Janet Bowdan teaches English at Western New England University. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Rewilding Anthology, River Heron Review and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Poetry Daily and Best American Poetry 2000. She likes poems that sneak intelligence into the imagery. She likes poems that make her see things in a new light. She likes poems. She likes writing in general. She lives in Northampton with her husband, their son, an elderly cat and a book-nibbling chinchilla.

Exhibitions include the Art-in-Embassies Program in D.C. sending my paintings to Cape Verde, Guatemala, Malta, and Caracus; others include the Divinity Center at Yale University, the Bowery Gallery in NYC, Hillyer Gallery at Smith College, the Contemporary Arts Museum at University of Massachusetts; the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, “The Painting Center” (Chelsea), NYC, The Provincetown Art Museum, The Julian Scott Memorial Gallery of Johnson State College, Vermont. Teaching positions have included RI School of Design, U of Minnesota, Brown University, Dartmouth College and U of Honduras. Grants include the Pollock-Krasner Award three times, a Kittredge Fund Grant from Harvard University, a George Sugarman Foundation Grant Award, two Artists’ Fellowships, NYC, and The Haven Foundation Award, Maine. I taught painting through the American University (D.C.) in Umbria, Italy; also, @ The New York Studio School, and at The Vermont Studio Center 1991-present; I was “cultural ambassador” through the International Residency Program from the Augusta Savage Gallery at U.Mass, to work with artists in South Africa. www.lornaritz.com

Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work forthcoming or published in Lily Poetry Review, Pirene's Fountain, The Shore, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sky Island Journal, and South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon, with the anthology Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry and her own group Ekphrastic Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College. She has featured in the Lily Poetry Review Salon and was also nominated for Best of the Net.