Richard Peabody edits Gargoyle Magazine and has published a novella, two books of short stories, six books of poems, plus an e-book, and edited (or co-edited) nineteen anthologies. He teaches fiction writing for the Johns Hopkins Advanced Studies Program.

Kirsten Hampton is a poet and filmmaker from Alexandria, Virginia.  She has been selected as a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for 2012, and has published in Beltway, Potomac Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Blueline, and Avocet, among others.  With her husband as director, she produced documentaries that have won a CINE Golden Eagle award and screened at the Library of Congress along with national film festivals.  A former university Associate Dean and Vice President, she also teaches poetry at area colleges.  She received a B.A. in English from Cornell University. 

In college, Dane Kuttler became a regular at the Hampshire Slam Collective, and participated in the first-ever Women of the World Poetry Slam in Detroit, MI.  After a long summer tour, and some time in the NYC area, Dane relocated to Seattle in April 2009.   Since her arrival, she has become a Seattle Poetry Slam regular, competed in several national-level slams, become a Write Bloody finalist, completed 365 poems in 365 days as part of the 2010 poem-a-day project, completed a manuscript novel-in-poems and published over a dozen poems. 

Michele Wolf is the author of Immersion, selected by Denise Duhamel for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, published by The Word Works. Her other books are Conversations During Sleep, winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook The Keeper of Light. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, Boulevard, North American Review, The Antioch Review, and elsewhere, including Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She teaches at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Her website is http://michelewolf.com.

Elisavietta Ritchie's most recent book of poems, Tiger Upstairs on Connecticut Avenue, is forthcoming from the Cherry Grove imprint, WordTech in 2013.  Her previous books include Cormorant Beyond the Compost; Real Toads; Awaiting Permission to Land; Spirit of the Walrus; Arc of the Storm; Elegy for the Other Woman; Tightening The Circle Over Eel Country; Raking The Snow; In Haste I Write You This Note; Flying Time. She edited The Dolphin's Arc: Endangered Creatures of the Sea and other volumes.  She served as president for both fiction and poetry divisions of the Washington Writers' Publishing House and continues as a fiction editor. She currently leads the workshop "Re-Write Your Life: Creative Memoir Writing," mentors, and serves as a poet-in-the-schools. Her sonnet "Camille Pissarro's Bather" recently won The Ledge Poetry Prize.

Rick Bursky's most recent book, Death Obscura, is out from Sarabande Books.  His previous book, The Soup of Something Missing, was published by Bear Star Press. His poems have appeared in many journals including American Poetry Review, Field, Iowa Review, Southern Review, Conduit, and Prairie Schooner. Bursky teaches poetry at UCLA Extension. 

Greg McBride is the editor of Innisfree.

Javy Awan works as an editor in Washington, D.C. His poems have appeared in Poet Lore and Potomac Review, which recently selected one of his poems for its "best of" volume.

Gregory Luce is the author of the chapbooks Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications) and Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press). His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Kansas Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Innisfree Poetry Review, If, Northern Virginia Review, Foundling Review, MiPOesias, Praxilla, Little Patuxent Review, Buffalo Creek Review, and in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press) and Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing). He lives in Washington, D.C., where he works as Production Specialist for the National Geographic Society.

Michael Spring is the author of three poetry collections: blue crow (2003), Mudsong (2005), and Root of Lightning (2011). His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlanta Review, DMQ Review, The Dublin Quarterly, Gavea-Brown, The Midwest Quarterly, NEO, and The Oregonian. Michael lives in O'Brien, Oregon. He is currently a natural builder, a martial art instructor, and a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine.

Paul Hopper has been a staff translator with the Department of State since May 1986.  Before that, he was a translator elsewhere; and before that, a teacher of German, Humanities, and introductory Linguistics.  He has published a few poems of his own, some humorous, in various little magazines, as well as a few translations of poems, mostly from German or Spanish, and a few articles about language learning, translation, and related topics.  During the workweek, he is not a humorless bureaucrat; he is a humorless support person for bureaucrats.  His hobbies include humor (laughing at other people’s humor, and attempting, often unsuccessfully, to make other people laugh) and obsessing over the weather and his health.

Anne Harding Woodworth's fourth book of poetry, The Artemis Sonnets, Etc. (Turning Point), was published in November 2011. Her poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in U.S. and Canadian literary journals and at various sites on line. She divides her time between the mountains of Western North Carolina and Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Gray Jacobik's collections include Brave Disguises (AWP Poetry Prize, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), The Surface of Last Scattering (X. J. Kennedy Prize, Texas Review Press, 1999), The Double Task (Juniper Prize, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), and a memoir-in-verse, Little Boy Blue (CavanKerryPress, 2011).  Gray holds a Ph.D. in British and American Literature from Brandeis University and is a professor emeritus, having retired from Eastern Connecticut State University. For almost three decades, Gray's poems have been published widely and a number of have received prizes. She is a painter as well as a poet.  For more information about Gray's work, please visit her website: http://grayjacobik.com

Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a clinical psychologist in Claremont, California, where she lives with her husband, an honest-to-god rocket scientist.  At one point, she developed cookie recipes for a boutique ice cream shop.  Later, she reviewed restaurants for the Claremont Courier, sometimes in heroic couplets, sometimes in anapest, sometimes imitating Hemingway.  In an earlier life, she was a German Lit major at Reed College and read poetry for credit.  She earned her B.A. in 1973, and her Ph.D. in 1982 from the California School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles.  She started writing poems when she was nine. Her poems and photos have been placed in many publications, including The Dirty Napkin; Off the Coast, Umbrella, qarrtsiluni, Poemeleon, Lilliput Review, Abyss & Apex, In Posse Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, Status Hat ArtZine, Waccamaw, The Centrifugal Eye, Cæsura, and dotdotdash.   She was nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize.  Her first chapbook, Eggs Satori, was a finalist of note in Puddinghouse Publications' 2010 chapbook competition.  They tell her it will be published sooner or later.

Maryanne Hannan has published poems in Pirene's Fountain, upstreet, Gargoyle, Naugatuck River Review, 1110, and Magma. A frequent book reviewer, she is a contributing editor at Cerise Press: A Journal of Literature, Arts and Culture.

In addition to Edwin Zimmerman's lifelong love of poetry (including service on the Poetry Board of the Folger Shakespeare Library), he has pursued strong interests in other art forms, such as music, dance, and Turkoman textiles (including service as President of the Washington Textile Museum for ten years).  In his professional life, he served as a Supreme Court clerk to Justice Stanley Reed, a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, an Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, and since 1969, practiced law at Covington & Burlington in Washington, D.C.  His poems have appeared in Partisan Review and elsewhere.  He is the author of a book of poems, A Piercing Happiness.

Heddy Reid is the author of A Far Cry, a chapbook of poems, and The Soul in Balance, a book of selected meditations paired with photographs of the Washington Cathedral. Her work has been published in Innisfree, Passager, Poet Lore, and The Southern Review, as well as several anthologies.  Heddy has taught poetry to adults and serves on the Poetry Board of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Born in New Orleans, W.M. Rivera's recent poems have appeared in the California Quarterly, Gargoyle, The Ghazal Page (online), The Curator Magazine (online), Lit Undressed, The Broome Review, Third Wednesday, Innisfree, and Lit Undressed.  His most recent book Buried in the Mind's Backyard, was published by Brickhouse Books in 2011 with a cover print by Miguel Condé one of Spain’s prominent artists.  Rivera's academic and professional activities in international agricultural development have taken him to more than 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.  Retired from the University of Maryland, he is currently working on a new poetry collection.

Maureen Donatelli lives in Abbotsford, British Columbia where she received her BA in English from The University of the Fraser Valley in 2001. Besides all things poetic, Maureen enjoys photography and spending time with her children. Her poetry has appeared at vox poetica, OVS, Willows Wept Review, Eudaimonia Poetry Review, Yes, Poetry, Connotation Press, Adroit Journal and her work is forthcoming in The Stray Branch.

Naomi Thiers has made her home in Washington DC/Northern Virginia since 1980. In 1993, her first book of poetry Only The Raw Hands Are Heaven won the Washington Writers Publishing House competition. Her poems, fiction, and interviews with writers have been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Pacific Review, Antietam Review, Phoebe, Town Creek Review, Potomac Review, Concise Delight, Iris, Belles Lettres, Sojourners, Plum Review, Wordwrights, Innisfree, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and other magazines. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured in several anthologies.

Karen Sagstetter has published poetry and fiction in forty literary journals, including Poet Lore, Shenandoah, and BorderSenses. She has won first prizes in literary contests sponsored by Glimmer Train Press and Antietam Review as well as Maryland individual artist's grants in poetry and fiction.  In addition, she has published two chapbooks of poetry and two nonfiction books. She studied in Japan as a Fulbright journalist and has worked in museum publishing in recent years.

Ann Gilligan Bond has always enjoyed writing poems, particularly using forms such as the pantoum, the sestina, and the terzanelle. After ten years of work, she recently completed a novel set in Ireland, Sighting at Tinnacurragh, which includes three poems. Much of her life has been spent doing artwork, especially watercolor landscapes. For the last sixteen years she has played the violin with the Waltham Philharmonic Orchestra. She has a Master's degree in English and has taught high school English and art.

Bob Meszaros taught English at Hamden High School in Hamden, Connecticut, for thirty-two years. He retired from high school teaching in June of 1999. He now teaches part time at Quinnipiac University. His poems have appeared in The Connecticut Review, Main Street Rag, Tar River Poetry, The Red Wheelbarrow, Concho River Review, and others.  

Maryann Corbett is the author of Breath Control, forthcoming in 2012 from David Robert Books, and the chapbooks Dissonance (Scienter Press, 2009) and Gardening in a Time of War (Pudding House, 2007). She has been a winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and a finalist for the Morton Marr prize and the Best of the Net anthology. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many journals in print and online, including River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Literary Imagination, Subtropics, and The Dark Horse, as well as The Able Muse Anthology and Hot Sonnets. She lives in St. Paul and works for the Minnesota Legislature.

Shirley J. Brewer (Baltimore, MD) is a poet, educator, and workshop facilitator. Shirley won first, second and third prizes in the Maryland Writers' Association 2010 Short Works Contest for Poetry. Publication credits include: Pearl, Comstock Review, Cortland Review, Little Patuxent Review, Passager, Manorborn, Free Lunch, and other journals. Her first poetry collection, A Little Breast Music, was published in 2008 by Passager Books (Baltimore). M.A. Creative Writing/Publishing Arts, University of Baltimore, 2005.

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Kathleen Hellen is a poet and the author of Umberto’s Night, which won the Washington Writers' Publishing House Poetry Prize and will be published by WWPH in October 2012. Her first book of poems, The Girl Who Loved Mothra appeared from Finishing Line Press in 2010. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Cortland Review, Evansville Review, Harpur Palate, Hollins Critic, James Dickey Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, Seattle Review, Southern Poetry Review, Stand, Subtropics, Witness, among others, and on WYPR’s "The Signal." Her awards include an Individual Artist Grant in Poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council. She is senior editor for The Baltimore Review. 

Roger Pfingston's poems have appeared recently in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hamilton Stone Review, and Naugatuck River Review. A new chapbook, A Day Marked for Telling, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2011. He also has poems in the recently released And Know This Place:  Poetry of Indiana, published by the Indiana Historical Society Press in Indianapolis.