Contributors

Poe Ballantine’s latest book is 501 Minutes to Christ (Hawthorne Books). He says he recently drove down the street where he grew up, expecting a flood of memories and emotions. Instead he went right past his old house, not even recognizing the ghost that sat under the laurel tree. He lives in Chadron, Nebraska.

David Barsamian lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he is the founder and director of Alternative Radio (www.alternativeradio.org). His books include What We Say Goes, coauthored with Noam Chomsky (Metropolitan), and Original Zinn, coauthored with Howard Zinn (Harper Perennial).

John Frank’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Louisville Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Paddlefish. He is at work on a collection of essays titled Gone Feral, in which he hopes to explain why, while he was growing up, his family’s pets were always attacking people. He lives in Ohio.

W.S. Merwin has written more than thirty books of poetry, translation, and prose. A Buddhist and environmentalist, he often addresses humankind’s separation from nature in his work. His writing has received two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, and in 2010, at the age of eighty-two, Merwin was appointed the Library of Congress’s Poet Laureate. Since the late 1970s he has lived in Hawaii on a former pineapple plantation that he has restored to its original rain-forest state.

Linda McCullough Moore lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she spends every waking moment attempting to find a good home for her latest collection of stories.

Kevin C. Powers served in Iraq with the U.S. Army. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Orleans Review, Poetry, and the New York Quarterly. He is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Texas at Austin. When not thinking about poetry or Italy (where he hopes to live someday) he can be found riding his Royal Enfield motorcycle through the Texas hill country.

Sy Safransky is editor and publisher of The Sun.

Faith Shearin is the author of two books of poetry: The Owl Question (Utah State University Press) and The Empty House (WordTech Communications). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Salamander, and the North American Review, and several of her poems have been read aloud by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. She lives with her husband and daughter in Baltimore, Maryland.

Sparrow lives in an experimental suburban commune in Teaneck, New Jersey. He blogs, but he does not Tweet. Look for his writing on the collective blog We Who Are about to Die (www.wewhoareabouttodie.com).

Lee Strickland’s fiction has been published in StoryQuarterly, the Gettysburg Review, and Other Voices. Her piece in this issue is her first published personal essay and is part of a memoir in progress, for which she is seeking an agent. She teaches writing at StoryStudio Chicago and North Park University and lives in Chicago with her husband and two dogs. On weekends they escape the city to their hundred-year-old farmhouse in Elizabeth, Illinois, where they go tubing down the Apple River.

James Carroll’s first love was baseball. He has been pursuing his second love — photography — for more than forty years. He lives in New York City.

Martin Fishman died in February at the age of seventy-two. His photographs are part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Coney Island in New York.

Brenda Flynn is a photographer, artist, and illustrator living in Ormond Beach, Florida. She dreams of winning the lottery and traveling to Tahiti.

Jesse Gresham graduated in 2009 with a degree in design from Louisiana Tech University. He lives in West Monroe, Louisiana.

Sharon Lee Hart lives and teaches photography in Nashville, Tennessee. She is working on a project about farm-animal sanctuaries.

Julia McHugh is the mother of two daughters and has a twin sister on the East Coast. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

Ken Royce has wrapped up two careers — one in the navy and one in higher education — and now devotes most of his time to photography. He once swam in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

Wendy Stone lives in Putnam, Connecticut.

Mike Voss has worked as a photographer for more than thirty years. He lives in Peotone, Illinois, with his wife, his youngest daughter, and three dogs who are clearly running the household.

Robert Zverina has maintained an online photo journal continuously since 1997, where he posts a “picture of the day” and microdocumentaries of thirty seconds or less. He lives in Seattle, Washington.