Liza Wolff-Francis is a poet and writer with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She was co-director for the 2014 Austin International Poetry Festival and a member of the 2008 Albuquerque Poetry Slam Team. She has an ekphrastic poem posted in Austin’s Blanton Art Museum by El Anatsui’s sculpture “Seepage” and her work has most recently appeared in Edge, Twenty, unseenfiction.com, Border Senses, and on various blogs. As a social worker, she has worked with Spanish speaking immigrant populations for twenty years. She wrote the play “Border Rising” from interviews with undocumented Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles. She currently lives in Albuquerque, NM.

Beau Williams is a fairly optimistic poet based out of Portland Maine. He co-runs a weekly poetry class at Sweetser Academy and facilitates workshops at high schools and colleges around the New England area. His work has been published in numerous poetry websites and journals.

Beau has performed internationally and nationally both as a solo artist and with the performance poetry collectives Uncomfortable Laughter and GUYSLIKEYOU. He was the Grand Slam Champion at Port Veritas in 2014 and was the Artist in Residence at Burren College in Ballyvaughan, Ireland in January of 2017. Beau’s book, Rumham, is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

 

Bob Warren is without credentials of any kind. He never graduated from anything, never received a diploma or certificate of completion from any sort of institution of either higher or lower learning.

At the age of thirteen, he stole all of his school records and spent that school year teaching himself at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He quit school at fifteen. At seventeen, he took part in his first civil rights march. At twenty-one, he was elected Unit Steward for the Operating Engineers.

Two decades later in Houston, he went to work at a poverty church. His jobs were to lead morning prayers and to beg food for 125 to 150 families a week. He was for nine years the Associate Director for the Albuquerque Storehouse. Subsequent to that, he was Resource Director for Habitat for Humanity in Valencia County.

He is married to Barbara Warren who came to the marriage with five kids who have somehow become 19 grandkids and 18 great-grandkids.

Pick up Litanies Not Adopted, Warren’s first collection of poetry, from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Danielle Smith is the young author of a chapbook of poetry entitled Gnarly. She is in desperate need of an updated biography.

Maria D. Sanchez has a Doctorate of Education, Ed,D. from Argosy University in Sarasota, Florida and a Masters in Counseling, M.A. from Webster University in Albuquerque, N.M. Sanchez also holds a Double Major in Business and Human Services, B.S.O.E. from Wayland Baptist University in Lubbock, Texas.

Dr. Sanchez has been in the Mental Health Counseling field for the past twenty years. She is also currently working as Director/Administrator of the

Toledo Y Carrasco Academia Hebreica. She has given presentations in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and El Paso on, “The Residual Trauma of the Inquisition.” Ms. Sanchez is working with the Jewish Federation helping individuals with Crypto or Converso Jewish background to obtain their dual citizenship to Spain.

At Family Tree DNA Project, she has assisted Adam Brown in obtaining DNA swabs from the Crypto and Converso Jewish population.

Dr. Sanchez is currently teaching classes on Crypto, Converso and Jewish culture, language (Ladino), Sephardi Jewish history, Torah studies, and Hebrew language. Her current works in Publication: El Sudario de Carrasco, Toledo y Maes;

Intersex,    Truth,    and    Spirituality;    El    Espejo, Memorias y Fotos de mi Mama Loggie Carrasco; Mi Nombre, La Historia de mi familia des de el ano 1350.

Currently, Dr. Sanchez lives in New Mexico with her family and four legged family members. She is in the process of developing seminars and conferences on Intersex topics.

Aja Oishi lives in northern New Mexico. Her writing draws from ecology, anthropology, and the years she spent in Spain, Japan, and New Zealand. She revels in the uncaged world and makes a living (and a life) by fighting for prisoners as an appellate public defender. Rock Paper Scissors is her first collection of poetry.