Contributer Biographies

Kat Templeton, (formerly Kristine Kugler,) is a resident artist of Vancouver, Washington who has been practicing her unique and evocative painting style for over 15 years. She is a 2000 alumni graduate of the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics. Kat is active in the Pacific Northwest art scene showing new and large scale art monthly at the prestigious Gallery Zero located in Portland, Oregon.

Ran Bleich  was born in Tel-Aviv, Israel in 1982. After serving a three-year mandatory military service in the Palestinian Territories between 2000-2003, he moved to France where and started writing as well as studying arts in Paris, at the Sorbonne, l'Alliançe Française and Nanterre University where he graduated with a BA in film, theater and literature and comparative literature. He is preparing to start an MA in translation and interpreting (English \ Hebrew \ French \ Italian) in Westminster University, London.

Daniel W. Davis is a graduate student born and raised in Central Illinois. His work has appeared in various online and print journals.
You can follow his work and musings at www.dumpsterchickenmusic.blogspot.com.

Carol Deminski lives in Jersey City, New Jersey but hopes to return to visit Maine. This is the first short story she has had published, and it was inspired by her visit to Mount Desert Island.

Janet M. Grivois is a Northern Maine native; she enjoys reading, writing, riding ATV and spending as much time as possible with her wife and inspiration, Julia.  Janet is a member of the Coyote Writing Circle and is currently working on several novels and short stories.  She is attending Northern Maine Community College and works at High View Rehab and Living Center as a C.N.A.

Hunter Stern is a technical writer living in San Francisco. His focus is short fiction and poetry. Prior to writing, he spent ten years as a software engineer. He has been published in the 13th Warrior Review, Unlikely Stories 2.0, and SmokeBox.com.

Denton Crocker is a 91 year-old Emeritus Professor of Biology at Skidmore College. Over the past several years he has written over 50 poems. Of his first submission (three poems to Blueline in 2009), one was published in volume 31 (Spring 2010). His poem in this edition of The Aroostook Review constitutes his second publication.

Mark DeCarteret's work has appeared in the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press), Brevity & Echo: Short Short Stories by Emerson College Alums (Rose Metal Press), New Pony: Collaborations & Responses (Horse Less Press), Places of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry (Story Line Press), (Black Sparrow Press) and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader, Under the Legislature of Stars—62 New Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press) which he also co-edited. This past April he was selected as the seventh Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Angel Dionne is currently a junior at UMFK majoring in English. She has been writing poetry as well as short fiction since the age of ten and hopes to one day become an accomplished novelist.  She also published a poem in this issue of The Aroostook Review.

John Grey is an Australian born poet and US resident since late seventies. He works as financial systems analyst. and recently published in Connecticut Review, Kestrel and Writer’s Bloc with work upcoming in Pennsylvania English, Alimentum and the Great American Poetry Show.

Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. His story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking, was one of five finalists for the 2009 Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize. In 2010 he has been a finalist in fiction at Black Warrior Review and Mississippi Review and in poetry at Cloudbank and Mississippi Review. The Mississippi Review finalist works appear in the Spring issue of that magazine and the Cloudbank finalist appears in the Spring issue of that magazine as well.

Peycho Kanev’s work has been published in Welter, Poetry Quarterly, The Catalonian Review, The Arava Review, The Mayo Review, Chiron Review, Tonopah Review, Mad Swirl, In Posse Review, Southern Ocean Review, The Houston Literary Review and many others. He is nominated for Pushcart Award and lives in Chicago. His collaborative collection "r", containing poetry by him and Felino Soriano, as well as photography from Duane Locke and Edward Wells II is available at Amazon.com. His new poetry collection “Bone Silence” will be published this fall by Desperanto.

Mercedes Lawry was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA and has lived in Seattle since 1978. She has been publishing poetry for over 30 years in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, Folio, Seattle Review and others. She has also published fiction and stories and poems for children.

Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published two novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002) and We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), a full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), and a book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009). He also has two novels released simultaneously, March 31, 2010: The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (Bronx River Press) and Following Richard Brautigan (Livingston Press). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominat! ed for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written, “It’s My Party.” With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

David Pendery, PhD, is a teacher and editor in Taipei, Taiwan, where he has lived for ten years. His interests include history, literature, languages, sports and games, rock and jazz music, and cats. He is married to a Taiwanese woman and they have no children.

Derek Richards:  After failing miserably as a rock star, Derek Richards began submitting his poetry last August. So far his work has appeared in over 100 publications and he has made $10. Which he spent on cigarettes. His biggests fans are his puppy, cat and two ferrets.
Happily engaged, he resides in Glouceser, MA., cleaning windows for a living.

G. David Schwartz is the former president of Seedhouse, the online interfaith committee. Schwartz is the author of A Jewish Appraisal of Dialogue. Currently a volunteer at Drake Hospital in Cincinnati, Schwartz continues to write. His new book, Midrash and Working Out Of The Book is now in stores or can be ordered.