Austin Alexis has work forthcoming in the anthology Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, Home Planet News and in 2 Bridges Review.  Recent work has appeared in The Ledge and in The Paterson Literary Review.  His first full-length collection, Privacy Issues (Lotus Press, Inc.–Wayne State University Press, distributor), won the 20th annual Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award.  His plays have been performed at Performance Space 122, the Samuel French Short Plays Festival and elsewhere.  A multi-genre writer, he continues to work on fiction and essays, as well as poetry and drama. www.lotuspress.org www.supress.wayne.edu.books  Amazon.com Barnes&Noble.com
ISBN: 978-0-9797509-8-4

Joel Allegretti is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Europa/Nippon/ New York : Poems/Not-Poems (Poets Wear Prada, 2012). He is the editor of Rabbit Ears, the first anthology of poetry about TV, coming in 2014 from Poets Wear Prada. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street , The New York Quarterly and PANK, among other national journals, as well as in journals published in Canada , the United Kingdom and India .

Betsy Andrews is the author of New Jersey ( University of Wisconsin Press , 2007), winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, and The Bottom (42 Miles Press, 2014), winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Prize. She is also the executive editor of Saveur magazine.

Geer Austin is the author of Cloverleaf, a poetry chapbook from Poets Wear Prada Press. His poetry and fiction has appeared in Big Bridge, MiPOesias, This Literary Magazine, Potomac Review, and BlazeVOX, among others. He was the of NYB, a New York/Berlin arts magazine. He lives in Brooklyn , New York .

Kyle Bella currently resides in Bushwick, Brooklyn . He manages social media for progressive website Alternet, does freelance journalism, and is working on a forthcoming mixed-genre book titled Queer Embraces. Writing and other musings from this project can be found at: http://queerembraces.tumblr.com/.

Jeffery Berg‘s poems have appeared in Court Green, Map Literary, and the Gay & Lesbian Review. He has written reviews for Lambda Literary Review and the Poetry Project Newsletter.  A Virginia Center of the Creative Arts fellow, Jeffery lives in New York and blogs at jdbrecords.

David Bergman is the author of Gaiety Transfigured, The Violet Hour, and most recently Fortunate Light.

Hansa Bergwall is a Brooklyn poet who writes about the ecstatic in everyday dreamscapes. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in St. Petersburg Review, Lodestar Quarterly and Whistling Fire among others. He co-authored a chapbook, The Thames and Hudson Project, with Timothy Liu.

Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney , Australia ; she lives in Philadelphia and is the author of Letters to Kelly Clarkson, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

Charlie Bondhus’s second poetry book, All the Heat We Could Carry, won Main Street Rag’s Annual Poetry Book Award for 2013. Previously, he published How the Boy Might See It (Pecan Grove Press, 2009), and two chapbooks, What We Have Learned to Love—which won Brickhouse Books’s 2008-2009 Stonewall Award—and  Monsters and Victims (Gothic Press, 2010). His poetry appears or is set to appear in numerous periodicals, including Midwest Quarterly and CounterPunch. He is the Poetry Editor at The Good Men Project www.goodmenproject.com .

Bryan Borland is founder and publisher of Sibling Rivalry Press and editor of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry. He lives in Alexander ,  Arkansas , with his husband, Seth Pennington. His website is www.bryanborland.com.

Michael Broder‘s first book, This Life Now, came out on the Body Language imprint of A Midsummer Night’s Press in 2014, making him the oldest new voice in contemporary poetry. He holds a BA from Columbia University , an MFA from New York University , and a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York . His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in BLOOM, Court Green, Columbia Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Classical World, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies This New Breed, My Diva, Divining Divas, Rabbit Ears, and Ancient Obscenities. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and numerous cats, both feral and domestic. Visit him at mbroder.com and follow him @MichaelBroder.

Guillermo Filice Castro is the recipient of a 2013 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship from the Poetry Project. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Court Green, Quarterly West, among many other journals, and the anthologies Flicker and Spark (Lowbrow Press, 2013), Divining Divas (Lethe Press, 2012), and Saints of Hysteria (Soft Skull Press, 2007). He is the author of two chapbooks, Cry Me a Lorca (Seven Kitchens Press, 2010) and Toy Storm (Big Fat Press, 1997).

Lonely Christopher is a poet and filmmaker. He is the author of the poetry collection Death & Disaster Series (Monk Books, 2014) and the short story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, which was a 2011 selection of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery imprint of Akashic Books. His plays have been produced in New York City and China . He wrote and directed the feature film MOM (Cavazos Films, 2013) and his stories have been adapted for the screen in Canada and France . He lives in Brooklyn .

William Leo Coakley has published in the Paris Review, London Magazine, Christopher Street, the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, and many other publications here and abroad. Since being selected for the Discovery series at the New York Poetry Center , he has often read his poems in public. In late 2011 he organized with Nathaniel Siegel, and read his poems at, a major queer poetry reading to celebrate the establishment of the new Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York. A native Bostonian, he is now an American and an Irish citizen. He won a Sotheby’s International Poetry Competition Prize and in 2013 his translation of Cavafy won the New England Poetry Club’s Der-Hovanessian Translation Award. He is publisher of Helikon Press, founded with his late partner of 48 years Robin Prising.
http://keepthelightsonfilm.com/archives/gay-new-york/what-to-do-until-the-poet-comes-part-one
http://keepthelightsonfilm.com/archives/gay-new-york/what-to-do-until-the-poet-comes-part-two
http://keepthelightsonfilm.com/archives/gay-new-york/what-to-do-until-the-poet-comes-part-3
http://connotationpress.com/a-poetry-congeries-with-john-hoppenthaler/march-2013/1779-william-leo-coakley-poetry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kCjAuFZAUI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dGXh54PlM0
http://thenewsgayper.com/2014/01/07/match-poem/

Steven Cordova is the 2012 first-place winner of the International Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize. His first full-length poetry collection, Long Distance, appeared in 2010 from Bilingual University Press. He lives in Brooklyn , New York .

Chauncey Dandridge, a NYC DJ/nightlife veteran for well over ten years, has always been a ferocious advocate for LGBT rights and equality and has lent his musical and event production talents and queer celebrity status to countless benefits, political protests and causes.  A writer since he can remember,  his poetry and lyrics have always been the inconsistent constant in his life still today.  He is also one of the producers of the annual New York City Dance Parade & Festival each May.  www.danceparade.org   Check out his work at www.scribd.com/cdandridge and his blog at www.houseofdandridge.com

Seren Divine is a queer feminist radical educator, performance poet, visual artist & activist. She has toured and competed across the country, with over ten years of involvement in the National Poetry Slams; from competition to volunteering, organizing and hosting. Seren earns a living as a Professional Performance Poet & Arts Educator, leading Performance & Writing Workshops for youth from Queens to Brooklyn , and in Colleges and Universities along the east coast. She is currently affiliated with Urban Word NYC, Urban Arts Partnership & El Puente Leaders for Peace & Justice.  She has five collections in print, two recordings & is widely anthologized. Seren debuted her first multi-media one woman show at New York City ’s historic WOW Café Theater; Be Here Now.
seren.divine@facebook.com
serendivine@yahoo.com

R Erica Doyle‘s first book, proxy, was published in 2013 by Belladonna Books, with cover art by the magnificent queer black artist, Julie Mehretu. Erica is a Lambda Award finalist and a winner of a first book award from the Poetry Society of America.  This fall, she’ll be teaching a free Cave Canem workshop for poets of color. She’s lived in Tunisia and Washington , DC , but now she’s back in Brooklyn , where she was born.

Alan Felsenthal co-edits a small press called The Song Cave (www.the-song-cave.com).

Davidson Garrett is a native of Shreveport , Louisiana . He trained for the theater at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and graduated from The City College of New York with an M.S. in Education. A member of Screen Actor’s Guild/AFTRA and Actors’ Equity, he has worked in theater, film and television since 1973. His poetry, fiction and articles have been published in The New York Times, The Episcopal New Yorker, Xavier Review ( New Orleans ), Sensations Magazine, Third Wednesday, Marco Polo Arts Mag, Big City Lit, The Stillwater Review, the website of The Beat Museum in San Francisco and in Podium, the online literary journal of the 92^nd Street Y.  Davidson is the author of two books of poetry: King Lear of the Taxi published by Advent Purple Press and To Tell The Truth I Wanted To Be Kitty Carlisle and Other Poems published by Finishing Line Press. In May 2013, he was invited to read his poetry and prose as part of the PEN World Voices Festival at Joe’s Pub.  Davidson has been a New York City taxi driver for over 30 years to help subsidize his art.

JOHN GIORNO An innovator of poets performing, John Giorno elevated Spoken Word to a high Art form. Born on December 4^th, 1936, John Giorno ‘s career spans fifty years. Giorno’s work: written, performed, recorded and filmed, and presented, has been a revolution and changed the way the world views poetry.
“In 1965, the idea occurred to me that a poet can connect to an audience using all the entertainments of ordinary life: watching television, listening to albums, radio, and the telephone, and going to rock concerts.”—John Giorno
” John Giorno raises questions to an almost unbearable pitch, to a scream of surprised recognition. His litanies from the underworld of the mind reverberate in your head and ventriloqize your own thoughts.”—William Burroughs
His book Subduing Demons In America , Selected Poems 1962-2007, will be published by Soft Skull Press in November 2007.
His book You Got To Burn To Shine  (Serpent’s Tail, 1994), poems, and deeply personal memoirs, including the story of his relationship with Andy Warhol (Giorno was the star of Warhol’s first film, Sleep, 1963), his anonymous sexual encounter with Keith Haring (he and Keith later became good friends); and being a Tibetan Buddhist, his understanding of death in the age of AIDS.
Giorno Poetry Systems, begun in 1965, innovated the use of technology in poetry, working with electronic and multi-media, creating new venues, and connecting poetry with new audiences. 1966-68, Giorno worked with Bob Moog, making sound compositions of his poems on the new invented Moog synthesizer.
In 1968, John Giorno created Dial-A-Poem, and innovated the use of the telephone for mass communications. Dial-A-Poem was the first time the telephone was used to communicate mass audiences. Dial-A-Poem’s enormous success, receiving millions of calls, gave rise to a Dial-A-something industry, from Dial-A-Joke and Dial Sports, to phone sex, to 900 numbers. Dial-A-Poem ushered in a new era in telecommunications.
Giorno Poetry Systems released over fifty LPs and CDs of poets working with performance and music, numerous cassettes, videopaks, poetry videos, DVDs and film, books, silk-screen Poem Prints and Poem Paintings, and the Internet.
John Giorno has lived for forty-five years at 222 Bowery, New York, in three lofts in a historic, landmark 1884 building, The Young Men’s Institute of the Y.M.C.A. Built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Cleveland Dodge, it was the first of the modern-day “Y”s, and helped young men get a better start in life, until it’s demise in 1932. Now, it is now an artist loft building. The Bunker of William Burroughs, is the former locker room, where he lived in the 1970s and 80s, and visited until his death in 1997. His bedroom is preserved as a relic. There is a Tibetan Buddhist shrine and meditation hall for teachings and practice. 222 Bowery is the home of Giorno Poetry Systems.
For over forty years, John Giorno has been Buddhist meditation practioner in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. His teacher is His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche. For thirty years, Giorno has hosted many great Tibetan lamas, who visit New York , and give teachings at 222 Bowery.

Stephanie Gray is a poet and experimental filmmaker whose work incorporates poetic voiceovers. She is the author of a book, Heart Stoner Bingo (Straw Gate Books, 2007) & a chapbook, I thought you said it was sound/how does that sound (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs 2012). Journal publications include VLAK, Sentence, Aufgabe, Brooklyn Rail, EOAGH, 2ndAvenuePoetry, Boog City , & The Recluse. Readings include the Segue, Zinc, Poetry Project Friday series.

Scott Hightower is the award-winning author of four books of poetry and Hontanares, a bi-lingual (Spanish-English) collection ( Devenir , Madrid , 2012). In 2008, Hightower’s work garnered a prestigious Barnstone Translation Prize. He is a reviewer for Fogged Clarity, a contributing editor to The Journal, and the editor of the bi-lingual anthology Women Rowing: Mujeres A Los Remos (Mantis Editores (2102). Hightower, a native of central Texas , lives and works in New York and sojourns in Spain .

Matthew Hittinger‘s titles include Skin Shift (2012) and The Erotic Postulate (forthcoming, 2014) both from Sibling Rivalry Press. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan where he won a Hopwood Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, and in 2012 Poets & Writers Magazine profiled him on their annual list of debut poets. You can read more of his work at matthewhittinger.com .

Joanna Hoffman has been on five National Poetry Slam teams. In 2011, she represented Urbana at the 2011 Women of the World Poetry Slam (WOWPS), National Poetry Slam, and Individual World Poetry Slam, placing in the top 10 at all three. In 2012, she was the Urbana Grand Slam champion, 4th place finalist at the 2012 Women of the World Poetry Slam, and the 2012 champion of Capturing Fire, the international queer poetry competition. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in decomP, PANK, Union Station Magazine, The Legendary, Spindle, Sinister Wisdom and in the anthologies Women’s Work and Milk and Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry. Her full-length book of poetry, Running for Trap Doors, was recently released by Sibling Rivalry Press. She has been nominated for a Pushcart and a Lambda Literary Award. When not performing poems, Joanna works at a nonprofit, bikes around Brooklyn and tries to convince her cat to wear bow ties.

Walter Holland, Ph.D., is the author of three books of poetry Circuit (Chelsea Station Editions, 2010), Transatlantic, (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992) as well as a novel, The March (Chelsea Station Editions, 2011). His short stories have been published in Art and Understanding, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, and Rebel Yell, Some of his poetry credits include: Antioch Review, Art and Understanding, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, The Cream City Review, Found Object, Pegasus,  Phoebe, and  Poets for Life:76 Poets Respond to AIDS.  He lives in New York City .

Manuel Igrejas: Fiction in Men 4 and poetry in A New Geography of Poets. Plays include Shrinkage, Kitty and Lina, Miss Mary Dugan and Hassan and Sylvia. Hassan and Sylvia is included in the anthology Plays and Playwrights 2011. Both Hassan and Sylvia and Miss Mary Dugan are available at www.indietheaternow.com.   Other plays include Chantal, Lisbon , Pittsburgh . and NSA, (O’Neill semi-finalist 2013), (Finalist, The Asuncion Project) and soon to be part of the Left Out Festival April, 2014. www.mannyigrejas.com.

Ice Gayle Johnson is a multi media artist living between Chicago and New York—the key published by Poets Wear Prada 2012- Corsa on The Hudson with Quotes by Edgar Allan Poe forth coming fall 2014- Ice Gayle Johnson performs her work from coast to coast and is published widely. Her self named cd Ice can be purchased on cd baby.com as well as her DVD on film baby.com. Ice Gayle Johnson created, developed, and managed Uphook Press- Ice Gayle Johnson is a multi media artist who loves to connect with her audiences through her words music and images- leaving them with thought provoking messages-

Zoe Contros Kearl is a Texan poet living and working in New York .

Collin Kelley is the author of the novels Conquering Venus and Remain In Light, which have just been re-issued in new editions by Sibling Rivalry Press. Remain In Light was the runner-up for the 2013 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Fiction and a 2012 finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. His poetry collections include Better To Travel (2003, iUniverse), Slow To Burn (2006, MetroMania Press), After the Poison (2008, Finishing Line Press) and Render (2013, Sibling Rivalry Press). Kelley is also the author of the short story collection, Kiss Shot (2012, Amazon Kindle Exclusive). A recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award, Deep South Festival of Writers Award and Goodreads Poetry Award, Kelley’s poetry, essays and interviews have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies around the world.

Amy King works with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, teaches at SUNY Nassau, and her most recent book is I WANT TO MAKE YOU SAFE.

Michael Klein’s latest book of poems is The Talking Day  (Sibling Rivalry Press) and he has new work published or forthcoming in Little Star, Provincetown Arts and Poetry magazine. He lives in New York City and Provincetown and teaches at Goddard College in Vermont .

Jee Leong Koh is the author of four books of poems, including Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press). He has been anthologized in New Poetries V (Carcanet Press) and Villanelles (Everyman’s Library). He is the curator of the arts website Singapore Poetry.

Dean Kostos‘s collection–This Is Not a Skscraper–was the recipient of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, selected by Mark Doty. Kostosis the author of Rivering, Last Supper of the Senses, The Sentence That Ends with a Comma, and Celestial Rust. He edited Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry and co-edited Mama’s Boy: Gay Men Write about Their Mothers. His work has appeared in Boulevard, Cimarron Review, Southwest Review, Stand Magazine ( UK ), Western Humanities Review, and on Oprah Winfrey’s website Oxygen.com.  http://deankostos.com/

Billl Kushner is the author of 8 books of sparkling poetry!

Rickey Laurentiis is the recipient of a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a 2013 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy . The author of the chapbook, Whipped (Floating Wolf Quarterly), his poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, Oxford American and Poetry. Born and raised in New Orleans , Louisiana , he currently resides in Brooklyn , New York . Website: rickeylaurentiis.com

Timothy Liu is the author of ten books of poems, including Don’t Go Back To Sleep, forthcoming from Saturnalia Books this fall. He lives in Manhattan with his husband.

Patrick Lucy lives in Philadelphia where he’s a partner in a small advertising agency. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast , elimae, Revista Laboratorio (translations by Carlos Soto-Román), NOÖ Weekly, Bright Pink Mosquito, Apiary, La Fovea and many more. Patrick is a member of the arts collective and record label Good Behavior (http://goodbehavior.us/).


Ricardo Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico . A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Queer/Art/Mentorship, he is the Managing Director at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City . He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Colaterales (National Poetry Series)

Ryan Doyle May’s work has appeared in various journals and performances. He is the author of the chapbook The Anatomy of Gray (Corresponding Society Press) and acted as the lead in the short film August, which was selected for the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and is currently finishing a novel. He lives in Brooklyn .

Vinton Rafe McCabe has more than three decades’ experience in print and electronic media.  He is past Arts Editor for the Advocate newspapers of CT and MA and a former producer/host for PBS in New England . His freelance work has appeared in such diverse publications as The New York Times, The Stamford Advocate, New England Monthly, and The New York Journal of Books. He is a published novelist, a produced playwright, and an award-winning poet. A passionate advocate for holistic healthcare, McCabe is the author of ten books on homeopathy and related subjects, including the now-standard text, PracticalHomeopathy, as well as the Amazon bestseller, The Healing Enigma. He is now also a first time novelist.  His book, Death in Venice, California, has just been published by The Permanent Press.

Kelly McQuain is the author of Velvet Rodeo, winner of Bloom’s poetry prize, and his most recent work can be found in Painted Bride Quarterly, Kestrel, The Pinch, Assaracus and the anthologies Drawn to Marvel: Superhero Poems, and Between: New Gay Poetry.

Author of Talking in the Dark, a poetry memoir (Scholastic, 2003), Billy Merrell received a Lambda Literary Award for The Full Spectrum (Random House, 2006).

Stephen S. Mills holds a MFA from Florida State University . His work has appeared in The Antioch Review, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, Knockout, Assaracus, The Rumpus, and others. He is the author of the Lambda-winning book He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices and the forthcoming A History of the Unmarried. He lives in New York City . Website: http://www.stephensmills.com/

Jerome Murphy received an MFA from New York University , where he currently acts as Program Administrator of The Creative Writing Program. He assisted Diane Middlebrook in researching Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage. His reviews have appeared in the column Outwords, which he authored for Next Magazine from 2010-2011, in The Brooklyn Rail, and at Lambda Literary online. http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/06/15/sacrilegion-by-l-lamar-wilson/

Seth Pennington grew up in the minnow farm capital of Lonoke , Arkansas , as the son of a mortician. He is Editor at Sibling Rivalry Press and of the poetry journal Assaracus. He married Bryan Borland in Boston on his birthday.

Steven Riel is the author of one full-length collection, Fellow Odd Fellow (Trio House Press, 2013) and three chapbooks of poetry, including most recently, Postcard from P-town, whichwas selected as runner-up for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize and published in 2009 by Seven Kitchens Press.  His poems have appeared in several anthologies and in numerous periodicals, including The Minnesota Review, International Poetry Review, Evening Street Review, Christopher Street, The G.W. Review, St. Andrew’s Review, The James White Review, and The Antigonish Review.  In 2005, Christopher Bursk named him the Robert Fraser Distinguished Visiting Poet at Bucks County (PA) Community College.  He served as poetry editor of RFD between 1987 and 1995.  He won a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 1992.  He holds an MLS from Simmons College and works as Manager of Serials Cataloging at Harvard University Library. Website: www.stevenriel.com

Tom Savage is the author of ten books of poetry including Afghanistan: From Herat to Balkh and Back Again (forthcoming from Fly By Night Press), Brainlifts ( 2008, Straw Gate Books) and Political Conditions/Physical States (United Artists Books, 1994).

Sarah Sarai’s books include The Future Is Happy, Emily Dickinson’s Coconut Face, I Feel Good, and O You of the Cotton Pajamas!. Her fiction chapbook, The Young Orator, was published by Winged City Chaps in 2014. Links to her work are at her blog, My 3,000 Loving Arms.

Christopher Schmidt is the author of a book of poems, The Next in Line, and a book of criticism, The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith. His poems, essays, and articles have appeared in a number of publications, including Tin House, Bookforum, Time magazine, and Lambda Literary. He is an Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College , City University of New York.

Elaine Sexton is the author of two collections of poetry, Sleuth and Causeway, both with New Issues.  She is an editor at ARTnews and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute.

Ely Shipley‘s first book of poems, Boy with Flowers, won the Barrow Street Book Prize judged by Carl Phillips and the Thom Gunn Award. His poems and essays appear in Gulf Coast, Western Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College-CUNY.

Robert Siek is a poet who lives in Brooklyn and works as a production editor at a large publishing house in Manhattan . His poems have appeared in journals such as Court Green, Mary, Assaracus, Chelsea Station, and The Nervous Breakdown. The New School published his chapbook, Clubbed Kid, and Purpose and Devil Piss, published by Sibling Rivalry Press,is his first full-length collection of poetry. His blog is www.hideandsiek.blogspot.com

Richard Tayson is the author of The World Underneath and The Apprentice of Fever.  He wrote the forward for the Walt Whitman poem, Live-Oak, with Moss:  A Restorative Edition and may be heard talking about this poem in the Backstreet radio program “Outed:  Sexual Identity in America .” In 2012, he was awarded a Ph.D. in English from CUNY’s Graduate Center and is currently at work on a memoir concerning addiction, obsession, and celebrity culture.

Steve Turtell is a poet who lives in New York City and Key West . His collection of poems, Heroes and Householders, was published in 2009 by Orchard House Press and will be reissued in May 2012 in an expanded second edition. His 2001 chapbook, Letter to Frank O’Hara is the 2010 winner of the Rebound Chapbook Prize given by Seven Kitchens Press and was reissued with an introduction by Joan Larkin in 2011. He is currently at work on Fifty Jobs in Fifty Years, and Peter Hujar: Invisible Master. You can follow him on Twitter as @rdturtle and friend him on facebook.

Chocolate Waters has been writing and publishing poetry for over four decades. During the second wave of feminism she was one of the first openly lesbian poets to publish, and her contribution has been documented in Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975 (Barbara Love, Ed.) Her first three collections: To the man reporter from the Denver Post, Take Me Like A Photograph and Charting New Waters were published between 1975-1980 (Eggplant Press, Denver, CO) and sold nearly 10,000 copies. They are considered classics of the early women’s movement. Her latest book, the woman who wouldn’t shake hands, was published by Poets Wear Prada ( Hoboken , NJ ) in 2011 and is available for sale here today. You can visit her at www.chocolatewaters.com or www.facebook.com/ChocolateWatersPoet

Related to the Marx Brothers through his mother, Richard Marx Weinraub was born in New York City in 1949; he was a Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico from 1987 through 2010.  A book of his poetry entitled Wonder Bread Hill was published in 2002 by the University of Puerto Rico Press .  His poetry has appeared in many journals including The Paris Review, Asheville Poetry Review, South Carolina Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, North American Review, Slate, and River Styx. A Spanish translation of Wonder Bread Hill wasrecently published by Terranova Press.  A chapbook of his poetry entitled Heavenly Bodies was published in 2008 by Poets Wear Prada, and a poem from it was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize.  His full-length collection entitled Lapidary was published by Poets Wear Prada in 2013.

LeNair Xavier originally gained notoriety in the underground as adult entertainer, “Tré Xavier”. He officially broke free from that persona in early 2011 when at a Men of All Colors/NY event, he debuted his poetry series about the gay porn industry simply titled, The Industry, and has been furthering himself from “Tré Xavier” ever since. He is now making a brand of LeNair Xavier as a writer, blogger(L’s X-Ray Vision), performer, and model. Such as by way of magazine interviews done here and abroad, poetry on Soundcloud, modeling for Next Door Magazine, and YouTube videos to show his singing, writing, dancing, and video production talents. He has also become a regular at Mike Geffner’s monthly erotica event, Titillating Tongues, where he is the unnamed stripper mentioned in Time Out New York ‘s review of the event.
www.TresX-RayVision.com, https://soundcloud.com/lenair-xavier, http://www.youtube.com/user/RemoSurf.

Don Yorty is a writer and teacher currently living in New York City. Two books of his poetry, Poet Laundromat and A Few Swimmers Appear, and a novel, What Night Forgets, have been published.
Link: www.donyorty.com

Jason Zuzga is the other/nonfiction editor of Fence. His poems and essays have been published in journals such as LIT, VOLT, SPORK, jubilat, The Yale Review, Drunken Boat, and EOAGH. He is a recipient of fellowships from the James Merrill House and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and in 2005 completed an MFA in poetry and nonfiction at the University of Arizona . Currently, he is a graduate student in the English PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania focusing on postwar ecology and documentary media.He has a chapbook Atom’s Licks available from Scharmel Iris Press and a book of poems upcoming from a Saturnalia Books in 2016.

Regie Cabico co-edited with Brittany Fonte Flicker and Spark, a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Prize. He lives in Washington , DC where he produces Capturing Fire: An International Spoken Word

Nathaniel A. Siegel is a GAY poet in the tradition of homoSEXual writers, thinkers, and doers throughOUT time immemorial. His chapbook “Tony” is published by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. He has new workinFlicker and Spark: A Contemporary Queer Anthology of Poetry and Spoken Word (Low Brow Press).