JAKE ADAM YORK is the author of Murder Ballads, selected by Jane Satterfield for the Fifth Annual Elixir Press Awards Judge's Prize. His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, Diagram, Octopus, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals as well as in the anthologies Visiting Walt (Iowa University Press, 2003) and Digerati (Three Candles, 2006).

His work has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize and has placed in numerous competitions including the 2004 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize contest, the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award, the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and others.

York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado, he directs an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students.

York is also a contributing editor for Shenandoah, a co-editor of the online journal storySouth and a founding editor of Thicket, an electronic journal dedicated to Alabama writers and Alabama writing. His work of poetic history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry, was published by Routledge in 2005. His scholarship has appeared in The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and his literary essays have appeared in Shenandoah and Florida Humanities Review.
 

Poet, composer of music (Max Able / Abel, Rawls & Hayes) and spoken-word performer (Scapeweavel), L. WARD ABEL lives in rural Georgia, and has been widely published in the U.S. and Europe, including White Pelican Review, The Pedestal, Versal (Netherlands), Juked, Angelface, OpenWide (UK), Ink Pot, Texas Poetry Journal, Kritya (India), and others. His chapbook, Peach Box and Verge, has been recently published by Little
Poem Press. Twenty of his poems are featured, along with an interview, in a recent print issue of erbacce (UK). His new full book of poems, Jonesing For Byzantium, has just been published at UK Authors Press (London). Abel's website is www.universecanoe.com.

LANA HECHTMAN AYERS, originally from Queens, New York, now resides in Kirkland, WA where she is a manuscript consultant, publishes the Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook Series, and runs writing workshops. A Pushcart nominee, she has been awarded honors in the "Discovery" / The Nation Prize and the Rita Dove Poetry Competition. Her poems appear in literary presses such as The Bitter Oleander, Cider Press Review and Natural Bridge. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New England College. Her first chapbook, Love is a Weed, was published by Finishing Line Press, and her first book, Dance From Inside My Bones, won the 2006 Violet Reed Haas Award, and both are available from her website, LanaAyers.com and Amazon.

JON BALLARD'S work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and many others. He has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2007: Lonesome (Pudding House) and Sad Town (Maverick Duck Press). A Michigan native, he currently lives with his family in Mexico City, Mexico.

STEPHEN GARDNER, a recovering academic dean, is G. L. Toole Professor of English at USC Aiken, where he has taught poetry and creative writing for thirty-five years. His poems, fiction, essays, and critical articles have appeared widely in such venues as Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Connecticut Review, Texas Review, Cimarron Review, Southern Poetry Review, and California Quarterly. He served as editor of both kudzu and The Devil's Millhopper magazines and is the author of This Book Belongs to Eva.

DAN MORRIS grew up in the foothills of the Cascades, 16 miles outside of Seattle. He earned a BA at the University of Utah and an MFA at Eastern Washington University. He now lives with his wife in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, attempting to earn a Ph.D. His work has been published or forthcoming in Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, LitRag, StringTown, Xavier Review, Homestead Review, California Quarterly, Red Rock Review, when it rains from the ground up, and the strange fruit. His chapbook Following the Day is available from Pudding House Publications.

Named Alabama's Poet of the Year in 1992, SUE SCALF has received over 100 awards for her poetry including recent awards by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She has also received four Hackney awards, Alabama's most prestigious prize. She has published four books of poetry and has appeared in a half-dozen anthologies. Sue's work has appeared in publications such as America, Carolina Quarterly, Southern Review and others. She is listed in A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers. Sue Scalf's most recently published books, Ceremony of Names and South by Candlelight, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.