Bios

Ron Nyren’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. With Sarah Stone, he is coauthor of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers, (Longman, 2005), published in a trade version as The Longman Guide to Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Writing (Sourcebooks, 2007).

John Venecek served as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1996-1998 during which time he taught English at a small university in Yekaterinburg, Russia – an experience that has been the inspiration of much of his early writing.  John is also a graduate of the Writing Program at DePaul University and has published a short memoir in the Prairie Light Review.  John currently resides in Orlando where he is the Librarian for the Humanities at the University of Central Florida and is affiliated with the Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando.

Steve Gilmartin’s fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Double Room, 14 Hills, 3rd bed, elimae, Mad Hatters' Review, Poemeleon, Drunken Boat, and Eleven Eleven. He works as a freelance editor and lives in Berkeley, California.

Karen Kevorkian has published White Stucco Black Wing (poems). Journals publishing her work include Antioch Review, Fiction International, Five Fingers Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Los Angeles Review, Mississippi Review, Shenandoah, Third Coast, VOLT, Witness, and in chapbooks at Archipelago.com and thedrunkenboat.com. Formerly on the creative writing faculty at the University of Virginia, she now teaches in the English department at UCLA.

Dennis Must is the author of two short story collections: Oh, Don't Ask Why, Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, CA (2007), and Banjo Grease, Creative Arts Book Company, Berkeley, CA (2000). His plays have been performed Off Off Broadway and his fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary reviews. He resides with his wife in Salem, Massachusetts.

Anne-E. Wood's fiction has appeared in Tin House, Agni, New Letters, Karamu Journal, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Other Voices, The Cream City Review, Fourteen Hills Magazine, Beloit Fiction Journal, Fiction Attic, and others. She is the author of the short story collection Two if By Sea, Winner of the 2006 Michael Rubin Chapbook Award. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and teaches writing at Rutgers University, The New Jersey Institute of Technology and The Gotham Writers' Workshop.

Nina Schuyler’s novel, The Painting, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, was named a Best Book by San Francisco Chronicle and nominated for the Northern California Book Award. It’s been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Serbian. Her short story, “Water Babies” won the Santa Clara Review’s Editor’s Choice Prize for Fiction, her short short, “Black Holes” won the Big Ugly Review Short Short Contest for 2008; and she was a finalist in the 2009 Stanford Fiction Contest.

R.S. Gwynn was born in Eden, North Carolina, in 1948. He attended Davidson College, where he played football, twice won the Vereen Bell Award for creative writing, and served as a member of Davidson's championship team on the General Electric College Bowl. After receiving his B.A. in 1969, he did graduate work at the Breadloaf School of English and entered graduate school at the University of Arkansas, earning the M.A. in 1972 and the M.F.A. in 1973. While a student at Arkansas, he received the John Gould Fletcher Award for Poetry.