Chris Anderson holds a Master's degree from the University of Connecticut , where he is now a doctoral candidate completing a dissertation entitled “Nothing Lowly: The Anti-Picturesque in American Nature Poetry.” He is a past recipient of UConn's Outstanding Scholar Program Fellowship, and he is a three-time winner of both the UConn Wallace Stevens Poetry Award and the Long River Review Graduate Writing Prize in poetry. As part of the UConn Mentor Connection Program he has served as a mentor to high school creative writing students, and he has been a fiction and poetry workshop leader for the annual conference of the Connecticut Writing Project. 

Gina Barreca is the author of They Used to Call Me Snow White, But I Drifted (1991), Perfect Husbands (and Other Fairy Tales) (1993), and Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even (1995). Barreca also edited the Penguin Book of Women's Humor (1996). She writes a weekly column for The Hartford Courant and has published articles in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinel and dozens of magazines including Worth and Cosmopolitan. Most recently, she edited the Signet Book of American Humor (1999) and heralded the millenium with a collection of essays, Too Much of a Good Thing is Wonderful (2000).

Lynn Z. Bloom is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and AETNA Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut , and the author of such autobiographical essays as "Subverting the Academic Masterplot" (1998) and "Teaching College English as a Woman" (1992). She is the recipient of the 1999 Uconn Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Research, and research awards from NCTE, NEH, and the US Department of Agriculture. The most recent of her seventeen books are The St. Martin's Custom Reader (August 2001), The Essay Connection (6th ed. 2001), and Composition Studies as a Creative Art (1998). Among her recent (of over 80) articles are "Freshman Composition as a Middle Class Enterprise" (1996) and "The Essay Canon" (1999), both in College English; and "Writing and Cooking, Cooking and Writing" (2001). She has also co-authored American Autobiography 1945-1980: A Bibliography (1982), and edited two diaries of American women civilian prisoners in the Philippines in World War II, Natalie Crouter's Forbidden Diary (1980) and Margaret Sams's Forbidden Family (1989, 1996). Her forthcoming books include a book length version of The Essay Canon ( Wisconsin , 2003) and the co-edited Composition Studies in the 21st Century: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future (SIUP, 2003).

 

 

Scott Bradfieldis the author of three novels, The History of Luminous Motion, What's Wrong with America, and Animal Plant, and the short fiction collection Greetings from Earth: New and Collected Stories. He has also written several screenplays for both independent and studio producers, four of which have been filmed, including The Secret Life of Houses, which was accepted as an official entry at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996 and received the Viewer's Choice Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival. His stories, journalism and reviews have appeared in Triquarterly, Conjunctions, The Vintage Book of American Short Stories, The London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. He was Seymour Fischer Guest Professor at the Free University of Berlin in Spring 2001. 

Kimberly Burwick was raised in Massachusetts and has lived in the Czech Republic and Wyoming . Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, The Literary Review, Hotel Amerika and other journals. Her first book of poems, Has No Kinsmen, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

Ken Cormier began making his name as a recording artist & performance poet in Ann Arbor in 1995 with his self-released cassette tape God Damn Doghouse. In 2000, Cormier toured the US and Canada to support the publication of his first book, Balance Act (Insomniac Press), and the CD release of God Damn Doghouse (Elis Eil Records). Elis Eil released his second CD, Radio-Bueno, in February 2002. Cormier is currently a graduate student at the University of Connecticut , where he teaches classes in English Composition, Expressive Writing in Performance, and Songwriting.

Margaret Gibson has published seven books of poems, most recently Icon and Evidence, 2001; Earth Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1997;The Vigil, a Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, 1993; Out in the Open, 1989; Memories of the Future, Melville Cane Award, 1986; Long Walks in the Afternoon, Lamont Selection for 1982; and Signs, 1979. She has been a recipient of various grants, including the National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Fellowship. Individual poems have won awards such as the James Boatwright Prize, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Poetry Prize (honorable mention) and a 2001 Pushcart prize. She has taught in MFA programs at the University of Massachusetts and Virginia Commonwealth University , and is half—year Visiting Professor at the University of Connecticut .

Kevin Goodan was raised in western Montana , where he fought forest fires for many years. He received his B.A. at the University of Montana , and his MFA at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst . His first book of poetry, In the Ghost-House Aquainted (Alice James Press, 2004) was awarded the L.L. Shipman/PEN New England Award.

V. Penelope Pelizzon is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Connecticut, and the author of Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000), which was selected for the Hollis Summers Prize and subsequently received the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. New poems and work from her second book in progress have appeared recently in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Field, and The New England Review. Her creative nonfiction and scholarly essays have been pubished in Creative Nonfiction, The Yale Journal of Criticism, American Studies. She was a fellow at the Uconn Humanities Institute in 2004-05.  

Sam Pickering has written 15 books; twelve of them are collections of personal essays.  The most recent is The Last Book, published by the University Tennessee Press, 2001.  He is now writing his second book on Australia , this one an account of the 12 months he recently spent in the western part of the continent. The book is tentatively titled Waltzing the Magpies.  And the book is terrible.  It will never be published.  Only miraculous rewriting will save it.

Sydney Landon Plum writes about birds and about our lives in the natural world. The editor of Coming Through the Swamp: The Nature Writings of Gene Stratton Porter, Plum has also written about Porter and about the writer and photographer Hope Ryden for American Nature Writers. She attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference as a scholar and participates in the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. She is currently an adjunct in creative writing at the University of Connecticut.  

Aaron Sanders is a writer who pays the bills by staying home with his two boys by day and working as a PhD candidate by night. He works as the Assistant Director in the Creative Writing Program at UConn and holds an MFA from the University of Utah. Aaron's most recent work appears in Quarterly West, Beloit Fiction Journal, Jabberwock Review, Hawaii Review, and Aura Literary Arts Review and has been featured on WAMC's “The Roundtable” (Northeast Public Radio). Aaron just finished a collection of short stories and is at work on a novel. Currently, Aaron teaches courses in Creative Writing, Writing and Performance, Small Presses and Literary Journals, and Composition and conducts writing workshops all over Connecticut.

Lauren Sarat has taught creative writing at Brown University, Rhode Island College, and Rutgers University. While living in Manhattan, she founded a series of meditation and writing workshops entitled "This Writer's Life," which she conducts through the Boston Learning Society and the Learning Connection in Providence. She has an extensive background in publishing, and worked as a literary agent, an assistant editor with Picador USA/St. Martin's Press, a features editor for Barnesandnoble.com, and spent years as a bookseller. Her short story, "Russian Lessons," has been nominated for the 2003 Pushcart Prize, and "Tejas" was a finalist in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Shenandoah, New York Stories, Anonymous, The Plum Creek Review, Turnstile, and is forthcoming in Confrontation.