Absofacto is the solo musical stylings of Jonathan Visger of the band Mason Proper.

Craig Blais’s work has appeared in Best New Poets, Spoon River Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sentence, and The Pinch. His first-book manuscript, About Crows, was a finalist for the 2010 Walt Whitman Award. He lives in Tallahassee, where he is a PhD student at Florida State University.

Botany is the moniker for electronic/pop sound creator Spencer Stephenson.

Joe Bueter is a former poetry editor of Ecotone. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Canteen, Parcel, Cave Wall, and Tar River Poetry.

Jim Clark is the Elizabeth H. Jordan Professor of Southern Literature and Chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina.  He was born in Byrdstown, Tennessee, and educated at Vanderbilt University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the University of Denver.  His books include Notions: A Jim Clark Miscellany, Dancing on Canaan’s Ruins, Handiwork, and Fable in the Blood: The Selected Poems of Byron Herbert Reece.  He has also released a CD of original poems and Appalachian folk music, Buried Land, and two CDs, Wilson and Words to Burn, with his folk-rock band The Near Myths.  In November 2010 he released a second solo CD, The Service of Song, featuring his musical settings of twelve poems by the north Georgia “farmer-poet” Byron Herbert Reece.

Christopher DeWeese is the author of The Black Forest, which will be published by Octopus Books this December. His poems have been published in Fence, jubilat, and Tin House. He lives in Western Massachusetts.

Dudes Die are a three piece shambling, psychedelic, garage pop band out of Austin, TX.

Phil Estes has poems forthcoming in DIAGRAM, elimae, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Redivider, and others. He is the author of the chapbook Gem City/Fountain City (Rabbit Catastrophe, 2009) and two forthcoming: Tommy Glorious and the Girls of Wichita (Mitzvah) and Children of Reagan (Rabbit Catastrophe). He lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Tarfia Faizullah‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and a Fulbright Fellowship.

Ori Fienberg works as the Lead Writing Specialist for Foundation Year, a Northeastern University program for inner-city Boston high school and GED program graduates. He’s had work published a variety of places including Diagram, Kill Author, and Subtropics.  Among other things, he enjoys eating caramel at midnight.  You can find musings and links to other publications at ojconfesses.blogspot.com.

The Great Curve is a three piece experimental/ambient rock band from Austin, TX.

Miriam Bird Greenberg is a Wallace Stegner Fellow and 2010 Ruth Lilly Fellowship recipient, though in the past she’s taught EFL in rural Japan, been thrown off a freight train by Canadian rail cops, and flown kites in Tiananmen Square. She lives in Oakland, CA.

Jenny Johnson‘s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, and The Collagist. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College, and she has been the recipient of a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Currently, she is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh.

Ben Loory lives in Los Angeles, in a house on top of a hill. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker. His book Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day is coming July 26 from Penguin Books.

Robin McLean was a lawyer, then potter in Sutton, Alaska for 15 years before attending the MFA program at UMass, Amherst. She currently lives in Bristol, New Hampshire.

Andrew Najberg teaches for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His chapbook of poems Easy to Lose was published by Finishing Line Press in 2007, and his poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including Louisville Review, Yemassee, Bat City Review, and forthcoming issues of North American Review and Artful Dodge.

John A. Nieves has poems published or forthcoming in journals such as: Indiana Review, Redivider, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Copper Nickel and Cincinnati Review. He won the 2011 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and the 2010 Southeast Review AWP Short Poetry contest. He received his M.A. in Creative Writing from USF in 2006. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri.

Oh, Mountain is the solo moniker of Eric Dina, a Floridian musician.

Lori Ostlund’s first collection of stories, The Bigness of the World, received the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda finalist and a 2009 The Story Prize Notable Book. Stories from the collection have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Georgia Review, among other publications. She was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in San Francisco but is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is at work on a novel and more stories.

Keiler Roberts was born in 1978 in Wisconsin.  After studying art at the University of Wisconsin and Northwestern University, she made paintings and drawings for ten years, and then happily switched to comics.  She now lives in Evanston, Illinois and teaches at DePaul University in Chicago. Her comic “Powdered Milk” appeared in Spring 2010 Nashville Review.

Nick St. John is a writer artist and peach farmer living in rural California.

Trilobite, the nom de band of writer Mark Ray Lewis, formed in 2006 in Albuquerque after songs accumulated as Lewis doodled and procrastinated from “stacking words” (prose writing).  The band is currently on hiatus from performing live as Lewis and bassist Michael Grimes lock horns in battle to grow the largest pumpkin in the state of New Mexico.

Sarah Vap is the author of three books of poetry. Her most recent, Faulkner’s Rosary, was released in 2010 by Saturnalia Books. Her fourth collection, Iris, Starless: a honeymoon, is forthcoming from Saturnalia in 2012. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula with her family.

Elizabeth Wade holds degrees from Davidson College and the University of Alabama. Her poetry and prose appear in Kenyon Review Online, the Rumpus, Oxford American, and others. She lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Patrick Whitfill, since graduating from Texas Tech in the spring of 2008, has been a writer-in-resident, a bartender, house painter, line cook, waiter, barback, freelance editor, lecturer, and, most recently, a clerk at an independent bookstore in Spartanburg, SC. His most recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Tar River Poetry, The Grist, Best New Poets, Lake Effect, and Unsplendid.

Landa wo is an Angolan poet who lives in Germany having previously lived in Ireland, France, Gabon, Congo and England. A poet in exile, Landa wo writes mainly in English and French with the heart oriented to the unknown, dreamed and surely idealized land of Angola. His work has won a number of awards including 1st prize in Metro Eireann writing competition judged by Roddy Doyle, Eist poetry competition, Feile Filiochta international poetry competition. His poetry appears in literary journals in Ireland, UK, South Africa and US (Boyne Berries Literary Magazine, The New Contrast, Kweli, Ropes, Weyfarers). Landa wo’s work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Landing Places Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2010), Longtemps je me suis…( Iroli Editor, 2009).