Authors

"That story/poem/song was great. Who is that writer?"

Ed Falco is an award-winning writer and poet whose “The Artist” was selected as a 1995 Best American Short Story. His latest works -- a novel titled Wolf Point and selected short stories called Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha -- were published in 2005 by Unbridled Books. About “Places, Please,” Falco explains: “Often my stories begin with some notion of a subject, something out there in the everyday world that I think I'd like to write about. Once a story gets going, however, the subject usually diminishes in importance as the particular characters and their unique situation take hold of my imagination. I started out wanting to write about the easy availability of pornography on the Internet and how that might affect a young teen’s perceptions about sex and sexuality. In the end I wound up much more interested in Carl and Alice, and how they were being manipulated by both their nature and their culture."

Elise Paschen has served as the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America and is the co-founder of “Poetry in Motion,” a national program that places poetry posters in public transportation to spread poetry to the masses. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Paschen received the Lloyd McKim Garrison Medal and the Joan Grey Untermyer Poetry Prize. She co-founded Oxford Poetry while pursuing graduate studies at Oxford University and guest edited a special edition of Poetry Magazine’s special issue on contemporary British poets. The author of Infidelities and Houses: Coasts, Dr. Paschen currently teaches in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Chris Forhan's second book of poems, The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, won the Samuel French Morse Prize and a 2004 Washington State Book Award. His first book, Forgive Us Our Happiness, won the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize. His work has also been awarded a Pushcart Prize and has been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, New England Review, and other magazines. He teaches at Auburn University and in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. Forhan describes “Thirty Year Elegy” and “Flowers of the World, with Full Color Plates” as “two poems that ponder what’s here, then gone: an elegy for a father and a litany of flowers, both those that exist and those that should exist, if the imagination had its way.”

George Singleton has published over 100 stories in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, the Georgia Review, Book and Zoetrope. He's the author of three collections of stories and one novel. “Shirts and Skins” is part of a new collection, Drowning in Gruel, from Harcourt. “Even though I had a pooched-out stomach as a skinny little kid,” he says, “I never felt uncomfortable in junior high when the PE teacher had us divide up shirts against skins. But man, did I ever wonder how those poor boys felt with the belly buttons that stuck out like misplaced thumbs. When I sat down to write the story, I'm sure that I had some subconscious flashbacks to those freakish South Carolina days.”

Kurt Brown’s fourth full-length collection, Future Ship, will be published by Story Line Press in 2006. He teaches craft classes and poetry workshops at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. The poems included in Verb are from Sincerest Flatteries: A Little Book of Imitations, which will be published in 2007 by Tupelo Press in their Masters’ Chapbook Series. Brown says that the poems “are meant to be, not mocking parodies, but affectionate imitations of poets whose work I admire and love -- with a few winks at the authors, and some good humor thrown in.”

“'Blight’ began as a rambling series of anecdotes drunkly inflicted on an audience at Case Western Reserve,” says Stuart Dybek. “Afterward, the friend who'd taken me out to a bar before the reading, perhaps feeling some responsibility for my running amok, asked if I'd ever thought of working that stuff into a comic monologue. I actually tried that: a poem in the shape of a comic monologue that used the material from that story. It didn't work, but I did get 'Blight' out of it.” Dybek's books of fiction include The Coast of Chicago, Childhood and Other Stories, and I Sailed with Magellan. His most recent book of poems is Streets in Their Own Ink.

John Cerreta has written music for film, video, dance, and theater. He has recently scored Stomp! Shout! Scream!, a feature film by Jay Edwards, and is currently producing a recording of his song cycle Eavesdropping.