Contributors

Coleman Barks is an American poet and he has collaborated with scholars to translate the poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi into American free verse.

Amnon Buchbinder lives in Toronto, Ontario, and is an associate professor of screenwriting at York University. He is the author of The Way of the Screenwriter and is currently completing his first novel and a fifteen-year film project called Travelling Medicine Show.

Halina Duraj teaches creative writing at the University of San Diego in California. She lives in a San Diego neighborhood inhabited by a flock of semiwild parrots and people who write “Remember that you are sacred!” on the sidewalk in purple chalk.

Alison Luterman lives with her husband and two formerly feral cats in Oakland, California. She teaches at the Writing Salon in Berkeley and just completed a new play, Touched, for which she is seeking a producer.

David Mahaffey prefers Star Trek to Star Wars, bourbon to scotch, and the serial comma to grammatical error. He works as The Sun’s digital-media director and lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.

John Moyne is a Persian scholar and a translator of the Persian poet Rumi.

Eric Nelson’s most recent poetry collection is The Twins. He teaches creative writing at Georgia Southern University and lives in Statesboro, Georgia, where he keeps five chickens who give him eggs and inspiration for his poems.

Mally Z. Ray is the pseudonym of a writer living in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Jalaluddin Rumi was a thirteenth-century poet and Sufi mystic.

Sy Safransky is editor and publisher of The Sun.

Ruth L. Schwartz’s most recent book of poems is Miraculum. She lives in Oakland, California.

Sparrow, now that he is fifty-nine, has begun to enjoy classical music. Lately he’s been listening to La Mer, by Debussy. He is the author of America: A Prophecy — The Sparrow Reader, and he lives in Phoenicia, New York.

Josh Weil is the author of the book of novellas The New Valley, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. His next novel, The Great Glass Sea, will be published in 2014. He lives with his girlfriend and her daughter in two side-by-side wood-heated cabins in Nevada City, California.

Joe Wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing up on the Big Dry, and two collections of poetry. He lives with his family in Forest City, Iowa, and though he doesn’t travel as often as he used to, he often daydreams about driving across Nebraska while listening to Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel.

Steven Ainsworth lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

James Carroll’s photographs have been published in The New York Times Magazine, LightWork, and B&W. He lives in New York City.

Rachel J. Elliott comes from a large, boisterous family who laugh a lot when they are together. Her own hearty laugh has been known to startle small children and adults alike. She is an editorial associate at The Sun and lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Zbigniew Fitz was born in Kraków, Poland, and lives in Laurens, South Carolina. He has been a devoted painter and husband for forty-five years.

Stéphanie Jantzen is working on a book of photographs called Under One Same Sky. She lives in Montpellier, France.

Edis Jurĉys is working on a new book of photographs and learning to dance the tango. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Pat Justis’s photographs have been published in Shots and Popular Photography. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

Richard Koenig teaches photography at Kalamazoo College in Michigan and is working on a documentary project about the first transcontinental railroad.

Matt Kollasch is quitting his thirty-year career as a librarian in July and moving from Warsaw, Poland, to Baku, Azerbaijan.

Sarah R. Lavigne lives in southern Vermont and photographs weddings and portraits for a living. The mother of a fast and busy toddler, she does her own documentary projects during naps and after bedtime.

Kat Moser lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where she runs a women’s clothing store she opened in 1973.

Jerry Uelsmann lives in Gainesville, Florida. He was considered a master of photomontage before the advent of photo-editing software. He has exhibited his photographs in more than a hundred individual shows.