Bruce Bond is the author of eight published books of poetry, most recently The Visible (LSU, 2012), Peal (Etruscan, 2009), and Blind Rain (Finalist, The Poet’s Prize, LSU, 2008). His tetralogy of new books entitled Choir of the Wells will be released from Etruscan Press in 2013. His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, The New Republic, The Yale Review, and many other publications, and he has received numerous prizes including fellowships from the NEA, the Texas Institute of the Arts, and the Institute for the Advancement of the Arts. Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and Poetry Editor for American Literary Review.

Peter Cooley has published eight books of poetry, seven of them with Carnegie Mellon. That press will release his ninth, Night Bus to the Afterlife, in 2013. The recent recipient of an ATLAS grant from the state of Louisiana and of the Marble Faun First Place Prize in Poetry from the Faulkner Society, he teaches creative writing at Tulane University and lives in New Orleans.

Vandana Khanna was born in New Delhi, India and received her M.F.A. from Indiana University in Bloomington, where she was a recipient of the Yellen Fellowship in poetry. Her collection of poetry, Train to Agra, won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize. Ms. Khanna’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals including Crazyhorse, Callaloo, and The Indiana Review, as well as the anthologies Homage to Vallejo, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. She lives in Los Angeles.

Stephen Lackaye’s other poems can be found recently in Cave Wall, Crab Orchard Review, The Pinch, RHINO, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Waccamaw. He lives in Beaverton, OR, where he works for Powell’s Books and teaches online for Northeastern University.

Ronald Lands received his medical degree and MFA from the University of Tennessee and Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, respectively. He currently practices and teaches internal medicine, hematology, and geriatrics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville campus His clinical vignettes, essays, and poems have appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, A Piece Of My Mind, the Annals Of Internal Medicine, Ad Libitum, and several others. His creative work has been published in Branchwood Journal, Wind, Descant, The Distillery, Washington Square, Fourth River, Nassau Review, RiverSedge, Big Muddy, and others. His work has also been included in the collection Breathing The Same Air, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Ken Poyner has been appearing in the alternative and small presses for 40 years or so, and is now out and about on the web. His real avocation, however, is being awful eye-candy at his wife’s powerlifting meets, from which she holds multiple world records. Menacing Hedge, Corium, Eclectica, Asimov’s, Frostwriting, Gutter Eloquence, and a host of others have been salted with his work of late.

Cyndle Plaisted Rials lives in Maine, between the mountains and the ocean; both pull her equally. She received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and her poems have appeared in Amethyst Arsenic, Hunger Mountain, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She is constantly pulled in many directions in the drive to create, from spinning yarn and knitting to singing and DJing.

Nicole Robinson is the outreach coordinator for Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Dear Great Blue Heron (forthcoming, Night Ballet Press) and The Slop of Giving In, The Melt of Letting Go (p2b press, 2007). Her recent poems have appeared in Literary Imagination, The Louisville Review, Spillway, and elsewhere. She lives in Kent, Ohio with her partner, Deb and their greyhounds Bill & Betty.

Amee Schmidt, a flash-fiction writer, aspiring novelist, and occasional poet, holds an MA in Creative Writing. In her spare time, she is Owner/Editor/Publisher of One Wet Shoe Media and Associate Editor of Mayapple Press. She is co-editor of and contributor to Greenhouse: The First 5 Years of the Rustbelt Roethke Writers’ Workshop. Her work has also appeared in Cardinal Sins and The Ambassador Poetry Project.

Karen Schubert’s work appears or is forthcoming in Ohio Poetry Anthology, A Narrow Fellow, Tapestries: Weaving Our World, the Best American Poetry blog, a past issue of Conte, and others. She is the recipient of a 2012 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and author of Bring Down the Sky (Kattywompus Press) and The Geography of Lost Houses (Pudding House). She teaches English at Youngstown State.

Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, Claude Clayton Smith is the author of an historical novel, two children’s books, four books of creative nonfiction, and the co-editor/translator of an anthology of Native Siberian literature. He has has also published a variety of short fiction, essays, poetry, and plays. He holds a BA from Wesleyan (CT), an MAT from Yale, an MFA in fiction from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and a DA from Carnegie-Mellon. His work has been translated into five languages, including Russian and Chinese.

 

Conte is:

Adam Tavel, Editor

Robert Lieberman, Editor

Eric Anderson, Contributing Editor

Special thanks to Andy Hefner for his groovy design template.

 

issue design by Robert Lieberman

 

Volume 8, Issue 2

©2013 the Conte Online staff

 

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