From Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal, Issue Twenty-six Summer 2012

Ted Deppe
Ted was born in Minnesota, and grew up in Indiana. He worked for many years as a coronary-care and psychiatric nurse and has taught creative writing in high schools, universities, and graduate programs in the United States, England, and Ireland. His previous books include Children of the Air and The Wanderer King, and Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems. He currently teaches in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program and directs Stonecoast in Ireland, where he now lives with his wife, poet Annie Deppe.

Nominated Poem NARROW ROAD

Vincent Spina
Vincent is living at -7 degrees in northern PA approximately 90 miles in every direction to a place to go. Deer in his back yard were okay for the first 15 yrs, but one does tend to get bored. He has one book of poetry published, Outer Borough. Sometimes he gets published in a mag.

Nominated Poem TEXT MESSAGES

From Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal, Issue Twenty-seven Winter 2011

Andrea D.E. Levin
Andrea is a recent graduate of the University of Southern Maine, Stonecoast MFA program. She teaches English and Humanities at a public high school in New Hampshire. She likes inspiring teenagers to fight for the honor of their favorite philosophers. In her spare time, when she is not writing poetry or forming unnatural attachments to morally ambiguous television characters, she studies ballet and belly dancing.

Nominated Poem The Geography of a Well

From Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal, Issue Twenty-eight Spring 2012

Michaela A. Gabriel
Michaela lives in Vienna, Austria, where she teaches English to unemployed adults. She tries to make additional money by translating texts as exciting as birdfeed catalogues, in order to be able to bribe the muses into staying with her. Trysts with said muses have resulted in poems that have found homes in a wide variety of international magazines and anthologies as well as two and a half chapbooks. She is currently trying to finally finish her full-length manuscript, Elemental, a collection of poems for every element on the periodic table

Nominated Poem who’s keeping time with the timekeeper’s daughter
                                      when the timekeeper’s out keeping time?

Tom Nowak
Tom lives and writes in Chicago where he is an MFA candidate at Columbia College. He received his BA with focuses in English and German from Augustana College. It was there he learned how to ballroom dance and shoot a bow. During his time in Chicago he hopes to learn how to breakdance and swing a sword properly.

Nominated Poem MR. FRUIT

Courtney Elizabeth Hitson
Courtney is finishing her MFA at Columbia College Chicago. She enjoys photography, anatomical illustrating, freestyle unicycling, cognitive rhetoric, and rainbow chip frosting. She possesses dual undergraduate degrees in psychology and English. Her poems have appeared in The Broken Plate, Genesis, Laundromat, The Public Haiku, Ball Bearings, and are forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review. She has a black cat named Mr. Hussie Pants.

Nominated Poem Collecting Mothers