Tree Bernstein

Tree Bernstein teaches Creative Writing at the Brooks Institute in California, and is the Ventura area coordinator for California Poets in the Schools (CPITS). Her advice column, “Ask Ms. Metaphor” (MixedMetaphorPress.com), appears in the Ojai Quarterly. Her poem “Regarding Pigs” was published in the anthology, Low Down and Coming On, edited by James P. Lenfestey.

Bill Berkson

Bill Berkson is an American poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties. The latest of his many volumes is Expect Delays (Coffee House Press, 2014).

LouAnn Shepard Muhm

LouAnn Shepard Muhm is a poet and teacher from northern Minnesota. Her poems have appeared in Dust & Fire, The Talking Stick, North Coast Review, Alba, Red River Review, Eclectica, Poems Niederngasse, and CALYX, among other journals and anthologies. She was a finalist for the Creekwalker Poetry Prize, the Late Blooms Postcard Series and the Midwest Book Award for Poetry, for her full-length poetry collection Breaking the Glass (Loonfeather Press, 2008). She received the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in Poetry in 2006 and 2012, and has been featured twice in “What Light” poetry sponsored by the McKnight Foundation and the Walker Art Museum. http://www.louannmuhm.com

Alan Montgomery

Deep Water Horizon

Alan Montgomery was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and is a tenured professor of Art at Dakota State University. His work was recently published in Henry Sayre’s seventh edition of A World of Art, published by Pearson Higher Education 2012. In a 1994 essay, “The Fragility of Connectedness,” Akira Lippit writes about Montgomery’s work as “exploring the connection between the physical reality of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, and the metaphysical content of Montgomery’s series, Irish History Lessons, which continues to manifest itself in drawings and paintings.”

Montgomery’s interests reside in topical issues ranging from environmental to socio-political and his formal application of materials reflects a contemporary approach to mixed media and traditional techniques. Place and time have been very important in the development of his work. “I would like viewers to see something they have not seen before,” he says. “I want to provide an experience that can be recognized as authentic and real, that is, a thought that inscribes itself onto the psyche.”

Elizabeth Robinson

Elizabeth Robinson is the author, most recently, of the poetry collections Blue Heron and Counterpart and the mixed-genre memoir/essay/poetry book On Ghosts, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book award.