february 2010 contributor notes

A. Philip Armbrister

A. Philip Armbrister is an Assistant Professor at The College of The Bahamas, and a Fulbright Scholar with research interests in sustainable development and Haitian Creole studies. For him, poetry is comforting, revealing and therapeutic. He uses it to express his creativity as it is revealed to him through people, objects, events, memory and imagination.

Anku Sa Ra

Born Cleveland W. Eneas III, March 9, 1977, and now known as , this old soul has journeyed through life as an artist in many respects and uses it, art, to share with the world, all that has been shared with him.

Randall Baker

Randall Baker lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and daughter. When not earning a living, he likes to wrestle with words. Occasionally, he is able to subdue them into forming a song, poem or story.

Marion Bethel

Bahamian Marion Bethel read law at Cambridge, and is the recipient of numerous awards for writing, including a James Michener Fellowship and the Casa de las Americas Prize. In 2009, Guanahani, My Love (House of Nehesi) and Bougainvillea Ringplay (Peepal Tree Press) appeared. She is now working on a third manuscript of poetry and a novel.

Nicolette Bethel

Nicolette Bethel is a Bahamian playwright, poet, anthropologist and blogger and the founding editor of tongues of the ocean .

C.S. Bhagya

C.S. Bhagya lives in Bangalore, India. She is an undergraduate of psychology, English literature, and journalism. Her work has appeared before in the online literary journal Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k).

Christian Campbell

is a poet, scholar and culture worker of Bahamian and Trinidadian heritage.  He studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received the PhD at Duke.  His debut collection, Running the Dusk (Peepal Tree Press), is forthcoming in 2010.  He is a professor at the University of Toronto.

Nancy Devine

Nancy Devine teaches high school English in Grand Forks, North Dakota where she lives. She co-directs the Red River Valley Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project. Her poetry, short fiction and essays have appeared in online and print journals.

Summer Edward

Born and raised in Valsayn, Trinidad, Summer Edward currently lives in Philadelphia. She is a Master’s student in the Reading, Writing, Literacy programme at the University of Pennsylvania. She blogs at http://www.well-lovedtales.blogspot.com. Her poetry and art have appeared or are forthcoming in Philadelphia Stories and St. Somewhere.

Sonia Farmer

is a Bahamian who completed her BFA in Creative Writing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, in May 2009. She is the author of two limited edition chapbooks, What Becomes Us and Grow. Her work has appeared in Ubiquitous Literary and Art Magazine, Poui X, and tongues of the ocean. She is currently Prose Editor for tongues of the ocean.

Brent A. Fisk

Brent A. Fisk’s poetry has appeared in Rattle, Fugue, Southern Poetry Review and many other literary journals.

Patricia Glinton-Meicholas

(featured writer)

Patricia Glinton-Meicholas is a Bahamian satirist, poet and novelist who has written numerous papers, articles and monographs on Bahamian history, art and culture as well as ten books, including coauthoring Bahamian Art 1492 to 1992, the first comprehensive work on the subject, two volumes of poetry, and several works of satire. She contributed entries to the Bahamas section of the Macmillan 37 volume Dictionary of Art, and her story, “The Gaulin Wife” is included in the Penguin anthology Under the Storyteller’s Spell.

Paul Hadden

Paul Hadden is a 24 year old Trinidadian currently working in Paris as an assistant English teacher. He keeps a blog of his experiences there which he also uses as a platform to showcase some of his short stories and poems.

Kei Miller

is from Jamaica but presently teaches in a cold country. His next collection of poetry, A Light Song of Light, is published by Carcanet this July. A new novel, the Last Warner Woman, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, also in July.)

Janice Pariat

Janice Pariat is ethnically all mixed up: some days Portugal, others Kent, mostly Shillong, India. She studied English Literature at St Stephen’s College, Delhi University and then Communications at Westminster, London, where she spent more time at the Embankment than in class.

Geoffrey Philp

Geoffrey Philp is the author of the children’s book, Grandpa Sydney’s Anancy Stories, and he maintains a blog at http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com. His short story collection Who’s Your Daddy?: And Other Stories was published by Peepal Tree Press in May 2009.

Jody Rathgeb

Jody Rathgeb grew up in Western Pennsylvania and is a graduate of St. Francis College and John Carroll University. From 2003-2008 she lived on North Caicos in the Turks and Caicos Islands. She currently lives in Richmond, Va., but continues to visit the islands and draw inspiration from them.

Althea Romeo-Mark

Born in Antigua, Althea Romeo-Mark is an educator who grew up in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. She is a world citizen, having lived and taught in the USA, Liberia, England, and in Switzerland since 1991. She was awarded the Marguerite Cobb McKay Prize by The Caribbean Writer in 2009.

Tregenza A. Roach

Tregenza A. Roach teaches at University of the Virgin Islands. His work has been published in The Caribbean Writer, where it earned the Marguerite Cobb McKay prize, and Calabash. He published his own collection, The Blessing of Rain and Other Poems, and was awarded the Margaret Walker Prize for fiction (Detroit Writers Guild).

Laura Sobbot Ross

Laura Sobbott Ross has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Florida Review, Calyx, Natural Bridge, Tar River Poetry, Slow Trains, and The Caribbean Writer, among many others. She was named a finalist in the Creekwalker Poetry Prize.

Elizabeth Schultz

Immersed in academic writing until her retirement from the English Department at the University of Kansas in 2001, Elizabeth Schultz subsequently found that sailing and writing poems provided new ways of discovering. She’s published two collections of poetry, a memoir, a collection of nature essays, and a collection of short stories.

Nic Sebastian

has two sons and travels widely. Her work has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lily, Autumn Sky Poetry, Mannequin Envy, Poems Niederngasse, Avatar Review, Anti– and tongues of the ocean. Nic blogs at Very Like A Whale.

N. A’Yara Stein

N. A’Yara Stein, born in Memphis in 1971, is a Romani-American poet and writer living on a chicory farm. She’s published in America, The New Orleans Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The Oxford American, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, and others. Ms. Stein lives near Chicago with her husband and sons.

Judy Swann

Judy Swann has been published in Lilliput, Literary Bohemian, Apparatus, Thema, and Tilt Poetry Magazine. Her poem “We Burned Incense” won first place in the InterBoard Poetry Competition in September, 2009. She lives in Ithaca, NY; but her childhood next door neighbor runs a dive shop in Grand Turk, and she is saving to go there.

Ellen M. Taylor

Ellen M. Taylor’s most recent poetry collection is titled Floating (Moon Pie Press). She has published in literary journals across the United States. An associate professor of English at the University of Maine, her interests include poetry of witness and marginalized voices. She lives in Appleton, Maine with her husband.

Martin Willitts

Jr’s recent poems appeared in Blue Fifth, Parting Gifts, Bent Pin, Nantuck River Review, The Centrifugal Eye, Quiddity, and others. His tenth chapbook is The Garden of French Horns (Pudding House Publications, 2008) and his second full-length collection is The Hummingbird (March Street Press, 2009). He co-edits www.hotmetalpress.net.

Changming Yuan

Changming Yuan grew up in rural China, and currently teaches writing in Vancouver. Yuan’s poems appear in Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry (2009), Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse, London Magazine and nearly 200 other literary publications worldwide; his first collection Chansons of a Chinaman was recently released by Leaf Garden Press.