Joe Sacksteder, Editor in Chief

Joe Sacksteder lives in Ypsilanti, MI where he wallows in fiction, poetry, filmmaking, music composition, and ice hockey. Recent and forthcoming publications include Puerto del Sol, Mississippi Review, filling Station, Aethlon: A Journal of Sport Literature, Big Muddy, Southeast Review Online, and Penumbra. In addition to teaching and taking classes at Eastern Michigan University, he paints houses, works at the Great Lakes Rabbit Sanctuary, and even sneaks into the background of movies now and then. He is currently wrapping up his first short film, Silo, with an Ann Arbor-based production company, Lionbelly Media.

Sarah Smarch, Consulting Editor

Sarah received her undergraduate degree in 2007 in both English and Art from Eastern Michigan University. During her undergraduate career she served as an assistant editor and also Editor in Chief for the literary arts journal, Cellar Roots. She also interned at 826michigan where she was ecstatic to be titled volunteer of the month in January 2007; wrote for EMU’s school paper, The Eastern Echo; and exhibited photography in Ford Gallery. She was recently awarded the EMU Graduate Award in Creative Writing and was named the Department of Language and Literature’s Distinguished Graduate Student in Creative Writing for 2008.

Fascinated by work which forces its audience to examine cultural socialization, her personal work ranges from genre-spanning multi-media installation pieces to fiction and poetry. Her work is often informed by familial, childhood, and religious experiences, and sifting through piles at garage sales.

Robert Stevens, Consulting Editor - Copy

Robert has been an academic librarian for ten years and currently works as the Humanities Librarian at Eastern Michigan University. Books are a particular passion and his hobby of creative writing has resulted in a growing pile of manuscripts waiting to be assigned an ISBN. He is also an avid collector of strange music and has been known to host internet radio shows that expose his greasy findings.

Ruth Bardenstein, Consulting Editor - Aesthetics

Ruth is currently an MFA student in Graphic Design (and Installation, Collage/Assemblage) at Eastern Michigan University. In 2009, she won a Graduate Recognition Award for Artistic Excellence and was the recipient of a Dorothy Lamming MFA Scholarship. She did her BFA work in Graphic Design at EMU as well and also has a BA in Mathematics and Economics from University of Michigan and a MS in Operations Research from MIT. Her interest in language, literary and philosophical texts, typography and symbol all inform her current work creating verbo-visual structures that attempt to expand the potencies of both literary and graphic languages.

Carla Harryman, Faculty Editor

The range of Carla Harryman’s work includes essays, fiction, poetry, performance writing and plays. Adorno’s Noise (2008) is a collection of experimental and conceptual essays that investigate “noise,” poetry, visual art, philosophy, political existence, and personal experience. She has published two novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: After Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999) and numerous volumes of innovative poetry and prose. These include the long poem Open Box, Improvisations (2007) and Baby (2005), a collection in prose and poetry that features the sensual world and critical perspectives of a maverick baby. She has also published two volumes of selected writings: There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (1995) and Animal Instincts: Prose Plays Essays (1989). Her most recent writing project is The Grand Piano, a collective autobiography in ten volumes by ten writers identified with the rise of Language Poetry in the Bay Area. She has also published a full-length play (Memory Play, 1994) and written a number of articles on poets’ performances and on contemporary innovative writing by women. In 2006 she co-edited Lust for Life, a volume of essays on the novelist Kathy Acker. A frequent interdisciplinary collaborator, she was co-founder of The San Francisco Bay Area Poets Theater (1980-1986) and has written, produced, performed, co-directed and directed many works of interdisciplinary performance. Recent productions include three distinct presentations of bilingual performances of her Mirror Play at the University of Montreal (2006), at “Music Unlimited 2005″ in Wels, Austria, and at the Hölderlinturm in Tübigen, Germany (2005); three evenings of Poets Theater performances at Links Hall in Chicago with works by Kathy Acker, Barrett Watten, Frank O’Hara, and herself; and new stagings of her plays Third Man (Poets Theater Jubilee, San Francisco, 2008) and Memory Play (Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2008). She has received numerous grants and awards including a Foundation for Contemporary Art Award (2004-05). Her work is widely anthologized and has been translated into French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Danish, and Serbian. A native Californian, she has spent much of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area and has lived in the Detroit area since 1995.

Many thanks to Founding Editor Christina Milletti. Read a bit of her fiction here.