, After Hours, Free Lunch, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review and others. In addition, he has eight poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004) and What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005).
Brownstein teaches elementary school in Chicago’s inner city, studies authentic African instruments with his students, conducts grant-writing workshops for educators and the State of Illinois Title 1 Convention, and records performance and music pieces with grants from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the Oppenheimer Foundation, BP Leadership Grants, and others.
Martin Burke is an Irish poet and playwright who currently makes his home in Bruges, Belgium. He is the author of the books "The Other Life," "The Weave That Binds Us," "Into History," "Psalms," "Kings," "The Easter Ballad," "Jerusalem," "Solstice Song," and "Ithaca," published by several presses in the United States, Europe and Northern Africa, as well as several E-books.. His plays, including "Six Scenes From a War" and "Ten Scenes from Lear," among other plays, have been performed in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Canada. Kiosque Review writes "His style is far ahead in terms of imaginative inventiveness.: ….startling, original work” The Irish Post writes of his poem "(Jerusalem) a fascinating long poem" Projected Letters says “Burke is the eloquent essayist of the sublime." Burke is also the founder of the bilingual theatre group Zonder Thuis.
Heather Cadenhead's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Illuminations, Boston Literary Magazine, The Ampersand Review, Prick of the Spindle, and others. She is the senior editor of The Basilica Review and resides in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Mary C. Charest was born 45 years ago on September 11, 1963. Ms. Charest has worked in various facets of the administrative field for over 20 years. Ms. Charest is happily remarried, and has three children. While she is determined to excel in all areas of life, writing remains her passion. Ms. Charest won the 2001 Communication Arts Showcase ‘In the Noise’ award for creative writing/media. Ms. Charest has also won the May 2003 and 2004 Short Story Garvin Lally Writers Awards.
Ms. Charest is also a freelance non-fiction writer, and has written for several different publishers including Point of View Publications, Blood-Horse Publications, Militaria International Publications, Virgo Publications, Krause Publications, CanPlay of Canada, and Harris Publications. In addition, she has written various newspaper editorials. Her interviewees include a number of remarkable people such as Jim Lehrer of PBS fame, and Canadian playwright David Carley in regards to his staged version of Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman in Canada .
Ms. Charest’s first version of her play Potato Chips was produced by the Catherine Lindsey Actors/Playwrights Workshop in Darien CT and sponsored by the Darien Arts Center July of 2003. Ms Charest’s play Final Copy was performed by the Catherine Lindsey Actors/Playwrights Workshop in Darien CT June, 2009. Ms. Charest’s play Body Shop is being considered for production by the Catherine Lindsey Actors/Playwrights Workshop in Darien CT next summer, 2010. Ms. Charest’s plays Potato Chips, Final Copy, and Body Shop are all being considered for production in September, 2009 at the Palace Theatre, connected with Colgate University , in Hamilton , New York .
Ms. Charest’s most recent work of fiction Little Man has been published in the Spring 2009 issue of Tangent Literary Arts Magazine.
Ms. Charest is lobbying for several Domestic Violence Bills, one of which was recently introduced in New Jersey Legislature.
Chung Chin-Yi is a doctoral candidate at the National University of Singapore. Her research centers on the relationship between deconstruction and phenomenology. She has published in Nebula, Ol3media and the Indian review of World literature in English, SKASE Literary Journal,.She is a teaching assistant at the National University of Singapore. She has presented papers on the Beckett centenaries in 2006 in Denmark and Ireland and recently at the Theory Culture and Society 25th anniversary conference.
Lisa M. Cronkhite has published work in Poetry Salzburg Review, Bible Advocate, Combat Magazine, Clark Street Review, Salome Magazine, The Penwood Review, Scrap & Stamp Arts Magazine, The Shepherd, Soul Fountain and Fighting Chance Magazine. She is currently taking a writer’s course for children based in Connecticut.
Lisa currently resides, here in the U.S. with her husband and two children. She suffers from the Bipolar disorder and writes as a coping skill in the hopes for better understanding.
Carl Davenport is an Atlanta writer who currently makes his home in the Washington D.C. area. He received his Masters in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh PA.
Nicelle Davis lives in Lancaster California with her husband James and their son J.J. She received her MFA from the University of California, Riverside. She teaches at Antelope Valley College. Her poems are forthcoming in A cappella Zoo, Illya’s Honey, Moulin, PANK, Redactions, Trancurrents and Verdad.
My poetry has appeared in over two hundred different publications including AGNI, Caliban, Chicago Review, Conduit, Cream City Review, gutcult, h_ngm_n, Hotel Amerika, Killing the Buddha, lift, Mudfish, New Orleans Review, and Third Coast as well as the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2000), Place of Passage: Contempoary Catholic Poetry (Story Line Press, 2000), and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader (Black Sparrow Press, 1999). Work is also forthcoming in Boston Review, Coconut, failbetter, Salamander, and Superstition Review. Four books total: Over Easy (chapbook—Minotaur Press), Review (Kettle of Fish Press), and The Great Apology (chapbook--Oyster Riv er Press for which I also edited Under the Legislature of Stars—62 N ew Hampshire Poets). And the latest, (If This Is the) New World, just published this year with March Street Press. This past April I was selected as the seventh Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Renee Emerson earned her MFA from Boston University. She recently won
the Academy of American Poets prize, and her work has been published
in Tar River Poetry, Keyhole Publications, The Blue Earth Review, The
American Literary Review, The Santa Clara Review, and various others.
She currently lives in Kentucky with her husband Bryan, where she
works as a secretary and is poetry editor for The Basilica Review.
Joe Flood is a writer from Washington, DC, who appreciates the ironic comedy of that city. In addition to writing short stories, he has written articles that have appeared in The Washington Post, The Hill Rag and elsewhere.His screenplay, MOUNT PLEASANT, won the Film DC Screenwriting Competition, finished in the top 15% of the Nicholl Fellowships and made it to the second round of the Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition. He has also written two short films as part of the 48 Hour Film Project and edited the script of an indie feature-length comedy that filmed in DC.
You can learn more about him at http://joeflood.com
Trina Gaynon, a graduate of the MFA in writing program at the University of San Francisco, relocated to southern California for love, not the air. Currently she volunteers with WriteGirl, an organization providing workshops and mentors for young women in high school who are interested in writing. Recent publications include Poetry East, Yemassee, Natural Bridge, and the anthology Bombshells:War Stories and Poems by Women on the Homefront.
Steve Goerger's work has been featured in Ampersand Review, Dispatch Litareview, The South Dakota Review and The Portland Review.
Arlan Hess is a Lecturer at Washington & Jefferson College where she teaches Literature and Creative Writing. She received her MFA from Vermont College and, in 2004, she founded Paper Street, an on-line journal of poetry and flash fiction.
Leland James was a recent winner of the Portland Pen Poetry Contest and the Writers’ Forum Short Poem contest. He was runner up for the Fish International Poetry Prize and received the Franklin-Chistoph Merit Award for poetry. His poems and short fiction have placed or received honorable mentions in several other poetry contests, including the St. Louis Writer’s Guild, Tom Howard, NewMillennium Writers, and By Line. His work has appeared in publications in the US, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Israel, including Reach Poetry, Magma, joyful, Inspirit, Ruminate, Harûah,Barnwood International Poetry Mag, Voices of Israel, Shine, Osprey Journal, Cyclamens and Swords, The Dawntreader, Umbrella, A Journal of Kindred Poetry and Prose, The Enigmatist, The Delinquent, and Carillon Magazine.
Michael Lee Johnson is a poet and freelance writer from Itasca, Illinois. His brand new poetry chapbook with pictures From Which Place the Morning Rises and his new photo version of The Lost American: From Exile to Freedom are available at: http://stores.lulu.com/promomanusa. The original version of The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom, can be found at: http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0-595-46091-7. He has been published in over 22 countries. Email: promomanusa@gmail.com. The author is also editor/publisher of four poetry sites, all open for submission, which can be found at his website: http://poetryman.mysite.com/. All of his books are now available on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=michael+lee+johnson.
Toshiya Kamei is the translator of The Curse of Eve and Other Stories (2008) by Liliana Blum and La Canasta: An Anthology of Latin American Women Poets (2008), as well as selected works by Édgar Omar Avilés.
Recent poems and essays appear or are due out in Agni online, Cold Mountain Review, Prick of the Spindle, American Book Review, Knock, Drunken Boat, and New Madrid. My first book of poems , MadFlights, appeared in 2002 from Ashland Poetry Press. Other excerpts from Paradise have appeared or will appear in Blue Moon Review, Agni Online, Provincetown Arts, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Sentence, and Artful Dodge.
JBMulligan has had poems and stories in dozens of magazines, including recently, Blue Unicorn, Freshwater, Argestes, Loch Raven Review, Doorknobs & Bodypaint and Aunt Chloe, and two chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, and has appeared in the anthology Inside Out: A Gathering of Poets (http://www.geocities.com/anneyohn2003/index.htm)
Nichols' past work has appeared in The Distillery, et cetera, Harbinger, Product, and Texas Review, and I have stories forthcoming from Squid Quarterly and Trailer Park Quarterly. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippiin Hattiesburg. |
Pamela Johnson Parker is a certified medical language specialist and adjunct instructor of poetry at Murray State University. Her recent poems and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming inAnti-, 6 Sentences, qarrtsiluni, The New Madrid Review, Broadsided,Pebble Lake Review, Muscadine Lines, Holly Rose Review, and The Binnacle. She is a current Pushcart Prize nominee.
Francis Raven is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple University. His books include 5-Haifun: Of Being Divisible (Blue Lion Books, 2008), Shifting the Question More Complicated (Otoliths, 2007),Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox 2005) and the novel, Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005). His poetry has been published in Bath House, Chain, Big Bridge, Bird Dog, Mudlark, Caffeine Destiny, and Spindrift among others. His critical work can be found in Jacket, Logos, Clamor, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Electronic Book Review, The Emergency Almanac, The Morning News, The Brooklyn Rail, 5 Trope, In These Times, The Fulcrum Annual, Rain Taxi and Flak. Francis lives in Washington DC; you can check out more of his work at his website:http://www.ravensaesthetica.com/.
Megan N. Risley is a senior Christian theology major at Seattle Pacific University, where she has studied for the past two years after transferring from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She's been a certified scuba diver for eleven years (her favorite dive spot is Cozumel, Mexico but dreams of diving the Great Barrier Reef), marched in her high school and college bands with an alto saxophone for 6 years (and can play the flute, piano and clarinet as well as all other forms of the saxophone), and has carried the dream of becoming a writer since she picked up a pen. Megan currently lives in Seattle, Washington where she passionately involves herself in her church community, finds ways to care for creation beyond simply recycling and taking shorter showers, and shamelessly loves her big, black cat "Norris" whom she adopted from a shelter in February of 2007.
Colleen Shaddox’s news reporting and essays have appeared on National Public Radio and in The New York Times, The Washington Post and many other venues. Her poetry has been published in the Connecticut River Review and Pine Island Journal. She also is a communication consultant for non-profit groups, particularly ones that advocate for children. She lives in Hamden, Connecticut, with her husband and son.
Pushcart Prize nominee Beate Sigriddaughter has published prose and poetry in many magazine and ezines. Her most recent book, a collection of stories and opinions of a philosophical white unicorn, The Unicorn And… was published in 2008. She is fiction editor at Moondance, www.moondance.org, and has established a Glass Woman Prize (details at www.sigriddaughter.com) to honor authentic women’s voices.
Kaye Spivey is a undergraduate at Eastern Washington University majoring in Creative Writing with a poetry focus. Although hoping to eventually be a published novelist, she currently focuses on writing poetry and short stories. She loves the changes in the seasons and foggy evenings which inspire her poetry. Her other writing can be found at www.sksuncloudspace.webs.com.
Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and son. He has been published in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. His novels Tatterdemalion (2008) and Amphisbaena (2009), both through Cauliay, are widely available in print. A third novel, A Fine Young Day, is forthcoming in Summer 2010. He tries hard.
Richie Swanson has lived simply in a boathouse on the Upper Mississippi River since 1987. Robert Olen Butler (1993 Pulitzer Prize for Literature) tutored him in the art of fiction from 1991 to 1992. He studied journalism at Bowling Green State University , Ohio , but his personal wisdom derives from exploring North America by bicycle from 1977 to 2005. He recently completed a five-month chronicle of Upper Mississippi birdlife at www.RiverBird-Blog.com, affiliated with National Geographic Online Store and Thayer Birding.
His novel The Trouble with Becoming an Aunt won the 2000 Peace Writing Award for unpublished novel, granted by PeaceHope, James R. Bennett, professor emeritus, U. of Arkansas . Excerpts appeared in Transnational-Perspectives.org. and other journals.
His wildlife-related nonfiction has appeared in Mississippi Monitor, Oregon Coast Magazine, Birder’s World, Western Birder, High Country News, Gloria Mundi and Bird Watcher’s Digest. You may find most of his work at www.WarblingRichie.com.
Eric Valles is an English teacher at the National University of Singapore High School. He has had significant work in journalistic writing (for Taiwan News, Asian Infrastructure Monthly and the Far Eastern Economic Review), creative writing (Muse Apprentice Guild, Writing Macao, Wickedness.Net) and education (e.g., Hwa Chong Institution (College) in Singapore ).
Changming Yuan grew up in rural China, authored three books before moving to Canada, and currently teaches writing in Vancouver. Yuan's poetry has appeared (or is forthcoming) in about 150 literary publications worldwide, including Barrow Street, Canadian Literature, Exquisite Corpse, Literary Review of Canada and London Magazine.
