Contributors

Ellen Bass’s poetry books include Mules of Love and The Human Line. She lives in Santa Cruz, California, and teaches at Pacific University’s MFA program in Oregon and at workshops in Big Sur, California; Taos, New Mexico; and Majorca, Spain.

C.J. Gall teaches philosophy, ethics, and humanities at DeVry University, where her mostly nontraditional students include ex-cons and veterans. “Leaving Shenandoah” is her first published essay.

Steve Kowit refused to salute the American flag when he was a schoolboy, refused to serve in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, and has opposed all U.S. wars since. He lives in California, near the Mexican border at Tecate, and teaches poetry workshops in San Diego. He is the author of a guidebook for poets titled In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop, and his latest collection of poems is The First Noble Truth.

Mark Leviton retired to Nevada City, California, after a twenty-five-year career as an executive with Warner Music Group, where he was paid to listen to music all day and go to concerts almost every night. He is now a volunteer broadcaster at the community radio station KVMR-FM and blogs about pop culture at www.sofein.com and www.rocksbackpages.com.

Robert McGee lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he mentors children and teenagers with autism and does manual labor to support his writing. He was once paid twenty-five dollars for an hour of mowing the same day he received twenty-five dollars for a story that took ten days to write.

Joel Peckham has published three collections of poetry — Nightwalking, The Heat of What Comes, and Movers and Shakers — and a memoir called Resisting Elegy: On Grief and Recovery. He lives in Huntington, West Virginia, and commutes to his teaching job at the University of Cincinnati Clermont College. He spends his summers at Camp Manitou in Maine, where as the music director he teaches teenagers how to play four-chord rock songs.

Susan Perabo is the writer-in-residence at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the author of two books of fiction: Who I Was Supposed to Be and The Broken Places. On the rare occasion that unexpected cash comes her way, her first instinct is to buy new socks.

Sy Safransky is editor and publisher of The Sun.

Heather Sellers lives in Holland, Michigan, and teaches creative writing at Hope College. Her most recent book is a memoir about face blindness called You Don’t Look like Anyone I Know.

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. He was an American writer, philosopher, abolitionist, and tax resister. In 1845 Thoreau built a small home on Walden Pond. He lived there close to nature for more than two years and recounted his experience in his book Walden: or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854. Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862.

Sue Ann Belknap is a photographer, writer, painter, and cartoonist who lives in Corvallis, Oregon. She is most proud of the time she spent raising her son, who has a rare disability called Prader-Willi syndrome.

Rita Bernstein is a former civil-rights lawyer who lives in Philadelphia with her husband and as many pets as he will tolerate.

Sarah Blodgett is a commercial and fine-art photographer living in Ithaca, New York. She is working on a book project and learning how to ride a unicycle.

William Carter’s most recent book is Causes and Spirits, and more than 150 of his photographs are in the permanent collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum. He lives in Los Altos Hills, California.

Mark Chester’s latest book of photographs is Twosomes, and his work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He lives in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Louise Roberson Henry’s photographs have appeared in The Village Voice. She lives in Joseph, Oregon, where she reads Japanese poets and listens to shakuhachi-flute music.

Ben Johnson is a photographer, artist, kayaker, and observer of small things. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Craig J. Satterlee has been a commercial and fine-art photographer for more than forty years and is a photography instructor at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming.

Morgan Tyree photographs small-town high-school football, and one of his photos has been selected by the Smithsonian Institution for an upcoming traveling exhibit titled Hometown Teams. He has an L tattooed on his right foot and an R tattooed on his left. He lives in Powell, Wyoming.

Anita Vizireanu is originally from Romania and lives in Athens, Ohio.