Dave Allen is the Director, Insights & Digital Media at NORTH, a Creative Brand Agency in Portland, Oregon, where he provides Digital Brand Strategy for the company’s clients.
He started his career as a musician as the founding member and bass player for the post-punk band Gang of Four. Since 1993 he has been a thought leader on how the Internet created a permanent societal and cultural shift, disrupting many industries and changing the way people interact with brands.
Dave’s personal website: I Am Dave Allen
Mike Bailey-Gates was born in 1993 in Rhode Island, USA. He became interested in photography at the age of thirteen when he began taking photographs of the landscape in his surrounding countryside. Over time the hobby progressed into a passion for portraiture and fashion. Michael is currently living in New England with his family and working as a photographer.
Erin Bealmear has been published in The New York Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Margie, XConnect, The Cortland Review, The Santa Clara Review, Opium, and Main Street Rag, among others. She was also awarded a South Carolina Review poetry award and was a finalist for the New Issues Poetry Prize.
Delphine Blue: as a 25-year veteran of the New York radio, club and party scene, Delphine Blue has covered everyone from B.B. King to Debbie Harry to Brian Ferry to Keith Carradine. She was there the night Public Image Ltd started a riot at the Ritz, was able to get Sinead O’Connor to sing an impromptu acoustic song in the middle of an interview. Her range extends beyond music—her series on artists included Ross Bleckner, who waxed poetic about his multiple pet dachshund.
Delphine currently hosts her show Shocking Blue on WBAI 99.5FM Thursday and Friday mornings from 10am-noon EST, and her other radio show The Rest Is Noise on eastvillageradio.com where her show is rated #1 of the 84 weekly music shows on this six-year old internet station. Her interviews can be heard on the internet station Art International Radio. She does commercial voiceover work and has been involved in creating catwalk soundtracks for designers such as Betsey Johnson and Nanette Lepore in Bryant Park. She’s also supervised music for film and commercials and curates music for events and parties.
Mel Bosworth is the author of Freight (forthcoming 2011, Folded Word Press) and Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom (Brown Paper Publishing, 2010). Mel lives and breathes in western Massachusetts.
Rae Bryant’s “Stage Play in Five Acts of Her: Matinée” can be found in the Summer 2010 Issue of BLIP Magazine. Her stories also appear in PANK, Annalemma, Kill Author, and Word Riot among other publications. Forthcoming are works in Gargoyle Magazine, Big Muddy and Puerto del Sol. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two children where she is completing a novel as part of her graduate thesis at Johns Hopkins University.
Timothy Buckwalter lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He is currently at work on a three-part exhibition series, “Life Of The World To Come,” that combines the work of mainstream artists with pieces from artists with disabilities. Buckwalter is also the subject of an upcoming solo show, “Let’s Get Tight,” at Mina Dresden Gallery in San Francisco.
Valerie Chiang was born in Taiwan in 1992, and currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her interest in photography began when she joined the popular photo-sharing website Flickr. What started out as a mere hobby quickly progressed into a passion for fine art and fashion photography.
Photography is the medium Valerie uses as a method of escapism. By applying a mythical, almost enigmatic aesthetic to her work, Valerie always strives to offer viewers an opportunity to stretch their imaginations and form their own stories from her photographs. She incorporates elements of both realism and surrealism into her work, thus creating a world filled with daydreams, nightmares, and everything in between.
Daniel Crocker is the author of People Everyday and Other Poems, Do Not Look Directly Into Me, and The Cornstalk Man. He’s a graduate from the Center for Writers and has recently had work in The Lost Angeles Review, The Chiron Review, and Night Train.
Courtney Eldridge is the author Unkempt, a short story collection, and The Generosity of Women, a novel. She is currently editing two new books, one of which is a young adult novel, written in collaboration with visual artists, primarily teenagers, from around the world, and channeled through Saccades Project. She lives in Los Angeles.
Karla Eoff is a freelance copy editor, who now lives in Taos, New Mexico. She is president of the board of Taos Local Television and a member of Metta Theatre.
Kimberly Ford turned to writing full-time, after earning her Ph.D. in Spanish and French Literature. She has since published essays, reviews and short fiction in a wide variety of magazines including The Believer, Redbook, Literary Mama, Lucero, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She also wrote a best-selling nonfiction book, Hump: True Tales of Sex After Kids (St. Martin’s, 2008) that led her husband to ask her to start publishing under her maiden name. Her proudest literary moment was having her short story “Generation” chosen as an O. Henry “Recommended Story” in 2009. Kimberly lives in Northern California with her husband and kids.
Alicia Gifford is a short fiction writer living in the Los Angeles area. Her work has appeared in lots of swell places that include The Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative Magazine, Hobart, The Los Angeles Review, Pank, Confrontation, and more journals and anthologies.
Bill Gilliland is an architect based in West Hollywood, California. A transplant from NYC in 1987, he is a third-generation Texas native with not much of a discernible accent and has never owned or worn cowboy boots. You really only need them for horseback riding or attending certain Hollywood events when nonverbal communication of cultural roots serve your purpose.
W.F. Lantry, a native of San Diego, won the 2010 CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Poetry Prize, and Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize in Israel. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Prairie Fire, Literal Latté, Asian Cha, Now Culture and Aesthetica (UK). During the last twelve months, his work has been published in fourteen separate and unique countries, including Texas. He currently works in Washington, D.C. and is a contributing editor of Umbrella: A Journal of Poetry and Kindred Prose.
David Laskowski lives in Madison, Wisconsin and teaches at Edgewood College.
Matthew Levin was born in 1968 and raised in Los Angeles, California. His mother, Sheree Rose, got into the LA punk scene in the late 1970’s, after her divorce, and introduced her young son to the music, art, and culture of the time. He studied film at the University of Oregon, and currently lives in Washington, DC, where he works as a filmmaker/screenwriter.
Elijah Majeski is a sixteen-year-old boy who is growing up in the suburbs of southeast Michigan. For reasons he is unaware of, at age twelve he began to take photos of his home and family. Despite a lack of any direction, he developed a strong passion for photography and hasn’t stopped taking photos since. His art aims to blur and cross the lines between dream and reality, hoping to portray the joys and difficulties of growing up.
Laurence Martel-Olivier is a seventeen-year-old photographer, living in Montréal, Canada. She began taking pictures at the age of five, when her parents gave her a camera, and has since been profiled in publications such as Elle Girl Korea, PhotoIcon, Dousée Magazine, Uppercase Magazine, and many more.
John McKernan is now a retired comma herder. He lives—mostly—in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review and many other magazines.
Rick Moody is the author of five novels, three collections of stories, and a memoir, The Black Veil. His most recent work is The Four Fingers of Death (July 2010, from Little, Brown and Company), a novel, and in 2012 he will publish On Celestial Music, a collection of essays. He also plays music in The Wingdale Community Singers.
Tara Violet Niami is a seventeen-year-old Australian-Iranian American, born in New York City,and currently resides in Los Angeles. “The book I selected is one of my all-time favorites, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It had a profound effect on me, and my photograph visualizes an image I found to be one of the most powerful moments in the book.”
Tara’s interviews have appeared in Coming Up Strong, Privelidge House, Studio Fludd (an Italian art collective), Saccades Project, Recordis Photography, and a photograph in Edie Magazine. She has been awarded include a regional gold key, two silver keys, and three honorable mentions in the regional Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for photography and a national gold medal. Her other work includes photographs taken for Babe’s and Ricky’s Inn, her father’s documentary on the blues club of the same name in South Central LA (2009), a photograph selected by President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities for a private, year-long exhibition in their offices in Washington D.C. (2010), as well as a photograph selected for Leave Me Here, a European publication and exhibit curated by Laurence Tarquin Von Thomas (2010). View her portfolio portfolio here.
Jon Patrick has been working in menswear for twenty years, and in 2009, he started The Selvedge Yard, a blog for his own creative outlet. True to its name, what began as a place for the widest possible range of his personal interests and inspirations, TSY has since been called a motorcycle blog by some, and a fashion blog by others, to which J.P. says, “Yes, thank you.” Having focused his energies on writing ‘a historical record of anarchy, alchemy & authenticity,’ Patrick is now taking the next step with The Selvedge Yard, working on special projects—interviews, short films, books—and various collaborations with both the old guard and a new generation of artists and artisans.
Greg Pierce’s stories have appeared in Avery, Electric Literature (forthcoming), Conjunctions.com, Confrontation, and Berkeley Fiction Review. He is currently working on a chamber musical, Andra, with composer John Kander. He is also learning to bake bread. His multimedia stage adaptation of Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (co-written with Stephen Earnhart) premiered at the Ohio Theatre in NYC in 2010, and will be featured at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2011. He’s working on his MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College, and lives with his partner in NYC.
Shelagh Power-Chopra’s work appears or is forthcoming in Metazen, Electric Lit’s Outlet Blog, Gargoyle, The Significant Objects Project, Used Furniture Review, and elsewhere.
Nicholas Ripatrazone is the author of Oblations (Gold Wake Press 2011), a book of prose poems. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, The Mississippi Review, The Collagist, Sou’wester, SmokeLong Quarterly and Beloit Fiction Journal.
Andrew Roe’s fiction has appeared in Tin House, One Story, Glimmer Train, The Cincinnati Review and other publications. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he lives in Oceanside, California.
Sheree Rose is a Los Angeles-based artist, whose films, videos, performances and photographs have been shown at museums and galleries all over the world, including the Tate Museum of Modern Art in Liverpool, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Beginning in 1981 as the staff photographer for Beyond Baroque Literary Center in Venice, California, she documented the growing music, literary and art scene in Los Angeles. She collaborated with her late partner, Bob Flanagan, in an interactive art installation which opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1992 and traveled to the New Museum of Modern Art in New York. She co-produced the Sundance-Award winning documentary, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, 1996. After Bob’s death, Sheree participated in an international art show in Tokyo, Japan where she exhibited “Boballoon,” a 20-foot high sculptural homage in Bob’s honor. Sheree received an MFA in Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine.
Dale Rothenberg is a nineteen-year-old musician and photographer studying jazz piano and photography at Oberlin College & Conservatory in Ohio. He grew up in Connecticut and started taking photos in 2006 when he picked up his father’s 35mm camera. Since then, he has expanded to many different formats and styles of photography, and his work has appeared in various books, newspapers, magazines, and online publications.
James Russel is your poet laureate of vulgarity. He lives in New Jersey, on purpose, because someone ought to. “The Gay Bomb” is his first published work, from the eternally revised short story collection, “A.D.D. Bombs.” It was a real Pentagon project. Millions of our tax dollars spent trying to make Al Qaeda queer while we cut education spending! Rome wasn’t burned in a day.
He recently completed his second novel, Jesse Rules in ’94, the diary of Jesse Amos, a grunge-age Holden Caulfield obsessed with Catholicism, losing his virginity, earning your vote for student council president, and getting away with murder. Would-be publishers can e‑mail eclecticjf@aol.com to pay him handsomely for this tome.
David Ryan’s fiction has appeared in BOMB Magazine, The Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Tin House, Alaska Quarterly, Hobart, New Orleans Review, and the anthology, Flash Fiction Forward, among others.
Douglas Silver’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, The Briar Cliff Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Our Stories, and elsewhere, and has been a finalist in competitions by Narrative Magazine and Glimmer Train.
Erik Smetana’s father was reared near an Arkansas watermelon patch, his mother on the outskirts of Motown. Examples of Erik’s work can (or soon will) be found in some form or fashion at Birmingham Arts Journal, 52nd City, Thieves Jargon, Monkeybicycle, Annalemma, and PANK among others. More information about Erik can be found at .
Kevin Spaide is from Auburn, New York. His stories are in Witness, Per Contra, Necessary Fiction, Identity Theory, Frigg and several other publications, both online and in print. He lives in Madrid with his wife and son.
Michael D. Snediker is the author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (University of Minnesota Press), as well as Nervous Pastoral (dove|tail press) and Bourdon (White Rabbit Press,forthcoming). His poems have appeared in venues including Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Jubilat, and The Paris Review. He teaches American Literature at Queen’s University, Ontario.
Chuck Stephens is a freelance writer and Contributing Editor to FILM COMMENT. He lives and teaches in Nashville, Tennessee.
Oliver Taylor is a sixteen-year-old photographer, living in England with seven cameras older than him and the words of a Chilean poet.
Edmund White’s many novels, memoirs, and works of literary and cultural criticism include A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, Genet: A Biography, My Lives, Arts and Letters, Hotel de Dream, and most recently, City Boy, a memoir about New York in the 1970s. Along with six other gay writers, he formed a literary club known as the Violet Quill. In 1982, he helped found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Officier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres, and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the faculty of Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing. He lives in New York City.
Bill Yarrow is the author of WRENCH (erbacce-press, 2009) and “Wound Jewelry” (new aesthetic, 2010). His poems have recently appeared in BLIP, PANK, Poetry International, Magma, DIAGRAM, Ramshackle Review, LITSNACK, and Blue Fifth Review. He lives in Illinois.