The Beautiful Anthology (24 page)

Uche Ogbuji
was born in Calabar, Nigeria. He lived, among other places, in Egypt and England before settling near Boulder, Colorado where he lives with his wife and four children. Uche is a computer engineer (trained in Nigeria and the USA) and entrepreneur whose abiding passion is poetry. His poems, fusing his native Igbo culture, European Classicism, Western American setting, and Hip-Hop style, have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies including
ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum
;
Corium Magazine
;
Soundzine
;
Lucid Rhythms
;
The Flea
;
IthacaLit
;
Unsplendid
;
String Poet
;
Mountain Gazette
;
The Raintown Review
;
Verse Wisconsin
and
New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan
. He is poetry editor and essayist at
The Nervous Breakdown
. Uche also snowboards, coaches and plays soccer, and trains in American Kenpo. Visit him at
uche.ogbuji.net
or keep up with him on twitter (@uogbuji).

Greg Olear
,
the senior editor of
The Nervous Breakdown
, teaches creative writing at Manhattanville College. His work has appeared at
The Rumpus
;
Babble.com
;
The Millions
;
Chronogram
;
WhAP!
; and
Hudson Valley Magazine
. His 2009 debut novel,
Totally Killer
(Harper, 2009), was featured at the Quais du Polar noir festival in Lyon, France, where he was a panelist.
Fathermucker
(Harper, 2011) is his acclaimed second novel. He lives with his wife, Stephanie St. John, and two children in New Paltz, NY.

Victoria Patterson
is the author of the novel
This Vacant Paradise
(Counterpoint Press, 2011).
Drift
(Mariner Books, 2009), her collection of interlinked short stories, was a finalist for the California Book Award and the 2009 Story Prize.
The San Francisco Chronicle
selected
Drift
as one of the best books of 2009. Her work has appeared in various publications and journals, including the
Los Angeles Times
;
Alaska Quarterly Review
; and
The Southern Review
. She lives with her family in Southern California and is an instructor at Antioch University’s Master of Fine Arts program.

Rachel Pollon
lives, loves, and writes in Los Angeles, CA. Some of her experiences include being employed in both the music and television industries, committing to lies when she’s done something embarrassing and needs to cover it up, deciding what to have for dinner, and being a loyal friend, family member, sexual partner, and dog owner. Her aim is to write about the interesting bits. And to see her neuroses as gifts she might like to return, but instead puts in a closet and forgets about until she goes looking for her favorite pair of boots and is slapped in the face by shame and recognition. She is a contributor to
The Nervous Breakdown
, and her blog is at
seismicdrift.com
.

Judy Prince
,
a retired college teacher and union activist, now lives half the year in Norfolk, Virginia, and the other half in Darlington, UK. She has published articles in the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Virginian- Pilot
and was a Chicago Dramatists Short Plays Competition finalist. She is now at work on a play about Shakespeare the woman, and recently launched Frisky Moll Press with the poetry pamphlets of Robin Hamilton (Anacreon translations) and Patrick McManus (
On the Dig
). Her own poetry pamphlets have been published by Phantom Rooster Press (2006 and 2009). Prince’s work is included in the first
James Kirkup Memorial Poetry Competition Anthology
(Red Squirrel Press, UK, 2010). Her
Poems2
is reviewed in
SPHINX 12 (
HappenStance Press).

Lance Reynald
was born in Texas, raised in Washington, DC, and self-exiled to Colorado. This world-traveled collector of air miles currently lives in Portland, Oregon, but keeps a bag packed near the door for the moment when wanderlust calls. He has an affinity for vanilla lattes, dirty martinis, the works of Faulkner, Kerouac, and Burroughs, the smell of imported cigarettes in fine woolens, the photography of Doisneau and Brassai, and what some regard as the worst of early 1980s Brit Pop. His first novel,
Pop Salvation
(Harper Perennial, 2009), is now available wherever books are sold.

Stephanie St. John
is a singer-songwriter who has recorded five full-length albums: the solo lp
Cinderella’s Dead
;
Vee Khan Nez Pha
and
Cease to Thrill
, with Vdisc; Lazy Eyes’
Tokyo Could Not Be Opened Because Tokyo Could Not Be Found
, with avant-garde composer David First; and
250 Times Sweeter Than Sugar
, with her band, Mimi Ferocious. She has performed at the Whisky A Go Go and The Roxy (in Los Angeles), CBGB and Brownies (in New York), and the general assembly room at the UN (in every country at once). Her latest projects include
The Blanket Show
, an album of experimental children’s music she’s producing with First, and a new as-yet-untitled solo record. She lives with her husband (Greg Olear) and two children in New Paltz, NY.

Steve Sparshott,
a British citizen and formerly a professional model maker, turned to writing after brain damage sustained in a 2003 road accident caused him to lose much of his physical function. Typing with the three middle fingers of his left hand at a blistering fifteen words per minute, he has had work printed in the London literary magazine
Smoke
, and various academic publications have featured his design-related social criticism. He reviews films for
Screenjabber.com
and, because his life just isn’t difficult enough, he’s writing a memoir called
Get Well Soon
.

Tyler Stoddard Smith,
described as an “up-and-coming humorist” by
Esquire
magazine, has had his works featured in
The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes
;
The Best American Fantasy
;
Esquire
;
Meridian
;
Pindeldyboz
;
The Big Jewel
;
Yankee Pot Roast
;
Word Riot
;
Barrelhouse
;
Monkeybicycle
; and
McSweeney’s
, among others. Visit his website at
tylerstoddardsmith.wordpress.com
.

Catherine Tufariello’s
first book of poems,
Keeping My Name
(Texas Tech UP), was a finalist for the 2005
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize in Poetry and the winner of the 2006 Poets’ Prize. Her poems have been featured in
The Writers’ Almanac
;
American Life in Poetry
; and
Poetry Daily
; and have been anthologized in
The Seagull Reader
;
Western Wind
;
The Sparrow Book of New American Poets
; and elsewhere. A native of Buffalo, NY, Catherine lives with her husband and daughter in Valparaiso, Indiana, where she works at Valparaiso University’s Center for Civic Reflection.

Angela Tung
has had fiction and nonfiction published in
The Frisky
;
Matador Life
;
The New York Press
; and
Carve Magazine
. She earned an m.a. in creative writing from Boston University and can be found at
angelatung.com
. Tung’s young adult novel,
Song of the Stranger
, was published by Roxbury Park Books (1999). Her latest book,
Black Fish: Memoir of a Bad Luck Girl
, chronicles the failed marriage between a Chinese woman and Korean man, both American- born but still bound by old-world traditions and is available on Amazon. Tung lives in San Francisco.

Stephen Walter
is an independent bookseller in Princeton, New Jersey. He feels it would be awkward to say more.

Zoe Zolbrod
has written one novel,
Currency
(OV Books, 2010), but she worked on it for a very long time. She’s written some short stories, too, and a few of them were published here and there way back when. Also, she’s written essays, some of which appeared in
Maxine
, a ’zine she co-published in the 1990s. She was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, went to college in Oberlin, Ohio, and got an m.a. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She works in educational publishing and lives in Evanston, IL, with her husband, the artist Mark DeBernardi, and their son and daughter.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Tremendous thanks must be given to all the writers and artists who so willingly shared their work for this anthology. Thank you also to our intrepid interns, Jen Schiller, Alex Meyer, and Shiah Irgangladen, all of whom worked with blazing speed and impressive skill. Sincere thanks go to designer Charlotte Howard who worked tirelessly (but with great humor) on this book, to Evre Basak for her wonderful cover artwork, and to proofreader Chris Gage. A million thanks go to Brad Listi, founder of
The Nervous Breakdown
and publisher of TNB Books, as well as every writer/editor and reader who makes
The Nervous Breakdown
such a welcoming online home and a fount of literary innovation.

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