A. Balkano, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and Jason Schneiderman
A. Balkano is the author of The Book of Dumb, a fiction, and Bring the Gnar, a non-. He lives with his family in the U.S.A.
Photo Credit: Marion Ettlinger
Jason Schneiderman is the author of Primary Source, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press; Striking Surface, winner of the Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press; and Sublimation Point, A Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books. His poetry and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House, among others. Jason has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004 and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in 2011. He is Poetry Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review, and Associate Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. Jason Schneiderman is an Associate Professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York.
Photo Credit: Marion Ettlinger
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is the author of Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books 2015), which was a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry. Her earlier poetry collections are Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books 2010); The Requited Distance (The Sheep Meadow Press 2011); and Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose 2011), selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Rachel holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. A Cave Canem and Kimbilio Fellow, she is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, The Millay Colony, and others. In 2011, Griffiths appeared in the first ever poetry issue in Oprah’s O Magazine. A photographer as well as a poet, her literary and visual work has appeared in Callaloo, Poets & Writers, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Writer’s Chronicle, Transition, American Poet, Mosaic, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Puerto Del Sol, Crab Orchard Review, RATTLE, Brilliant Corners, Kweli Journal, PMS: poem memoir story, The Drunken Boat, Salt Hill Journal, THRUSH, Folio, Hambone, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and many others.