Kristin Berger lives in Portland, OR with her family, and writes poetry, essays and fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Journal, The Comstock Review, Verseweavers, VoiceCatcher, and online at thepedestalmagazine.com, hipmama.com, momwriterslitmag.com and hotmetalpress.com.

R.T. Castleberry is an assistant editor at Lily Literary Review and the former co-editor/co-publisher of the poetry monthly, Curbside Review. Castleberry’s work has appeared in numerous journals including Conte, Concho River Review, Another Chicago Review, Poet Lore, Common Ground Review, Pacific Review, Borderlands and Texas Review.

Chad Faries has published poems, essays, photographs, interviews, and creative non-fiction in Exquisite Corpse, Mudfish, New American Writing, Barrow Street, The Cream City Review, Afterimage, Post Road, and others. His book, The Border Will Be Soon: Meditations from the Other Side was a winner of Emergency Press’s open genre book competition. It chronicles his visits to Yugoslavia between 1995-2000, and will be published in May 2006. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and was a Fulbright Fellow in Budapest. His memoir, Some Houses, is seeking a publisher. When not traveling he is a carpenter and professor. He recently purchased an old Victorian home and now is planning his next Triumph motorcycle in order to solidify his artificial existence as a renaissance man.

When not writing, M. Frost works as a veterinarian in Pennsylvania. Finishing Line Press just published her first chapbook, Cow Poetry and Other Notes From the Field. Her work appears in numerous journals, including Nimrod, Potomac Review, Mannequin Envy, flashquake, Wicked Alice, and Pemmican. Learn more about her poetry at www.mfrostwords.com.

Ruth Goring is co-director of a small organization called Chicagoans for a Peaceful Colombia (www.chicagoans.net), but makes her living as a book editor at University of Chicago Press. Goring has published poems in Mars Hill Review, White Pelican Review, Dos Passos Review, Target Earth, Prairie Light Review, and a few other journals; her first book of poetry, Yellow Doors, came out in 2004.

Janet E. Irvin is chairman of the International Language Department at Springboro High School in Ohio, where she teaches Spanish and AP English. Her fiction has appeared in Flights, the Oyez Review, OASIS Journal 2004 and 2005, MudRock: Tales and Stories, Void, and in the Plymouth Writers’ 2005 anthology Acts of Emancipation. She has been awarded a fiction fellowship by the Midwest Writers Workshop and received the Leo Love Merit Scholarship from the Taos Writers’ Conference. In addition to her fiction writing, Irvin authors a regular column for the Ohio Foreign Language Association Quarterly The Cardinal. She is currently working on a novel.

Sandra Lambert lives in Gainesville, Florida – a place whose rivers and prairies inform her writing. She has been published in the journals Breath and Shadow and Sinister Wisdom, and her work is featured in the video project At the Corner of Me and Myself: Voices of Multiple Social Identities. "A Spangly Silver Leotard" is an excerpt from her unpublished novel, The Adventures of Ivy.

Michael Constantine McConnell graduated from the University of North Texas with a Master’s in English with concentrations in Poetics and Scottish Literature. After years of moving furniture, farming swamp plants, and serving coffee, he currently works in the Graduate School at Texas Woman’s University as a thesis/dissertation reader. Michael’s most recent poems and palindromes are forthcoming in Style, Freshwater, and The Tar Wolf Review. “Portal,” an autobiographical essay about overcoming Guillam-Barre Syndrome, will appear in the forthcoming Helen Keller Foundation disability anthology. A devout student of the 20-Button Anglo Concertina, Michael serves as co-editor for Farrago’s Wainscot and The Porch, out of Denton, Texas.

Laura McCullough graduated with a BA from The Richard Stockton College of NJ and holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Goddard College. She has been a New Jersey State Arts Council Fellow, won a Geraldine R. Dodge Scholarship to attend the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and was the 2005 Prairie Schooner Merit Scholar in Poetry at the Nebraska Summer Writers Workshop. She has published poems widely in literary magazines and journals such as Nimrod, Potion, Hotel Amerika, Gulf Coast, Nightsun, Iron Horse Quarterly, Boulevard, Amarillo Bay, The God Particle, Poetry East, Confluence, Exquisite Corpse, The Potomac, Stirring, Word Riot, Tarpaulin Sky, and others. Her first collection of poems, The Dancing Bear, was published in February, 2006. She is a professor of writing at Brookdale Community College in NJ where she chairs the Visiting Writers Series.

Brandy McKenzie is a poet living in the Portland area, where she teaches college writing and literature. Her work has been published in a number of magazines, including Literal Latte, The Connecticut Review, Cottonwood, and The Comstock Review, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Chloé Yelena Miller was recently awarded an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Miller has poems published or forthcoming in Alimentum Journal, Lumina, Privatephotoreview.com, South Mountain Poets Chapbook, Spiralbridge.org and Threshold, Passages from Prague. Her manuscript, Permission to Stay, was a finalist for the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. She lives in NJ and teaches writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. For more information visit www.ChloeYelenaMiller.com.

Jessica Murakami is currently working on her MFA in poetry at the University of Oregon and her doctorate in clinical psychology. While an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, she was published in several on-campus literary journals. This is her first publication since then. “Harriet & Isamu” is a poem in celebration of her grandparents, one of whom just recently passed away. She would like to dedicate this poem to her grandmother, a remarkably kind woman who had a lot of spunk, as well as a wonderful ability to love people completely and with ease.

Yveta Shanfeldová is a journalist, translator, film writer and poet, working periodically in the United States and the Czech Republic. In the summer 2006, her first collection of poems, Night Jugular Shaft, was issued by the prestigious publishing house Host in the Czech Republic.

 

Conte is:

Adam Tavel, Editor

Robert Lieberman, Editor

Andy Hefner, Producer

Noah Deboy, Producer

 

issue design by Andy Hefner

 

Volume 2, Issue 4

"Between Seasons"

©2006 the Conte Online staff

 

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

All original works are Copyrighted (©2006) by their respective authors. Authors retain all rights and privileges associated with their work as delineated in our blanket copyright policy, and reprinting, copying, or reproducing in any fashion any of the works contained in this issue without the creator's express consent is strictly prohibited. For information on contacting any of the authors featured in this issue, please email poetry@conteonline.net or prose@conteonline.net.

 

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