Duff Brenna

Duff Brenna is the author of six novels. He is the recipient of an AWP Award for Best Novel (The Book of Mamie), a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a South Florida Sun-Sentinel Award for Favorite Book of the year (The Altar of the Body), a Milwaukee Magazine Best Short Story of the Year Award, and a Pushcart Honorable Mention.

Brenna’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Cream City Review, SQ, Agni, The Nebraska Review, The Literary Review, The Madison Review, New Letters, and numerous other literary venues. His work has been translated into six languages.

www.duffbrenna.com

James Brown

James Brown is the author of the recently released memoir, This River, and The Los Angeles Diaries. He’s received the Nelson Algren Award in Short Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and Ploughshares.

Brown teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Cal State San Bernardino.

www.jamesbrownauthor.com

Walter Cummins

Walter Cummins' fourth short-story collection, The End of the Circle, from Egress Books is available on Amazon.com. In addition to publishing more than 100 stories, he edited The Literary Review for twenty years and is now co-publisher of Serving House Books.

www.waltercummins.com

Joseph Deumer

Joseph Duemer is Professor of Literature at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. His poems have appeared widely in literary journals in the US and in Vietnam; his most recent book is Magical Thinking, from Ohio St. University Press. He blogs at sharpsand.net.

Clyde Fixmer

Clyde Fixmer is a San Diego Poet and short story writer. His work has appeared in over a hundred magazines and journals. His latest book of poems, Walking in a Land of Dancers, was published by Scopcraeft Press, Portales, NM.

Thomas Fleming

Mathias B. Freese

Mathias B. Freese is a psychotherapist and teacher, as well as the author of The i Tetralogy, a Holocaust novel and winner of the Allbooks Review Editor’s Choice Award 2007; and Down to a Sunless Sea, a collection of short fiction, Indie Excellence Finalist Book Awards.

His stories have appeared in Fiction Fix, Mensa Bulletin, Eclectica, Wilderness House Literary Review, Subtletea, and Pulp City.

“Sincerely, Max Weber” is from his new collection of short stories now in progress, Working Through the Holocaust. “Soap,” from the same collection, appears in Issue 2 of Serving House Journal.

www.mathiasbfreese.com

Elizabeth Gauffreau

Elizabeth Gauffreau’s most recent publication is a short story in the anthology, When Last on the Mountain. Her fiction also appears in The Long Story, Soundings East, Ad Hoc Monadnock, Rio Grande Review, The Mystic River Review, Blueline, and Slow Trains, among others.

As Assistant Dean of Individualized Studies at Granite State College in Concord, New Hampshire, Gauffreau teaches nontraditional students to develop a customized major from a variety of educational and professional experiences.

Susan Hartung

Susan Hartung’s poems have appeared in The Berkshire Review, A Memory of New Hunger, and the online journal Cell2Soul. They have been printed as posters for traveling exhibitions organized by Healing Legacy in Brattleboro, Vermont. Elephant Tree House Press will publish a chapbook of her work in spring of this year. Hartung is a visual artist with an MFA from Columbia University in painting. She lives and works in western Massachusetts.

Terry Hertzler

Terry Hertzler’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including The Writer, North American Review, Margie, Nimrod, Literal Latté, and Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, as well as being produced on stage and for radio and television. His work has twice been nominated for The Pushcart Prize.

Michael Hettich

Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poetry, Like Happiness, was published this past October by Anhinga Press. A new book, The Animals Beyond Us, is forthcoming in 2011 from New Rivers Press. His poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. He teaches at Miami Dade College and lives in Miami with his family.

Donna Hilbert

Donna Hilbert’s books include The Green Season (World Parade Books, 2009) and, from PEARL Editions, Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems, and Transforming Matter. Hilbert appears in, and her poetry is part of, the text for the documentary “Grief Becomes Me: A Love Story.” She lives in Long Beach, California.

Thomas E. Kennedy

Line-Maria Lång

Half-Swedish and half-Danish, Line-Maria Lång lives in Copenhagen. Her debut story collection Rat King (Rottekonge) appeared in 2009 from the distinguished Danish publishing house, Rosinante. English translations from her debut collection have appeared or soon will appear in the American literary journals: The Southern Review, The Literary Review, Absinthe: New European Writing, and Serving House Journal.

Her photograph appears on the cover of the anthology, The Girl with Red Hair, in which 20 writers were invited to contribute work inspired by that photograph.

Line-Maria Lång is also an actress and singer, who appears in the 8-minute film, Pictures of a Moving House. The film is a strange, David Lynch-like experience, and was made by Lotte Mia Wewer, who also took the photograph of Line-Maria Lång on the cover of the anthology. (Lotte Mia Mewer specializes in experimental short films and has received prizes for her films as well as grants from the Danish Film Institute.)

Dorianne Laux

Dorianne Laux is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship among other awards and the author of five collections of poetry. She teaches at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and at the Pacific University Low Residency MFA program. Her most recent collection is The Book of Men (Norton).

William Luvaas

William Luvaas is the author of two novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (Little, Brown) and Going Under (Putnam), and a story collection, A Working Man’s Apocrypha (Oklahoma Univ. Press).

He is the recipient of a 2006-07 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. His story, “The Firewood Wars,” was Co-Winner of Fiction Network’s Second National Fiction Competition; “Ashes Rain Down” won first place in Glimmer Train’s Winter 2007/08 Fiction Open Competition; and “Family Life” has just won The Ledge Magazine’s Fiction Awards Competition.

His short fiction, essays, and articles have appeared in many publications, including: The American Fiction Anthology, American Literary Review, Antioch Review, Blackbird, Carpe Articulum, Cosmopolitan, Confrontation, Epiphany, Glimmer Train, Grain Mag., Main Street Rag, No Place for a Puritan: The California Desert Anthology, North American Review, Open Spaces, Paraspheres (anthology), Pretext 10 (anthology), Short Story, Stand Magazine, The Sun, Thema, Vignette, The Village Voice, and The Washington Post Book World.

Luvaas’ new novel, An Unimagined Fate, is being represented by Victoria Sanders Associates in New York.

Chauncey Mabe

Chauncey Mabe fell in love with reading in the small library of the elementary school in his hometown of Wytheville, Virginia. That, combined with a love of newspapers, courtesy of his father, suggests he may have been fated to a career in journalism.

After 23 years as the books editor and senior cultural columnist for the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, he began working with the Florida Center for the Literary Arts. He has interviewed everyone from John Ciardi to Eric Carle, Dave Barry to Margaret Atwood, Charles Willeford to Marilyn French, Tom McGuane to Edmund White, A. Manette Ansay to Joyce Carol Oates.

Before joining the Sun Sentinel, Mabe worked as a reporter and magazine editor. He continues to review books of all genres for a variety of publications and to write on his blog Open Page; and he is a Contributing Editor for Serving House: A Journal of Literary Arts.

flcenterlitarts.wordpress.com

Clare MacQueen

Jack Marshall

Jack Marshall is a well-known poet based in San Francisco. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and the author of several poetry collections and a stunning memoir, From Baghdad to Brooklyn, his most recent volume is The Steel Veil, published by Coffee House Press. The three poems that appear in this issue are sections from Trace, a book-length poem.

David Memmott

David Memmott has published five books of poetry, a novel, and a story collection. Recent work has been published by Strange Horizons, High Desert Journal, and Windfall; and in the anthologies, Deer Drink the Moon: Poems of Oregon; Salt: An Oregon Coastal Poetry Anthology; Writers on the Job: Tales of the Non-Writing Life; and The Alchemy of Stars: An Anthology of Rhysling Award Winners.

Memmott’s a Fishtrap Fellow and has received three Fellowships for Publishing from Literary Arts, Inc. His newest book is the poetry collection, Giving It Away. His book of poems, The Larger Earth: Descending Notes of a Grounded Astronaut, was selected as one of the 150 best books of poetry published in 150 years of Oregon history.

His long narrative poem, “Where the Yellow Brick Road Turns West,” was a finalist for the 2010 Spur Award for Best Western Poem of 2009, and is available online through Poets and Writers e-chapbook series edited by Walter Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy on Web del Sol.

Memmott is the editor and publisher of Wordcraft of Oregon.

Joseph Millar

Joseph Millar’s two collections of poetry are Overtime and Fortune, both from EWU Press. A third collection, Blue Rust, is due out from Carnegie Mellon University Press this fall, and will include the three poems reprinted in this issue. He teaches in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program.

Valerie Miner

Valerie Miner is the author of thirteen books, including the new novel, After Eden. Her writing has appeared in The Village Voice, Salmagundi, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, Southwest Review, and many other journals. Her work has been translated into Turkish, Danish, German, Swedish, Dutch, French, and Spanish.

A professor and artist-in-residence at Stanford University, Miner has won awards and fellowships from The Rockefeller Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation, among others. In addition, she’s had Fulbrights in India, Tunisia, and Indonesia.

www.valerieminer.com

Robin Parks

Robin Parks’ stories and essays have appeared in The MacGuffin, Bellingham Review, Prism International, and other journals; and her fiction has won the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. She has an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she was the Presidential Fellow in Creative Writing.

Hank Pugh

Hank Pugh is a graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. His work has appeared in 322 Review. He currently lives and practices law in Easton, Maryland.

Kenneth Rapoza

A graduate of the MFA program at Vermont College, Kenneth Rapoza has work published in The Antioch Review, Upstreet, and The New Renaissance. He spent the last 13 years as both a national and foreign-based journalist for The Wall Street Journal and, earlier, for The Boston Globe. His reporting has appeared on the cover of The Nation and in irreverent online magazine, Salon.

R. A. Rycraft

R. A. Rycraft has published stories, essays, reviews, and interviews in a number of journals and anthologies, including PIF Magazine, VerbSap, Perigee, The MacGuffin, and Calyx.

Winner of an Eric Hoffer Best New Writing Editor’s Choice Award for 2008 and a Special Mention for the 2010 Pushcart Prize, Rycraft is chair of the English department at Mt. San Jacinto College in Menifee, California.

rarycraft [at] servinghousejournal [dot] com

Marla E. Schwartz

A Palm Beach County, Florida resident for 12 years, this Ohio native has been writing in different genres for many years. She’s currently a Senior Writer for Miami Living Magazine, a Feature Writer for Lighthouse Point Magazine, and a Cultural Arts Correspondent for AroundWellington.com.

An avid photographer, her work has appeared in numerous Ohio publications, as well as in AroundWellington.com, Miami Living Magazine, The Miami Herald, The Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and The Palm Beach Post.

She has had an assortment of plays published and produced throughout the country, including her piece “America’s Working?” at the First Stage and Lone Star Ensemble theater companies in Los Angeles and by Lynn University at an Off-Broadway company in New York. Her play, “The Lunch Time Café,” was a finalist for the Heideman Award, Actors Theatre of Louisville.

You can contact her at: marlaschwartz [at] att [dot] net

Tom Sheehan

Tom Sheehan’s recent books are Epic Cures and Brief Cases, Short Spans (both from Press 53, North Carolina); and A Collection of Friends and From the Quickening (both from Pocol Press, Virginia).

His work appears in Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform and Milspeak Anthology: Warriors, Veterans, Family and Friends Writing the Military Experience. He has 14 Pushcart nominations, Noted Story Awards for 2007 and 2008, and the Georges Simenon Fiction Award; and is included in Dzanc Best of the Web Anthology for 2009 and nominated for Best of the Web 2010.

Rope and Wire Magazine has published 145 of Sheehan’s short stories. Print issues include Rosebud (3) and Ocean Magazine (7), among others, and hundreds of his stories and poems appear in internet publications.

His publications also include three novels, An Accountable Death, Vigilantes East, and Death for the Phantom Receiver (a football mystery); as well as five poetry collections (among them, This Rare Earth and Other Flights; Ah, Devon Unbowed; The Saugus Book; and Reflections from Vinegar Hill).

Sheehan served with the 31st Infantry Regiment in Korea in 1951.

Colin Smith

Colin Smith was born in 1974 and raised in Middlebury, Vermont. Spending summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts and backcountry New Hampshire gave him an appreciation of the natural world, and provided the subject matter for several of his early poems. He has studied with the poet Robert Pack and attended the summer New England Writers Conference at Middlebury College.

Al Zolynas

Al Zolynas spent his boyhood in Australia before coming to the United States when he was fifteen. He taught in the English Department at Alliant University for many years and is a senior Zen practitioner. The poem, “Love in the Classroom,” originally appeared in Zolynas’s collection, The New Physics, published by Wesleyan University Press. Many of his poems can be found online as well.