Tipton Poetry Journal
A. Jay Adler's poetry has appeared in such publications as Pebble Lake Review, Eclipse, and Poetrybay. He received a 2002 residency in poetry from the Vermont Studio Center. His screenplay What We Were Thinking Of won second prize at the Maui Writers Conference Screenwriting Competition, and his essays on film appear in Bright Lights Film Journal and DoubleTake. Adler is Professor of English at Los Angeles Southwest College.
Dustin Joseph Anderson has an MA in English with a concentration in creative writing. He works with a publishing developer, building and designing school textbooks. Dustin is married and lives near Dayton, Ohio.
Arlene Ang lives in Spinea, Italy. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Envoi, Forklift Ohio, Georgetown Review, In Posse Review, Other Poetry, Rattle and Stand. She is the recipient of The 2006 Frogmore Poetry Prize and serves as a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. More of her work can be viewed at http://www.leafscape.org/aang.
Sandy Sue Benitez's poetry has appeared in online journals such as Zygote in my Coffee, Words-Myth, The Orange Room Review, Killpoet, Mastodon Dentist, and Lily. Sandy lives in Wyoming with her two hyper children and darling husband. She is editor of Flutter, an online poetry journal. Her first book Ever Violet (DN Publishing,2007) and chapbooks, Beneath a Black Pearl Sky and Petal Storm are available at http://www.lulu.com.
Ben Berman won the 2002 Erika Mumford Prize from the New England Poetry Club and was nominated for a 2006 Pushcart Prize. He has poems published in Natural Bridge, The Cimarron Review, Burnside Review, Salamander, Inkwell and others. He currently teaches high school in Boston.
Born in 1981, Australian Sam Byfield is the author of From the Middle Kingdom (Pudding House Publications). He has been published in Diner, Meridian and The Outside Voices, The Pedestal Magazine, Stirring, Eclectica and The Avatar Review. He was a 2006 Sundress Best of the Net finalist and is an editorial assistant at Lily Lit Review.
Carol Carpenter’s stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Margie, Yankee, America, The Pedestal Magazine, Barnwood, Indiana Review, Quarterly West, Carolina Quarterly and various anthologies. She received the Richard Eberhart Prize for Poetry. Formerly a college writing instructor, journalist and trainer, Carol now writes full time in Michigan.
Dan Carpenter has published poetry in Illuminations, Pearl, Maize, Flying Island and Pith and fiction in Sycamore Review, Prism International, Laurel Review, Fiction, Pearl, Hopewell Review, Flying Island and other journals. A collection of columns Dan wrote for The Indianapolis Star, where he earns his living, was published by Indiana University Press in 1993 with the title Hard Pieces: Dan Carpenter’s Indiana. He also contributed to the IU Press books Falling Toward Grace (1998) and Urban Tapestry (2002) and wrote the text for the photo book Indiana 24/7 from DK Publishing (2004).
David Cazden was born as a U.S. citizen in Vienna, Austria in 1958. Living in Kentucky most of his life, he began writing poetry in high school. By college he had won the Danzler award for creative writing from the University of Kentucky English Department. Soon after obtaining his engineering degree, he stopped writing poetry for over two decades. He is currently the author of Moving Picture (Word Press, 2005), and one chapbook, The Joy of Cooking School, and is the Poetry Editor for Miller’s Pond Magazine.
Antonia Clark is a medical writer for a medical software company in Burlington, Vermont. She has previously published short fiction and essays in The Missouri Review, StoryQuarterly, The Sun, Thema, Troika, and other journals. Poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in kaleidowhirl, The Pedestal Magazine, and Rattle. She is currently co-administrator of The Waters, an online poetry forum and workshop.
Mark Comstock, whose photograph is on this issue’s cover, lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan and works at the University of Michigan managing the Property Control Office and has contributed over 350 articles to 11 different railroad publications. He contributes to 6 websites that have interests in covered bridges, old barns, lighthouses, classic diners and other roadside anomalies. Mark is a member of the "Highpointers Club" whose goal is to climb the each state’s highest point. Mark completed the 50 states in 1997 and guides climbs of Mt. Rainier and Mt. Hood during the summer months.
Jack Conway’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Columbia Review, The Hiram Poetry Review, Yankee and Rattle among others. His work has been anthologized in The North Anthology of Light Verse, edited by Russell Baker; In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare ( University of Iowa Press) and The 1987 Arvon International Poetry Anthology, edited by Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. He is the author of American Literacy: Fifty Books That Define Our Culture and Ourselves (William Morrow, 1994). He teaches at the University of Massachusetts and Bristol Community College.
K.R. Copeland is not a lumberjack, trapeze artist, dairy farmer, bricklayer's assistant, cigar maker or waste paper packer. She is an Illinois poet, and also the Art Director of the online political lit-zine Unlikely 2.0. She has one chapbook, Anatomically Correct available through Dancing Girl Press.
David Allan Evans is the poet laureate of South Dakota. Born in Sioux City, Iowa, he began college on a full football scholarship. He has five books of poems and several books of prose. His latest is The Bull Rider’s Advice: New and Selected Poems (Center for Western Studies, 2003). His writings have appeared in many journals and over 80 anthologies, including The Norton Book of Sports, Motion: American Sports Poems, Splash: Great Writing About Swimming and Diving, Heartland: Poets of the Midwest, Poetspeak, and The Best Poems of 1969 (Borestone Awards). He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bush Artist Foundation in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has been a Fulbright Scholar in China twice.
Gail Gilliland’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Comstock Review, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. Gail is the author of a story collection, The Demon of Longing (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002) and of a poetics, Being a Minor Writer (University of Iowa Press, 1994). Gail lives in California.
Ernestine Hayes is a member of the Kaagwaantaan clan of the Tlingit
people of Southeast Alaska. Her first book, Blonde Indian, an Alaska Native Memoir, was a finalist for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize. She is currently assistant professor of English at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, where she makes her home.
Paul Hostovsky's poems appear widely online and in print and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. He has two poetry chapbooks, Bird in the Hand (Grayson Books) and Dusk Outside the Braille Press (Riverstone Press). He works in Boston as a sign language interpreter. More of of Paul's poetry is at: www.paulhostovsky.com.
Joshua D. Kalscheur lives in Northfield, Minnesota. His poetry has been published at Words On Walls and is forthcoming at The New Delta Review and Ruminate Magazine. Joshua’s poetry was nominated for an AWP award in 2006.
Nita Karpf is an administrator at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, Ohio. In addition to poetry, her writing energy also finds outlets in scholarly research (as Juanita Karpf) and fiction. When not writing, she might be walking her three rescued greyhounds or working on her old crumbling house.
Norbert Krapf is a native of Jasper, Indiana who has lived in Indianapolis since 2004 after 34 years of teaching at Long Island University, where he directed the C.W. Post Poetry Center. His six collections of poems include the recent collaboration with Darryl Jones from I.U. Press, Invisible Presence: A Walk through Indiana in Photographs and Poems(2006), as well as Looking for God’s Country (2005), The Country I Come From (2002), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Somewhere in Southern Indiana (1993). Norbert has also recently completed a poetry and jazz CD in collaboration with Monika Herzig titled Imagine: Indiana in Music and Words.
Jody Kuchar is a resident of Carmel, Indiana and the managing editor of ScribeSpirit.org, a free, international and intergenerational eZine. Jody is a watercolorist, and metal sculpturist. She calls herself an "Arts Facilitator.” Jody is married to her soul mate and owned by her parrot, Sunkist, who delights in shocking visitors by calling them "Wanker."
Sarah Layden holds an MFA from Purdue University, and her fiction has appeared in Artful Dodge and 42opus. She teaches writing at IUPUI and Marian College in Indianapolis, and previously worked as a newspaper reporter.
Rohana McCormack received her BA and MA degrees from Duke University and studied semesters of poetry with Stanley Kunitz, Felix Stefanile, May Swenson and John Woods. She has won awards from Purdue University, Writer’s Digest, Lucidity 2005 International and 2006 Juried Contests. She has a new chapbook, Free Will, The Billiard King and Other Mad Dogmas (Pudding House Publications, 2007). Anthologies include Indiana Sesquicentennial Poets (Ball State Univ.), Indiana Women Poets, edited by Alice Friman, Purdue Miscellany, Passagers #44, Contest Winners 2007, and Hymns to the Outrageous (Pudding House Publications, 2007).
Beth Mink is an Industrial Electrician from Fishers, Indiana with a fabulously handsome husband, two wildly intelligent sons, three dogs and a yellow jeep.beep.beep.
Cheryl Soden Moreland has lived most of her fifty years in Kokomo and Indianapolis, and with that has come a fondness for and a history rich in all-things-Hoosier. She is a community volunteer and a freelance writer, having written for NUVO, Indianapolis Star, and two essays in Urban Tapestry: Indianapolis Stories.
Michelle Morgan recently moved back home to Auburn, Maine from Columbus, Ohio, and alternately spends her days writing and collaging. She is currently applying to graduate school with the hope of pursuing a Master’s in American and New England Studies. Her work has most recently appeared in The Aurorean, The Banyan Review, Salt River Review, and JMWW: A Quarterly Journal of Writing. Her poems have also been accepted for inclusion in the anthologies Through the Kitchen Window: A Sense of Home and Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger American Poets.
Kristine Ong Muslim lives in the Philippines. Her poems and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in many fine places. These include Bellevue Literary Review, Chronogram, The Pedestal Magazine, The Pittsburgh Quarterly Online, Syntax and Whistling Shade. Her publication history: http://www.freewebs.com/blackroom8.
Thomas Alan Orr's first book of poems, Hammers in the Fog, was published in 1995. He is at work on his second collection, Lips to the Ground. His poetry has appeared in two anthologies, Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor, and In Praise of Fertile Land, from the FCC Farmland Trust. Orr reads his poems in the feature film, Somewhere in Indiana, produced by independent film-maker Don Boner (2004).
James Owens' book of poems, An Hour is the Doorway, is scheduled for publication by Black Lawrence Press in 2007. Some recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review, Chantarelle's Notebook, Boxcar Poetry Review, Blue Fifth Review, and Galatea Resurrects. He is a staff reviewer for The Pedestal Magazine. He lives with his wife and three children in La Porte, Indiana.
Jeffrey Owen Pearson lives in Muncie, Indiana, and was a Tipton Poetry Journal nominee for the Pushcart Prize in 2006. On his poem about Indiana’s optional “In God We Trust” license plates: “In a country where our currency depends on trust, and says so, perhaps it is fitting that our motor vehicles are sovereign to the same domain. Of course, it begs the question, how far does this trust go? Road Show looks at the subject in a whimsical way. The emphasis in the title naturally falls on the word show.”
Richard Pflum has published two collections (A Dream of Salt and A Strange Juxtaposition of Parts) and has recorded a CD (Strange Requests). His poems have appeared in Sparrow, Event, Kayak, The Reaper, The Exquisite Corpse, Tears In The Fence, Arts Indiana Literary Supplement, Indiannual, The Flying Island, The Hopewell Review, Ploplop, The Indiana Experience and Bear Crossings. His newest chapbook, The Haunted Refrigerator and Other Poems, was published by Pudding House Publications in 2007.
Donald Platt’s third book, My Father Says Grace, was published in the spring of 2007 by the University of Arkansas Press. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Western Humanities Review, Black Warrior Review, Chelsea, Antioch Review, Epoch, Cream City Review, Quarterly West, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Notre Dame Review, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, and BOMB. His poems have been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize and in The Best American Poetry 2000 and 2006. He is an associate professor of English at Purdue University.
Priscilla Rhoades is a poet from North Carolina whose work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Mississippi Review and other literary journals.
Maureen A. Sherbondy lives in Raleigh, North Carolina and her poetry has appeared in Calyx, Feminist Studies and other journals. Maureen’s chapbook, After the Fairy Tale, was just published by Main Street Rag. Her website is: http://www.maureensherbondy.com
Cheryl Snell is Maryland poet and a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee with work in or forthcoming from Red River Review, Remark, Botteghe Oscure, Small Spiral Notebook and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Flower Half Blown (Finishing Line Press, 2002) and Epithalamion (Little Poem Press, 2004). Her novel, Shiva’s Arms, will be published in 2007 by Writer’s Lair Books. She has a blog with her sister at http://www.snellsisters.blogspot.com
Paul Sohar is a New Jersey poet who got to pursue his life-long interest in literature full time when he went on disability from his job in a chemistry lab. The results have slowly crept into Chiron, Grain, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Poem, Poesy, Poetry Motel, Rattle, Wordrights and seven books of translations from the Hungarian, but now a volume of his own poetry, Homing Poems, is available from Iniquity Press.
Michael E. Strosahl runs a newspaper distribution operation and currently resides in Elwood, Indiana. Michael is president of the Indiana State Federation of Poetry Clubs and hosts a monthly poetry reading in Alexandria, Indiana, meeting at the Lighthouse Cafe. His poem “Just Once” was selected by the Arts Council of Indianapolis for IndyGo’s “Shared Spaces/Shared Voices” 2006 public art contest.
Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son. He has been published in Aesthetica, The Book of Hopes and Dreams, and Rock Salt Plum, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. He tries hard.
David Thornbrugh currently writes from South Korea, where he teaches English in a National University. He writes to push back the darkness a little bit at a time, in the same flighty manner as lightning bugs. He has been published in numerous small press journals, and once wrote the questions for a geography textbook. He prefers multiple choice questions to True/False.
Laura A. Walker is a student at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, studying English and Writing. When she is not in Marion, she lives at her home in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania with her family.
Yun Wang lives in Oklahoma and has published poems in numerous literary journals including Kenyon Review and Green Mountains Review and a chapbook, The Carp (Bull Thistle Press, 1994), and a poetry book, The Book of Jade (Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, Story Line Press, 2002).
Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who has long adopted English as his writing language and has published widely in literary magazines around the world including, in the USA, Antietam Review, California Quarterly, The Iconoclast, Italian Americana, Poesia and Potomac Review. He is the author of three collections, most recently Straight Astray (Troubador Publishing, 2005), and a featured author in the 2006 edition of Poet’s Market.