Inaugural Issue

Julie Brooks Barbour is the author of the chapbook Come To Me and Drink (Finishing Line Press, 2012).  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Waccamaw, Kestrel, UCity Review, Diode, damselfly press, Prime Number Magazine, and Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems.  She teaches at Lake Superior State University where she edits the journal Border Crossing. http://juliebrooksbarbour.weebly.com/

 

Samiya Bashir’s second book of poems, Gospel, was a finalist for both the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and along with her first collection, Where the Apple Falls, the Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry most recently appeared in Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cura, The Rumpus, and Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K,and has been honored of late by two Hopwood Awards from the University of Michigan and the Aquarius Press Legacy Award. An Ann Arbor, Michigan, native and recent NEA Writer-in-Residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Samiya teaches creative writing at Reed College.  www.samiyabashir.com

 

Born in Trinidad and raised in New York City, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is the author of Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, and Convincing the Body. Her work is in anthologies including: Callaloo, Carry the Word, The Mom Egg, To Be Left With The Body, So Much Things To Say:100 Calabash Poets and Making the Trees Shiver.  Boyce-Taylor’s text, WATER has been commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow, and The Joyce Theater for Ronald K. Brown /Evidence Dance Company. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Stonecoast: The University of Southern Maine. She is working on a memoir/poetry titled, The Red Bible: Poems of Loss and Remembrances after her mother Eugenia Boyce. www.vepress.com

 

Scott Cairns, Professor of English at University of Missouri, is director of MU Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki/Thasos, bringing graduate and undergraduate students to Greece every June for engagement with literary life in modern Greece. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, etc., and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing.  His most recent books are Compass of Affection (poetry), Short Trip to the Edge (memoir), Love’s Immensity (translations), and a book-length essay, The End of Suffering. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2625

 

Hayan Charara was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1972, to Arab immigrants from Lebanon.  He is author of  The Alchemist’s Diary (Hanging Loose, 2001) and The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon, 2006), nominated for the National Book Award. His awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucille Joy Prize for Poetry, and a New Voices Award Honor for a children’s book, The Three Lucys, forthcoming from Lee & Low Books. His poems have been translated into French and Arabic and  nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is the editor of Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry (University of Arkansas, 2008). He is the president of the Radius of Arab American Writers and currently divides his time between Houston, where he lives with his wife and two sons, and San Antonio where he teaches poetry writing, literature, and theory at Our Lady of the Lake University.  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/hayan-charara

 

Alfred Corn is the author of ten books of poems. He spends half of every year in the U.K., and Pentameters Theatre in London staged his play Lowell’s Bedlam in the spring of 2011. In 2012, he was a Visiting Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, preparing a translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.  His first ebook, Transatlantic Bridge: A Concise Guide to the Differences between British and American English, was published in 2012, and in 2013, Press 53 will publish a new volume of poems titled Tables. http://topicsevent.blogspot.com/

 

 Veronica Golos: Co-Editor of Taos Journal of Poetry & Art

 

 

 

 

Sam Hamill is the author of more than forty volumes of poetry, literary prose, and celebrated translation from ancient Chinese, Japanese, Latin, ancient Greek and Estonian. His most recent poetry is Border Songs (Word Palace Press). He divides his time between Anacortes, Washington and Latin America.

 

 

Christine Hemp has aired her poems and essays on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. She currently writes, produces, and hosts a public radio program entitled The Hempsonian Institute of Higher Yearning which weaves poetry, music, science, and art into an hour-long exploration of  the senses.  She has recently received a Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship for Literature and an Iowa Review Literary Nonfiction Award for her memoir in progress. Her new poetry collection, That Fall was selected for the New Women’s Voices Series at Finishing Line Press. A former Taos, New Mexico resident, she now lives in Port Townsend, Washington.   www.christinehemp.com

 

H. L. Hix’s recent books include a “selected poems,” First Fire, Then Birds: Obsessionals 1985-2010 (Etruscan Press, 2010); a translation, made with the author, of Eugenijus Ališanka’s from unwritten histories (Host Publications, 2011); and an essay collection, Lines of Inquiry (Etruscan, 2011).  He lives a few hours due north of Taos, with his partner, the poet Kate Northrop; their writing studio was once a garage, and before that was a barn.  www.hlhix.com

 

Joan Houlihan’s most recent book of poetry, The Us, was named a 2009 “must read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her earlier books are The Mending Worm, winner of the Green Rose Award from New Issues Press, and Hand-Held Executions: Poems and Essays. A fourth collection, Ay, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2013. Her work has appeared in  Boston Review, Poetry, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review and Gettysburg Review, and anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press). She is contributing editor for the Contemporary Poetry Review and author of critical essays on contemporary American poetry online at bostoncomment.com. Founder and Director of the Concord Poetry Center and the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference, Houlihan is on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. www.joanhoulihan.com

 

Sarah Husain was born in New York City and grew up in Hong Kong, Sudan and Pakistan. She is the editor of Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality. Her poetry is concerned with memory, nation, violence, bio-terrorism and the female body. She has worked on issues of immigrant rights, access to public higher education and grassroots anti-violence projects in the Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities, and contributes to discourses of gender, sexuality, and violence as it relates to Muslim women in the US.  She’s performed her poetry at numerous places, including, the Bowery Poetry Club, Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe, among other spaces. Support from the Joyce Foundation, Poets & Writers, the Chicago Guild and South Asian Women’s Creative Collective and she was a recipient of Hedgebrook writer’s residency. 

 

Patricia Spears Jones is poet and playwright and author of Painkiller (2010), Femme du Monde (2006) and The Weather That Kills (1994) and three chapbooks. She edited Think: Poems For Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Hat/ (2009) and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of Poetry by New York City Women (1978). Anthologized in Angles of Ascent; Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry; broken land: Poems of Brooklyn, bumrush: the page and Best American Poetry, 2000.  Mabou Mines commissioned and produced ‘Mother’ and Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting.  Former Program Coordinator at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Prose and commentary in Calabar,  http://cultureid.com  The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Village Voice, www.tribes.org, and Bomb, where she is a contributing editor. Poems and prose are featured in African Voices, The Agni Review, Bomb, Barrow Street, Calabar, www.cultureID.com, Callaloo, www.kwelijournal.org, Fifth Wednesday, The Oxford American, The Southampton Review, and TriQuarterly. She has read and taught at colleges, universities and literary centers around the nation.

 

Connie Josefs  is a writer, teacher and literary consultant. She worked as a writer, producer and story analyst for film and television before turning her attention to fiction and essay writing. She has led workshops in fiction and creative non-fiction writing for more than 20 years, and served on the faculty of the Emeritus Program at Santa Monica College in California, where she was founding editor of the literary journal, E-33: Writings from Emeritus. She currently teaches creative writing and literature at the Osher Institute at UNM Albuquerque. She also leads private workshops and provides individualized coaching, editing and manuscript consultation through The Writing Circle. Connie holds an MFA in fiction writing from Antioch University.

 

Alexander Long’s third book, Still Life, won the 2011 White Pine Press Poetry Prize.  A chapbook, also titled Still Life, won the 2010 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition.  His work appears in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Callaloo, Pleiades, & The Southern Review, among others. http://www.whitepine.org/catalog.php?series=6#S http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/alexander_long/index.shtml

 

Layli LongSoldier holds a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is currently pursuing her MFA at Bard College. Her poems have appeared in The American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the anthology Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas and a forthcoming issue of Kenyon Review Online. She also exhibits visual works, with her most recent installation at the Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation, SD. She resides in Tsaile, AZ on the Navajo Nation and is an adjunct faculty member at Dine’ College. Her first chapbook of poetry is titled, Chromosomory (Q Ave Press, 2010).

 

Ken McCullough’s most recent books of poetry are Walking Backwards and Broken Gates, forthcoming, and a book of stories, Left Hand. He has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Academy of American Poets Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pablo Neruda Award, a Galway Kinnell Poetry Prize, the New Millennium Poetry Award, the Blue Light Book Award and the Capricorn Book Award. McCullough has worked closely with Cambodian poet U Sam Oeur, survivor of the Pol Pot regime, and together they have published a bilingual edition of U’s poetry, Sacred Vows, and a memoir, Crossing Three Wildernesses. McCullough lives in Winona, Minnesota with his wife and younger son, and is the former Poet Laureate of Winona.   www.acrossthreewildernesses.com

 

Sawnie Morris was winner of the 2010 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award for a selection of 5 poems, and co-winner of the 2007 New Mexico Book Award for her chapbook in The Sound a Raven Makes.  Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, drunkenboat.com, The Journal, and other magazines. Her prose on poetry has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Boston Review.  She is a co-founder and current assistant to the director of Amigos Bravos: Because Water Matters.

 

U Sam Oeur was a farmer boy born on March 24, 1936 at Thlok, Svay Rieng Province, Cambodia where he was educated under the  French educational system. After high school, he was sent to the United States by USAID where he  earned his BA in Industrial Education in 1965. In 1968 U Sam earned his MFA from the University of Iowa, then returned to Cambodia. In 1972, President Lon Nol  nominated U Sam as Secretary General of the Khmer League for Freedom, member of the World Anti-Communist League. He was a prisoner of war from 1975 to 1979 under the Khmer Rouge Era.  Since returning to the U.S. in 1992, U Sam has published two books: a collection of poems, “SACRED VOWS,” and his memoir, “CROSSING THREE WILDERNESSES.”  His poetry is published both nationally and internationally. U Sam now lives in Dallas, where he is currently translating into Khmer Walt Whitman’s poems: “Song of Myself,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “We Hear America Singing,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

 

Alicia Ostriker’s thirteenth poetry collection, The Book of Seventy, received the 2009 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, and she has twice been a finalist for a National Book Award.  Her most recent collection is The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011.  Ostriker teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation at Drew University.

 

A tattooed attemptress, Robin Powlesland has the language breadth of a condor’s wingspan. Previously published in effing, Venus Envy, Open Letters Monthly and a finalist for Omnidawn’s 2010 Chapbook Contest, she continues attempting in the high desert of the Sangre De Cristos. http://postmodernpetroglyphs.blogspot.com/

 

 

Khadijah Queen holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is the author of two poetry collections: Conduit (Black Goat/Akashic 2008), and Black Peculiar, which won the 2010 Noemi Book Award for Poetry. Individual poems, four times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, appear in jubilat, Best American Nonrequired Reading (Houghton Mifflin 2010) and many other journals and anthologies. Visit her website: www.khadijahqueen.com

 

 Jamie Ross paints and writes on a mesa west of Taos (when not farther south). His poetry has been featured in many journals, as well as the anthology Best New Poets 2007. His collection, Vinland, published in 2010, was awarded the Intro Poetry Prize from Four Way Books.

 

 

Metta Sáma is author of Nocturne Trio (YesYes Bøøks 2012) and South of Here (New Issues Press 2005 (published under her legal name)). Her poems, fiction, creative non-fiction, & book reviews have been published or forthcoming in Blackbird, bluestem, Drunken Boat, The Drunken Boat, Esque, hercricle, Jubilat, Kweli, The Owls, Pebble Lake Review, Pyrta, Reverie, Sententia, Vinyl, among others. Sáma is the former recipient of the Jay C and Ruth Halls Fellowship at UW-Madison and has received numerous fellowships for writing retreats and travel abroad. In addition to her creative work, she has published scholarship on Dionne Brand, Terrance Hayes, Audre Lorde, & Toni Morrison.

 

‘Annah Sobelman is the author of  ”In the Bee Latitudes” (UC Press, Berkeley), recently  published, and “The Tulip Sacrament, ” (Wesleyan University Press). She has taught poetry as  ’poet-in-residence’ at universities including UCLA and the MFA  program in poetry at the University of Montana, Missoula. Recently returned from living in Florence, Italy, ‘Annah lives in Los Angeles.

                                                   
Catherine Strisik: Co-Editor of Taos Journal of Poetry & Art; www.catherinestrisik.com

 

 

   

                  
Virgil Suarez is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently 90 MILES: Selected and New, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is also the author of several  novels,  collections of stories, and two volumes of memoirs. When he is not writing, he is out riding his motorcycle up and down the Blue Highways in Florida, where he lives and works.

 

Susan Terris’ books include The Homelessness of Self, Contrariwise, and Fire Is Favorable to the Dreamer. Her work has appeared in many journals, including The Southern Review, The Journal, and Ploughshares. A poem of hers from Field appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXI.  She is the editor of Spillway Magazine and poetry editor of In Posse Review and of Pedestal. In 2013, The Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems will be published by Marsh Hawk Press.  http://www.susanterris.com

 

Andrea L. Watson is founding publisher and editor of 3: A Taos Press, a multicultural and ethically voiced publishing house. Andrea’s poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Rhino, Runes, Subtropics, Cream City Review, Ekphrasis, International Poetry Review, Memoir (and), and The Dublin Quarterly, among others. She has designed and curated sixteen ekphrasis events of poetry and art across the United States, commencing with Braided Lives: A Collaboration Between Artists and Poets, sponsored by the Taos Institute of Arts, which traveled to Denver, San Francisco, and Berkeley. Other shows include Interwoven Illuminations, featured in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review; The Sacred Blue; Frida-Fractured; Reflections on RANE; Threaded Lives, with its book, Poems from the Fiber World; and, most recently, Fragments: Poets and Artists of the South and Southwest. She is co- editor of the poetry anthology, Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined.