Biographies

Brand
by Karen Braucher

Karen Braucher is the author of AQUA CURVES, winner of the 2005 Stevens Manuscript Competition (selected by Peter Meinke), and SENDING MESSAGES OVER INCONCEIVABLE DISTANCES, finalist for the Oregon Book Award (selected by Maxine Kumin), as well as two chapbooks, MERMAID CAFÉ and HEAVEN'S NET. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in atelier, Diner, fireweed, hipfish, Manzanita Quarterly, Pool, Puerto del Sol, Nervy Girl, the new renaissance, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry, The Oregonian, Oregon Review, Paterson Literary Review, Rain, Rattle, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Worcester Review, and other places, including Portland's buses and trains through the national Poetry in Motion program. Braucher has won the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Worcester Poetry Prize, the Bacchae Press chapbook competition, and two Oregon Literary Arts fellowships. She has had multiple careers in education and business and has three graduate degrees, including an MBA from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA in writing from Vermont College/The Union Institute. She studied English literature, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she took a senior seminar with late poet Richard Hugo. While writing, occasionally teaching, raising a child, and running a small poetry press known as Portlandia, she lives and swims in Portland, Oregon. She is originally from Massachusetts.

Contact Information: braucher@portlandia.com

American Violence
by Wyn Cooper

Wyn Cooper has published three books of poems:The Country of Here Below (Ahsahta Press, 1987), The Way Back (White Pine Press, 2000), and Postcards from the Interior, (BOA Editions, 2005), as well as a chapbook, Secret Address (Chapiteau Press, 2002). His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Agni, Verse, Fence, and more than 60 other magazines. His poems are included in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including The Mercury Reader, Outsiders, and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. In 1993, “Fun,” a poem from his first book, was turned into Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning song “All I Wanna Do.” He has also cowritten songs with David Broza, David Baerwald, and Bill Bottrell. In 2003, Gaff Music released Forty Words for Fear, a cd of songs based on poems and lyrics by Cooper, set to music and sung by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell. It has been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and World Café, and has been written about in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Observer, and elsewhere. Songs from the cd have been featured on 4 tv shows.
He has taught at the University of Utah, Bennington College, Marlboro College, and at The Frost Place, where he now serves on the advisory board. He is a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. He lives in Halifax, Vermont, and helps run the Brattleboro Literary Festival.

Wyn has given readings across the United States as well as in Europe, and is available for readings, workshops, and residencies.

Contact Information: wcooper@sover.net

When I Was a Lesbian, THE BUN and PATENT
by Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel received a B.F.A. degree from Emerson College and a M.F.A. degree from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry. Her most recent titles are Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh, 2005) and Mille et un sentiments (Firewheel Editions, 2005). Her other books currently in print are Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), The Star-Spangled Banner, winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize (1999); Kinky (1997); Girl Soldier (1996); and How the Sky Fell (1996). Duhamel teaches creative writing and literature at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood, FL with her husband, the poet, Nick Carbó.

Contact Information: sedna61@aol.com

We Got Here Yesterday/We're Here Today/And I Can't Wait To Leave Tomorrow
by John Giorno

John Giorno is the author of you got to burn to shine; Cancer in My Left Ball, Grasping at Emptiness; Suicide Sutra; Shit, Piss, Blood, Pus & Brains; and other books of poetry. He has produced twenty-eight LPs, CDs, and tape cassettes on his label, Giorno Poetry Systems; and is the founder of the AIDS Treatment Project.

Contact Information: giornopoetry@attglobal.net

In Recognition of Leadership
by John Cantey Knight

John Cantey Knight is a past winner of the Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition for poetry, the Louisiana Literature Prize for poetry, the New Delta Review Eyster Prize and the Langston Hughes Prize for poetry.

Contact Information: john.knight1@navy.mil

Buying Yourself in the Drugstore
by Ronnog Seaberg

Ronnog seaberg was born and educated in Sweden. She graduated fron Uppsala University and emigrated to the U.S. in 1959 as the wife of artist Stevens Seaberg. As a writer in Swedish and English she has published several novels, poetry collections, prose books and cultural journalism in Sweden and Finland. In English most of her work is poetry for performance. A founding member of Seaberg Acrobatic Poetry she has read her original poems in Atlanta and other places in Georgia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, Tulsa, OK, and Boston while doing acrobatic posing with Stevens Seaberg and other members of the group. She has also performed in Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Göteborg, Kalmar, Umeå, and Uppsala, Sweden. Ronnog and Steve Seaberg played a major part in Wim Wenders' movie The Soul of a Man, 2003. Ronnog is also an art critic.

Contact Information: sseaberg@bellsouth.net

Snow and Froggy's Class
by Sharan Strange

Sharan Strange grew up in Orangeburg, SC, was educated at Harvard College, and received an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Ash, winner of the 2000 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, selected by Sonia Sanchez (Beacon Press, 2001). She is a contributing and advisory editor of Callaloo and cofounder of the Dark Room Collective. Strange has been a writer-in-residence at Fisk University, Spelman College, the University of California at Davis, and the California Institute of the Arts.

Contact Information: SStrange@spelman.edu

Written in pencil at the Virginia State Hospital
by Bill Taylor

William "Wild Bill" Taylor, a native Virginian, is the former Director of Emergency Medical Services at the Jersey City Medical Center, Jersey City, NJ and the cities of Pasadena and Corpus Christi, TX. He now lives in Katy, Texas, devoting his time to poetry, fiction, essays, and short stories while remaining close to his children and psychiatrist.

Contact Information: jtango03@yahoo.com