BIOS - A to E



 
Lyn Coffin Lyn Coffin is a widely-published poet, fiction writer, playwright and translator, with 20 books published or forthcoming. Her most recent publication was The First Honeymoon, published by Iron Twine Press, and A Taste of Cascadia, published by Whale Road Books. Both are available on Amazon. She has translated many Georgian authors, and her collaboration with Givi (A Marriage Without Consummation) will be published this summer. The Knight in the Panther Skin is forthcoming this September from Poezis, Tbilisi. Her next big translation project is a translation of Salamura ("Piccolo"), by Archil Sulakauri. This book, illustrated by Vaho Muskheli, will be published by Ice House Press this year. She teaches Literary Fiction at the University of Washington.The Knight in the Panther Skin is forthcoming this September from Poezis, Tbilisi.  
 
Beau Cutts Beau Cutts 

	  In Memoriam, Robert C. "Beau" Cutts (1947-2013)

         In the well of the night.-
	                Beau Cutts, "The Etowah," from Night Is A Rare Place And Other Poems
A new hole was ripped in the fabric of the planet on September 11: the molecules formerly known as Beau Cutts sailed from Mother earth into the cosmos and poetry lost a poet's great heart, an adventurer's heart, a friend's heart, a beloved's heart.
While it'd be fair to call Beau a regional poet (Georgia Poet of the Year, 2006), he managed to sidestep the fate of so many such versifiers; you won't find him in the Galaxy of Obscurity.
Sure, he distilled his entire wild life into a single slim volume of poetry, a one-and-only. But what a book it was, it is- as The Centrifugal Eye readers learned when I reviewed his Night Is A Rare Place And Other Poems in these pages in August 2009. The book went on to become a text assigned in college classrooms where it was used to teach critical thinking and environmental advocacy. It sold out four times (several hundred copies, I believe), and went into four more editions, each one incorporating Beau's painstaking revisions like a Walt fussing over Leaves of Grass. And "The Etowah," Beau's master poem at the heart of the book, became the basis for a chapbook of my own, The Etowah River Psalms , making Night Is A Rare Place a book that keeps on giving like its great-hearted author.
Someday a PhD candidate will parse Beau's editorial efforts in her dissertation. I figure collectors will scramble to acquire the complete set of NIARPAOP. I suspect Beau will be anthologized alongside Sidney Lanier. And I believe what was formerly known as the very soul of poet Beau Cutts will one day take up residence in Andromeda, close by, starwise, poetrywise. He'll loom large o'er the night.

-Karla Linn Merrifield 		 
 
Donatella D'Angelo Donatella D’Angelo Donatella D'Angelo, photographer and graphic designer from Milan, Italy, has been working in visual arts and communication since the '80. She also teaches packaging design and organizes photo labs in schools. A few years ago she started her own personal research on «body and identity» and her work has been exhibited throughout Italy and appeared in various online and printed publications. First prize at the national contest LABirintiFOTOgrafia 2015.
www.donatelladangelo7.tumblr.com/
www.donatelladangelo.wix.com/photography
  
 
Richard Denner Richard Denner was born in 1941 in Santa Clara, California. In the late '60s, in a wilderness cabin outside of Ketchikan, Alaska, he began printing chapbooks on a hand press with worn fonts of type; thirty years later, there are over two hundred titles in his backlists. For twenty years, Denner operated a bookstore and coffeehouse in Ellensburg, Washington, that was a venue for poets, musicians, and artists. Now a monk, known as Jampa Dorje, he recently completed a traditional Tibetan three-year retreat in the Colorado Rockies under the guidance of Tulku Sang ngag. Visit his websites: www.dpress.net and www.kapalapress.net.  
 
David Bromige David Bromige Often associated with Language poetry, David Bromige was born in London in 1933. He received a BA from the University of British Columbia in 1962 and studied for a MA and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. The 2001-2003 Sonoma State Poet Laureate, Bromige published dozens of books and garnered many awards during his lifetime. His accolades include two NEA fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, two Poetry Foundation prizes, and a 1988 Western States Arts Federation award for his collection Desire: Selected Poems, 1963-1987, published by Black Sparrow Press. He died on June 3, 2009.  
 
Neeli Cherkovski Neeli Cherkovski's most recent book of peoms is THE CROW AND I. He is completing a memoir of his life in poetry and a poetics manual called THE BONES OF POETRY.  
 
DION D'SOUZA Dion D'Souza works as an editor; simultaneously, he attempts to craft interesting verse and short fiction. His work has appeared in Kavya Bharati, Nether, One Forty Fiction, Helter Skelter, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and Muse India. He was shortlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Creative Writing Prize in 2013 and the Raedleaf India Poetry Award in 2014.  
 
LINDA ASHOK Linda Ashok is the Founder/President of RædLeaf Foundation for Poetry & Allied Arts (rlpoetry.org). She was one of 25 featured poets of Poetry with Prakriti, 2014, and was invited to the XII POESIA International Encounter, Venezuela. In 2015, her manuscript won a workshop with Arthur Sze at the Napa Valley Writers' Conference, California, US. Linda does poetry book reviews for the Rumpus. Her poems have appeared on online journals; Visual Verse, Shot Glass Journal, Poetry Kanto 2014 (Annual Issue), CUNY Murphy Institute Blog, Hark Magazine, The Lake, The Linnet's Wings, The Thumbprint Magazine. Her works have been anthologised in Bhasanagar 2014, edited by poet Subodh Sarkar.  
 
NABINA DAS Nabina Das is the author of four books, two fiction books and two poetry collections. The short story collection The House of Twining Roses: Stories of the Mapped and the Unmapped (LiFi Publications, 2013-14) has been critically acclaimed. Her debut book and novel Footprints in the Bajra (Cedar Books, 2010) was long-listed in the prestigious 'Vodafone Crossword Book Award 2011.' Nabina's debut poetry collection Blue Vessel (Les Editions du Zaporogue, 2012) was cited as one of the best poetry books of the year while the most recent volume Into the Migrant City (Writers Workshop 2013) was cited as one of the top 11 poetry reads of 2014. The work here was first published in Kindle Magazine.  
 
USHA AKELLA Usha Akella who moved to the USA from India in 1993, is the Founder, The Poetry Caravan, which provides free workshops and readings to disadvantaged people in Senior Centers, Women's shelters, and Healthcare facilities. The Poetry Caravan was launched in Greenburgh, Westchester County, New York, in October 2003 and Austin in 2015. Usha's first book of poems ...Kali Dances, So Do I... published by Authors and Writers, India Ltd., was released in 2000 to positive reviews and is suggested reading at Smith College, USA. Her second book of poetry, A Face That Does Not Bear The Footprints Of The World, was released at the International Rumi Conference, Calicut, India, in March 2008. In February 2012, Usha Akella scripted and produced her first musical, Ek. An English Musical on the life of Shri Shirdi Sai Baba (Sterling Publications, India). She was awarded the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize 2011 by the Siir Festival, Turkey, and was winner of Maryland Poetry Review's Egan Memorial Contest. She edits a yearly section on Diaspora poetry in www.museindia.com. Her new collection, Rosary of Latitudes, was released in July 2015 and is published by Transcendent Zero, a poetry press based out of Houston. She is cultural ambassador for Austin.  
 
DOMINIC ALAPAT Dominic Alapat is the author of two ebooks of poetry; Reeling (2012) and Circling the Sky (2013), both published on www.lulu.com. His poems have appeared in poetry journals like nth position, decomP, Miller's Pond Poetry Magazine, Inclement Poetry Magazine, The Poet's Haven, Kavya Bharati and Nether. He has read his work at the Prakriti Poetry Festival in Chennai, the 100 Thousand Poets for Change event and the Kala Ghoda Festival in Mumbai among others. He has been writing poetry for the blog Woodsmoke (www.woodsmoke.wordpress.com) since 2008. Alapat lives in Mumbai where he is a freelance writer and editor. The poems here are from Reeling (2012), www.lulu.com.  
 
Donatella D'Angelo Donatella D'Angelo photographer and graphic designer from Milan, Italy, has been working in visual arts and communication since the '80. She also teaches packaging design and organizes photo labs in schools. A few years ago she started her own personal research on «body and identity» and her work has been exhibited throughout Italy and appeared in various online and printed publications. First prize at the national contest LABirintiFOTOgrafia 2015.
http://donatelladangelo7.tumblr.com/
http://donatelladangelo.wix.com/photography
  
 
Tina Cabrera Tina Cabrera earned her MFA in Fiction from San Diego State University in 2009. Excerpts from her novel, short fiction, and poetry have appeared in journals such as Hobart, Quickly, Crack the Spine, Big Bridge Magazine, Vagabondage Press, San Diego Poetry Annual, Fiction International and Outrider Press. She has presented critical work at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) in New York and Pennsylvania, which has been published in print and online. You can visit her writer's blog at www.cannyuncanny.wordpress.com/.  
 
Nancy A. Dafoe Nancy A. Dafoe is a published writer and poet, in addition to being an English educator living in Central New York. Her cross-genre-memoir and poetry-book on dealing with Alzheimer's in her family An Iceberg in Paradise: A Passage through Alzheimer's was just published by SUNY Press (April 2015). An Iceberg in Paradise was a short-list finalist in the 2013 William Faulkner/William Wisdom Creative Writing competition, non-fiction category.
Dafoe has also written books for educators and pre-service teachers on writing instruction. Her books include Breaking Open the Box: A Guide for Creative Techniques to Improve Academic Writing and Generate Critical Thinking, published in March 2013, and a companion book for classroom use, Writing Creatively: A Guided Journal to Using Literary Devices, published by Rowman & Littlefield Education in 2014. Excerpts from Dafoe's fiction are included in the anthology Lost Orchard, edited by Jo Pitkin and published by SUNY Press. Dafoe's essays, fiction, and poetry have won awards, including first place in the New Century Writer and Soul-Making Literary competitions, and her work has appeared in a number of literary magazines and publications.
Dafoe also maintains a blog and web presence on two websites in addition to her Facebook and Goodreads pages:
www.nancydafoebooks.com and www.dafoenteachingwriting.com 		 
 
Will Alexander Will Alexander Born and raised is South Central Los Angeles, Will Alexander grew up around the violence that has plagued this area for decades. The only child of working class parents, he attended Washington High School, avidly participating in school sports. In 1972 he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Creative Writing.
In the mid-1970s the noted Black poet K. Curtis Lyle, a founding member of the Watts Writers Workshop, met with Alexander and others at his home and at an incense business run by musicians Ray and Ernest Straughter. This period was also marked by a twelve hour dialogue in San Francisco with the surrealist poet Philip Lamantia which had an enormous effect on the young Alexander. Through those gatherings Alexander began confirming the power of works of his readings of Bob Kaufman, Octavio Paz, and Francophone Negritude writers such as Aimé Cesaire and Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo-all poets who would strongly influence his subsequent poetry and, later, the visual art he had begun creating. Their themes of cosmic isolation from society and interior discovery strongly affected him, and helped him to what he describes as an "alchemical metamorphosis," which drew him away from his intense involvement with sports to his participation in the arts.
In 1987 he published his first book, Vertical Rainbow Climber, which already contained the heady mix of metaphor and sophisticated language that characterizes so much of his work. A short chapbook, Arcane Lavender Morals, followed in 1994, with new books-including Stratospheric Canticles, Asia & Haiti, Above the Human Nerve Domain, and Towards the Primeval Lightning Field-following throughout the 1990s. The writing represents a complex distillation if images from many fields, including botany, astronomy, psychology, physiology, mysticism, and history. He has also written novels and dramas, including a fiction/non-fiction work, Sunrise in Armageddon , published in 2006.
Alexander has performed throughout the country, and has taught courses at the University of California at San Diego, Naropa in Boulder, Colorado, Hofstra University, and Mills College. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. 		 
 
J.J.Blickstein J.J.Blickstein is a poet, editor, ghostwriter, part-time truck driver, musician and visual artist. He lives with biologist/nurse/herbalist, Jen, and son, in the foothills of Woodstock, NY where he also teaches Nei Gong and the Chinese internal martial arts of Taiji Quan & Xing Yi Quan. He is quite fond of hiking, gardening, herbal medicine, bourbon, bbq, books...
Books in print include Barefoot on a Drawing of the Sun (Fish Drum Inc., 2006); a handmade limited edition artist's book/CD collaboration w/ French painter Jean-Claude Loubieres, Signs/Signe (AdLeo Editions, Paris, France, 2007); Vision of Salt & Water (Bagatela Press, Mexico, 2002). In 2009, as part of a literary contingent, travelled to Cassis, France on a poet exchange & translation project sponsored by the Carmargo Foundation; POEM: Poets On an Exchange Mission (Fish Drum, Inc. 2009) was the resulting anthology. Works have appeared in many journals & anthologies including: Heavenbone; Free Verse; Arson; Skidrow Penthouse; Big Bridge; 5trope; Milk; Van Gogh's Ear; Rattle; Long Shot; House Organ; The Butcher's Block; Fish Drum; Temple; Skanky Possum; Fire (UK); American Diaspora (University of Iowa Press, 2001); Vespers (University of Iowa Press, 2003); Shamanic Warriors, Now Poets (R&R Publishing, Scotland, 2003); InFiltration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2015).		  
 
John Bloomberg-Rissman John Bloomberg-Rissman has just finished a 5-year textual project/poem, In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his life mashup called Zeitgeist Spam. The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making (Leafe Press, 2007), and Flux, Clot & Froth (Meritage Press, 2010). His working title for the fourth section is Adouéke, a plant name he found in a Kanaka war chant translated by Louise Michel while she was exiled on New Caledonia in the 1870s (adouéke makes warriors “fierce, and charms their wounds.”) In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has been involved in several collaborations, perhaps most notably (because published) w/ Anne Gorrick, and with Ernesto Priego-Ivy Alvarez-Eileen Tabios. He is also editor and/or co-editor of several anthologies, including one with Jerome Rothenberg, of Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Anthology of Outside & Subterranean Poetry: Poems for the Millennium Volume 5, and he’s now embarked on another even more ambitious anthology project, called Nuestra America. His web presence is http://www.johnbr.com Zeitgeist Spam.  
 
Xavier Cavazos Xavier Cavazos received his MFA in 2013 from Iowa State University where he served as poetry editor for Flyway: Journal of Creative Writing and the Environment and is the author of Barbarian at the Gate, selected and introduced by Thomas Sayers Ellis as part of the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets Chapbook Series and Diamond Grove Slave Tree, the inaugural Prairie Seed Poetry Prize from Ice Cube Press. Cavazos has been a member of three national slam teams, and was the 1995 Grand Slam Champion of the NuyoRican Poets Café and has poetry forthcoming in the Best American Experimental Writing (BAX) 2015. Cavazos teaches in the Central Washington Writing Project, Africana and Black Studies and the Professional and Creative Writing Programs at Central Washington University.  
 
Carla Bertola Carla Bertola born in 1935 in Torino,Italy where she lives.Since the 60's contributes to poetry magazines,takes parts to Meetings.She produces visual poetry in the 80's. and performes sound poetry in Italy and abroad,she also exhibits visuals,publishes poetry-visual books,and is on many International anthologies.She is editor of the mag Offerta Speciale.  
 
Ed Coletti Ed Coletti is a poet, painter, fiction writer, and chess player who studied under Robert Creeley in San Francisco (1970-71). Ed recently has had work in The Brooklyn Rail, North American Review, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Spillway, Ambush Review, and So It Goes - The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. Recent fiction publications include Crucible Fiction Prize (2d place winner), Noir Nation, and Romance Magazine. Internet presence includes Ed's popular 10-year-old blog No Money In Poetry. His book, When Hearts Outlive Minds, was released June 2011. Germs, Viruses, and Catechisms was published by Civil Defense Publications (San Francisco) during Winter 2013. Ed refers to those poems as "historicowarpoligious." The Problem With Breathing came out from Edwin S. Smith (Little Rock) June 2015.. He now is working on Apollo Blue's Harp, a poetic-history of music. edcoletti@sbcglobal.net  
 
Karen Alkalay-Gut Karen Alkalay-Gut born in England during World War II, grew up in Rochester, N.Y. and moved to Israel in 1982, where she teaches English poetry at Tel Aviv University. A founder and former chair of the Israel Association of Writers in English, she is also on the board of the Yiddish Writers Association as well as the Federation of Writers in English. She has won numerous prizes for her poetry and has published innumerable books, in English, Hebrew and Spanish, including one in Italian translation entitled "Danza del ventre a Tel Aviv: Poesie d'amore esopravvivenza ". Trans. Johanna Bishop and Andrea Sirotti. Bologna: Edizioni Kolibris, 2010. Her most recent work is a cooperation with photographer husband Ezra Gut on the Galapagos Islands.  
 
Maxine Chernoff Maxine Chernoff has written 14 books of poetry, most recently Here (Counterpath, 2015 and is also the author of 6 works of fiction, one of which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. She is the winner of a 2013 NEA Fellowship in Poetry and of the 2009 PEN USA Translation Award for her co-translation of The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin (Omnidawn, 2008). She chairs the Creative Writing Department at SFSU.  
 
Youssef Alaoui-Fdili Youssef Alaoui-Fdili is a Moroccan-Latino, born in California. His family and heritage are an endless source of inspiration for his varied, dark, spiritual and carnal writings. He has an MFA in Poetics from New College of California. There, he studied Classical Arabic, Spanish Baroque and Contemporary Moroccan poetry. He is also well versed in the most dour and macabre literature of the 19th Century. His poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, 580 Split, Cherry Bleeds, Carcinogenic Poetry, Red Fez, Big Bridge, Dusie Press, and nominated for a Pushcart at Full of Crow. Youssef is an original creator of the East Bay literary arts festival "Beast Crawl."
Photo credit Sophia Leisou. Sophie Sticated Designs