Per Contra Contributors Winter 2010

Contributors Winter 2010

Arlene Ang serves as staff editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. Her collection of poems Secret Love Poems was published in 2007 by Rubicon Press. Her collaborative fiction with Valerie Fox has been published in Admit 2, Defenestration, and qaartsiluni, and they are the authors of a poetry collection, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008) More of Ang's work may be read at www.leafscape.org.

Rumjhum Biswas, is an Erstwhile copywriter whose prose and poetry have been published in India and abroad, both in print and online. Notably in South, Words-Myth, Everyday Fiction, Muse India, Eclectica, Nth Position, The King's English, Arabesques Review, A Little Poetry, Poems Niederngasse, The Little Magazine - India and Going Down Swinging and Etchings – Australia. Her poem "Cleavage" was in the long list of the Bridport Poetry Competition 2006. She won third prize in a poetry contest run by Unisun Publishers India in February 2008. A flash fiction by her was shortlisted in the 2008 Kala Ghoda Arts Festival literature section Flash Fiction Contest managed by Caferati. Her poem "March" was commended in the Writelinks' Spring Fever Competition, 2008. She won third prize in the Muse India Poetry Contest 2008. Her story "Ahalya's Valhalla" is among the notable stories of 2007 in Story South's Million Writers' Award. She was a participating poet in the 2008 Prakriti Foundation Poetry Festival in Chennai. Links to her work at www.rumjhumbiswas.com. She blogs at http://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com/

Rosa Alice Branco is a poet, essayist and translator. She has a Ph.D. in Philosophy and is Professor of the Theory of Perception at the Escola Superior of Arts and Design in Matosinhos and a researcher at the University of Aveiro. She has published eight volumes of poetry, including Spelling out the Day, her collected poems. Her two books of essays are What Prevents the World from Being a Picture and Visual Perception in Berkeley. Her poetry has appeared in various languages, including French, Spanish, Arabic, and English. Close to fifty of her poems have appeared in various literary magazines in the United States. She is the organizer of two International Poetry Festivals: “ Spoken Aloud” and “Meetings at Talabriga”, as well as various colloquia and literary publications. She is the President of Limiar, an association of cultural affairs. In July, 2009, Branco's book O gado de Senhor (Cattle of the Lord) won the 15,000 Euro (over $20,000) Great Spiral Poetry Prize granted to the best poetry collection of the year from Portugal, Galicia, Angola, or Brazil.

Richard Burgin - Click here for bio

H.R. Coursen's 32nd book of poetry, 'Blues in the Night' will appear from Moonpie in March. He will be a featured poet at the Plunkett Festival at UMaine, Augusta, in April. He lives in Brunswick, Maine and teaches Aviation History at Embry Riddle and Shakespeare at Southern NH University.

Gastão Cruz is a poet, critic, and translator. Born in Faro, Portugal (1941), he has published twenty books of poetry in Portuguese, as well as poetry in French. He published a book of poetry criticism, Portuguese Poetry Today. He has translated plays by Shakespeare, Strindberg and Chekov as well as poetry by Blake. He co-founded a repertory theater company that was active for more than two decades. His work received many awards, among which are the PEN Award for Poetry in 1985, and the Poetry Award of the Portuguese Association of Writers.

Okla Elliott is currently the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he is a PhD candidate in comparative literature. He also holds an MFA from Ohio State University. In addition to his American education, he has studied at Universities and Institutes in Germany, Mexico, Poland, and Quebec. For the academic year 2008-09, he was a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. His non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in A Public Space, Cold Mountain Review, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, North Dakota Quarterly, and the Sewanee Theological Review, among others, and his journalistic writings have appeared in several newspapers. His plays have been produced at Ohio State University and Louisiana Tech University. His books include a limited edition poetry collection, The Mutable Wheel (illustrated by Brian Zegeer, MFA, Univ. of Pennsylvania), published with funding from the NC Arts Council and the United Arts Council of Greensboro, and a chapbook, Lucid Bodies and Other Poems (MSR Press, 2006). He is also co-editor, with Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov (New American Press, 2008).

Valerie Fox's most recent book is Bundles of Letters, Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press), written with Arlene Ang. Previous books of poems are The Rorschach Factory (Straw Gate Books) and Amnesia, or, Ideas for movies (Texture Press). Her work has appeared in many magazines, including Hanging Loose, Per Contra, Siren, Phoebe, Watershed, and West Branch. Very involved in collaborative writing, she and Arlene Ang have collaborated in the writing of poetry and fiction, publishing in magazines such as Admit 2, Defenestration and Qarrtsiluni. She was a founding co-editor of 6ix magazine (1990-2000), and currently edits Press 1, a journal of fiction, poetry, opinion, and photography, found at www.leafscape.org/press1. Her writing and more about her can be found at www.leafscape.org/vfox.

Gwenna Johnson is from Eastern Pennsylvania. She graduated from Drexel University and is a member of Sigma Tau Delta. She worked for Drexel's Publishing Group and also collaborated with the Painted Bride Quarterly. While continuing to write, her plans are to pursue a degree in Veterinary Medicine.

X. J. Kennedy, of Lexington, Mass., writes textbooks and children's books for a living. His latest collection of verse, In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: new & selected poems (Johns Hopkins U. Press), was a 2008 Notable Book of the American Library Association. In April 2009 he was given the Robert Frost medal of the Poetry Society of America for his life's work in poetry.

Charles Martin is a poet and translator. His verse translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid was published in November of 2003 by W.W. Norton and Co and was winner of the Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets for 2004. His most recent book of poems, Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems, published in July 2002 by the Sewanee Writers’ Series/ The Overlook Press, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. His other books of poems include Steal The Bacon and What The Darkness Proposes, both published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Johns Hopkins also published his translation of the poems of Catullus, and his critical introduction to the Latin poet’s work appears as one of the volumes in the Yale University Press’ Hermes Series. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, Boulevard, The Threepenny Review, and in many other magazines and anthologies. He is the recipient of a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, a 2001 Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2005, he received an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at Syracuse University, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the West Chester Conference on Form and Narrative in Poetry, and the Unterberg Center of the 92nd Street YMHA. He is currently on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program and the School of letters of The University of the South. In 2005, he was named Poet in Residence at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

Elliot Richman won a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Poetry, as well as a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in Poetry. He has published four full-length collections: The World Dancer; Honorable Manhood: Poems of Eros & Dust; (From the First Persian Gulf War); Walk on Trooper (Vietnam War Poems); Franz Kafka’s Daughter Meets the Evil Nazi Empire!!!: Holocaust Tainted Poems. His work has appeared in, among others, Asylum, Bakunin, Beloit Poetry Journal, Caliban, Centennial Review, Confrontation, Green Fuse, Modern Haiku, Mickle Street Review, Osiris, The Quarterly, and Yellow Silk. Richman now works as a private contractor on American warships. More of his sea poems can be found in www.jerseyworks.com.

Maryanne Stahl is the author of novels THE OPPOSITE SHORE and FORGIVE THE MOON, published by New American Library, as well as a chapbook of poetry and flash fiction, ELECTRIC URGENCY, published by Pudding House Press. She lives in Thunderbolt, Georgia.

Lewis Turco - Click here for bio

Chika Unigwe was born and raised in Enugu, Nigeria. She has a B.A degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and a Ph.D from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. A UNESCO-Aschebrg fellow and a Rockefeller Foundation fellow, her most recent novel is On Black Sisters' Street (Jonathan Cape, 2009).