The Becoming is the first book of the West of Kingdom Come tetralogy, forthcoming from Calamari Press in Fall 2013.

TJ Beitelman's first collection of poems, In Order to Form a More Perfect Union, was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2012. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where he teaches writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. [website] [email]

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012), chosen by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award. Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Indiana Review, Southern Indiana Review, Mid American Review, Narrative Magazine, Sou'wester, Southern Indiana Review, and other journals. Her prose has appeared in Gulf Coast and Copper Nickel. One of her photographs graces the cover of There is another poem, in which the news has been erased and rewritten, a wonderful NMP chapbook by Zachary Harris. As of this writing, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram lives and snowboards in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing. She was raised in the Rust Belt. She is 1/6 of the poetry collective [Line Assembly]. [website]

Hannah Buckland lives in Eureka, IL. She works there, too, as a librarian at Eureka College.

Suzanne Burns's writing has previously been published by Dzanc Books, Night Nomb Press and Finishing Line Press. She is currently working on a memoir composed of diary entries about her obsession with sugar, tentatively titled Sweet and Vicious. In her free time she practices baking cakes from scratch for the Deschutes County Fair's annual competitive baking competition. [email]

Paul Crenshaw’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Essays 2005 and 2011, anthologies by W.W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, and numerous literary journals, including Ecotone, North American Review, and Southern Humanities Review. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University. [email]

Danielle Cadena Deulen teaches in the doctoral creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati. She's the author of two books: Lovely Asunder (poems, U. of Arkansas Press), and The Riots (essays, U. of Georgia Press). [email]

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It (forthcoming from W.W. Norton: Liveright), and of Pot Farm, Barolo, Warranty in Zulu, The Morrow Plots, Sagittarius Agitprop, and the chapbooks, Four Hours to Mpumalanga, and Aardvark. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he prepared his first batch of whitefish-thimbleberry ice cream. [website]

Leora Fridman is a writer, translator and educator living in Massachusetts. She is an MFA candidate at the UMass Amherst Program for Poets and Writers where she is Assistant Director of the Juniper Institute and co-curates the Jubilat/Jones Reading Series.

Trey Jordan Harris lives in Missouri. Other poems have recently appeared in Sixth Finch and as a broadside from Thrush Press. [email]

BJ Hollars teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. You can reach him at his [website]. He hopes you do. [email]

Valerie Hsiung is a poet, playwright, screenwriter and composer. Her poems appear recently or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, VOLT, Mad Hatters’ Review, Spittoon, New Delta Review and Juked. She works as a vaudevillian performer and naturalist in California and Belle-île-en-mer, France.

Nate Logan's recent work has appeared in delirious hem, Forklift, Ohio, and Ninth Letter among others. He's the editor of Spooky Girlfriend Press and a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.

Beth McDermott is a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at UIC. She lives in New Lenox, IL. [email]

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum’s first book of poems, Ghost Gear, is forthcoming with the University of Arkansas Press; his anthology, Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days, was released in 2012. He is Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek.org, is Acquisitions Editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books, and teaches writing at CU-Denver. Andrew's poetry, reviews, essays, and interviews recently appear in The Writer's Chronicle, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Ascent, Glimmer Train, American Literary Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Missouri Review, storySouth, InsideHigherEd.com, Copper Nickel, New Letters, and Hayden's Ferry Review. [website]

Ted McLoof teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, Associative Press, and elsewhere, and he's been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is staff writer at Rookerville. [email]

Megan Peak's work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Bakery, The Boiler Journal, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Pleiades, and Stone Highway Review. She is a first-year poet in The Ohio State University's MFA program. [email]

Taryn Schwilling lives in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where she conducts research for a Fulbright grant. Her manuscript was recently a finalist for the Slope Editions book prize, and her work has appeared in Fence, La Petite Zine, and Colorado Review. [email]

Jocelyn Sears is an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia, where she teaches an undergraduate poetry workshop and edits Meridian. [email]

Bret Shepard is currently in the graduate program at the University of Nebraska, where he also teaches writing. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, Copper Nickel, FIELD, Whiskey Island, and elsewhere. If so inclined, you should also read some of his other poems online in the Sink Review, UCity Review, and Requited. [email]

Bruce Smith does dry wall and mud in Syracuse, NY.

Jake Syersak is the author of Notes to Wed No Toward, winner of the 2013 Plan B Press chapbook contest. His poems have most recently appeared in Ilk, Coconut, and Conjunctions (Web). [email]

Jill Talbot is the author of Loaded, a memoir. She is the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non) Fictions Come Together and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. She is the 2013-2015 Elma Stuckey Writer-in-Residence in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago. "The Professor of Longing" is from her forthcoming memoir, The Way We Weren’t. [website] [twitter] [email]