Carrie Fountain’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, AGNI, and Southwestern American Literature, among others. Her debut collection, Burn Lake, was a winner of a 2009 National Poetry Series Award and was published by Penguin in 2010.  She lives in Austin, Texas and teaches at St. Edward’s University.

Robin Hemley is the author of ten books of nonfiction and fiction and the winner of many awards including a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction from The Chicago Tribune, The Story Magazine Humor Prize, an Independent Press Book Award, two Pushcart Prizes and many others.  His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published in the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Australia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and elsewhere and he frequently teaches creative writing workshops around the world.  He has been widely anthologized and has published his work in such places as The New York Times, The Believer, The Huffington Post, Orion, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, and many of the finest literary magazines in the U.S.  The BBC is currently developing a feature film based on his book Invented Eden that tells the story of a purported anthropological hoax in the Philippines. His third collection of short stories, Reply All, is forthcoming in 2012 from Indiana University Press (Break Away Books) and The University of Georgia Press recently published his book A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism, and Travel. He is a Senior Editor of The Iowa Review as well as the editor of a popular online journal, Defunct (Defunctmag.com) that features short essays on everything that’s had its day.  He currently directs the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa and is the founder and organizer of NonfictioNow, a biennial conference that will convene in November 2012 in Melbourne, Australia.  

Oni Buchanan’s concert programming is often interdisciplinary in nature, directly engaging the intimate connections between the arts, and frequently including adventurous contemporary works alongside established repertoire, bringing works from disparate centuries into fascinating and enlightening conversation. In addition to solo programming, she has co-curated (with poet Jon Woodward) several large-scale, interdisciplinary performance projects. Their first project, "Machines," featured the machines and films of kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson exhibited alongside live performances of incredible contemporary musical works. They then produced "Four Quartets: Variations," moored by the performances of four vocalizing actors and four poets interacting with excerpted and remixed text of T. S. Eliot.

Most recently, they commissioned a concert-length work for piano/spoken text/electronics from renowned electroacoustic composer John Gibson, which will be premiered in September 2012 and performed on tour throughout the 2012/13 season. The piece, called "Uncanny Valley" (after Jon Woodward’s serial poem of the same name), explores the phenomenon of "semantic satiation," searching through repeated poetic lines and musical forms for what is most uncanny, and most human, in both language and music.

Oni Buchanan's third poetry book, Must a Violence, is forthcoming from the Kuhl House Poets Series in September 2012, selected by Mark Levine. Her previous books include Spring, a Poetry Honors winner of the 2009 Massachusetts Book Awards and selected by Mark Doty for the 2007 National Poetry Series, and What Animal, selected by Fanny Howe for the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series. Oni is also a concert pianist, has released three solo piano CDs, and actively performs across the U.S. and abroad. She lives in Boston with her husband, the poet Jon Woodward. Photo by Jon Woodward.

Jon Woodward's books are Uncanny Valley (forthcoming from Cleveland State University Poetry Center), Rain (Wave Books), and Mister Goodbye Easter Island (Alice James Books). He lives in Boston with his wife, poet and pianist Oni Buchanan, and he works at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

“Zilka Joseph’s poems wear antennae, soft scales, pincers and curled tails.  Like the creatures that fill this collection, Joseph’s forms are sinuous, elegant—and each poem, in its way, delivers a delicious jolt of venom.  ‘You will get bitten,’ she writes.  ‘That is the nature of the beast.’” -Diane Seuss

“Part bestiary, part foray into mythical conflict and primal fear, Zilka Joseph’s What Dread probes different ‘degree(s) of deadliness.’   Whether victim or devourer, master or voyeur, the speakers in these poems understand that no matter our choices, we will become prey.  One must therefore ‘handle the beautiful danger.’” -Terry Blackhawk

“In this extraordinary new collection, Zilka Joseph writes a visionary poetry that looks deeply into the pain of this world but also explores the imagination and motivation of the poet herself.” -Keith Taylor

Zilka Joseph’s work has appeared or is appearing in The Kenyon Review, Review Americana Gastronomica, Cutthroat, Rattle, Repast and in Cheers To Muses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women. Her honors include a Zell fellowship, a Hopwood award and the Elsie Choy Lee Scholarship (CEW). Her first chapbook Lands I Live In (Mayapple Press) was nominated for a PEN America Beyond Margins award. What Dread, her new chapbook (semifinalist in the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices contest) has been nominated for a Pushcart. India: A Light Within and Wisdom of the Lotus, her collaborative work with a photographer and an Indian classical dancer has been exhibited at U-M and Copper Colored Mountain Arts, Ann Arbor, as well as other cities, and recently published. Before she moved to the US, she taught for several years in Kolkata, India, where she continues to teach as well as gives readings when she visits. Currently, she is the program manager at the Center for South Asian Studies, U-M, and a poetry instructor for Springfed Arts in Ann Arbor.

Hanna Pylväinen graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was also a postgraduate Zell Fellow. She is the recipient of residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Headlands Center for the Arts, and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachussetts. Her first novel, We Sinners, is forthcoming from Henry Holt in August 2012. She is from suburban Detroit.

Rachel Richardson is the author of Copperhead (Carnegie Mellon, 2011). She grew up in Berkeley, California, and earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where she won the Theodore Roethke Prize. She also received an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She has taught in several prisons, public schools, and universities, and now lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with her family. 

Clayton Eshleman's poems, critical essays, and translations of poets as important and diverse as César Vallejo, Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy, Henri Michaux, and Bernard Bador have earned him (and his fellow co-translators in some cases) international acclaim, as testified by a National Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and two Landon Translation Prizes from the Academy of American Poets. 

During his career he has published over forty books, including, between 2008 and 2012, three collections of poetry—The Grindstone of Rapport: A Clayton Eshleman Reader, Anticline, andAn Anatomy of the Night; and three translations—Curdled Skulls by Bernard Bador, Endure by Bei Dao, with Lucas Klein, and Solar Throat Slashed by Aimé Césaire, with A. James Arnold. In the past decade he has also published three collections of prose—Companion Spider, Archaic Design and Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld. In 2003 University of California Press published his translation of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, on which he spent spent over forty years. In 2012 Black Widow Press will bring out a 400 page compendium of poetry, prose, prose poems, lectures, translations, and journals by Eshleman, spanning 1967 to 2012: The Price of Experience.

Daniel Woodrell has been called one of the best kept secrets in American literature and is the author of eight books including Tomato Red which won the 1999 PEN Center USA award for fiction, Woe to Live On which was adapted into a movie by Ang Lee, and Winter’s Bone, recently adapted into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name. He recently published his first collection of short fiction, The Outlaw Album, twelve new, timeless tales of those on the fringes of society. Five of Daniel Woodrell's eight published novels were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Woodrell lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.

Photo by Bruce Carr.

Katie Estill is a graduate of Kenyon College and has an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  She lived in Greece for five years and has worked as a teacher, journalist, and head of a county task force on violence against women. She is the author of two novels: Evening Would Find Me, published by Joyce Carol Oates’ Ontario Review Press, and Dahlia’s Gone, St. Martin’s Press, which was a finalist for the Dashiell Hammett Prize.  Her short stories have appeared in such journals as The Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, Ontario Review, Elder Mountain, and the anthology, Surreal South. She lives in the Ozarks with her husband, Daniel Woodrell.

Toi Derricotte's new book, The Undertaker's Daughter, was just released by the University of Pittsburgh Press.  Her previous books are Tender (1997), winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize; Captivity (1989); Natural Birth (1983); and The Empress of the Death House (1978). The Black Notebooks, her literary memoir, was published by W.W. Norton in 1997 and won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has essays published in The Best American Essays 2006, edited by Lauren Slater, and The Best American Essays 2011, edited by Edwidge Danticat.  Of her poems, Sharon Olds wrote, "Toi Derricotte's poems show us our underlife, tender and dreadful.  And they are vibrant poems, poems in the voice of the living creature, the one who escaped--and paused, and turned back, and saw, and cried out.  This is one of the most beautiful and necessary voices in American poetry today".

Recognized as a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania in 2009, her honors include the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; two Pushcart Prizes; the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists; the Alumni/Alumnae Award from New York University; the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, Inc.; the Elizabeth Kray Award for service to the field of poetry from Poets House; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Maryland State Arts Council. In 2009, she received the University of Pittsburgh Chancellor's Distinguished Public Service Award.  With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem Foundation. She is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Photo by Seichi Tsutsumi