Contributors' Notes Sherman Alexie is the author of 21 books of poetry and prose, including Face, a book of poems due out any second from Hanging Loose Press, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. He lives with his family in Seattle.
Caitlin Doyle is currently the Writer-In-Residence at St. Albans School in Washington, DC. She received her MFA from Boston University in 2008, where she was awarded the George Starbuck Fellowship in Poetry. She graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 2006 as the Thomas Wolfe Scholar in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Measure, The Warwick Review, Hanging Loose Press, The Lyric, and others.
Dennis Finnell has published three books of poems, Red Cottage, which won the Juniper Prize, and Belovèd Beast and The Gauguin Answer Sheet, both from the University of Georgia Press. He works as a financial aid administrator at a community college in western Massachusetts, and has volunteered at a local literacy agency.
Esther Greenleaf Mürer lives in Philadelphia. She has been a composer, literary translator, and editor. At 73, she considers herself an emerging poet. Her recent poetry has appeared in Mimesis, Town Creek Poetry, The Externalist, New Verse News, and The Ghazal Page.
Mark Jarman's latest collection of poetry is Epistles (Sarabande Books, 2007). Sarabande Books will publish his new and selected poems, Bone Fires, in 2010. He is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
Emily Leithauser is a recent graduate of Boston University's MFA program. As an undergraduate, she studied French history and literature and at Harvard University. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she teaches Creative Writing and English at the National Cathedral School.
Stephen Charles Lester is a senior business analyst at a software company in Denver. His work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Matter Journal, Iconoclast, failbetter, DIAGRAM, Juked, and Unlikely Stories.
Daniel Lin was New York Times Fellow at NYU and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writers' Conference. He's recently published poems in The Jewish Quarterly, The Indiana Review and AGNI. He lives in New York City.
Dennis Loney's poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Sewanee Theological Review, The Shit Creek Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Washington, DC.
Austin MacRae's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Measure, The Raintown Review, The Lyric, The Formalist, Pivot, Blue Unicorn and elsewhere. He is also the author of a chapbook collection, Graceways, available at Modern Metrics.
Amit Majmudar is a Nuclear Medicine fellow at University Hospitals/Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and twin sons. His first book, 0',0', is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press / TriQuarterly Books.
Rick Mullin is a business journalist and painter whose poetry has appeared in print and online journals including Umbrella, Measure, Light Quarterly and The Shit Creek Review. His chapbook, Aquinas Flinched, is available from Modern Metrics.
Marci Nelligan's work has appeared in Jacket, The New Orleans Review, Chain, Word For/Word, How2, Dusie, and other journals. She lives in Lancaster, PA, with her husband and 2-year-old, teaches creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College, and tries not to swear.
David Sanders lives in Athens, Ohio. His poetry has been collected in two chapbooks/fine editions, Time in Transit from The Literary House Press at Washington College, 1995, and Nearer to Town from R. L. Barth, 1998, and has been published in journals such as The Hudson Review, The New Criterion, The Southern Review, and others.
Sappho, one of the most renowned lyric poets of antiquity, was born sometime between 630 and 612 BC on the Island of Lesbos. What little is known about Sappho's life comes mainly from her intimately personal body of work, much of which has been lost over the centuries due to natural and cultural forces. Her poetry survives in fragments, discovered on strips of papyrus and a potsherd, as well as in the citations of other ancient writers. Though she employed a variety of meters, she is most famous for composing in a metrical pattern that has come to be known as Sapphic meter. "Fragment 31," Sappho's passionate exploration of love, longing, and envy, derives tension from the interplay between boundless emotion and strictly controlled form. In my translation, I've tried to capture Sappho's lyre-tuned music by creating a formal correspondence with the traditional Sapphic stanza. —Caitlin Doyle
Lesley Wheeler's books include Heathen (forthcoming from C&R Press) and Voicing American Poetry (Cornell University Press). Her poems appear in Poetry, AGNI, Witness, and other journals. She is a professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
Ken Wood is a painter working in St Louis, MO and teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. His work is exhibited at the Philip Slein Gallery in St. Louis and in the Boston Drawing Project at the Bernard Toale Gallery in Boston. He will have a solo show at the COCA Gallery in St. Louis in 2010.