Don Berger's poems and prose have appeared in The New Republic, Slate, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Ironwood, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, and other magazines including some from Berlin, Leipzig, and Budapest.  Quality Hill, his first book, was published by Lost Roads Publishers (editors C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander).  A bilingual edition of a second collection, The Long Time, is close to being accepted by Thedel von Wallmoden (Wallstein Verlag) in Erlangen, Germany.  For the past eighteen years he's taught writing and literature at the University of Maryland and, for the past ten years, also at Montgomery College.

George Bishop's latest work appears in New Plains Review and Melusine. New work will be included in Naugatuck River Review and The Penwood Review. Bishop is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Old Machinery from Aldrich Publishing. He attended Rutgers University and now lives and writes in Kissimmee, Florida.

Lavina Blossom grew up in rural Michigan and now lives in Riverside, California.  She divides her creative hours between poetry and painting (primarily collage and mixed media).  She has a blog focusing on her creative process as a visual artist:  http://www.lavinablossom.com/blog.  She has an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of California, Irvine, and her poems have appeared in various journals, including The Paris Review, The Literary Review, and Kansas Quarterly, as well as in the online journal Poemeleon.  Her short story "Blue Dog" appeared in the online journal Women Writers.  She is an Associate Editor of Poetry for Inlandia: a Literary Journey.

Judy Brackett's stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Other Voices, Alaska Quarterly Review, Squaw Valley Review, The Fourth River, James Dickey Review, Wisconsin Review, THEODATE, Sierra Songs & Descants (Hip Pocket Press), and The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets (Backwaters Press), as well as other publications. She is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and has taught creative writing and English literature and composition at Sierra College. A native of Nebraska, she has lived in California's northern Sierra Nevada foothills for many years.

Shirley J. Brewer (Baltimore, MD) is a poet, educator, and workshop facilitator. Publication credits include: The Cortland Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Pearl, Comstock Review, Loch Raven Review, Passager, Manorborn, and other journals. Her poetry chapbook, A Little Breast Music, was published in 2008 by Passager Books.  A second book of poems, After Words, was recently published (February, 2013) by Apprentice House/Loyola University.  M.A. Creative Writing/Publishing Arts, University of Baltimore, 2005.  www.apoeticlicense.com

Mark Jay Brewin, Jr., won the 2012 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize of the University of Utah Press for his first book manuscript, Scrap Iron. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review, New Madrid, The Hollins Critic, Copper Nickel, Southern Humanities Review, Poet Lore, North American Review, Greensboro Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA program of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

Emily Rose Cole is an emerging poet, folksinger, and MFA hopeful currently residing in Indianapolis. Her debut solo album, "I Wanna Know," was released in May of 2012.  Her work has appeared in several publications, including Amethyst Arsenic, Punchnel's, Third Wednesday, The Eunoia Review, and The Rusty Nail.

Philip Dacey was the subject of our Closer Look series in Innisfree 14:

http://tinyurl.com/PhilipDacey

Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education at The New School in New York City. Norman Mailer wrote that Dodds' novel The Last Bad Job showed "something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people." Dodds' novels What Smiled at Him and Another Broken Wizard have been widely acclaimed by critics and readers alike. His screenplay, Refreshment—A Tragedy, was named a semi-finalist in 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. Two books of Dodds' poetry—The Last Man on the Moon and The Blue Blueprint—are available from Medium Rare Publishing. Dodds' writing has also appeared in a number of periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal Online, Folio, Explosion-Proof, Block Magazine, The Architect's Newspaper, The Main Street Rag, The Reno News & Review and Lungfull! Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha.

Phillip A. Ellis is a freelance critic, poet and scholar. His chapbooks, The Flayed Man and Symptoms Positive and Negative, are available. He is working on a collection for Diminuendo Press. Another has been accepted by Hippocampus Press. He is the editor of Melaleuca.

Susan Mitchell Evans is a poet and fiction-writer living in Athens, Georgia.  Her work has appeared most recently in Connecticut River Review and Athens Magazine.  She teaches Advanced Placement English Literature and oversees an annual creative writing festival. 

Roger Fogelman was born in New York City in 1940. From an early age, he wrote poetry and for the next 45 odd years, he has continued to produce poems on various subjects, such as nature and the human condition. He won the Morrison Poetry Prize at Cornell University and the American Academy of Poets Award at the University of Virginia. His work has been published in the American Academy of Poets' Commemorative Volume, 1965; the Cornell Writer; and the Nassau Review. Dr. Fogelman graduated from Cornell University in 1960 and received an MA and PhD in English from the University of Virginia. He also holds an MS in TESL from Queens College. He currently resides in New York City.

Lucia Galloway is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Venus and Other Losses (Plain View, 2010) and a chapbook, Playing Outside (Finishing Line, 2005).  Her poems appear in print and electronic journals, including The Comstock Review, The Sow's Ear, Innisfree, Inlandia, Poemeleon, Untitled Country Review, The Dirty Napkin, The Prose Poem Project, qarrtsiluni, and Stirring, among the more recent.   Awards include the Robert Haiduke Prize from the Bread Loaf School of English and first- and second-place prizes from Artists Embassy International.  "Found Horses" won Honorable Mention in The MacGuffin National Poet Hunt (2005), and other poems have been recognized with Pushcart or Best of the Net nominations.  Galloway  co-chairs the reading series, "Fourth Sundays, Poetry at the Claremont Library."

Joshua Gray is a native of the Washington DC area, but recently moved to India with his family. He was the DC Poetry Examiner for Examiner.com for two years, where he wrote reviews of poetry books by local poets as well as articles on the local poetry scene. Once upon a time he "busted" (reviewed) poems on his blog Poembuster, but gave that up a few years ago; however, he now reviews a poem a month for Poetsandartists.com.

David Brendan Hopes is professor of literature and language at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, an actor, painter, and widely produced playwright. He is the author of the Juniper Prize and Saxifrage Prize-winning book, The Glacier’s Daughters, and of Blood Rose (Urthona Press, 1997), the Pulitzer and National-Book Award-nominated A Childhood in the Milky Way (Akron University Press), and the volumes of nature essays, A Sense of the Morning (1999) and Bird Songs of the Mesozoic, from Milkweed Editions. The latest, full-length poetry collection A Dream of Adonis appeared from Pecan Grove Press. His works has appeared in periodicals such as The New Yorker, Audubon, Christopher Street, Connecticut Review, The Sun.

Kinzy Janssen was admitted to several selective poetry workshops at the University of Iowa as an undergraduate, but she was especially influenced by visiting professor, poet Mary Ruefle, who was teaching nonfiction at the time. Her poetry earned an honorable mention in the Wisconsin Arts, Letters, & Sciences 2010 Poetry Contest and she has read and discussed her poetry on the radio, in art galleries, and in particularly welcoming bars.

Carol Jennings was born and grew up in western New York State.  She attended The College of Wooster, and received her B.A., M.A., and J.D. from New York University.  She worked as an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection for more than 30 years, retiring at the end of 2011.  She has participated in numerous poetry workshops at NYU, the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Md., and Chautauqua.  In addition, she served on the staff of The New York Quarterly in the early years of its publication.  Her poems have appeared in The New York Quarterly, Potomac Review, Oberon, Amelia, Chautauqua, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and two anthologies.

Elaine Magarrell, teacher, artist, and writer, was raised in Clinton, Iowa.  She is the author of two prize-winning books of poetry: On Hogback Mountain (Washington Writers' Prize) and Blameless Lives (The Word Works Prize).  Her work has appeared in Passager, Poet Lore, The Hollins Critic, and elsewhere.  One of her poems is included in Bedford Introduction to Literature and Bedford Introduction to Poetry.  Honors include numerous grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  She lives in Washington, DC.  

Allan Peterson's fourth book, Fragile Acts, one of the five finalists for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award, is the second title in the new McSweeney's Poetry Series. His last book is As Much As from Salmon Press, 2011. Other books are All the Lavish in Common (2005 Juniper Prize), Anonymous Or (2001 Defined Providence Prize) and five chapbooks, notably Omnivore, winner of the 2009 Boom Prize from Bateau Press. His next book, Precarious, is forthcoming from 42 Miles Press in 2014. His poems also appear in Innisfree 6 and Innisfree 8.

Roger Pfingston has new poems in Passager and Naugatuck River Review. His chapbook, A Day Marked for Telling, was published in 2011 by Finishing Line Press.

A physician and teacher of art history, Michael Salcman is the author of two collections: The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises), nominated for The Poet’s Prize, and The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises, 2011). His anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors and diseases is forthcoming. He has served as chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and as president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. In addition to Innisfree, recent poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hopkins Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Ontario Review, and New York Quarterly. 

Catherine Simpson, a cellist who lives in Santa Barbara, has been previously published in the Big River Poetry Review, Right Hand Pointing, Spectrum, Serving House Journal, This Great Society, Four and Twenty Magazine, Step Away Magazine, and Into the Teeth of the Wind.

Katherine Smith is the author of one book of poetry, Argument by Design (Washington Writers' Publishing House, 2003).  Her work appears in Southern Review, Ploughshares, Louisiana Literature, Poetry, Louisville Review, Appalachian Heritage (where her poem "Shipment" won the Denny Plattner Award for Outstanding poem in 2008), Poems and Plays, Measure, and Appalachian Journal.

Robert Joe Stout's fiction and poetry has appeared in the anthologies Southwest, New Southern Poetry, and Survivors of the Invention. A novel, Miss Sally, was published by Bobbs-Merrill and another, Running Out the Hurt, in 2012 by Black Rose. He also has published the nonfiction books Why Immigrants Come to America and Blood of the Serpent: Mexican Lives from Praeger and Algora respectively. He currently lives in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Matthew Thorburn is the author of three books of poems, including This Time Tomorrow (Waywiser Press, 2013) and Every Possible Blue (CW Books, 2012). He lives and works in New York City. For more information, visit www.matthewthorburn.net.