Contributors

Chris Bursk’s poetry was first published in The Sun in 1977; he now has six grandchildren and is the author of a collection of poetry about their imaginary friends (and his) titled The Boy with One Wing, which is his tenth book. His awards include the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the Green Rose Prize. He lives in Langhorne Manor, Pennsylvania.

Doug Crandell’s most recent novel is They’re Calling You Home. He lives in Douglasville, Georgia, with his wife, six dogs, seven cats, three sheep, two goats, and sixty chickens.

Ram Dass is an American spiritual teacher. His seminal book is Be Here Now in which he articulates Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.

Gillian Kendall is finally writing full time at the age of fifty-three, since she doesn’t have any other paying work. She lives in Florida, and every item in her home — including the cat and the plants — is secondhand.

Heather Kirn Lanier is author of the memoir Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach For America and the chapbook The Story You Tell Yourself, winner of the 2010 Wick Chapbook Competition for Ohio Poets. She lives in Vermont and blogs about parenting a child with disabilities.

Jennifer Murvin’s work has been published in The Cincinnati Review, Bellingham Review, and Midwestern Gothic. She is a California valley girl living in Springfield, Missouri, where she teaches writing and the graphic novel at Missouri State University.

Davy Rothbart is the creator of Found Magazine, a frequent contributor to public radio’s This American Life, and the author of the essay collection My Heart Is an Idiot and the story collection The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. His documentary film Medora, about a resilient high-school basketball team in rural Indiana, was released nationwide last year. He divides his time between Los Angeles and his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Susan Straight has published eight novels, most recently Between Heaven and Here, which is set in an orange grove. All three of her daughters work at museums, which she thinks could be a world record. She lives in Riverside, California, where she has a one-eyed retriever named Fantasia and a Chihuahua-born fighting hen who is approximately ninety in chicken years.

Cary Tennis loves to begin projects and hates to finish them. Recently he finished a fourteen-year stint as Salon’s advice columnist, which means he can now begin life all over again and take singing lessons this time. He lives in San Francisco.

Gary Thompson is an attorney who represents pro bono detainees imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. He is also an avid runner and ran the Chicago marathon last October in three hours and thirty-eight minutes — his personal best. He lives with his wife and children in Washington, D.C.

Ian Bassingthwaighte is a writer and photographer who has a love for elephants but is terrified of anything with antlers. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Michael Forster Rothbart spent six years as a photojournalist working on projects about Chernobyl and Fukushima, and his new book, Would You Stay?, depicts the people residing near those nuclear-disaster sites. He lives in Oneonta, New York, and takes photographs for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many universities. He tells his side of his brother Davy’s essay “Summit Fever,” also in this issue, at his website: mfrphoto.com.

Edis Jurĉys was born in Lithuania, studied film and photography in Russia, and now lives in Portland, Oregon.

Matt Kollasch recently ended his thirty-year career as a librarian and moved from Warsaw, Poland, to Baku, Azerbaijan.

Kim McAlear is an avid gardener and a soil technician at Cornell University. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Tucker Sharon’s recent photography projects focus on sugarcane harvests, the work of stevedores, and the deforestation of the Peruvian Amazon. He divides his time between Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

M.N. Surratt teaches junior high and high school and lives in Flower Mound, Texas. His work has been published in The Texas Observer and The Dallas Morning News.

Lloyd Wolf lives in Arlington, Virginia. He recently returned from the Middle East, where he was working with writer Carol Grosman on documenting the lives of Jews and Palestinians for a project called Jerusalem Stories.

Natalie Young’s photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She lives in Manhattan Beach, California, with her miniature dachshund, Georgia.