ISSUE 07

 
  Carlyn Porter says: What you see in my pictures are bits and pieces of myself, sometimes in body and sometimes not. What isn't literally a shot of my physical self is a reflection of me in another form. I’m part of the first generation to be completely raised on digital. My grandfather gave me my first digital point-and-shoot when I was twelve. What was most influential on my photography is my insatiable hunger for travel, whether on a plane to France or riding in a car up and down the East coast. I spend a lot of time planning trips. Of course what excites me most about travel is coming back home and looking over all the pictures I took. If I don’t get it on camera I feel like it never happened.
     
  Matt Bissett-Johnson is a freelance cartoonist and caricaturist based in Melbourne, Australia. He has been published in The Age, New Matilda, the Melbourne Observer, Heavy Duty (a Harley Davidson mag), AEU News (for the teachers union), Australian Nursing Journal (for the nurses union), The Epoch Times, The Australian Rationalist, Bicycling Australia, Dissent, Opinion Online, and Wild Magazine (a bushwalking and wilderness magazine). He has illustrated science fiction for Aurealis. “I also work regularly as a caricature artist for business events and used to work as a writer/animator for ABC Television on Recovery, Fly TV, and Backberner. I am also a painter and printmaker, exhibiting occasionally. I have a good life.”
     
  Shveta Brahma is studying Fiction Writing at Harvard University. She says she likes to write about the youth of the old, the lives of the dead, the joys of the sad, the words of the silent, the future of the past, the past of the now, the wow of the simple and the plain of the famous. Her stories are about people whose lives span continents, about emotions which drive people to extremes, about folklore she heard as a child from her father and grandfather, and about simple actions which mean a lot. And she says her writing reflects the contradictions, possibilities and poignancies of east meeting west, and of social and cultural transformations resulting from it. shveta.brahma at gmail.com.
     
  Salem Admassu writes her best work in bed, hiding from the San Francisco fog. Though English was once her third language, her love for fiction has made it her favourite. She is working on her first novel, Truths and Maladies.
     
  Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the novels Tetched and Roughhouse, both of them finalists for an Asian American Literary Award. As a performance poet, he has read his work in Hong Kong, Budapest, Berlin, London, Dublin, and other citiies. He teaches fiction at the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA and lives with his wife and daughter in Manhattan.
     
  Michael Montesano will be teaching English in Buenos Aires in the fall. As well as poetry, he writes for the Interboro Rock Tribune. He blogs at Stolen Time Cafe.
     
  Jessica Hollander is studying toward an MFA at the University of Alabama. Her publication list includes Quarterly West, Hayden's Ferry Review, Hobart, Keyhole, Barrelhouse, and The Emerson Review.
     
  Meagan Bernabé has been published in Los Angeles Journal, Thirst for Fire, and the American Drivel Review, among other publications. She recently moved from Los Angeles to Austin, Texas with her husband and their 17-pound cat, Meatball. meaganbernabe at gmail.com
     
  Leigh Byrne says she lives a double life. One is wholesome and simple in the Midwest where bowling is the most thrilling pastime, and folks still proudly sport mullets. Then there’s her other life writing, often dark, and sometimes sleazy. After studying Journalism in college, Leigh began writing features and a weekly humorous column for a small newspaper in Western Kentucky. She found nonfiction to be too restricting, and, eventually, she quit and went into sales. She began writing again six years ago and has had several short stories anthologized and published in print and online publications such as Thieves Jargon, Glassfire Anthology, Pocket Change, Shine! Journal, and Short Story Library.
     
  Sherrill Alesiak worked in advertising and college teaching. When she quit working to focus on writing, two grandchildren appeared along with elderly relatives with dementia. “A poem or story gets squeezed out now and then,” she says. Her writing is published in Alligator Juniper, Detroit Free Press, Princeton Arts Review, Kalliope, the Kerf, The MacGuffin, The Owen Wister Review and in the anthology, Eating Her Wedding Dress.
     
  Robert Earle is the author of Nights in the Pink Motel (Naval Institute Press, 2008), an account of a year in Iraq; The Way Home (DayBue, 2004), a novel; and many short stories published in literary magazines across the US. (Iron Horse Literary Review, Quarterly West, Mississippi Review, Chiron Review, Larcom Review, Pangolin Papers, Inkwell, and elsewhere.) He was contributing editor of Identities in North America: Search for Community (Stanford, 1995), a collection of essays about North American interdependence. Robert Earle studied literature and creative writing at Princeton and Johns Hopkins. He lives in Arlington, Virginia. raponikon at mac.com
     
  Laura Bogart has a recently-minted MFA and lives near Maryland. She’s working on a novel and a collection of short stories (“insomnia isn’t always a bad thing”). Her work has been published in Ne’er Do Well and Wazee Journal. The name of the Corgi is Flint. He’s Laura’s friend’s mom’s puppy.
     
  Randall Brown has an MFA from Vermont College and teaches at Saint Joseph’s University and Rosemont College. He is the lead editor of SmokeLong Quarterly, the author of the award-winning collection Mad to Live (Flume Press 2008), and a contributor to The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field (Rose Metal Press 2009).
     
  Diane Judge lives in Durham, North Carolina. She is a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective, founded by poet Lenard Moore. Her poem, Because of Emmett Till, is published in Black Magnolias Literary Journal. diane.judge at ymail.com
     
  Thomas O’Dell is a Canadian writer living in Singapore, where he is the secretary of the Society of Singapore Writers. He has worked most of his life in the IT industry, including time in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Canada. Last Chance is his first publication.