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CONTRIBUTOR BIOS
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CONTRIBUTOR BIOS
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FICTION
RUCHIKA TOMAR earned her BA in English Literature from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University in the city of New York. She is at work on her first novel.
KELLY LUCE will be an artist in residence at Devil's Tower National Monument this fall. She is currently working on a novel, as well as a collection of stories, set in Japan; other stories in the collection appear in the Tampa Review (2008 Danahy Fiction Prize Winner), The Gettysburg Review, Nimrod, and Kyoto Journal. Check out her blog, Crazy Pete's Blotter, at www.thecrazypetesblotter.blogspot.com. Like a good little writer, she lives in a cottage in the woods.
KEVIN WU is a 27-year-old writer who lives in Carmichael, California. He finished his collection of stories, The Monkey Orchestra and Stories, and now live in tranquility planning his first novel. Wu is originally from Guangzhou, China, and spent the first nine years of his life speaking Chinese and doing Chinese things. Chinese schools and Chinese words, Chinese friends and relatives. In 2006, Wu completed his MFA at Brown University in Fiction and since then has been living a minimal existence, becoming vegetarian and drinking only a bit of water. He has been doing very little and thinking of nothing, perhaps in correlation with what monks do. Wu thought this way, he would understand something different about the US and the general world.
POETRY
DINA OMAR is a Palestinian-American woman attending UC Berkeley, majoring in Middle Eastern Studies and Anthropology. She's an up and coming poet having published poems in The Pacific Review Literary Journal, the Berkeley Poetry Review and the International Global Report. She speaks on various issues from the Palestinian right to self-determination to the growing dichotomy between the Arab and American worlds. For the past two years Dina has both been a student and a teacher in June Jordan's Poetry for the People Program. Poetry, photography, debating, filming documentaries and art in general have become Dina's platform to help educate people about women's issues, Muslims, Arabs, Iraq and most of all, the Palestinian plight. Currently Dina is submitting her first book to be reviewed for publication titled Sabbar.
MICHELLE PEŃALOZA grew up in Nashville, Tennessee and stuck around to earn her BA in English Literature and Secondary Education from Vanderbilt University. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where she also works as an undergraduate professor of poetry and English.
JASON KOO has published his poetry in The Yale Review, North American Review, Verse, Another Chicago Magazine, Bellingham Review, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, on Verse Daily, and elsewhere. His reviews and interviews have appeared in Gulf Coast, Center and The Missouri Review, where he served as Poetry Editor. Koo currently serves as Poetry Editor for the new literary journal, Low Rent. He is a visiting assistant professor of English at Davidson College.
ROHAN MULGAONKAR holds an MA in English from Stanford University and a BA magna cum laude from Boston College. He is currently teaching English as a Fulbright Scholar in the remote, travel-restricted area of Tembagapura, West Papua, Indonesia.
ESSAY
HAUQUAN CHAU has recently returned to Canada after ten years of living in Japan. His other published work can be found at Eclectica, Verbsap, Flashquake, Glimpse Abroad and ThingsAsian. One of his articles, “Teaching the F-Word” was recently published in The Best of Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2. He is currently working on a memoir about his experiences in Japan.
GRACE TALUSAN earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of California, Irvine. She has published essays and short stories in Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Tufts Magazine, Colorlines Magazine, The Del Sol Review and other literary journals and anthologies, including Going Home to A Landscape: Writings by Filipinos. Talusan was awarded a Massachusetts State Artist Grant in Fiction Writing. Currently, she teaches writing at Grub Street, Inc. and Tufts University.
LEWIS LEONG is an alumnus of the School of the Arts in San Francisco and is currently working toward a BA in Literary Journalism at UC Irvine and possibly a minor in computer science. He hopes to become a technology journalist after his studies and live in San Francisco, the city in which he grew up and handed over his heart to. He is a self-professed geek who spends most of the day permanently tethered to the Internet and loves running three operating systems simultaneously.
LITERARY REVIEW
SPENCER DEW is the author of Songs of Insurgency (Vagabond Press, 2008), a collection of short stories. A PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, Dew is a regular reviewer for Rain Taxi Review of Books and a fiction editor for Chicago Review. Visit his author website at www.spencerdew.com.
COVER DESIGN ARTIST
JEANETTE LEAGH has an affinity for the obscure, awkward and kind of naughty, and hopes her design work reflects as much. She also has a weakness for kebabs and lying about.
