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Quinten Anderson was born and raised in Indiana and recently moved from Portland to Turner, ME. He studied poetry at Goddard College, and New York and Indiana Universities. He believes that people do not fall in love, but that their noses fall in love. He condones wiping noses on shirt sleeves, cooking good food, drinking lots of beer, and writing while sober. Quinten wants to chop more wood, eat more meat, and have more time to write. He is working with his partner and their two-year-old son to practice permaculture in Turner and are looking for other like-minded folks to help. Interested?
Jessica Anthony is the author of The Convalescent (McSweeney’s/Grove), an ALA Adult Notable Book and Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, andChopsticks (Penguin/Razorbill), a multimedia novel created in collaboration with the creative director at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Rodrigo Corral. Chopsticks, called a “21stCentury Novel,” was an Amazon Book of the Month, and selected as App of the Year. Anthony’s short stories can be found in Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, New American Writing and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission. Her books have been published in a dozen countries and reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, theWall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She teaches at Bates College.
Dana Bialek always seems to work in bakeries although she is decidedly not a baker—just a morning-person, people-person, and the stalwart girl behind the counter. She came to Portland from the temperate West Coast, and has stuck around just long enough to satiate her curiosity about winter. She’s gearing up to take off on her bicycle and collect stories around breakfast tables for her upcoming project Yolks & Spokes.
Imogen Binnie is the author of the zines The Fact That It’s Funny Doesn’t Make It A Joke and Stereotype Threat. Additionally, her work has been anthologized in The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, released in Fall 2012. She is currently a monthly contributor to Maximum Rocknroll and has previously written for Aorta Magazine, The Skinny and PrettyQueer.com. She writes about books at www.keepyourbridgesburning.com. Nevada, her first novel, will be released by Topside Press in April, 2013.
Joshua Boucher is a poet who grew up in Northern Maine and has recently relocated to southern Maine. He received a BA in English and a BFA in Creative Writing from The University of Maine at Farmington. He then received his MFA in poetry from The University of Michigan’s Creative Writing Program.
Julia Bouwsma received her BA from Swarthmore College and her MFA from Goddard College. Her poems and reviews have appeared (or are forthcoming) in: Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Cutthroat, Natural Bridge, The Progressive, Puerto del Sol, RHINO, Still: The Journal, Sugar House Review, Weave Magazine, Whole Beast Rag and Wisconsin Review. Bouwsma is also the recipient of two residency fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She was the Managing Editor of Alice James Books from 2009 to 2011. Currently, she serves as Book Review Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Coeditor for Shape&Nature Press, and Poetry Editor for New Plains Press. A writer, editor, teacher, and farmer, she lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine.
Sarah Braunstein is the author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (W.W. Norton). The novel was a finalist for the 2011 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, and was the winner of the 2012 Maine Literary Award. In 2010 she was named one of “5 Under 35” fiction writers by the National Book Foundation, and she received a 2007 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award.
She teaches at Harvard University Extension School & Summer School, the Stanford University Online Writer’s Studio, and in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She will be a visiting professor at Colby College in 2012-2013. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. Based in Portland, Maine, she is at work on a second novel and a book of nonfiction about suburban adolescence.
She teaches at Harvard University Extension School & Summer School, the Stanford University Online Writer’s Studio, and in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She will be a visiting professor at Colby College in 2012-2013. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. Based in Portland, Maine, she is at work on a second novel and a book of nonfiction about suburban adolescence.
Ian Carlsen is an actor and writer, who has lived in Portland, ME for the past ten years. Most recently he has had films screen at the Woods Hole International Film Festival, The Miami International Film Festival and the Maine-based horror festival Damnationland.
He is a member of the Lorem Ipsum theater collective and supplied existential monologues for Weeping & Blubbering, and Pag-Wag: The Pageant Wagon Play. A full length play of his, entitled Gargantua, will be produced this fall.
He is a former student of the University of Southern Maine and attended the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference for poetry. His poetry has appeared in Decrepit Americana.
He is a member of the Lorem Ipsum theater collective and supplied existential monologues for Weeping & Blubbering, and Pag-Wag: The Pageant Wagon Play. A full length play of his, entitled Gargantua, will be produced this fall.
He is a former student of the University of Southern Maine and attended the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference for poetry. His poetry has appeared in Decrepit Americana.
David Caron was born and raised in the state of Maine and never believed he’d leave due to a lack of imagination. In the days following this lack, he went to college, graduated, proceeded to board his first plane and fly overseas to France. He taught English there for a year—his students none the wiser for it. Following a summer back in the states, meditating in the pristine waters of the Sandy River, he flew to England and there studied the deep mysteries of modern and contemporary literature and culture at the University of York. Not much a fan of cults, or mastering anything, he quit, came home, and settled down in Portland. He’s been sometimes in love, oft times not, and where he can, he writes. He has no publications to speak of.
Portland was intended as a temporary destination and residence for Sarah Caouette—That’s what they all say, right? After having completed an MFA in Creative Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, relatively unscathed, she decided to stick around the Maine coast, to write and live out some romantic notion about being in the place she’s supposed to be. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in The Citron Review, Cigale Literary, Dead Flowers: A Poetry Rag, and forthcoming in the Tower Journal and Milo Review. Featured as an outgoing contributor for The Good Men Project, she tries to stay consistent with her blog, where she discusses everything from the idiosyncrasies of interpersonal relationships to contemplating morality inside a vacuum.
Colleen Clark is a haphazard memoirist and short fiction writer. She rather fell out of a Conservatory and into an English Major after being inspired by then Professor, Jessica Anthony. Colleen now totes a Bachelors in English with a double minor in Creative Writing and Music from University of Southern Maine. Colleen spends her spare time riding her bike (whose name is Herbie), singing with Builder of the House and What if Catapult, picking away at a collection of memoirs she hopes one day to publish, attending weekly writing conferences at UNE, volunteering at The Telling Room and Reiche, and pondering the big questions in life like “Why does my cat act like a dog?”
Jaed Muncharoen Coffin is the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (Da Capo/Perseus), a memoir which chronicles his experience as a Buddhist monk in his mother’s native village in Thailand. Jaed has spoken widely at universities and colleges where his book is taught as a common text in multicultural curriculum initiatives. His forthcoming book, Roughhouse Friday (Riverhead/Penguin), is about the year he fought as the middleweight champion of a barroom boxing show in Juneau, Alaska. Recently, Jaed has served as the 2009 William Sloane Fellow at Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the 2009-10 Wilson Fellow in Creative Writing at Deerfield Academy, and the 2008 Resident Fellow at the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska. Jaed currently lives and writes in Portland, Maine, and is on the nonfiction faculty at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA.
Caitlin Corrigan is a writer, educator and performer. Her fiction has been published in Word Riot, NANO Fiction, Tin House "Flash Fridays" and elsewhere. As her burlesque persona, Moxie Sazerac, she has performed on dozens of stages in New Orleans, New York City, and beyond. Caitlin received her MFA in Fiction from Rutgers-Newark in 2014, and is excited to be back in Portland after nearly a decade away. Reach her on Twitter @corrigancait.
Michele Christle is a writer, teacher, and consultant. Born in Wolfeboro, NH, Christle received her MFA (Fiction) from University of Massachusetts Amherst. She served in the Peace Corps in Cameroon. Her writing can be found in Action, Yes, The Kenyon Review, Cultural Survival, and The Northern New England Review. She lives in Frankfort, Maine and is working on a memoir about 35 days at sea on a container ship with her father.
Jennifer Dupree grew up outside of Boston and is now a resident of Maine and a Stonecoast MFA student. Her short stories have appeared online in Front Porch Review and Family Circle and are forthcoming in The Master’s Review and Stone Cold: A New England Crime Anthology. A former bookstore owner, Jen has a deep and abiding passion for reading. Find a link to her book blog as well as links to her stories and other information at her website. She is currently at work on a linked collection of stories and a novel.
Peter Ellis is a freelance writer and multimedia producer currently living in Portland, ME. He is an editor and writer for a science and humor blog. He also enjoys making music for film.
After freelancing in film and television for many years, Erin Enberg decided it was time to focus on writing and steered her ship into The Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program through the University of Southern Maine where she worked on fiction and screenwriting. Upon graduating from Stonecoast, she finished a full-length script, Rock N’ Roll & The Immortal Soul, and put on a live reading with local musicians who wrote and performed original rock songs. She also became one of the fiction editors for the inaugural issue of The New Guard, a literary review based in Portland, ME. Her flash fiction piece Desert Dry was published in Kerouac’s Dog Magazine, a literary journal celebrating the style of the beat generation, based out of the U.K. She’s finishing up a series of flash fiction pieces about WWII called Machine Gun Fire: Rapid Stories from the Second World War and recently wrapped production on a short film about WWII POWs.
Karla Fossett is a native Mainer, with roots in both Downeast Maine and the Jersey Shore. After earning a film degree from Boston University and spending the first five years out of college pursuing film work, Karla now lives in Portland and is pursuing her true love of fiction. She graduated in July 2013 from the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program and currently works as a technical writer and editor for BerryDunn, a national CPA and consulting firm. She is at work on her first novel, a young adult work inspired in part by her time spent as a high school social studies teacher.
Carolyn Gage is a playwright, performer, director, and activist. The author of nine books on lesbian theatre and sixty-five plays, musicals, and one-woman shows, she specializes in non-traditional roles for women, especially those reclaiming famous lesbians whose stories have been distorted or erased from history. Gage has taught at Bates College and the University of Southern Maine. She has won the Oregon Playwrights Award from the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts as well as the Maine Literary Award. A collection of her plays was a national winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Drama, and she was a featured artist at UNESCO-sponsored World Theater Day in Rome, Italy, this year.
James Gendron is the author of the chapbook Money Poems (Poor Claudia, 2010) and the full-length collection Sexual Boat (Sex Boats) (Octopus, 2013). He was born in Portland, Maine, and lives in Portland, Oregon.
While earning an MA at Washington College and an MFA from Vermont College, Frank Giampietro was the president and general manager of a retail appliance business in Dover, Delaware. His first book of poems Begin Anywhere was published by Alice James Books in 2008. He is the co-author of Spandrel with Denise Bookwalter and Book O' Tondos with Megan Marlatt. Awards for his poetry include a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, a Kingsbury Fellowship from Florida State University, a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Florida Book Award. He is the creator of La Fovea, and Poems by Heart. His poetry, nonfiction, short-short fiction, and book reviews have appeared in journals including 32 Poems, American Book Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior, Cimarron Review,Copper Nickel, CutBank, FENCE, Hayden's Ferry, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Ploughshares, Rain Taxi, Subtropics, The Southern Review, and Tampa Review. He was a resident scholar at The Southern Review from 2010 to 2011 and the managing editor of Alice James Books from 2011 to 2012. Currently, Frank Giampietro serves as the interim director of Cleveland State University Poetry Center and visiting assistant professor of English at Cleveland State University and in the North East Ohio Master of Fine Arts program.
Alex Giardino is a translator and writer, whose work includes My Life with Pablo Neruda and “La Scarlettina.” She is currently working on a play about the founding of the first burlesque theater in San Francisco.
Megan Grumbling’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, and other journals; was awarded a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation; and received a Robert Frost Foundation Award for Poetry. She reviews plays and books for the Portland Phoenix, and helps edit the poetry and arts journal The Café Review. She has written and staged performance works as part of the Sacred and Profane, the Belfast Poetry Festival, and Port-Fringe 2013, and her short film Carrying Place, a Sisters Grumbling production, screened in Maine and Coney Island this year. She teaches writing at SMCC and UNE, and has worked in poetry workshops with prisoners, police officers, and Buddhists. Her most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Unsplendid, Angle, and the Berlin journal Sand.
Tarra Haskell went to school for directing theatre and she enjoyed it. Tarra also enjoys: cobalt blue (anything), mazo ball soup and one particular pair of burnt sienna corduroys that mysteriously vanished when her mother assisted with laundry after five consecutive school photos of Tarra sporting said pants. Tarra dislikes: driving, spelling and the smell of tequila.
Shonna Milliken Humphrey is a Maine-based writer whose essays have appeared in The New York Times, Salon, and The Atlantic. Her first book, Show Me Good Land, was a semi-finalist for the 2012 VCU Cabell First Novel award. For two years, she was a food writer for the Maine Sunday Telegram. She currently works at Thomas College and Southern New Hampshire University. Shonna earned a MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College, and her six years as executive director of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance were honored in 2010 with a “Friend to Writers” award from PEN/New England. She lives in Gorham with her musician husband, Travis James Humphrey.
Jon Keller has worked as a clam digger, sternman, mussel dragger, carpenter, concrete worker, hunting guide, mule packer, cattle hand, English teacher, grill cook, and oyster shucker. He lives on a sailboat in Maine. In a recent review of his debut novel, Of Sea and Cloud, writer Paul Molyneaux said, “I have to wonder what kind of life the author lives.”
James Patrick Kelly has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays, and planetarium shows. His fiction has been translated into sixteen languages. In 2007 he won the Nebula Award, given by the Science Fiction Writers of America, for his novella “Burn” and the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award twice: in 1996, for his novelette “Think Like A Dinosaur” and in 2000, for his novelette, “Ten to the Sixteenth to One.” He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and has two podcasts: Free Reads and James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod.
He is a member of the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He is the Vice Chair of the Clarion Foundation, which oversees the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop at the The University of California at San Diego. He served two terms as a councillor on the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and was Chair of the Council from 2003-2006. He has also served on the New England Foundation for the Arts.
He is a member of the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He is the Vice Chair of the Clarion Foundation, which oversees the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop at the The University of California at San Diego. He served two terms as a councillor on the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and was Chair of the Council from 2003-2006. He has also served on the New England Foundation for the Arts.
Brian Kevin is the author of The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America, new this summer from Crown/Broadway. He's also the associate editor at Down East magazine and a sporadic contributor to Outside, Travel + Leisure, Men's Journal, Audubon, and a variety of other mags. He has an MFA from the University of Montana, for what that's worth, and he's a transplant to Maine by way of that great state, Oregon, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. He tweets it up at @BrianMT.
Elizabeth Kohler is a feminist writer living in Maine, soon to be apprenticing on a farm and then returning to Turkey to teach English. She cares about accountability, safe spaces, folk art, discourses on grief, her cello, a full night's sleep, and not taking shit.
David Axel Kurtz just sat down to count how much he'd written (seven novels, seventeen novella, and three collections of short stories—but who’s counting!) and it freaked him out so badly he's going to go drink vodka, because, vodka. He lives at davekov.com with three lorem ipsums and his pet mudkip, Kinakuta.
Zanne Langlois is a performance poet and English teacher from Portland, Maine. She holds a BA in English from Tufts University and a M.Ed. in Teacher Leadership from Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her work has been published Animus and Monkey’s Fist, and in the anthology Passion and Pride: Poets in Support of Equality. She performed in the Women of the World Poetry Slam in 2012 and the Individual World Poetry Slam in 2013.
Abby Laplante is a lifelong writer whose work ranges from short fiction to slightly longer fiction. She was born and raised in Bath, mythical city of ships, and currently calls Portland her home. She studied English at the University of Maine where she received various accolades for her fiction, and has served as a freelance editor for magazines and newspapers. Abby spent a few years working in the non-profit and social service field here in Portland and presently works for a university. When she’s not working or writing, she’s winning stuffed animals out of claw machines. She’s a pro.
Amy Lawless is the author of two books of poems: Noctis Licentia (Black Maze Books, 2008) and My Dead (Octopus Books, 2013). She was a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry. Recent poems and essays can be found in or forthcoming from Best American Poetry 2013, Delirioius Hem, and Gigantic Magazine. She lives in New York City.
Jennifer Lunden’s lyric essay, “The Butterfly Effect,” took first prize in the Creative Nonfiction animal issue (Winter 2011), and then went on to win a Pushcart. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Orion, the Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Wigleaf, and Mothering.
Lunden’s documentary, Sadie’s Last Day, was an official selection of the Maine International Film Festival, and she recently learned, to her utter delight, that an article she wrote for the Portland Phoenix—which argues that Maine should secede from the US and join Canada—is cited in Wikipedia.
Lunden is a mental health counselor and the founder and executive director of the Center for Creative Healing, where she specializes in helping people break through creative blocks. Her essay about therapeutic writing, “Salvage, Salvation, Salve: Writing That Heals,” appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of Creative Nonfiction.
Lunden’s documentary, Sadie’s Last Day, was an official selection of the Maine International Film Festival, and she recently learned, to her utter delight, that an article she wrote for the Portland Phoenix—which argues that Maine should secede from the US and join Canada—is cited in Wikipedia.
Lunden is a mental health counselor and the founder and executive director of the Center for Creative Healing, where she specializes in helping people break through creative blocks. Her essay about therapeutic writing, “Salvage, Salvation, Salve: Writing That Heals,” appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of Creative Nonfiction.
Matthew Jude Luzitano received his BFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maine at Farmington, and his MFA in Writing at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared most recently in Cantaraville and Brilliant Corners. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his one-eyed dog Sally and his wife, Andrea.
Jason Michael MacLeod has garnered two Academy of American Poets prizes, an Atlanta Review International Publication prize, a recent artist grant from the Vermont Studio Center, and has had work accepted by journals ranging from the North American Review to Word Riot. He holds a B.A. in English from Grinnell College, a B.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Maine at Farmington, an M.A. in English from Iowa State University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. He is currently writing faculty in the distance learning programs of the Florida Institute of Technology and the Chapman University system. Jason lives in Portland, Maine.
Meagan Maguire is a poet & human being from Maine. Her work has been featured in The Alarmist, BurningWord, The Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of three collections, the latest of which is entitled INTIMATE OMENS. She is always on the internet, and can be reached there at twitter.com/MeaganWords
Kerrin McCadden’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Green Mountains Reviewand elsewhere. She is the recent recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and support from The Vermont Arts Endowment Fund. Currently studying for her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College, she is also a long-time English teacher at Montpelier High School in Montpelier, Vermont, and lives in nearby Plainfield with her children and a poodle.
Ryan McLellan is a teacher, singer/songwriter, nationally touring poet, Buffler fellow and editor from Waltham, Massachusetts. The author of five collections of poetry and the spoken-word album Last-Second Changes to the Set List, his work has been published widely in journals such as The Subterranean Quarterly, The November 3rd Club, Lower East Side Review, Bird’s Eye reView, Concise Delight, Cosmopolitan Review, OVS Magazine as well as the anthologies Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse and the 2010 Poets’ Guide to New Hampshire. He is the only three-time recipient of the Esther Buffler Poetry-In-Schools Fellowship from the Portsmouth (NH) Poet Laureate Program and has presented workshops around the country to a wide range of audiences. He is a semi-finalist and four year veteran at the National Poetry Slam and his full-length collection, Plenty of Blood to Spare, was published by Sargent Press in 2012. He lives in Portland, Maine and teaches in Dover, New Hampshire.
Cathleen Miller is a poet, herbalist, and special collections librarian living near the Casco Bay in Portland. She grew up deeply connected to the land in Western Pennsylvania, and has carried that understanding of our interdependence with her throughout her life and writing. She holds an MA in poetry from Temple University. Her work has appeared in Chain, EOAGH, The Fanzine, Anything Anymore Anywhere, and The Lake Rises. She co-authored the chapbook Cut and Shoot (2001, MAN Press) with poet Deborah Richards. She blogs at deliciousginger.wordpress.com and teaches workshops on poetry, herbalism and permaculture in and around Portland.
Douglas W. Milliken is the author of the codex White Horses (Nada, 2010) and the forthcoming novel To Sleep As Animals (PS Hudson, 2014). Other work also appears in McSweeney’s, Slice, Fiddleblack, and the Believer.
Patricia O’Donnell‘s novel, Necessary Places, was published this year from Cadent Publishing. She has had short stories appear in a variety of publications, such as The New Yorker, Agni Review, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Literary Review, The Short Story, The Eloquent Edge, Women Running: Stories of Transformation, and other journals and anthologies. She received the Martin Dibner award for short fiction.
Patricia is the Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Maine at Farmington. Outside her busy academic life, Patricia says some of her favorite activities include: reading, kayaking, jogging, yoga, walking the dog, steeping tea, shoveling snow, stacking wood, contemplating her mortality, trying to distinguish whether her dog is merely smiling at her or jeering, watching the resident snake at her camp eat frogs, waiting for loons to resurface, and taking delight in her three children and two grandchildren.
Patricia is the Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Maine at Farmington. Outside her busy academic life, Patricia says some of her favorite activities include: reading, kayaking, jogging, yoga, walking the dog, steeping tea, shoveling snow, stacking wood, contemplating her mortality, trying to distinguish whether her dog is merely smiling at her or jeering, watching the resident snake at her camp eat frogs, waiting for loons to resurface, and taking delight in her three children and two grandchildren.
Emily Paquin is a recent graduate of the master of arts program at Emerson College in Boston. Her work has been published in Portland Monthly Magazine and Poetry Southeast. She has begun a recent foray into the world of food blogging, finding the subject matter to be quite scrumptious (both literally and figuratively). She is currently living in Portland, Maine making and selling weird aquatic-themed art, and attempting to finish her first novel. She can often be found tromping through the woods with her dog, or splatting paint across a canvass with fervent determination.
Dave Patterson grew up in Vermont and attended St. Michael’s College. He earned an M.A. from the Bread Loaf School of English, where he won first place in the 2008 Freeman Fiction Writing Contest. In January 2013, he graduated from the Stonecoast MFA Program where he gave a commencement speech about the messiness of art, wrote a collection of Maine-based short stories, and recorded a country album about love, betrayal, and murder (in that order). The stories are currently trying to find a home in literary journals throughout New England, and the country album can be heard in the smoky taverns of Southern Maine.
Cyndle Plaisted Rials lives between the mountains and the ocean; both pull her equally. She teaches creative writing for SNHU and operates a small business in which she designs and creates eclectic fashion accessories. She is interested in dichotomies and paradoxes, in the defined and the fluid, in yearning and whims. Cyndle received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2008, and her poems have appeared most recently in Amethyst Arsenic, Conte, and the current issue of the Wrong Brain zine.
Skye Priestley is a poet and artist living in Portland. He goes to sleep every night and he wakes up in the mornings. He drinks coffee regularly, and sometimes alcohol. He does not smoke. He likes to run and swim and eat delicious foods. He likes math and literature and studies Japanese is his spare time. Someday he will die.
Ian Ramsey has appeared in the anthology Maine Voices, Words & Images and Backpacker Magazine. He is an MFA candidate in the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington. Ian has toured Europe playing jazz, been in a Trinidadian Mas Band, spent weeks following an arctic caribou migration, led chants in Japan’s Nebuta Festival, and performed in a subarctic Inuit dance troupe. He has been a featured artist in a statewide conference on “The Creative Economy,” and has been an artist-in-residence across America and abroad. Ian is a licensed Maine guide and has led trips to Japan, Ireland, Costa Rica, Vietnam, and China. He is the Chair of Fine Arts at North Yarmouth Academy and lives in Bowdoin with his musician wife, Patia Maule.
Jacques J. Rancourt was raised in Maine. His poems have appeared or will appear in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets 2014, among others. He has received a Wallace Stegner fellowship from Stanford University and the Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He lives in Oakland, California.
gaelle win robin is a queer writer, printer, assistant editor of nin journal, designer, and performance artist from rural Maine. Their writings have appeared in Vagabonds: Anthology of the Mad Ones, and they are the author of a number of self-published chapbooks. Their work can be found at gaellerobin.tumblr.com or on comehell.wordpress.com, a collective queer writers' blog based in the northeast.
Kate Russell is a native of Clifton, Maine, and has a BFA from University of Maine at Farmington and an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Barrelhouse, Redivider, and other journals. In August, she will be moving with her catahoula leopard dog to Lawrence, Kanas to start work towards a PhD at University of Kansas.
Julie Poitras Santos holds two MFAs, one in Visual Art from the University of Colorado in 2000, and a second in Poetry from the Stonecoast Creative Writing Program in 2013. Her recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Guard's Bang!, The Café Review, La Fovea, and the Wesleyan University Press Blog. Her visual and performance work has been exhibited widely in the US and Europe. She lives in Portland, Maine and teaches at Maine College of Art.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (2007), Scary, No Scary (2009), Fjords vol. 1 (2012), and a forthcoming book, The Book of Joshua. He co-does Octopus Books and The Bad Blood Reading Series in Portland, OR.
Lynn Shattuck blogs regularly for her website, http://thelightwillfindyou.com as well as the Huffington Post and the Elephant Journal. Her work recently appeared in Under the Gum Tree and the Juneau Empire. She lives in Portland with her husband and two children.
Madeleine Slavick has authored several books of photography, poetry, and non-fiction, such as Fifty Stories Fifty Images, Something Beautiful Might Happen, delicate access, and China Voices. She lived in Portland in the 1970s, in Los Angeles in the 80s, and in Hong Kong under British and then Chinese rule. Madeleine now lives in New Zealand with two cows, two horses, two chickens, two cats, and two people.
Jenny Smick received her BFA from the University of Maine and MFA from the Stonecoast Creative Writing program. Her short stories have appeared in Words and Images Magazine, Literary Mama Magazine, and Crab Creek Review. She won a national writing contest through Glamour Magazine for her short story “Streak” which was turned in to a short film. This past year, she received a Pushcart Prize honorable mention. She writes plays and fiction.
Ethan Stebbins studied at New York University. His work has appeared in the Hudson Review and the Dark Horse. He carries letters in Portland, Maine, where he creates things sometimes out of words and sometimes out of stones.
Martin Steingesser's poems whisper, shout and occasionally slam. He's author of Brothers of Morning and The Thinking Heart: the Life & Loves of Etty Hillesum, the latter versions based on Hillesum's journal and letters, composed and arranged for performance in two voices with cello. In addition to performing throughout Maine, the Ensemble recently toured Europe to return Hillesum's words to the place they were taken, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and performed at the Center for Dialog & Prayer, in Oswiecim, Poland, and the International Etty Hillesum Congress in Belgium. His poems appear in many publications, including The Sun, The Progressive and the Humanist and in literary journals such as Poetry East, American Poetry Review and Cafe Review. They have won a number of awards, most recently the Betsy Sholl Award 2013 and First Place for an individual poem in Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance's Literary Awards 2008. He was named Portland's first Poet Laureate, 2007-09.
Jeffrey Thomson is the author of four books of poems, including Birdwatching in Wartime, Renovation, and The Country of Losts Sons. His awards include a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2006 Creative Artists Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a 2008 Fellowship on the Literary Arts from the Maine Arts Commission, as well as Fellowships from the Wesleyan Writers Conference, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and Writers @ Work. He has published recent poetry and nonfiction in Quarterly West, Isotope, Indiana Review, Sycamore Review, Brilliant Corners, Gulf Coast, and Willow Springs, as well as critical essays on Sandra Cisneros, James Wright, Derek Walcott and the environmental elegy. Currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maine at Farmington he received his Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri in 1996.
Lindsey Wallace has an MFA in poetry at the University of Montana in Missoula. She's currently living in Maine while longing for the Montana mountains. Her work of poetry has appeared in Words and Images, 42opus, Redactions, Milk Money, The Indiana Review, and Starting Today: 100 Poems for 100 Days, an anthology from University of Iowa Press.
Jan Elizabeth Watson received her BFA from the University of Maine at Farmington and her MFA from Columbia University, where she was also a Teaching Fellow. She has taught college writing throughout Maine. Her first novel, Asta in the Wings, was published to critical acclaim in 2009. Her second novel, What Has Become of You,will be published worldwide by Dutton (a division of Penguin Random House) in the spring of 2014.
Meg Willing is a designer, writer, and artist. She earned her BA in poetry and book arts from Hampshire College. Her writing and artwork has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Gigantic Sequins, Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations, and elsewhere. She is also a recipient of a 2014 residency from Hewnoaks Artist Colony. From 2012-2013, she served as the Managing Editor of Alice James Books. Currently, she serves as the Design and Production Manager for Shape&Nature Press and as a freelance book designer for various independent presses. She resides in the lakes region of Maine.
Brody Wood splits their time between Maine and Arizona 80/20 writing poems and essays about dysphoria, disability, trauma, falling in love with all your best friends and people being rude.
They are a performer, publisher and mentor, and they care about queer and trans antiassimilationist activism, radical support networks, youth autonomy, healing from chronic pain, listening to country music, going to math class and party planning.
They are a member of Come Hell, a collective of Northeast queer writers.
They are a performer, publisher and mentor, and they care about queer and trans antiassimilationist activism, radical support networks, youth autonomy, healing from chronic pain, listening to country music, going to math class and party planning.
They are a member of Come Hell, a collective of Northeast queer writers.
Emily Jane Young is co-creator and director of Word Portland. She studied writing at Wells College, The University of Maine at Farmington, and Stonecoast MFA. She tries her best to write all the genres, but finds fiction to be nearest and dearest. Look out for her first Novel, Darling, in 2015.
Join us at Word Portland – first Monday of the month, every month, at 9PM at LFK. Check the events page for details!