Marilyn L. Taylor, former Poet Laureate of the state of Wisconsin (2009 and 2010) and the city of Milwaukee (2004 and 2005), taught poetry and poetics for fifteen years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has facilitated poetry workshops, readings and presentations throughout the state and many venues across the country, from Connecticut to California. She has recently been appointed to the advisory board of the Low-Residency MFA Program at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado. Marilyn is the author of six collections of poetry, the most recent of which, titled Going Wrong, was published by Parallel Press in 2009. Her work has also appeared in many anthologies and journals, including The American Scholar, Poetry, Measure, The Able Muse, Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column, and in a new anthology titled Filled with Breath: 30 Sonnets by 30 Women Poets. She was awarded first place in contests sponsored by The Atlanta Review, Dogwood, Passager, The Ledge, and the GSU Review poetry journals. She is currently a Contributing Editor for THE WRITER magazine, where her articles on craft appear bi-monthly.
J.L. Conrad’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets (SUNY Press, 2010), H_NGM_N, Pleiades, Columbia, Third Coast, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mid-American Review, The Cream City Review and Forklift, Ohio, among others. She is the author of A Cartography of Birds (Louisiana State University Press, 2002) and a chapbook, Species of Light (bellywater press, 2004). Conrad earned her MFA in creative writing from American University and is currently working toward her PhD in Literary Studies at UW-Madison.
Christine Holm is a Wisconsin native; she has lived, studied, and worked in Madison since 2002. She took her first creative writing course in 2008 on a dare and mostly lies in her poems. She currently works determining Supplemental Security Income benefit eligibility for community members, and will be attending an MFA program in the fall. She participates in a poetry workshop at Oakhill Corrections through the Writers in Prison Project.