Ray Gonzalez is the author of Cool Auditor: Prose Poems (forthcoming 2009), Renaming the Earth: Personal Essays (2008), and nine other books of poetry including Consideration of the Guitar (2005), The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (2002), a winner of a 2003 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, Cabato Sentora (1999); and The Heat of Arrivals (1996), a winner of a 1997 PEN/Josephine Miles Book Award.  He is the author of two other books of nonfiction: Memory Fever (1999), a memoir about growing up in the Southwest, and The Underground Heart (2002), which received the 2003 Carr P. Collins/Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Book of Nonfiction.  He is also the author of two books of short stories, The Ghost of John Wayne (2001) and Circling the Tortilla Dragon (2002).  His poetry has appeared in the 1999, 2000, and 2003 editions of The Best American Poetry and in The Pushcart Prize: Best of Small Presses 2000.  He is the editor of twelve anthologies, most recently No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 Poets.  He has served as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review for twenty-five years and founded LUNA, a poetry journal, in 1998.  He received a Lifetime Acheivement Award in Literature from the Border Regional Library Association in 2003 and is a Full Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. 

Alan Michael Parker is the author of five collections of poems, Days Like Prose, The Vandals, Love Song with Motor Vehicles, A Peal of Sonnets, and the just-released Elephants & Butterflies (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008), as well as a novel, Cry Uncle. He is also editor of The Imaginary Poets, co-editor of The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse, and editor for North America of Who’s Who in 20th Century World Poetry. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Pleiades, and The Yale Review, among other magazines; his prose appears regularly in journals including The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker and The San Francisco Chronicle. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Pushcart Prize and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Alan Michael Parker teaches at Davidson College, where he is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing, and at Queens University, where he is a Core Faculty member in the low-residency M.F.A. program. Alan Michael Parker lives in Davidson, NC, with his wife, the painter Felicia van Bork, and their son, Eli.

Lia Purpura’s King Baby won the 2007 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books and was published in 2008. Her collection of essays, On Looking, published by Sarabande Press in August 2006, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. From that collection, “Glaciology” was awarded a 2005 Pushcart Prize, and was a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays, 2005; “Autopsy Report” was a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays, 2004. In 2004 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose.  Increase, her first collection of essays, won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2000.  Her collection of poems, Stone Sky Lifting, won the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award and was published in 2000 as well. She is also the author of The Brighter the Veil (winner of the Towson University Prize in Literature/Poetry), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash, translated on a Fulbright year in Poland. Her poems and essays appear in many magazines, including Agni Review, DoubleTake, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Orion,  Parnassus: Poetry in Review and Ploughshares. A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow in Poetry, Lia Purpura is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA Program in Tacoma, WA. 

Marianne Boruch has taught at Purdue since 1987 and directed the M.F.A. Program since its beginning in 1987 until 2005. Her work includes six collections of poetry—Poems New & Selected,  A Stick that Breaks and Breaks and Moss Burning (Oberlin College Press, 2004, 1997, 1995); Descendant and View from the Gazebo (Wesleyan, 1989, 1985)—and two books of essays on poetry, In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations and Poetry’s Old Air. Her poems and essays have been published in such places as The New Yorker, The Nation, Iowa Review, The Georgia Review and have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, 1997, Boomer Girls, Poets of the New Century, Poets Reading: The field Symposia, and elsewhere. Her awards include two Pushcart Prizes, the Terrence DePres Award from Parnassus, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her chapbook, Ghost and Oar, came out in October 2007 from Red Dragonfly Press, and includes pieces written when she was an Artist-in-Residence at Isle Royale National Park. Marianne Boruch published her sixth collection of poetry, Grace, Fallen from (Wesleyan University Press) in February 2008.

25.February.2009 Silas House Silas House is the author of the novels Clay’s Quilt (2001),  A Parchment of Leaves (2002), The Coal Tattoo (2004), and the play The Hurting Part (2005).  His writing has been widely acclaimed and is known for its keen insights into the natural world and human nature.  His work is the recipient of two Kentucky Novel of the Year Awards, the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Chaffin Award, and many others.  He is a two-time finalist for both the Southeast Booksellers Award and the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize.  His writing has been published in such magazines as The Oxford American, Bayou, The Southeast Review, Night Train, The Beloit Fiction Journal, The Louisville Review, Wind,  and many others. House was recently commissioned to write a play for the Lexington Theatre Guild and is currently working on his fifth novel while he awaits the publication of his fourth, Eli the Good, which will be out in Spring 2009 from Candlewick Books.  His play The Hurting Part was published in July 2008.  A nonfiction book, Something’s Rising, will be published in 2009 as well.  House lives in Eastern Kentucky, where he was born and raised.

Alex Kuo holds a B.A. from Knox College and an M.F.A. from The University of Iowa. More than three hundred-and-fifty of his poems, short stories, photographs and essays have appeared in magazines and newspapers—most recently in amerasia journal, Ploughshares, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Post Road, Piano Journal--and in anthologies such as Craig Lesley’s Dreamers and Desperadoes, Ishmael Reed’s From Totems to Hip=Hop, and Andre Codrescu’s American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century.    He has been an administrator and a teacher of writing, literature and ethnic studies for more than forty-five years at several American colleges and universities as well as in China at Peking University, Beijing Forestry University, Jilin University, Fudan University, and Hong Kong’s Baptist University. During this period he has received three National Endowment for the Arts awards, and grants from the United Nations and the Idaho Commission for the Arts for background research in China for his novel Long River. In 1991-2 he taught in China as a Senior Fulbright Scholar, and in 1997-8 in Hong Kong as the Lingnan Scholar in American Studies. He was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency for 2003-4. He was Writer-in-Residence for Mercy Corps in 2002-3, and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Knox College in the spring term of 2004. In 2008 Fudan University invited him to be its first Distinguished Writer-in-Residence. He has worked and lived almost his entire adult life in the American West. His most recent books are This Fierce Geography (poems/1999), Lipstick (short stories/2001) which received the American Book Award in 2002, and Panda Diaries (novel/2006).

Joan Burbick was born in Chicago and has lived for the last thirty years on the West Coast. She received her B. A. from Boston College, an M. A. and Ph. D. from Brandeis University and a second M. A. from Wesleyan University. She has written four books and numerous articles and reviews on nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and culture. Her writings include literary critiicism, cultural studies, nonfiction, and poetry. She is a full professor of English and American Studies at Washington State University where she has held two endowed professorships in English and Liberal Arts. She has also been the Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and a Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Center for Humanities, Wesleyan University. In 2004, she completed a month residency at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy. She has given readings and papers throughout the United States, Europe, China, and the Middle East. After the release of Gun Show Nation in the fall of 2006, she gave readings on gun culture throughout the United States, including the Harvard Medical School, The Friends Center in Philadelphia, and the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., She has also discussed her recent book on over twenty public radio stations in the United States and England. In the spring of 2008, she was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, Poland. During this period, she give readings and lectures in both Poland and Germany. In the spring of 2009, she will be the Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence in American Studies at Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois.

8.May.2009 Adam Clay Adam Clay is the author of The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). His second book, The Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. He has published two chapbooks, Canoe (Horse Less Press, 2006) and As Complete as a Thought Can Be (Cannibal Books, 2008), and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Ploughshares, Bat City Review, CutBank, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. Clay co-edits Typo Magazine and lives in Michigan.