Bios

Keith J. Powell is a graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. His plays have appeared in Elements of English 12, Dramatics Magazine, and at Playscripts, Inc. He is the Managing Editor of Switchback.

Emily Leithauser is a graduate of Boston University’s M.F.A. program. Her poems have recently appeared in Measure and Unsplendid, and a Baudelaire translation of hers was published in Literary Imagination. While in Boston, she worked as an editorial assistant to the poetry editor at The Atlantic. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is a Ph.D. student in English at Emory University. She studies late 19th and early 20th century poetry.

Joanna Pearson’s poetry has appeared recently in Best New Poets 2010, Blackbird, The New Criterion, River Styx, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere.  She recently completed both her MD and her M.F.A. at the Johns Hopkins University, and is now in the midst of her residency training as a physician at Johns Hopkins.  She lives in Baltimore with her husband, Matthew.

Nicholas Friedman’s poetry has appeared in several journals in the U.S., England, and Ireland. Newer work has appeared or is forthcoming in PN Review, American Arts Quarterly, The Sewanee Theological Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A life-long resident of Upstate New York, he works as assistant editor of EPOCH Magazine.

John Drury is the author of Burning the Aspern Papers and The Disappearing Town, both published by Miami University Press. His new collection of poems, The Refugee Camp, is forthcoming from Turning Point Books in Fall 2011. He has also written The Poetry Dictionary and Creating Poetry, both published by Writer’s Digest Books. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, two Ohio Arts Council grants, an Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review.

Traci Chee is an always-writer and sometimes-teacher. She has a graduate degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State and is looking forward to earning her teaching credential in 2012. In recent years her work has been published in The Big Stupid Review and ABJECTIVE, and her collection of short stories, Consonant Sounds for Fish Songs, is forthcoming from Aqueous Books. She lives in California, where she keeps a fast dog and a weekly blog. She likes fish and ships.

David Alpaugh has lived in California for 45 years but has yet to lose his New Jersey accent. His collection, Counterpoint, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press. He has been a finalist for Poet Laureate of California. His poems have appeared in Evergreen Review, The Formalist, The Hypertexts, Light, Raintown Review, Poetry, and many other journals.

Steven Winn’s work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Florida Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA and elsewhere. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and spent 28 years as a critic of arts and culture at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Heather Hallberg Yanda teaches in the English Department at Alfred University in the hills of upstate New York. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Sojourners, The White Pelican Review, and The Yale Journal of Medical Humanities among others. Her first collection of poems, The Neighbors’ Beautiful Daughters, is currently looking for a publisher.

Trina L. Drotar, a San Francisco native currently residing in Sacramento, comes to poetry through prose, art, music, and design. She is working on a collection of prose and poetry, Night Garden, for her MA thesis. She is the current editor of Poetry Now and former editor of Calaveras Station. Her work has appeared on Medusa’s Kitchen and Ophidian, and in WTF, Word Riot, Rattle, and Brevities.