qarrtsiluni

Transformation is so basic to life and so central to our own work, it was an almost immediate choice for our theme. Its success, of course, depended on the artists drawn to it, and we have been pleased at the wide range of responses received. From many excellent submissions, we chose work we felt best embodied the active moment of transformation rather than describing it; artists sent an abundance of impressive work and gave us rich material to craft a strong and lasting beauty with this issue of qarrtsiluni.

It was an honor to be invited to be guest editors, and a pleasure to see our expectations realized. We hope the examples of media such as music, book arts, flash fiction, digital imaging, and video will continue to be part of future submissions to qarrtsiluni along with the established work in poetry, photography and prose, and that new friends have been attracted to its open and engaging format.

—Jessamyn Smyth and Allan Peterson

Click on the contributors’ names to see all their publications in qarrtsiluni to date.

C. Albert is a collage artist who often includes poems in or along with her collages in exhibitions. This interdisciplinary work has recently been featured in Mannequin Envy and the Houston Literary Review. She has two online portfolios: Runaway Moon and Aerial Dreams.

Dax Bayard-Murray (a sad gold) has had poems published in Redivider, Sawbuck, 42opus, The Caribbean Writer and Otoliths. He grew up in the Virgin Islands on a hillside overlooking farms and the Atlantic. Now he lives on a hillside in Boston and makes spreadsheets at a biotech company. In real life he is a person.

Judith Bernal has been writing poetry for ten years. After decades of translating, social work and administration, retirement has energized her passion for writing and reading poetry.

Nicolette Bethel was born and raised in Nassau, Bahamas, where she currently resides. She has lived, studied and worked in the UK and Canada, and is now apprenticed to the Government for her sins and others’. She is a playwright, a poet, a fiction writer and an anthropologist. She blogs as Scavella at scavella.wordpress.com, and links to her other online poems can be found here.

Darcy Bruce is currently a student and an employee of the Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut, where she is a full time used book putter-awayer and coffee maker, and a part time goat and cat rustler-upper. She enjoys books, writing, coffee and cats with varying degrees of equality, but while she is rather fond of the goats, they are somewhat further down the list. You can read some of her works in progress by visiting her Xanga site.

Chris Clarke (Coyote Crossing) is a science and nature writer currently residing in Nipton, California, a town in the Mojave Desert with a population of thirty people and perhaps ten times as many bats.

Dr. Michael Brant DeMaria is a psychologist, author, poet and musician with 25 years of experience in the work of guiding others on their life journeys. A diplomat in expressive therapy, he integrates nature and creativity (poetry, play, music, movement and art) in his therapeutic work. He has also created 3 CDs of ambient world music, “The River,” “Ocean,” and “Siyotanka,” and is the author of several books and a couple of plays. He is the founder and director of ONTOS, a consulting company which specializes in helping individuals and groups live more creative, meaningful and effective lives. Find out more about his work at www.ontos.org.

Lisken Van Pelt Dus is a high-school teacher and martial arts instructor, raised in England, the U.S., and Mexico, and now living in Massachusetts. Her work can be found in Conduit [pop-up], Main Street Rag, The South Carolina Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Umbrella, and other journals and anthologies, and has earned awards from The Comstock Review and Atlanta Review. A chapbook, Everywhere at Once, is forthcoming from Pudding House Press.

Jessica Fox-Wilson is an educator, writer, and poet who lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two cats. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Motel, Rive Gauche, and Gin Bender Poetry Review, among others, and her book reviews have regularly appeared at Read Write Poem and the Uptown Neighborhood News. She is also the founding editor of Asphalt Sky and blogs at 9 to 5 Poet and Attack of the Movie Watchers.

Angela France (webpage) works with challenging teenagers and, for relief, makes her brain leak out of her ears by trying to write poetry. She is enjoying middle age and is spectacularly bad at housewifery.

Liz Gallagher (Musings) has poetry, fiction and non-fiction work published or forthcoming in Magma, Stirring Literary Magazine, Dead Drunk Dublin, The Pedestal Magazine, The Stinging Fly and others. She was selected for the Best New Poets 2007 anthology from Virginia University.

Richard Garcia is the author of The Persistence of Objects from BOA Editions. His poems have recently appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review and Crazyhorse.

Clare Grant meant to send in some things about cobwebs drying in the sun, daffodils under a sudden fall of snow and the sunset draining out of the sky. But instead her blog, Three Beautiful Things, gave her a handful of posts about loose coppers and five pound notes.

Suzanne Grazyna is really a robot.

Daniel Hales (website) has poems currently or forthcoming in Bateau, Slant, Slipstream, Cranky, Upstreet, Taiga and The Comstock Review. His poem “Licorice” was recently featured on Verse Daily. He plays guitar and sings in The Frost Heaves, The Ambiguities, and The Wherewithal.

Pamela Hart is a former journalist. Her chapbook, The End of the Body, was recently published by toadlily press. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals like BigCityLit.com, Rattapallax, Lumina and Kalliope. She is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art and teaches writing at Long Island University’s Graduate School of Education. She blogs at A Walk Around the Lake.

Penny Harter (website) is published widely in journals and anthologies. Her recent books include The Night Marsh (WordTech, 2008), Along River Road, Lizard Light: Poems From the Earth, and Buried in the Sky. Her illustrated alphabestiary, The Beastie Book, will be out early in 2009 from Shenanigan Books. She has won three poetry fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, as well as an award from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Mary Carolyn Davies Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the William O. Douglas Nature Writing Award. She lives in Summit, New Jersey, and visits schools for the New Jersey Writers Project.

Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi is an Iranian poet, translator and freelance journalist. Her poems appear in the anthologies Contemporary Women Poets of Iran and Anthology of Best Women Poets. She is the author of Eternal Voices: Interviews with Poets East and West and The Last Night with Sylvia Plath: Essays on Poetry. She has extensively translated World literature into Persian. Among her several publications are: Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, Women Poets of the World, Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry, The Beauty of Friendship: Selected Poems by Khalil Gibran, and Love Poetry of the World, Classic and Contemporary.

Caren Heft (website) makes letterpress books. Cave Canem2 was a small edition done out of love of a dog, Dillenger, now gone. “For those of us who love dogs,” she notes, “we sign up to break our hearts with every dog as, with any luck at all, we will outlive the latest dog.” Heft is the director of the Edna Carlsten Gallery at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, in Central Wisconsin.

Jo Hemmant (florescence) is an ex-journalist and editor, relatively new to poetry but completely obsessed. Her work has appeared in Canopic Jar and Word Catalyst and is upcoming in blossombones, Equinox, Decanto and Fire. She’s a founding editor, along with Christine Swint, of a new poetry and art journal, ouroboros review, which will appear online quarterly and in print biannually. She lived abroad for many years — Sicily, Amsterdam, Hong Kong (the inspiration for this poem) — and can now sometimes be found in the ‘burbs outside London, but mostly up, up in the clouds.

Sonia Hendy-Isaac loves shoes, wine and poetry — not necessarily in that order. Her poem in this issue is from her debut collection, Flesh, due out from Bluechrome in summer 2009. She is also an editor at iota and her most recent work has been published by Snakeskin and The Shit Creek Review.

Christopher Hennessy (blog) is the author of Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets (University of Michigan Press) and his poetry appeared in Ploughshares‘ special “Emerging Writers” edition. His poetry, interviews, essays, and book reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Verse, Cimarron Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, Wisconsin Review, Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere. His poems were anthologized in This New Breed.

Matthew Hittinger (website) is the author of the award-winning chapbooks Pear Slip (Spire Press, 2007) and Narcissus Resists (Beauty/Truth Press, forthcoming 2008). Shortlisted for the National Poetry Series and Walt Whitman Award, Matthew’s work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Fine Madness, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mantis, Meridian, and elsewhere, including the anthology Best New Poets 2005. Matthew lives and works in New York City.

Tammy Ho Lai-ming (website) is a Hong Kong-born and -based writer. She edited Hong Kong U Writing: An Anthology (2006) and co-edited Love & Lust (Inkstone Books, 2008). She is also a co-founder and co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the first and currently the only Hong Kong online literary journal. Ho wishes soon she will experience a great transformation that normal mortals can afford.

Joe Hyam lives in Tunbridge Wells, UK. He was a journalist, but now spends more time writing poetry and growing vegetables. Every day at Now’s the Time he posts “three fine or strange things, which, day by day, give me pleasure, and which I hope will amuse and give pleasure to others.”

Dick Jones (Patteran Pages), a musician and recently retired drama teacher, has been writing seriously for the past 20 years. His poems and short stories have been published in a wide range of magazines, both on- and offline, and he is currently preparing a selection of poetry for submission to publishers.

Lucy Kempton is British, living in Brittany with husband and dog, and sometimes teaching English. She blogs at box elder — subtitled “meanderings of a displaced dilettante” — and the microblog Out with Mol. She also supplied the photographs for an online project called Compasses, in a call-and-response pattern with the travel sonnets of British blogger Joe Hyam. She co-edited qarrtsiluni’s Water issue with Katherine Durham Oldmixon.

Donna Kuhn (Digital Aardvarks) is an author and mult-media artist working in video, visual art, dance, poetry and music. She lives in Northern California.

Dorothee Lang edits the BluePrintReview, an experimental online journal, and is the author of Masala Moments, a travel novel about India. Her work has appeared in Pindeldyboz, Hobart, Eclectica, The Mississippi Review, Juked, No Tell Motel, Subtletea and numerous other places. For more about her, visit her at blueprint21.de.

Susanna Lang’s collection of poems, Even Now, has just been published by The Backwaters Press. She has published original poems and essays, and translations from the French, in such journals as The Baltimore Review, Kalliope, Chicago Review, New Directions, Green Mountains Review, Jubilat, and Rhino, winning a 1999 Illinois Arts Council award for a poem published in The Spoon River Poetry Review. Her book publications include translations of Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, both by Yves Bonnefoy. She lives with her husband and son in Chicago, and teaches in the Chicago Public Schools.

Bobbi Lurie’s third collection of poetry, Grief Suite, is forthcoming from CustomWords. Her other books are The Book I Never Read and Letter from the Lawn. Her work has appeared in numerous print and on-line journals including New American Writing, the American Poetry Review, Otoliths and diode.

Charlotte Mandel’s seventh book of poetry is forthcoming from Midmarch Arts Press. Her other titles include Sight Lines (read sample poems on her webpage) and two poem-novellas of feminist biblical revision — The Life of Mary and The Marriages of Jacob. As an independent scholar, she has published a series of articles on the role of cinema in the life and work of poet H.D., and studies of May Sarton. She teaches poetry writing at Barnard College Center for Research on Women.

Dana Guthrie Martin (My Gorgeous Somewhere) lives and writes in the Seattle area. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Canopic Jar, Juked, Boxcar Poetry Review, and Blood Orange Review, Weave Magazine, and Coconut Poetry. She edited the Hidden Messages issue of qarrtsiluni with Carey Wallace.

Janet McCann has taught at Texas A&M since 1969. She had an NEA award in poetry in 1989, and her most recent collection is Emily’s Dress (Pecan Grove Press, 2004).

Susan Meyers (blog) is the author of Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), which received the SC Poetry Book Prize, the SIBA Book Award for Poetry, and the Brockman-Campbell Book Award. A long-time writing instructor, she lives in the rural community of Givhans, near Summerville, SC.

Ann E. Michael (website) is a poet, essayist, librettist and educator who lives in Eastern Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College and is a rostered Artist-in-Education with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and in newspapers, family magazines, poetry anthologies, educational and academic publications as well as on radio. Her chapbooks of poems include More than Shelter (Spire Press), The Minor Fauna (Finishing Line Press), and Small Things Rise and Go (FootHills Publishing).

Mario Milosevic lives in the Columbia River Gorge, one of the most beautiful places anywhere. His day job is at the local public library. He writes poems, stories, novels, and a little non-fiction. For a complete list of his publication credits (and more bio), see his website.

Lucy Morris is an explorer, anthropologist and humanitarian worker. She is based in London, and works for an international aid agency supporting projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lucy is usually found carrying either a camera and/or notepad. She writes a work blog.

Caitlin O’Brien is a farmhand and writer in Central Vermont. When she can get to the internet, she blogs at kat.uprush.org.

Katherine Durham Oldmixon is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Huston-Tillotson, an historically Black university on Austin’s East Side. A poet active in the community, she also serves on the board of Texas Folklife, is the current president of Austin Poetry Society and is a Research Associate of the Humanities Institute of the University of Texas at Austin. She and Arturo Lomas Garza blog about their artistic projects, many of which are collaborations, at Katudi Artists Collaboration. She co-edited qarrtsiluni’s Water issue with Lucy Kempton.

Oriana lives by the sea, the cold Pacific Ocean near San Diego.

Pamela Johnson Parker (Pamela’s Musings) is a wife, mom, and transcriptionist/ editor, an adjunct creative writing instructor, and a brand-new graduate of an MFA program in poetry.

Allan Peterson, one of the two editors of this issue, was profiled in the Call for Submissions. (He is no relation to the two Petersons whose work appears in the issue.)

Evan J. Peterson (Poemocracy) is a native Floridian, and as such has difficulty distinguishing between the surreal and the merely absurd. His writing has recently appeared in/on The Pinch, The Southeast Review, CaKe, and LaFovea.org. He studies and teaches at the Florida State University.

K. Alma Peterson is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The New Orphic Review, Perihelion, Skidrow Penthouse and others. In 1999, her poem “Between Us” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rosemount, Minnesota.

Zoe Polach is a high school student in the DC metro area. She is a devoted student of everything she can find, and enjoys few things more than making puns, poems, and connections.

Monica Raymond, who was selected as a 2008 finalist in poetry by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, recently moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Minneapolis to take up a Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights Center there.

Moira Richards writes accounting textbooks and poems in South Africa. Her tanka and collaborative work appear in journals in a half-dozen different countries about the planet.

Susan Roney-O’Brien teaches, reads for The Worcester Review, and writes. Her work has appeared in Yankee, Prairie Schooner, Diner, Concrete Wolf, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, Margin, Rock and Sling, Ekphrasis, and other magazines. She has won the Worcester County Poetry Association Contest, the William and Kingman Page Poetry Book Award for her chapbook, Farmwife, and the New England Association of Teachers of English “Poet of the Year” award.

Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld has been published both nationally and internationally in journals, books, and anthologies and on the Internet. A former SMU Press editor, SMU English instructor, and Navy missile analyst, she has also done poetry therapy with forensic patients at St. Elizabeths Hospital and has made and maintains three Web sites for JewishGen on perished Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.

Paul Selig’s work for the stage has been produced internationally. He is the director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College and makes his home in New York City. A practicing intuitive and energy healer, his website is GuidedReadings.com.

Tom Sheehan’s Epic Cures won a 2006 IPPY Award, and A Collection of Friends was nominated for Albrend Memoir Award. He has nine Pushcart and three MillionWriter nominations, a Silver Rose Award ART and the Georges Simenon Award for Excellence in Fiction. He served in 31st Infantry Regiment, Korea, 1951. He meets again soon for a lunch/gab session with pals, the ROMEOs, Retired Old Men Eating Out, aged 92, 80, 79, and 78. They’ve co-edited two books on their hometown of Saugus, Massachusetts, sold 3500 to date of 4500 printed. He drove out to Oak Park, Illinois for the birth of his latest grandchild, Cavan Thomas Sheehan, on July 25.

Barbara Smith (Barbara’s bleeuugh!) lives in the Republic of Ireland with her six children and partner. Doghouse Books published her debut collection, Kairos, last year. Her work has been published in Europe, the US, Canada and beyond. She is currently enrolled in the MA in Creative Writing programme with Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, truly making her a ‘Cross-Border poet.’ Listen to an interview with Barbara here (mp3).

Jessamyn Smyth, one of the two editors for this issue, was profiled in the Call for Submissions.

Robin Sontheimer is a graduate student at the University of Missouri Kansas City. She studies linguistics and 19th century American literature, writes poetry, and takes photographs.

Barbara A. Taylor’s haiku and short form poems have appeared on Poemeleon, Moonset, Stylus, Wisteria, Ribbons, Lynx, Simply Haiku, and others, including MET anthologies Landfall and Atlas Poetica. A native of Australia, her diverse poems with audio are at her Tripod site.

After more than ten years as a still-life photographer, Maggie Taylor began using the computer to create her images in 1996. Her images have appeared in one-person exhibitions around the world, and are in numerous public and private collections. For more about Maggie, and for samples of her work, visit her website.

The photography of Jerry Uelsmann (website, blog) has been exhibited in more than 100 individual shows in the United States and abroad over the last 30 years. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1972. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Biblioteque National in Paris, and many other museums worldwide.

Scott Wiggerman has published one book of poetry, Vegetables and Other Relationships (Plain View Press, 2000), and been published in dozens of journals, including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Windhover, Midwest Poetry Review, Spillway, Poesia, and Concho River Review. Most recently, he has been published in the anthologies Queer Collection (Fabulist Flash, 2007), The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press, 2007), and Only Connect (Cinnamon Press, 2007). In addition, he is one of the two “cats” (i.e., editors) of Dos Gatos Press, which publishes the Texas Poetry Calendar, now in its eleventh year.

Bev Wigney is a photographer, writer and naturalist living on a farm in eastern Ontario. She blogs at Burning Silo, and maintains in addition a website and an online photo gallery for her nature-related photography.

Katherine Williams, while making transgenic mice at UCLA, authored three chapbooks, published in various anthologies, and received a Pushcart nomination. She does marine research now on James Island, SC, where she lives with her husband, Richard Garcia (see above) and their dog Louie.

Melinda Wilson is Managing Editor of Coldfront Magazine. She lives and teaches in New York City.

Steve Wing (PBase gallery) is a visual artist and writer whose work reflects his appreciation for the extraordinary in ordinary days and places. He lives in Florida, where he takes dawn photos on his way to work in an academic institution. His work recently has also appared in Flutter, Perigee, Pequin, BluePrintReview and Eclectica.

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