Craig Arnold

“Energetic, cool, and stylish. He should have been a gang-leader.” With these words, the late poet Thom Gunn summed up one of the country's most exciting and most celebrated young poets, Craig Arnold.Craig’s debut collection, Shells, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the nation’s most prestigious first book award. His writing has appeared in three volumes of Best American Poetry as well as in Poetry, Yale Review and the Paris Review. Among his numerous honors and awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and the Rome Prize. A veteran of the poetry slam scene, his live performances are legendary or, as the Portland Mercury put it: “Best. Poetry reading. Ever.” Craig’s second book, Made Flesh, is a mythological rhapsody on the themes of love, death and “the joy of self-forgetting.” Craig recently returned to the States from Bogotá, Colombia, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. At home, he is Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. This spring and summer he goes to Japan on a US/Japan Creative Artists Residency, to continue work on a book about solitude, society, pilgrimage and volcanoes.

James Reese

An Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Great Plains Writers’ Tour at Mount Marty College in Yankton, South Dakota, James Reese is also Editor-in-Chief of Paddlefish. Reese's poetry and prose have been widely published, most recently in New York Quarterly, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Paterson Literary Review, South Dakota Review, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. His most recent collection of poetry is These Trespasses (Backwaters Press, 2005, 2006) which includes Pushcart Prize nominated poems. Reese is also the 2008, 2009 National Endowment for the Art’s Writer-in-Residence at the Yankton Federal Prison Camp.

Of These Trespasses, Susan Naramore Maher, in Western American Literature, says: “Reese inspects surprising, clarifying moments of poignancy and honesty, trespasses into connection and forgiveness....Hardpan and salt-licked country can still be fertile ground for a talented poet. Like Mustang Dick’s songs, Reese’s poems ‘just taste like more.’ One can forgive these trespasses that bring such luminescent news of life and love.” Kevin Woster of the Rapid City Journal calls Reese’s book “a jarring collection of real-life poetry that kicks like an old pump-12 gauge” with “a style that’s rugged as washboard gravel.” Nebraska poet Don Welch says, “If you want poems smooth-tongued or surrealistic, don’t look here.”

Carolyn Helmberger

Carolyn is a native of Omaha, Nebraska. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Nebraska and has published poetry in Plainsongs, Cooweescoowee, The Connecticut River Review and other journals.  She is an avid Manchester United football fan and enjoys spending time with her husband, Lee, and their five pets.

Liz Kay

Liz Kay lives in Omaha with her husband and three children.  She is completing her MFA in creative writing from the University of Nebraska, where she has received both the Helen W. Kenefick Prize  in Poetry, and the Wendy Fort Memorial Prize.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Margie, The Chicago Quarterly Review, The New York Quarterly, and other journals.