Contributors

Geoffrey Becker’s most recent books of fiction are Hot Springs and Black Elvis. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at Towson University. He often gets up in the middle of the night to study YouTube videos of obscure guitarists or to shake out his seven-year-old son’s dream catcher.

Michelle Cacho-Negrete lives in Portland, Maine, where she works with writing students online and in person. Her essay “Stealing” appeared in the anthology Best of the Net 2011.

Brian Doyle is the ink-stained, testy editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon. His sea novel The Plover will be published in April 2014.

Tony Hoagland’s poetry collections include What Narcissism Means to Me and Donkey Gospel. His essay “Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America” was published this year in Harper’s online. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Brenda Miller’s most recent essay collection is Listening against the Stone. She teaches English and serves as editor-in-chief of the Bellingham Review at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. Recently she discovered the joy of singing and even performed “Moon River” in front of her voice class.

Carolyn Miller lives in San Francisco, where she writes, paints, and works as a freelance copyeditor. Her books of poetry are After Cocteau and Light, Moving.

Joan Murray is the author of Looking for the Parade and editor of Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times. She grew up in a loud, congested South Bronx neighborhood and now lives in a quiet, tiny Hudson Valley hamlet in New York. She has changed some names in her essay to protect privacy.

Barbara Lyghtel Rohrer lives in the Ohio River Valley near Cincinnati. Her writing has been published in The Kentucky Post, Cincy, and Cincinnati Business Courier, and she is working on a collection of essays. She was raised Roman Catholic and is now a Universalist “whose concept of God has expanded to include the Sacred Feminine.”

Sy Safransky is editor and publisher of The Sun.

Sarah Pemberton Strong’s most recent novel is The Fainting Room. She lives in Hamden, Connecticut, where she is a self-employed master plumber and a poetry editor at New Haven Review. She says that when her mother, who was a carpenter for many years, read her poem in this issue, she said, “I’m sorry about the breakfasts, but at least I taught you how to use tools.”

Alice Walker is a writer and activist. She’s best known for her 1982 novel, The Color Purple. The novel won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, making her the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction. It was adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 film and a 2005 Broadway musical by the same name.

Rita Bernstein, who has been a photographer for fifteen years, is now painting and drawing and enjoying being a beginner again. She lives in Philadelphia.

Bri Bruce is a photographer, writer, artist, musician, and surfing instructor who lives in Los Gatos, California.

James Carroll’s photographs are included in the collections of the New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He lives in New York City.

Rachel J. Elliott lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, and works at The Sun. After playing volleyball in college, she is now revisiting the sport with her daughter, who just made her middle school’s team.

R.A. Friedman’s work has appeared in Supplementaire. When not at his job of archiving Yiddish sound recordings, he wanders the streets of Philadelphia with his camera.

Peter Ingrasselino’s photographs have been published in Black & White and Photographer’s Forum. He works as a dialysis nurse and lives in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

Edis Jurĉys lives in Portland, Oregon. A native of Lithuania, he gained most of his experience with photography and video in Russia.

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

Igor Malijevský is a photographer, poet, and short-story writer living in the Czech Republic.

Roger Pfingston began taking photographs in the late 1940s with a Brownie Hawkeye camera. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Scott Tompkins currently teaches film to teenagers. He lives in Leelanau County, Michigan, where he spent the spring wandering the hills in search of morel mushrooms.

Roy Traver is a teacher and the coordinator of the photography and digital-imaging program at Yavapai College in Prescott, Arizona.