Committees

Editorial Committee

Melinda Wilson, Managing Editor

Melinda Wilson is Co-Editor of VIDAweb and Managing Editor for Coldfront Magazine. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Diner, Lumberyard, Verse Daily, WOMB, Burnside Review, Rattapallax, The Agriculture Reader, among other publications. She earned her MFA in poetry from The New School in Manhattan, and she now splits her time between New York City and Tallahassee, FL, where she is working toward her PhD in poetry at Florida State University.

Carmen Giménez-Smith

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, four poetry collections— Gender Fables, Goodbye, Flicker, The City She Was, and Odalisque in Pieces. She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. Formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press.
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Outreach Committee

Alyss Dixson

Alyss Dixson received a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale. She began her career as an intern for the Story Department for New Line Cinema, New York and later transferred to New Line’s West Coast office. She left New Line to work as an assistant and Script Coordinator on the film Money Talks, the debut film of director Brett Ratner. Afterward, Brett hired her to head up his new company, Rat Entertainment, based at New Line. For five years she acted as principal executive and producer at the company working on films like Rush Hour, Family Man, Paid in Full (Dimension/Miramax) and as an associate producer on Double Take (Disney). Later, she joined Paramount Pictures as a Vice President of Production, Worldwide, and now writes and produces and consults for film and television. Writer Mollie Gregory featured Ms. Dixson in her book Women Who Run the Show (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). She is hard at work on her forthcoming debut novel, A Place Called Paradise.

Kara Candito, Co-Director

Kara Candito is the author of Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her poems and reviews have appeared or will appear in such journals as Blackbird, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Sycamore Review, Diode, and Best New Poets 2007. She has received awards for her poetry, including an Academy of American Poets Prize and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Becca Klaver, VIDA Calendar

Becca Klaver was born and raised in Milwaukee and now lives in Brooklyn. She holds degrees from the University of Southern California and Columbia College Chicago, and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Rutgers University. A founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, she is the author of the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost, 2009) and the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010).