Cate Marvin, Co-Founder
Cate Marvin’s first book of poems, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinksy for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. She is co-editor with poet Michael Dumanis of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for which she received a Whiting Award, was published by Sarabande in 2007. She teaches poetry writing at Columbia University’s MFA Program and Lesley University’s Low-Residency M.F.A. Program, and is an associate professor in creative writing in the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.
Erin Belieu, Co-Founder
Erin Belieu is the author of three poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including Infanta, One Above & One Below and Black Box. Belieu has been a winner of the National Poetry Series, The Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and was a finalist for the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is also the coeditor of The Extraordinary Tide, an anthology published by Columbia University Press, featuring the work of contemporary American women poets. Belieu has worked extensively in literary publishing and was previously the managing and poetry editor for AGNI magazine as well as the founding editor of Hotel Amerika. She is presently the director of The Creative Writing Program at Florida State University.
Barrie Jean Borich
Barrie Jean Borich is the author of Body Geographic, forthcoming in the American Lives Series of the University of Nebraska Press. Her previous book, My Lesbian Husband: Landscapes of a Marriage (Graywolf) won the ALA Stonewall Book Awards. She’s the recipient of the 2010 Florida Review Editor’s Prize in the Essay and the 2010 Crab Orchard Review John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize, and her essays appear in recent issues of Ecotone, Seneca Review, Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review, South Loop Review, and Seattle Review. Her work has been named Notable in Best American Essays and Best American Non-Required Reading and she teaches in the MFA/BFA creative writing programs at Hamline University, where she’s the nonfiction editor of Water~Stone Review. (www.barriejeanborich.net).
Kekla Magoon
Kekla Magoon is a New York City-based author, editor, speaker and educator. Her debut novel, The Rock and the River (Aladdin, 2009), has earned praise from teen and adult readers alike, including mention in The New York Times and a Booklist starred review. Kekla is Co-Editor of YA and Children’s Literature for Hunger Mountain, the arts journal of Vermont College of Fine Arts. She also leads writing workshops for youth and adults, and writes non-fiction titles for the educational market. Kekla holds a B.A. in History from Northwestern University and an M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts (www.keklamagoon.com).
Danielle Pafunda
Danielle Pafunda is author of Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press 2009), My Zorba (Bloof Books 2008), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press 2005), and the forthcoming Manhater (Dusie Press Books). A selection of her work appears in the anthology Gurlesque (Saturnalia 2010). She was co-editor of the longstanding online journal La Petite Zine (www.lapetitezine.org) from 2002-2009, and curates poetics forums at the feminist literary blog Delirious Hem. She is an assistant professor of gender & women’s studies & English at the University of Wyoming. (Danielle Pafunda’s blog)
Lisa Schlesinger
Lisa Schlesinger’s plays and radio plays include Wal-martyrs, Celestial Bodies, Twenty One Positions (with Naomi Wallace and Abed Fattah Abusrour), Same Egg, Manny and Chicken, Rock Ends Ahead, Bow Echo, The Bones of Danny Winston and Leaner than Light: 12 Frames of Paul Engle. She is at work on an opera, Harmonicus Mundi, commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theatre with Portland Stage Company and funded by the Sloan Foundation, and a new play with Rivendell Theatre. Schlesinger coordinates the Playwriting Program at Columbia College Chicago.
Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed is the author of three books: WILD, a memoir (Knopf, 2012), TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS, a selection of her “Dear Sugar” columns from TheRumpus.net (forthcoming from Vintage, July 2012), and TORCH, a novel (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Allure, Self, The Missouri Review, Brain, Child, Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS, THE BEST NEW AMERICAN VOICES, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota.
Ann Townsend, Secretary & Treasurer
Ann Townsend is the author of two collections of poetry: Dime Store Erotics (Silverfish Review Press, 1998), and The Coronary Garden (Sarabande Books, 2005). She is the editor of a collection of essays, Radiant Lyre: On Lyric Poetry (with David Baker), published by Graywolf Press in 2007. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Individual Artist’s grant from the Ohio Arts Council, and a Discovery Prize from The Nation. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including The New Young American Poets, American Poetry: The Next Generation, and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology. Dominic Consolo Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Denison University, Ann Townsend also owns and operates Bittersweet Farm in Granville, Ohio. Visit her at www.anntownsend.com.
