Birkensnake 6

James Tadd Adcox lives in Chicago. His first book, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge, a collection of fictions, is available from Tiny Hardcore Press.

Tantra Bensko teaches fiction writing through UCLA Ex. Writing Program and her own academy online. She has two books out, with two more slated — from Dog Horn and Make-Do, four chapbooks, including from ISMs Press, and two hundred stories and poems in journals and anthologies, such as Red Fez, Birkensnake, and Surreal South. She publishes people’s chapbooks through LucidPlay Publishing, maintains a resource site, Experimental Writing, published Exclusive Magazine, and runs the FlameFlower Experimental Fiction contest. She lives in Berkeley.

Lena Bertone’s writing has appeared in Caketrain, Harpur Palate, Redivider, PANK, Wigleaf, NANO Fiction, Matchbook, and other magazines. She has a chapbook coming from Origami Zoo Press in 2014, and a novel coming from Aqueous Books in 2015. 

Alicia Cole, an educator and writer, lives in Lawrenceville, GA, with a photographer, a cat, and two schools of fish. Her short fiction may be found in Lodestar Quarterly and Demeter’s Spicebox; her poetry may be found in Goblin Fruit and Mythic Delirium and is forthcoming in Dark Mountain.

Armel Dagorn is 28, French, and has been living in Ireland for the past seven years. His writing has been published in magazines such as Paper Darts, decomP, and Popshot.

Jim Eigo has written on theater, dance, art, literature, sex, and the design of clinical trials. He is an architect of two reforms of AIDS drug regulation, expedited approval and expanded access, that have helped bring many treatments to many people, work profiled in the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague. His short fiction has appeared in such volumes as Best American Gay Fiction #3, in such print journals as The Chicago Review and in such web publications as cleavermagazine.com. 

Jennifer Smith Gray melded her common maiden name and her common married name to come up with this fascinating, one-of-a-kind new name. Likewise, the ordinary experiences of her past — childhood, university, young adulthood — have come together nicely with new ordinary experiences as a wife, mother, and less-young adult, to kick off some pretty extraordinary stories (if she does say so say herself). Born and raised in Northern Ontario, Jennifer transplanted herself to the big city 17 years ago and is inspired by the writing development opportunities in and around Toronto.

Leeyanne Moore lives in Charlottesville, VA, and has a penchant for all things perversely southern and fabulist.

Dr. Hippu Salk Kristle Nathan is an engineer–turned development researcher from India. He does research and activism on the frontiers of disarmament, energy, and human development. He writes short fiction in both Odia and English. His micro-fiction struggle appeared in twenty20 journal. His flash fiction ‘The Thief’ received an honorary mention in ‘100 Words or Fewer Writing Contest — Five.’ Also, his short story ‘A Door without a Handle’ is published in Scribble — the literary supplement. He has scripted plays on issues of casteism, dowry, and child labor. He is currently working on his first collection of Odia short stories.

Eliza Smith was born in Los Angeles, but lives in Oakland, which suits her better. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, Necessary Fiction, Birkensnake, and Hobart. She is an editor for Story Tapes. 

Wyatt Sparks is living the good life in Chicago. His work has been featured in PANK, Redlightbulbs, Untoward, and some other great lit mags.

J. J. Steinfeld is a Canadian fiction writer, poet, and playwright who lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published fourteen books, including Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized? (Stories, Gaspereau Press), Would You Hide Me? (Stories, Gaspereau Press), An Affection for Precipices (Poetry, Serengeti Press), Misshapenness (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions), and A Glass Shard and Memory (Stories, Recliner Books). His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals internationally, and over forty of his one-act plays and a handful of full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States.

Gene Tanta was born in Timisoara, Romania, and lived there until 1984, when his family immigrated to the United States. Since completing his MFA and Ph.D., Tanta has written two poetry books, begun editing two anthologies, and published poems and translations in journals such as: Ploughshares, EPOCH, Columbia Poetry Review, Circumference Magazine, and The Laurel Review. The five prose poems included in Birkensnake are from his third collection called What Is to Be Said. His research inspects the heavily policed border between ethics and aesthetics in the work of post-communist Romanian and first-generation American poets. Currently, he is living in Bucharest as a Fulbright Scholar.

Toby Vaughan is the co-editor of a small online short story magazine, called The Red Line. He has lived and worked in Beijing, Seoul, Boston, Zurich, and Rio de Janeiro, but now lives in London, England. While writing this story he listened to “Gone, Play On” by Russian Red.

Sylvain Verstricht has a master’s degree in film studies from Concordia University, though he has mostly been writing about dance for the past seven years. Other short stories from his Utopia series can be found in Headlight Anthology 16 and Cactus Heart 3.5. He lives in Montreal.

Editors

If he had any choice in the matter, Miodrag Kojadinović would have not chosen Serbia, Canada, and Mainland China as the locations to spend the longest time in, but that’s what has happened. He comes from an extended family of visual artists and musicians, but chooses to express himself primarily through writing (though he has also appeared in several documentaries and a TV show and his photos were exhibited in a few countries). His writing has been published in English, Serbian, Dutch, Russian, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Portuguese, Slovene, Mandarin Chinese, Swedish, Italian, and Hungarian (and forthcoming in Polish) in 22 countries.

Megan Milks is the author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, forthcoming from Emergency Press, and most recently the chapbook Twins (Birds of Lace, 2012). Her fiction has been anthologized in three volumes of experimental writing as well as many journals, and her scholarship has been published in Feminist Studies, electronic book review, and the volume Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, which she co-edited, forthcoming from Routledge. She teaches creative and new media writing and journalism at Illinois College.