Jim Berger received his BA from Columbia University, and a PhD from Univ. of Virginia. Jim is a poet, teacher, and literary scholar. He taught 3rd grade students; he was a member of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative (New York,) teaching poetry writing in elementary schools. Currently he’s the Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale University. He has been awarded the prestigious Taft Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Jim has published two academic monographs, four books of poems, and two odd collections of “manifestos.” Jim edited the book Helen Keller, The Story of My Life published by Random House, He was reviewed in The New Yorker, and the Women’s Review of Books. Diane Stevenson was born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Her mother’s family was among the first French settlers here. She secured an M.F.A. from Columbia University and was granted a graduate degree without an undergraduate degree. Next, she parlayed Columbia’s Ph.D. program in American literature and published The Beauty Shop Monologues, nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She's a Breadloaf Scholar and was listed in an early edition under “Outstanding Writers: Poets.” She taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Hobart and William Smith, and the University of Southern Mississippi. She's published poems and articles in The Nation, Boulevard, Pataphysics, Raritan, The Yale Review, Socialist Review, and The Mississippi Review. Her husband was the late great film critic and historian Gilberto Perez. Geri Lipschultz is the author of Grace Before the Fall, published this year by DarkWinter Press. Geri is so grateful to be one of three writers for the children’s book of poems Did You Kiss a Cat Today??? Her work appears in Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing and in Spuyten Duyvil’s Wreckage of Reason II. Twice a Pushcart nominee, Geri has published in Terrain, The Rumpus, Ms., New York Times, the Toast, Black Warrior Review, College English, among others. She has an MFA from Iowa and a PhD from Ohio University and currently teaches at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her one-woman show was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr. She’s currently living in a cabin in the lower Adirondacks.
