Andrés Cerpa is the author of Elegy with a Bicycle in a Ransacked City, forthcoming from Alice James Books (January 2019). A recipient of a fellowship from the McDowell Colony, Canto Mundo, and a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, Devil's Lake, Gulf Coast, Third Coast, Perigee, Radar Poetry, The Shallow Ends, TriQuarterly, Frontier Poetry, Horsethief, West Branch, and RHINO.
Benjamin Aleshire travels the world as a poet-for-hire, writing poems for strangers in the street on a manual typewriter. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Green Mountains Review, Havana Times and others.
Cheryl Pallant is an award winning writer, poet, dancer, healer, writing and somatics coach, professor and workshop leader. She is the author of twelve books: Contact Improvisation, on dance; poetry books, Continental Drifts, Morphs, Uncommon Grammar Cloth, and Into Stillness; chapbooks, Poetry by Chocolate, The Phrase, Declaration of Independence, and Spontaneities. Released in Spring 2017 is Her Body Listening, a collection of new poetry. Ginseng Tango, a memoir about living in South Korea, and a chapter on dance, Zen, and evolutionary spirituality in Herstories is due out Fall 2017. Flesh Matters: Somatic Awareness through Movement and Writing arrives 2018. Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in numerous print and online magazines such as Fence, HOW2, Tarpaulin Sky, North Dakota Quarterly, and Oxford Magazine, and in several anthologies like An Introduction to the Prose Poem and Food for Thought. She has published over 200 reviews and interviews with dancers, writers, performance artists, and spiritual practitioners from around the globe and was dance critic for a local newspaper for twelve years. She received the Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts in 2013. Into Stillness was Finalist for the Virginia Books Award and the Southeastern Book Association. Her essay “Gifting Poetry” was chosen as Finalist for the Bechtel Prize. She has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Richmond Arts Council. She teaches at University of Richmond and leads workshops on creative writing, poetry, contact improvisation, Writing From the Body, mindfulness, healing, and creativity at hospitals and art centers throughout the U.S. and abroad. She founded RVA Litcrawl, dances with Song-ah, maintained the Richmond Contact Improvisation Jam for 25 years, and organizes the Fall East Coast Jam. She practices meditation, mostly Zen, for four decades, is an interfaith minister and co-founder of Integral Meditation Group. She is certified in Reiki and Healing Touch and trained in Process-Oriented Psychology, Authentic Movement, and yoga. Ongoing interests include tango, bicycling, hiking, postmodernism, somatics, Integral Philosophy, sustainability, and delight. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.
sam sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, The MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Michener Center for Writers. He’s the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award and his poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals.
Jamie O’Hara Laurens is the recipient of the 2016 Ping Pong Free Press of the Henry Miller Library Chapbook Award. Her first collection, Medeum, is on its second printing. Poetry and reviews have appeared in Poet Republik, Alexandria Quarterly, and Hawkmoth. She lives in Brooklyn.