Alyson Foster received her undergraduate degree in creative writing at the University of Michigan where she was the recipient of a Hopwood Award for short fiction. She is presently enrolled in the M.F.A. program at George Mason University where she is a Completion Fellow.  Her work has been published in Smokelong Quarterly and is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, and Glimmer Train.

Lisa Norris’s book Toy Guns won the 1999 Willa Cather Fiction Prize and was published by Helicon Nine Press.  Other stories, poems and essays have been published or are forthcoming in South Dakota Review, Notre Dame Review, Fourth Genre, Ascent and others.  She is an assistant professor at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington.

Anne Panning’s short story collection, Super America, won The 2006 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She has also published a book of short stories, The Price of Eggs, as well as short fiction and nonfiction in places such as Prairie Schooner, Passages North,  Black Warrior Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, Five Points,  West Branch, Brevity and many others.  Anne recently published her first poem, “So,” in 32 Poems. Two of her essays have received notable citation in The 2006 and 2007 Best American Essays.  She has just completed a memoir, Viet*Mom: An American Mother of Two Moves to the Mekong.  She lives in upstate New York with her husband and two children, and teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.   Her website is www.annepanning.com

Alan Feldman’s work has recently appeared in The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, upstreet, Salamander, Smartish Pace, and Artful Dodge.  His most recent collection, A Sail to Great Island (Univ. of Wisconsin, 2004) won the Felix Pollak Prize for Poetry; an early book, The Happy Genius (SUN, 1978) won the Elliston Book Award for the best collection published by a small, independent press in the United States.  He is represented in a number of anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2001 and Best American Erotic Poems 1800 to the Present.  He offers a free drop-in poetry workshop at the Framingham (MA) Public Library and, during the summers, at the Wellfleet (MA) Public Library.

Jonathan Johnson is the author of two books of poetry, Mastodon, 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves (poems from both of which first appeared in this magazine), and the memoir Hannah and the Mountain.  Johnson recently returned from living in Scotland to resume migrations between upper Michigan, Idaho, and Washington, where he teaches in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.

Richard Hoffman is the author of the Half the House: A Memoir, the poetry collections, Without Paradise and Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2009 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club for best book of poems in the preceding two years. He has just published a work of fiction, Interference & Other Stories. His work appears in such magazines as Agni, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, Poetry, Witness and others. He teaches in the Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing at Emerson College, and in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He is currently a Brother Thomas Fellow, an artist’s award administered by The Boston Foundation.

Scott Cairns is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, etc., and both have been anthologized in Best American Spiritual Writing. His most recent poetry collection is Compass of Affection. His spiritual memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, and his translations, Love’s Immensity, appeared in 2007. His book-length essay, The End of Suffering, appeared in 2009. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and is Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair in English at MU.

W.D. Wetherell’s books include the novel Chekhov’s Sister, the story collection The Man Who Loved Levittown, and the memoir, North of Now. Most recently, the novel A Century of November. In l998, he was awarded the Strauss Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, allowing  him to devote five years exclusively to his writing. He lives in rural New England with his family.

Christopher Howell’s Dreamless and Possible: poems New & Selected will be published in spring 2010 by the University of Washington Press.  He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane.

Reg Saner’s essays and poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and more than fifty anthologies, as far afield as Rome and Tokyo. Three of his four poetry collections have won national prizes. The most recent among his several books of nonfiction is Living Large in Nature: A Writer’s Idea of Creationism, forthcoming this spring from the Center for American Places.