Masthead

Ravi Shankar is Poet-in-Residence and Associate Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, Chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust and the founding editor of Drunken Boat. He has published or edited seven books of poems, including Deepening Groove, Radha Says, Seamless Matter, Voluptuous Bristle, Wanton Textiles, and Instrumentality. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W Norton & Co.), called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Pushcart Prize, been featured in The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, appeared on the BBC and NPR, and has performed his work around the world. He is currently on the faculty of the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong.

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University and teaches composition at Hostos Community College in New York City, where she currently lives.  Her dissertation explores the representation of social experiment in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American fiction set in Italy.  Suzanne's fiction and poetry have appeared or will soon appear in Gargoyle Magazine, elimae, PANK,Word Riot, Breakwater Review, and Sierra Nevada Review.  She also writes fiction reviews for magazines such as The Literary Review, Small Axe, and World Literature Today. 

Rob Ray examines technology in public and outdoors spaces. This examination results in interactive public artworks, experimental films and audio works. His most recent interactive work, GETLOST! was commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices Festival in Cumbria and Lancashire, UK. His video game disguised as ATM, Bucky’s Animal Spirit, was selected for the art.tech exhibition at The Lab (San Francisco), and the (re)load exhibition at Antena (Chicago). Rob also collaborates with Jason Soliday and Jon Satrom as a member of the Chicago-based circuit-bent multimedia noise trio I Love Presets. From 1999 to 2008, Rob was founder and head curator of DEADTECH electronic arts center in Chicago, IL. Rob recieved an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

Michael T. Bullock is a composer, improviser, video artist, illustrator and writer living in Boston, MA, USA. His modes of work include electroacoustic composition, improvisation, drawing, and video. Bullock performs across the US and in Europe, collaborating with a huge range of artists, including Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, steve roden, Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley of nmperign, Mazen Kerbaj and Theodore Bikel. Bullock’s music has been released by numerous labels including Cassauna, Winds Measure, Sedimental, Grob, 1.8sec, al Maslakh, and Homophoni. He recently completed the first PhD from the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

Named one of "today's strongest emerging talents in literary fiction and poetry" from the Huffington Post, Sybil is the author of two books of fiction, The Life Plan, a comic novel, and a linked short story collection, Talismans. Her MFA is from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

She spent twelve years teaching in South Korea before returning to the States in 2007. She is an Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing) at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where she is the Assistant Director of the Meacham Writers' Workshop. She is currently on faculty of the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong and is on faculty for the Yale Writer's Conference.

Heather Bryant won the 2009 Southeast Review Narrative Nonfiction Contest.  She was Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Randolph College, Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, and fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts’ Moulin à Nef residence in France.  Her short fiction has appeared with The Southeast Review, Women Writers, and Seal Press.  She teaches writing at Pace University. 

Michelle Chan Brown’s Double Agent was the winner of the 2011 Kore First Book Award, judged by Bhanu Kapil. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Linebreak, The Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Sycamore Review, Tampa Review, Witness, and others. Her chapbook, The Clever Decoys is available from LATR Editions. She earned her MFA at the University of Michigan and lives in Pomfret, Connecticut, where she is the Writer-in-Residence at Pomfret School.

Shira Dentz is the author of a book of poems, black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), that was nominated for the PEN/Osterweil Award 2011. She is also the author of a chapbook, Leaf Weather (Tilt Press/recently reissued by Shearsman), and another full-length collection, door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press), that is forthcoming. Her poems have appeared widely in journals including The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, jubilat, and New American Writing, and featured online at The Academy of American Poets' site ({Poets.org), NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah and is Writer in Residence at The New College of Florida this spring. Shira is the Book Review Editor of  Drunken Boat.

Holly Wendt is an English Instructor at Casper College in Casper, Wyoming. She teaches and has taught creative writing, composition, and medieval literature at Casper College, at Binghamton University, where she received her doctoral degree, and at Ohio University, where she received her Master of Arts degree.

Previously, she has served as the book review editor and as a reader for Quarter After Eight and as managing editor for Harpur Palate. Her short fiction has appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal, and she is currently at work on several novel projects. Holly is the co-director for the 2010 Equality State Book Festival.

Amanda Dambrink studied nonfiction at Brigham Young University and at Ohio University before moving to Madison, Wisconsin where she now works for a medical software company by day and scribbles essays by night. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Prairie Margins, Normal School, Alimentum, and The Iowa Review.

Erin Wilcox is a writer, poet, musician, and freelance editor. Erin formerly worked for Alaska Quarterly Review and has helped judge literary contests such as the Kore Press Short Fiction Award and the Poem A Day Chapbook Challenge on Writer’s Digest’s Poetic Asides blog. She coordinates the Editorial Freelancers Association’s Arizona chapter, which she founded in 2007. Erin’s creative work has been recently featured or is forthcoming in Praxis: Gender and Cultural Critiques, Short and Twisted, Spiral Orb, Soundzine, Stoneboat, Cold Flashes: Literary Snapshots of Alaska, Veil: Journal of Darker Musings, and in radio broadcast’s including KXCI Tucson’s A Poet’s Moment, Broad Perspectives, and Alaska Public Radio’s AK Radio. She writes for various publications, including Copyediting and Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses. Find out more at wilcoxediting.com and wilcoxwrites.com.

Andrea Henchey holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University; she also held a month-long residency at the Julia and David White Artist’s Colony. Her work has appeared in Absent and Ghotiand is forthcoming in H_NGM_N, PANK, and A River & Sound Review. Though her travels have brought her to more exotic locales such as Nepal, Kenya, and Chile, she currently lives in Connecticut where she coordinates “Inescapable Rhythms,” a poetry reading series, trains for marathons with her mutt, Bodhisattva, and teaches full-time. Learn more at www.andreahenchey.com

Susanne Antonetta (Suzanne Paola)’s most recent book, Inventing Family, a memoir and study of adoption, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Awards for her poetry and prose include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, a Library Journal Best Science book of the year, a Lenore Marshall Award finalist, a Pushcart prize, and others. She is also coauthor of Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, soon to be available in a second edition. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Orion, Seneca Review, and many anthologies, including Short Takes and Lyric Postmodernisms. She is half-time professor at Western Washington University.

Deborah Poe is author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010), Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008), and “the last will be stone, too,” as well as a novella in verse, “Hélène” (Furniture Press 2012). She has several chapbooks, including a four-part-edition as part of the Dusie Kollektiv (5). Her poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in 1913, Shampoo, Denver Quarterly, The Dictionary Project, Mantis and Bone Bouquet. Her visual work—including video and handmade book objects—will appear or has appeared in University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Poetry Off the Page (Tucson 2012), the Handmade/Homemade Sister Exhibit at Brodsky Gallery (Philadelphia 2012), and ONN/OF “a light festival” (Seattle 2012). Online exhibits of her visual and text work include Yew Journal, PEEP/SHOW, Elective Affinities, and Trickhouse. For more information, please visit www.deborahpoe.com.

Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is currently pursuing her MFA at Bard College. She currently resides in Tsaile, AZ on the Navajo reservation and teaches at Dine’ College. Her first chapbook of poetry is titled, Chromosomory (Q Ave Press, 2010).

Claire Zoghb’s collection, Small House Breathing, won the 2008 Quercus Review Poetry Series Annual Book Award. A chapbook, Dispatches from Everest, is forthcoming from Pudding House Press. Her poems have appeared in Connecticut Review, CALYX, Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America (The Lebanon Issue), Natural Bridge, Through A Child’s Eyes: Poems and Stories About War, and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems. She holds an MALS from Wesleyan University. A freelance graphic artist/book designer, Claire lives in New Haven’s Morris Cove neighborhood and works across the harbor as Graphics Director at Long Wharf Theatre.

Jean-Jacques Poucel (visiting professor of French literature at the University of Calgary) is a poet, translator, and literary critic. He is the author Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory (2006) and has completed studies on several members of the Oulipo, some of which appear in Pereckonings (Yale French Studies 105) and Constrainted Writing I & II (Poetics Today 30.4 & 31.1), which he co-edited. He is a member of the Parisian transatlantic poetry translation collective Double Change, With whom he edited Contemporary Critical Forms (Formes Poétiques Contemporaines 9), and his translations of Emmanuel Hocquard's Conditions of Light (2010) and Anne Portugal's Flirt Formula (2012) have both been published by La Presse series in contemporary poetry (Fence Books). In 2011-2012, he was a Fellow at Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, the University of Cologne's Center for Advanced Studies.

Heidi St. Jean is a Master’s Candidate in Fairfield University’s MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in inklight, a publication of afterimage, the journal of media arts and cultural criticism; Theodate, the online poetry journal of Hill-Stead Museum; and Long River Run, journal of the Connecticut Poetry Society. She also serves as Poetry Editor for Mason's Road, Fairfield University's online literary journal. Previously, she held the position of Director of Media Relations for several years in the insurance industry and successfully ran her own freelance writing business. Her work frequently appeared in local newspapers, online, and in national and trade magazines.