We’re thrilled to introduce you to 34 writers whose work graces the soon-to-be-published pages of Winged: New Writing on Bees. Our heartfelt thanks to these and the many other talented writers who submitted their work for consideration. This book and this project simply would not exist without your voices.

Thank you!

Contributor Biographies

Lea Banks has published or has work forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Big River Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, Connotation Review, and American Poetry Journal, among others. She is the author of All of Me, (Booksmyth Press, 2008). Banks is the founder of the Collected Poets Series in Western Mass. She attended New England College’s MFA program and her poems, “All of Me,” and “Hallelujah,” have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Recently, Banks was a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. Her chapbook is being re-issued as a paperback by Booksmyth Press.

**Special note: Banks’ poem “The Majesty,” which appears in Winged, first appeared in SWEET:  A Literary Confection, V3, Spring 2011. The editors of Winged would like to acknowledge and thank the editors of SWEET.**

John Beer is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the chapbook Lucinda (SPORK, 2013). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lived on the Greek island of Patmos for two years in the late 1990s, where he served as literary assistant to Robert Lax. Beer edited a collection of poems by Robert Lax, Poems (1962-1997) (Wave Books, 2013).  He currently teaches creative writing at Portland State University.

Kristin Berger is the author of a poetry chapbook For the Willing (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and former editor at VoiceCatcher. She has been awarded Writers Residencies at The H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest and at Playa, Summer Lake, Oregon. Recent poetry and non-fiction has appeared in, or is forthcoming, in Camas, Cirque, Forest Log (Spring Creek Project), and North Dakota Quarterly.

Malachi Black is the author of Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014).  His poems appear widely in journals and anthologies, and his work has several times been set to music and has been featured in exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad.  Black is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego.

Karina Borowicz is the author of two poetry collections, Proof (Codhill Press, 2014) and The Bees Are Waiting (Marick Press, 2012), which won the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry and was named a Must-Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, including AGNI, Pleiades, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review. She makes her home in the Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts.

Marina Callahan lives in Portland, Oregon and attends Portland State University.

Susanna Childress is the author of Entering the House of Awe (New Issues, 2011), winner of the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Award, and Jagged with Love (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. She also writes fiction and creative nonfiction and, along with Joshua Banner, comprises the band Ordinary Neighbors, whose full-length album The Necessary Dark draws on her writing. She lives in Holland, Michigan.

Rachel Cochran is a recent graduate of the University of Missouri’s Master of Arts program in English. She has stories forthcoming in Angelic Knight Press’s Demon Rum anthology and Antimatter Press’s Local Magic​ anthology. Previous works of her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Deep South Magazine, The Missing Slate, Literary Orphans, The Ohio River Review, and more.

CA Conrad is the author of seven books including ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014), A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON (WAVE Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (WAVE Books, 2010). A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics. Visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

John Davis is the author of Gigs (Sol Books) and The Reservist (Pudding House Press.) His recent work appears in Hawaii Pacific Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The North American Review, and Rio Grande Review. He teaches high school and performs in rock n roll bands.

Annette Fisch is a graduate of Barnard College and lives in New York. She is currently working on her first novel when not practicing law. She particularly enjoys combining emotional distress with scientific distress in her fiction. Her work has previously appeared in Black Heart Magazine.

Adrienne Flagg is a professional performer and producer based in Portland, Oregon.  She teaches theater throughout the US and is seen on stages in both improvisation and plays. She grew up on a sheep farm in Turner before moving to Portland and then New York for professional training. While she was gone, her father briefly tried his hand at beekeeping. Adrienne has taken the hobby further than her father and is on her sixth year of beekeeping.

Michele Glazer’s last book is On Tact, & the Made Up World (Iowa 2010). She teaches in the MFA program at Portland State University.

Charles Goodrich is the author of three volumes of poems, A Scripture of Crows, Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden, and Insects of South Corvallis, and a collection of essays about nature, parenting, and building a house, The Practice of Home. He serves as Director for the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University, a program that hosts writers’ residency, literary readings, and symposia at the intersection of literature, environmental science, and ethics.

Craig Goodworth is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice lies on the boundary between ecology, poetics and spirituality. Working in drawing, installation and poetry, his art addresses the body and place. Goodworth holds master’s degrees in sustainable communities and fine art and has received fellowships in art and writing as well as serving as an artist-in-residence in various contexts.

Kate Gray tends her students’ stories at Clackamas Community College, where she has been teaching for 20 years. Her first full-length book of poems, Another Sunset We Survive, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 2007 and followed chapbooks, Bone-Knowing (2006), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize and Where She Goes (2000), winner of the Blue Light Chapbook Prize. Her novel, Carry the Sky, is an attempt to look at bullying without blinking and will be published by Forest Avenue Press in 2014.

Dena Rash Guzman is a poet, essayist and beekeeper living on her family’s sustainable farm outside Portland, Oregon. Life Cycle—Poems, her first book, was published by Dog On A Chain Press in 2013. Her work can be found online and in print at The Poetry Foundation, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Luna Luna Magazine, Ink Node and elsewhere. She has had her poems anthologized several times, including by publishers in the People’s Republic of China where she has performed her work for thousands.

Jeanine Hathaway, on the MFA Poetry faculty at Seattle Pacific University, has published a novel (Motherhouse with Hyperion: NY, 1992), personal essays (“Appearances” in The Wichita Times, monthly from 1995-2007), and poetry (The Self as Constellation with UNT Press: TX, 2001, and The Ex-Nun Poems with Finishing Line Press, 2012).

Kiandra Jimenez is a poet, homeschooling mother, and avid organic vegetable gardener from California. She teaches creative writing at UC Riverside Extension and serves as Arts Editor of Lunch Ticket Literary Magazine. She is a current MFA candidate in Fiction and Poetry at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Visit her at hungryfolktale.com.

Lois P. Jones is a host of Pacifica Radio’s “Poet’s Café” (KPFK 90.7 FM), and co-hosts the Moonday series in West Los Angeles. Publications include Narrative Magazine, American Poetry Journal, Nassau Review, Askew and Antioch’s Lunch Ticket. Her work won honors under Fiona Sampson, Kwame Dawes and others. New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear selected “Ouija” as 2010 Poem of the Year. She is the Poetry Editor of Kyoto Journal and a multiple Pushcart nominee

Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the author of The Fortunate Islands, eight chapbooks and the recent online collection Season of Change (Mudlark 46); her poetry can also be found in many journals and anthologies. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she has also been a reviewer for Library Journal, the editor of the online journal Perihelion, and a longtime poetry instructor for UC Davis Continuing Education. She is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle, a contributing editor for Poetry Flash and a blogger for Coal Hill Review. Susan is also an exhibiting visual artist. Please visit her website at: http://www.susankelly-dewitt.com

Elizabeth Lawson recently retired from the Writing Department at Ithaca College where she taught writing in many forms for over a decade. Educated at Bryn Mawr College, she holds a MA in Botany from the University of Texas at Austin, a PhD in Plant Biology from Cornell University, and an MFA in Nonfiction from Southern New Hampshire University. She worked at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in the UK, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden as a botanical instructor, and for the Ecological Society of America and the Botanical Society of America for many years as a technical/copy editor. She writes as a naturalist at www.elizabethwinpennylawson.com.

Lois Leveen is the author of the novels The Secrets of Mary Bowser and Juliet’s Nurse.  Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and been engraved on a hospital wall.  She is a recovering academic and volunteer urban beekeeper.

Sarah Marshall grew up in Oregon, earned her MFA at PSU, and continues to write and teach in the area. Her essays have most recently appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, and Lapham’s Quarterly, and she is at work on a book about female victimhood narratives in American culture.

Jennifer Moore has poetry published or forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Best New Poets, The Volta, Columbia Poetry Review and elsewhere, and criticism in Jacket2 and The Offending Adam. She holds degrees from the University of Colorado and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio Northern University.

Lynn Otto teaches writing and literature as an adjunct at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon, and freelances as a copyeditor. Her work has appeared in Plain Spoke, Triggerfish Critical Review, Strong Verse, and Centrifugal Eye.  She is soothed by the sound of bees because it means something is going right.

Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, has six full-length books of poetry, most recently Understory, from Lost Horse Press in 2013. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, Calyx, and the Internet’s Poetry Daily. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and the recipient of the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts.  

Melissa Reeser Poulin teaches English and creative writing in many settings, working with the elderly, high school students, and adult English language learners. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, and she was a 2014 Pushcart nominee. She lives with her husband, a metal artist and blacksmith, in Portland, Oregon.

Claire Preston is Reader in Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her books include Edith Wharton’s Social Register (2000), Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early-Modern Science (2005), Bee (2006), and The Aid of Similitudes : The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (forthcoming 2014).

Jill McKenna Reed is a poet, writing instructor, and beekeeper in Portland, Oregon. She is co-owner of Bee Thinking, a beekeeping supplier specializing in foundationless hives. When she is not writing or teaching, she can be found catching swarms or helping new beekeepers around the Portland area. Jill earned her MFA in Creative Writing – Poetry, at Portland State University.

Frank Sherlock is the author of Space Between These Lines Not Dedicated, Over Here, The City Real & Imagined (w/ CAConrad), and a collaboration with Brett Evans entitled Ready-to-Eat Individual. Por Aquí, a Spanish-language collection of works translated by Carlos Soto-Román, will be published in Chile in fall 2014. Poems beyond the page have found their forms in installations/performances/ exhibitions, including Refuse/Reuse: Language for the Common Landfill, Kensington Riots Project, Neighbor Ballads, and B.Franklin Basement Tapes. Sherlock is a recipient of the 2013 Pew Fellowship in the Arts for literature. He is currently Poet Laureate of Philadelphia.

Maxine Silverman’s poetry is published in many journals, anthologies (including Pushcart Prize III), and Enskyment: Online Archive of American Poetry. She is the author of three chapbooks (SurvivalSong, Red Delicious, and 52 Ways of Looking) and Transport of the Aim: Poems on the lives of Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Celia Thaxter. In addition to poetry, she creates collage and visual midrash. Her website is http://www.maxinegsilverman.com.

George Venn is an award-winning poet, writer, literary historian, editor, linguist, and educator, and an eclectic, complex, and distinguished figure in western American literature. Taught beekeeping in his grandfather’s apiary, he has also worked for apiaries in Washington, Oregon, and Montana. See Keeping the Swarm (Wordcraft, 2012) for details, or http://www.georgevenn.com.

Jeanne Wagner is the recipient of several national awards, including the 2013 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Prize. Her poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry and American Life in Poetry. She is on the editorial board of California Quarterly. Her most recent book, In the Body of Our Lives, was released by Sixteen Rivers press in 2011.

Marty Williams is a working writer living in both Oakland, California, and on Kenai Lake in Alaska. Her poetry appears in Poetry East, Inquiring Mind, Digital Paper and dcomP magazine, as well as in the anthology Bearing Witness: Poetry By Teachers About Teaching. She has published chapbooks, poetry postcards, and artist books. Marty loves bees and other pollinators.

Leni Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator (Open City) and the novel The Listeners (Tin House), which was a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award. Her work has appeared in  Quarterly West, Open City, Salt Hill, New Orleans Review, GOOD, Harp & Altar, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Zumas is an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Portland State University.