Greg Ames
Greg Ames lives in Brooklyn. His stories have appeared in Fiction International, McSweeney's, Literal Latte, and Other Voices.
Lee Ann Brown
Lee Ann Brown's books of poetry include Polyverse (Sun & Moon) and The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan University Press). She teaches poetry and literature at St. John's University in Queens and will be making apprearances this fall at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC (Oct 12), the Kelly Writers House at U Penn (October 20) and Barnard College, NYC (November 7). Brown is currently obsessed with her baby daughter, Miranda Lee Reality Torn.
Robert Carlucci
Robert Carlucci received his Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in 1996. His thesis, "The Arts and Public Life in Florence during the Period of the Republic, 1502–1512" relied on archival research to explore the political motivations behind the artistic commissions to Michelangelo and Leonardo during this period. Following this, he joined The Medici Archive Project, a non-profit American organization based in Florence where he co-developed a database management system for recording archival data drawn from the documents of the Medici Grand Dukes. Following his return to the United States in 1999, Dr. Carlucci joined The Media Center for Art History at Columbia University where he is the Manager of Education and Research. His principal responsibilities involve the design and development of digital teaching tools for the faculty of the Department of Art History and Archæology. He is exploring innovative ways to deliver digital images to the Columbia University community by combining sophisticated database technology with Web site design. His current projects include The History of Architecture: Digital Teaching and Learning Resources, a 3-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Chris Chanin
Clifford Chase
Clifford Chase is the author of The Hurry-Up Song: A
Memoir of Losing My Brother and editor of Queer 13: Lesbian & Gay Writers Recall Seventh Grade. In addition to "Blithe House Quarterly," his fiction has appeared in "Yale Review," "Threepenny Review," "Boulevard" and other journals, and his nonfiction in "Newsweek," "Newsday," "Book Forum," "Out," "Poz" and "Nerve."
Peter Culley
Peter Culley's books of poetry include The Climax Forest (Leech Books) and the just released Hammertown (New Star). As an art critic he has received grants from the Canada Council and has written on artists such as Stan Douglas, Roy Arden and Kelly Wood and for the Vancouver Film Festival. His blogspot is http://mossesfromanoldmanse.blogspot.com/.
Jennifer Natalya Fink
Jennifer Natalya Fink is the author of Burn (September 2003: Suspect Thoughts Press).She has won a variety of awards for her short fiction, including The Dana Award and The Georgetown Review Fiction Award, and has published her work in a wide array of magazines and collections. She is the author of Performing Hybridity (Minnesota: 1999). She teaches writing at Pratt, NYU, and Makor, and is Founder and Executive Director of The Gorilla Press, an organization devoted to helping kids to write and publish their own books. She is at work on a new novel, Veronica, set in post-war Brazil.
Thomas Glave
Thomas Glave was born in the Bronx and grew up there and in Kingston , Jamaica . A graduate of Bowdoin College and Brown University , Glave is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Binghamton . In 2000, City Lights books published his collection Whose Song? and Other Stories appeared which was nominated by the American Library Association for their "Best Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year" award, by the Quality Paperback Book Club for their Violet Quill Award. Recently, he has recently completed a second collection, The Trials of Taran J. and Other Not-Fictions , and is working on a novel, a collection of essays. His awards include two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, a Fullbright Scholarship, an O. Henry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a fellowship from the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown . Glave was named a "Writer on the Verge" by The Village Voice in 2000. Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer has said of Glave, "[he]has the strong talent and courage to take up the right to enter the inner selves of both black and white characters in his stories.”
Rebecca Godfrey
http://www.harpercanada.com/godfrey/index.html
Jesse Goldstein
Jesse Goldstein shares a birthday with Barry Hannah and lives off the most beautiful train in Brooklyn. His story in Open City 17 is his first publication.
James Earl Hardy
Born and raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Broonklyn, New York, James Earl Hardy is the author of the B-Boy Blues series: B-Boy Blues, 2nd Time Around, If Only For One Nite, The Day Eazy-E Died and Love The One You're With. The novels chronicle the relationship between a journalist-turned-junior high school teacher and a " homo thug" bike messenger-turned supermodel. The series has been credited with launching the Africentric gay hip hop love genre. An honors graduate of both St. John's University and the Columbia University School of Journalism, his byline as a feature writer and cultural critic has appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Essence, Newsweek, OUT, The Source, VIBE, and The Washington Post.
Shelley Jackson
Shelley Jackson was extracted from the bum leg of a water buffalo in 1963 in the Philippines and grew up complaining in Berkeley, California. Bravely overcoming a chronic pain in her phantom limb, she extracted an AB in art from Stanford and an MFA in creative writing from Brown. She has spent most of her life in used bookstores, smearing unidentified substances on the spines, and is duly obsessed with books: paper, glue, and ink. Nonetheless, she is most widely recognized for an electronic text, Patchwork Girl, a hypertext reworking of the Frankenstein myth.
As for ink on paper, she has left her ineradicable stain on "Conjunctions," "Fence," "Grand Street," "Kenyon Review," and many restaurant napkins. Her first book, The Melancholy of Anatomy, was published by Anchor in April 2002. Shelley Jackson also illustrates children's books, including two of her own, The Old Woman and the Wave and the forthcoming Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog. She lives in transit and specializes in everything.
Karl Kirchwey
Director of Creative Writing and Senior Lecturer in the Arts, Bryn Mawr
M.A., Columbia University
Karl Kirchwey holds degrees in English Literature from Yale College (B.A.) and Columbia University (M.A.). He is the author of four books of poems: A Wandering Island (Princeton University Press, 1990; recipient of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America), Those I Guard (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1993), The Engrafted Word (Henry Holt, 1998; a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year") and At the Palace of Jove (Putnam, 2002). His play in verse entitled Airedales & Cipher, based on the Alcestis of Euripides, received the 1997 Paris Review Prize for Poetic Drama and has been presented in public readings at An Appalachian Summer Festival (Boone, North Carolina) and at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York. His poems have appeared in periodicals such as Grand Street, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Criterion, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Parnassus, Partisan Review, Poetry (Chicago), Slate, The Southwest Review, Tin House, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. His poems and translations have been anthologized in works including The KGB Bar Book of Poems (2000), The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1987-1998 (1998), Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry: a Bilingual Anthology (1996), Twentieth Century Poems on the Gospels: an Anthology (1996), and After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1995).
Kirchwey has been the recipient of grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts, and also received a Rome Prize in Literature in 1994-95. From 1987 to 2000, he was Director of the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. He has taught creative writing and literature at Smith College, Yale and Wesleyan Universities, and in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University.
Victor LaValle
Victor LaValle was raised in Flushing and Rosedale, Queens . He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in English and received his M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University . His first book, Slapboxing with Jesus received the 2000 PEN/Open Book Award and The Ecstatic was a finalist for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award. LaValle has been described by the Chicago Tribune as "a writer of darkly humorous tales full of haunting beauty, astonishing leaps of imagination and language that crackles and hums" ( Chicago Tribune). He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has taught creative writing at Mill College and Columbia University .
Naomi Leimsid
Naomi Leimsider received her MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College in May of 2001, attended the Breadloaf Writers' Conference in August of 2000 and has a story forthcoming from Zone 3 magazine in December of 2002. She has been teaching composition and literature since Septemberof 1999. She was one of the proud co-founders of "Lambs to the Slaughter" reading series. She is now in the process of finishing "Revenge Fantasy", her collection of short stories about obsessed and confused women.
Michael Leong
Michael Leong holds an A.B. in English Literature from Dartmouth College and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. at Sarah Lawrence College. He has poetry forthcoming in Tin House. He free-lances in New York.
Sam Lipsyte
Sam Lipsyte is author of Venus Drive, a short story collection named one of the twenty-five best books of the year by the "Village Voice," and a novel, The Subject Steve. His latest novel is Home Land. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in dozens of journals and magazines and has been translated and published abroad. His story "Snacks" appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002. He lives in Astoria.
Paul Lisicky
Paul Lisicky is the author of the novel Lawnboy and the memoir Famous Builder, a finalist for the 2003 Lambda Literary Award in Autobiography. His work has appeared in "Ploughshares", "Boulevard," "Open House," "Flash Fiction," and in other magazines and anthologies. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is a member of the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Of Paul Lisicky's work, Michael Cunningham says, "The appearance of a writer like Paul Lisicky, a writer who deeply respects the complexities of love and desire, who can find tragedy and transcendence almost everywhere he looks, is a rare event."
Barry Matthews
Barry Matthews was born and raised in rural Vermont. He holds an MFA in fiction from Cornell University and his work has recently appeared in Best New American Voices 2003. He lives in Brooklyn and is currently finishing his first novel.
Krista McGruder
Krista McGruder was born in Neosho, Missouri. Her work has appeared in "The Best of Carve Magazine," "storySouth," "The North American Review" and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She attends the New School's fiction MFA program. Her book of short stories, Beulah Land, is due out this fall from The Toby Press. For some of her work, go to "storySouth" and "Carve Magazine."
Wade Nacinovich
Wade Nacinovich is a fiction writer living in Brooklyn. He has been published in the Brooklyn Review, Pindeldyboz.com and PS1.org as a part of the Special Projects Writers Series. One of his stories will also appear in the upcoming Pindeldyboz #4.
Chris Prentice
Oz Shelach
Oz Shelach was born in West Jerusalem in 1968, has been a journalist and editor for Israeli radio and magazines, and runs an online news service and art gallery at http://www.oznik.com. He currently lives in New York.
Rachel Sherman
Ed Sikov
Born in 1957 in Natrona Heights, PA, Ed Sikov is a 1974 graduate of Highlands High School, where he was a maladjusted loner. Escaping from his misery, Ed plunged into more of the same as a disaffected, alienated student at tiny Haverford College, where he majored in English and spent a lot of time by himself. He graduated in 1979, moved to New York, came out of the closet, got happy, and went to film school. He earned a Ph.D. in film studies in 1986. He is the author of four books, has contributed essays to several gay-themed anthologies, and his work has appeared in such diverse publications as Premiere, Architectural Digest, Film Quarterly, the Village Voice, the Air Force Academy's literary journal, and the Brazilian edition of Cosmopolitan.
Ed Sikov's latest book is Mr. Strangelove, the first American biography of one of the cinema's greatest comedians. It's the story of a screamingly funny, desperately unhappy soul - a man who thought he was empty. Sellers, who could mimic anyone and don any mask at will, was privately convinced that his personality had no core - that there was no personal substance under the put-on characters he so readily and hilariously assumed. The Goon Show made him famous; the Pink Panther films made him rich; Lolita and Dr. Strangelove gave him artistic respectability; I Love You, Alice B. Toklas and What's New, Pussycat? turned him into a 60s flower-power icon that still resonates today.... And yet Sellers - whose blistering improvisations could ruin takes by sending the casts and crews of his films into peals of uncontrollable laughter while the camera was running - remained confused and lonely, difficult to work with, volatile one minute and torporous the next.
He worked with some amazing stars, from Shirley MacLaine, Sophia Loren, Maggie Smith, and Goldie Hawn to Shelley Winters, Ringo Starr, Elke Sommer, and Claudine Longet. And he made films with such talented, voluble directors as Blake Edwards, Roman Polanski, Paul Mazursky, Billy Wilder, and the late Stanley Kubrick. As his Pink Panther director Blake Edwards describes him, "Peter was a mercurial clown who could get you laughing one minute and cut your heart out with a bloody ax the next."
Darin Strauss
Writer Darin Strauss graduated form Tufts University and attended New York University in creative writing. His first novel was the highly regarded Chang and Eng, and he has recently published his second novel, The Real McCoy. Strauss has published three short stories in McSweeney's and is at work on a story collection. Darin Strauss lives in Brooklyn and teaches at New York University.
India Radfar
India Radfar, author of "India Poem," 2002 and now "The Desire to Meet with the Beautiful," 2003 on Tender Buttons Books, lives in the Catskill Mountains with her husband, Bernard and her son, Aram. Her work in teaching poetry has led to collaboration with anthropologist Jenny Fox on a book about the oral poetics of children.
Hellen Klein Ross
Helen Klein Ross makes her living writing fiction for large advertising agencies. She holds a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from the New School. She has taught at Parsons, the New School and the School of the Visual Arts. She lives in Manhattan and is at work on a novel, a collection of poems and a commercial for toilet paper.
Hannah Tinti
Hannah Tinti developed her skills as an editor working at literary agencies and several magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review and Washington Square. Her own fiction has been published in Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Story Quarterly, Sonora Review, and is forthcoming in Epoch. Her two books, Animal Crackers and Resurrection Men, forthcoming from Dial Press.
Hannah earned her M.A. from New York University's Graduate CreativeWriting Program and has received residency fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center and Hedgebrook. In June2001 the New York State Writers Institute awarded her a grant to study in Lugano, Switzerland. She currently teaches fiction at Gotham Writers Workshop. She is also editor of One Story.
Cynthia Weiner
Cynthia Weiner teaches at the Writers Studio and Pace University in Manhattan. She is working on a collection of short stories.
Marc Woodworth
Marc Woodworth is the Associate Editor of the journal "Salmagundi," quarterly of the humanities and social sciences, and is the Assistant Director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. His collection of poems Arcade is now available on Grove Press. He also edited, Solo: Women Singer-Songwriters in Their Own Words (Dell, 1998).
