SHAMPOO Issue 41 Contributors

people told Sara Adams that her hair might freeze off but she moved to Alaska anyway.  for more details about teenage vampire love, please see Fredward Bound.  you can also check out her Oulipost/found poetry blog, here.

Shane Allison enjoys good friends, a good martini, and tattooed burly bearded men.  he recently finished his first novel.

Robert Balunwas at one point, at least, an MFA candidate at City College.  he has done his best to travel and become a well-rounded person and lives in Port Chester, New York, a town which has far too many downtown hair salons.  he has been a reader for the Earshot Reading Series and the City College Masters Series, and his work has previously appeared in the journal O Sweet Flowery Roses. this editor is thrilled that, at least at one point, appearing in SHAMPOO was considered to be a milestone by this contributor..

Stephanie Barber lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she makes videos & writes and enjoys.  she does.  she is able to access joy.  more can be learned about her work here.

Christopher Barnes’ first collection, Lovebites, is published by Chanticleer.  each year he reads at Poetry Scotland’s Callender Poetry Weekend.  he also writes art criticism which has been published in Peel and Combustus magazines.

Lauren Beck is a writer and musician from Baltimore, Maryland who holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts.  she is terrified of cotton balls, but eagerly embraces the challenges of teaching writing at a local community college.  her favorite color is orange, which is also the color of her aura, according to her amateur aura-reading friend.  Lauren’s first book, An Almost Impossible Blue, was self-published in 2012.

Andrew Brenza is a poet and aspiring librarian living in New Jersey with his wife and his tech-savvy son.  in addition to SHAMPOO, his work has appeared in GlitterPony, Sawbuck, Yes, Poetry, and The Scramble, among others.  recent poems can be found in Strange Horizons, and/or, Infinity’s Kitchen, and REM Magazine.  he is very fond of hot vents, cold seeps, and tidal pools.

David Buuck is a writer who lives in Oakland, California.  he is the founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, and co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics.  An Army of Lovers, co-written with Juliana Spahr, is recently out from City Lights, and Site Cite City is just out by Futurepoem.

Chris Carosi is from Pittsburgh.  recent work has appeared in Spring Gun, Switchback and Berkeley Poetry Review.  the minimum average temperature of Uranus is -224°C, making it the coldest planet in the solar system.  he lives in San Francisco.

Katie Cloutte has been writing poetry since she was thirteen when she compared her family to a colony of ants.  she spent four years soaking up some much needed poetry wisdom at the University of Richmond before receiving her MFA from New England College.  closer towards the originally intended date of this publication, she was collecting years teaching abroad in addition to encountering some near-death experiences while thickening her snarky vocabulary.

Sharon Coleman is a fifth generation East Bay denizen who has a penchant for learning languages and their entangled word roots.  her poems and blink fiction are scattered generously across various journals, including a chapbook, Half Circle.  she co-curates the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and co-directs the Berkeley Poetry Festival.

after years of avoiding the draft, Sarah Cook has temporarily settled down in the outskirts of Maine.  for best results, read this in conjunction with her other fine products.

E Crandall has an absolutely stunning bio.

G. Taylor Davis — the word Taylor looks a bit like a boxed in portion of his face: the y is the crooked bridge of his nose.  the a and the o are his eyes.  they have been slightly different since he was socked in the eye by Brad Runyon in seventh grade.  he has been a customer service rep, a travel agent, a student, a hairdresser, a sales rep, a student again and a teacher.  he currently teaches English in Malaysia.  his hobbies are cigar rolling and looking for lost things.

Maung Day is a poet and artist from “now-democratic” Burma—wait, is it now?  his poems have been published in magazines such as Guernica, The Awl, The Wolf, and International Poetry Review.  he is based in Thailand now.

Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes in the Minneapolis school district.  her poetry has recently appeared in The Worcester Review, Broken Pencil, and Slipstream, and she is the recipient of the 2011 Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College.  her most recent published book is Notenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch, while her novel, The Trouble With Clare, was due out from Hydra Publications in 2013.

Tiffany Denman likes to write poems about numbers.  the poems appearing in this edition are about the number “33.”  the number “33” is following you.

Roberta Feins received her MFA in poetry in 2007 from New England College.  her poems have been published in Five AM, Antioch Review, The Cortland Review, and The Gettysburg Review.  her first chapbook, Something Like a River, was published by Moon Path Press in 2013. Roberta edits the e-zine Switched-On Gutenberg and often dreams of living in a stone cottage in the Auvergne region in France.

Carina Finn works as a robot whose primary function is to wear dresses and bake pies.

Nathan Gamache was born, in the usual way, in Brighton, Massachusetts.  he remembers admiring the old VO5 with its funky, Toronto Blue Jays font.

Marco Giovenale has an ugly scar across the top of his head, and no hair to hide it.  the scar is an asemic glyph, whose meaning is unknown (otherwise, it wouldn’t be asemic).  drawings and texts by the writer under the scar may be found here and there on the net and on paper.  at the time of this writing, the constellations foretold that a (post)flarf chapbook would potentially be arising soon, thanks to Ahsahta Press.

Zack Haber is a poet who lives in Oakland.  he curates “The Other Fabulous Reading Series” in Berkeley.  his work has been published in Moria, The West Wind Review, Calmaplombprombombbalm.com, Where Eagles Dare and other places.

Kyle Harvey, winner of the 2013 Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, has recently published poems in The Telluride Watch, Grand Valley Magazine, Fat City Review, Colorado Journeys, Ossuary Whispers, and SP CE.  his first chapbook, Hyacinth, is available from Lithic Press.  he shampoos his beard in Fruita, Colorado, where he owns an art gallery and lives with his wife, two kids, three cats, a dog, and nine chickens (named after some of his favorite poets).

Martian Hiatt is a poemifyer from Melbourne; is in Melbourne, poemifying. tastatur!

Crow Jane is an anonymous international all-girl poetry collective with members in Bath, Brooklyn, Bruges, Lyons and Kyoto.  published in Aufgabe, Kilometre Zero (London/Paris), and Lungfull!, they write and translate all their work together.  their watchword is, “behind every man is a miscarriage in Thurston Moore’s pool.”

JD Jenkins is a poet abiding in San Francisco.  he has been invited to exist across all folds of martime and space.  he has yet to send in his RSVP.

Joshua Johnston is, at the time this is being written, in Caneyville, Kentucky, waving a foam finger with your name on it, Dear Reader.

George Kalamaras learned to love vowels by studying every other letter of his last name.  or, rather, he learned to love one and only one vowel.  he writes from the Midwest, a place where bluetick coonhounds tree all the other vowels not in his name, baying them silly, scared and hiding in the leaves.

Jami Kali is a reincarnated Mayan healer who uses her voice to play with words.

Britta Kallevang: the birds keep looking for her but she’s not to be found. not under the city or the Sound.

Sarah Kobrinsky’s poems and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Bayou, Monkeybicycle, 100 Word Story, Magma Poetry, The Molotov Cocktail, Sparkle + Blink, Berkeley Fiction Review, and others.  in another life, she would have been a homicide detective.  or a ballerina.

rex leonowicz wishes he could change his pronoun to cupcakes.  he’s a trans intersectional feminist poet from NYC who lives in Oakland.  his work’s been featured in Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight, Gertrude Journal, Them: A Trans Literary Journal, and Dude Magazine, among others.

Michael Levell writes and teaches in Colorado.  he was once attacked by a wild dog in Northern India after being invited to the Dalai Lama’s birthday party.

Diana Magallón is a graphic designer; you can see something of her work in this bubble.

R/B Mertz lives with her wife and friends in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  she teaches writing and hardly ever uses shampoo.  you can find out more about her and more poems here.

B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher.  his work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest); Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others.  he plays jazz violin and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Erin M. O’Brien —

Emily O’Neill set up a twisted house of horrors in the New Mexico desert, and the few survivors escaped with only vague, nightmarish memories.  her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Weave, Whiskey Island, Gigantic Sequins, and Muzzle Magazine, among others. You can pick her brain here.

a few months prior to publication of this issue, the editor received an email from a Lola Olinsky with the subject line “wednesday” and a body of text which included nothing but the one mysteriously beautiful line which can now be admired eternally here in this issue.  while the editor may never know whether or not it was intended as such, he concedes that it is desparately eloquent, beautiful, and pure-as-can-be poetry.

Fani Papageorgiou’s book When You Said No, Did You Mean Never? (Shearsman Press, UK, 2013) won the Hong Kong Poetry Prize, judged by Ha Jin.  her second book, We Won’t Talk about Nora, will be published in the US in 2015.  her poems have appeared in more than thirty magazines and literary journals in the US and the UK.

several winters ago, Eddie Paterson planted broccoli, ruby sprouts, garlic, kale, carrots, broad beans, snow peas, lettuce and radishes. subsequently, he mulched as needed.

voices of Jeff Pearson’s big family (6 older sisters, 1 older brother, 21 nieces & nephews) creep around like earwigs whose whispers sound like personal revelations but are more the generative scriptures founded by past Book of Mormon prophets’ genetic memory.  accreted rites and vernacular have become doctrine in his writing from so much Latter-Day Saint exposure in his raising; although, he no longer practices.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.  for more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website.

Peach Power has long, red hair she never brushes and a real bad case of senioritis.  she is the editor of nothing, has won nothing, and has been published nowhere.  on the way back from India, she was worried about the butterfly wings and dried frog she was sneaking through US Customs.

Bret Shepard has won awards for his juggling and unicycling.  his twin brother and he performed together juggling/unicycling as children.  they were not clowns.

Erik Šimšík (b. 1987) lives in Bratislava, Slovak Republic (Central Europe).  this implies that his nationality is Slovak.  moreover he is sociologist and author of the book of visual poetry Monorezeň a Stereozemiaky/Monoschnitzel and Stereopotatoes (Drewo a Srd press).  he loves sex, drugs and smartphones.

Jesse Tangen-Mills is a translator and writer living in Colombia, where he wonders if the planet goes out in Luto or Luta.  he is the author of the chapbook Alienating Space (Publishing Genius).

Diana Turken is a poet and a native Los Angelino.  she is working on her high school teaching credential and how to ride a bike.  you can find her work in La Petite Zine and Slake.  she’s already caught one foul ball this year, and the season’s not over yet.

J. A. Tyler lives in Colorado.  he drives a Geo Metro.

Joe Valverde lives on the banks of the Charles River in a town called Cambridge.  he’s at work on a novel about political radicalism and green things. Camillo Querno is a sixteenth-century extemporaneous poet from Apulia who was Pope Leo X’s pet versemaker; he stopped by Boston last year to sing a few tunes.

Theodore Worozbyt wonders whether anyone really wants to know why the Mona Lisa smiles.  beets remind him of blisters.  many feel there is something he is not telling them.  it isn’t true.

Allen Qing Yuan, born in Canada and aged 19, is to attend University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he co-publishes Poetry Pacific with his mentor poet father Changming Yuan.  recently interviewed by Nostrovia!Poetry, Allen has poetry appear in 69 literary publications across 16 countries, including Blue Fifth Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Literary Review of Canada, Mobius, Paris/Atlantic, Oklahoma Review, Poetry Scotland, Spillway, and Two Thirds North. his first collection, Traffic Light, was published in the summer of 2013.

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