Born in Portadown, Northern Ireland, I have made my home in Turkey, Poland, Italy, South Korea, the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom – experiences that inform my absurd-surreal stories. My writing has been translated into Danish and Polish & featured in the Best British Poetry series. My essays, stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in various anthologies and magazines in Europe and North America, including Tin House, Fence, 3:AM, Sprung Formal, Rain Taxi, Poetry, and Versopolis Review. I have performed my work at various festivals and art galleries in Prague, Madrid, London, Bristol, Manchester, North Carolina, and Ireland. Currently, I live in Castelldefels, Spain and teach high school literature in Barcelona. My debut novel, Never Mind the Beasts, is available from Dostoyevsky Wannabe. "Marcus Slease’s ‘Never Mind the Beasts’: probably the wildest bildungsroman since ‘Anti-Oedipus’; imagine Joyce’s ‘Portrait…’ being retold by a Leopold Bloom on a mission to steal back epiphanies from standarized marketing. An essential, liberating read." Matt Travers, broke Mayakovsky fan "Writing actually as love! Marcus Slease’s crinkling, crackling prose is full of sparks, full of troubles, full of wonder. Never Mind the Beasts radiates with the force, brevity and immediacy of stylists like Mary Robison, Rikki Ducornet and Diane Williams. “The demand to love,” wrote Roland Barthes at the beginning of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes; “overflows, leaks, skids, shifts, slips”. “Writing to touch with letters, with lips, with breath,” wrote Hélène Cixous in Coming to Writing. These are the thrilling, vibratory spaces, movements and possibilities Slease’s writing opens up." Colin Herd, author of You Name It "Say Lydia Davis and Donald Barthelme had a son, and his life story was painted by Basquiat, and the paintings were ground up into a spice, then used to flavour a crazy-hot dish you just can’t stop eating while the scenery shifts around you: that taste might be something like Never Mind the Beasts." Ruby Cowling, author of This Paradise "robust pro aktiv quixotik goes evreewher is from evreewher nouns ar verbs verbs ar yu a nu way uv intraktivitee langwage th narrativ rocks takes yu evreewher thers no conclewsyun its in th going poignant tragik ekstatik have anothr box top meeting yu at th melting grange th adventurs dont stop home keeps mooving evn yu dont need 2 carree th props opn ths wun up each page fluid change meeting yu in yu alive wundrful a great xperiens ths book." bill bissett, author of Breth /the treez uv lunaria

Nicole Mauro has published poems and criticism in numerous journals, including How2, Jacket, and Western Humanities Review. She is the author of six chapbooks, one full-length collection, The Contortions (Dusie Books, 2009), and is the co-editor of an interdisciplinary book about sidewalks titled Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Space (with Marci Nelligan, ChainArts, 2008). Her second full-length poetry collection, Tax-Dollar Super-Sonnet Featuring Sarah Palin as Poet, is due out from Black Radish Books in 2011. Nicole lives in the San Francisco bay area with her husband Patrick, and daughters Nina and Faye. She teaches rhetoric and language at the University of San Francisco.

at 13 i fell in love with a 15 year old girl, who sooned turned 16, & able to drive. i wrote long-hand love poems to her in notebooks, the most forceful act i cld do when not talking to her on the phone for many solid hours. i don't remeber how we ended, but at my first year of college in 1972 she was in an accident, her vett slipped under the back of a semi truck, decapitating her. poetry became energy. my highschool sweetheart kathy must have had hundreds of sappy loves poems written for her, & ultimately there's tragedy there too. i felt my being bend to forms of poetry, felt most comfortable with the likes of ez pound & charles olson & robert creeley & william carlos williams, but read various outshoots from w.s. merwin to ms. plath, to the beats, kerouac, to henry miller, buwoski, intrigued by language poets i.e., larry eigner, & the PROCESS, which i knew in my early 20's wld be a life-long process. a poet must live by his wit's, i remember creeley explaining in an interview, & my wits had me working in various factories for 35 years. still, thru all the decades, i wrote. i cldn't NOT write. it was NECESSARY. i had no control. wild years of drunken readings. & most of the details i cannot recall. these days, married to ann, who is also a writer, who fell in love with in the mountains of new hampshire 25 years from suddenly hearing her voice in my soon-be-lost house thru a long marriage into divorce & the rage of that, hell, but ann, my love, soul-mate moved up against lake erie & we married & aging without mercy, thanks the stars for the strike at the last factory, i'm out of that, into something different: weighed against 350 degree presses & fiberglass dust, all metals yell, & i sit in a partial cubicle now, headset on, keyboard under my finger & the computer screen. it isn't a job without stress, & it doesn't pay factory wages, & the hours change weekly; whatever, at age 54 i'm a poet. i've worked relentlessly. i never want to stop.

John Korn began writing poetry around 2002. He grew up and still lives in Pittsburgh PA. He has an Associates Degree from Community College of Allegheny County, and would like to further his education some day. He worked in a second hand store for three years and is currently a social worker. John draws and paints on occasion, is interested in digital film making, and would like to attempt different forms of story telling, audio, visual and written word. His new book of poetry, Television Farm, is available at amazon.com. An interview with the author can be found here: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poetica...