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About the Editors and Contributors
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227 Luke and Jennifer Reynolds are both passionate about human rights causes and literature. Currently they live in Massachusetts with their son, Tyler. Luke is a teacher and freelance writer. Jennifer is a freelance writer and a full-time mother. Steve Almond is the author of five imperfect books and the father of one perfect daughter. He lives outside Boston with his small but hopeful family. Beth Alvarado is the author of the short-story collection Not a Matter of Love, which won the Many Voices Award from New Rivers Press and was published in . Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been published most recently in the journals Ploughshares, Cue, and spork. She teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson and is currently working on a memoir called Anthropologies. Everything takes place in the desert. Jane Armstrong’s work has appeared in Newsweek, North American Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, New Orleans Review, River Teeth, and Brevity and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. She teaches at Northern Arizona University. Born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age thirteen , Baca was eventually sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison. After that he began to turn his life around: he learned to read and write and unearthed a voracious passion for poetry. Instead of becoming a hardened criminal , he emerged from prison as a writer. Baca sent three of his poems to Denise Levertov, the poetry editor of Mother Jones. The poems were published and became part of Baca’s Immigrants in Our Own Land, published in , the year he was released from prison. He earned his GED later that same year. He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, and, for his memoir A Place to Stand, the prestigious International Award. In he won the Cornelius P. Turner Award. Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS CTR.qxd 7/15/09 8:14 AM Page 227 228 ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love and beyond. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities throughout the country. In he created Cedar Tree, Inc., a nonprofit foundation that works to give people of all walks of life the opportunity to become educated and improve their lives. Ishmael Beah came to the United States when he was seventeen and graduated from Oberlin College in . He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the United Nations on several occasions. He lives in New York City. In , at the age of twelve he fled attacking rebels who destroyed his village in Sierra Leone. By thirteen he had been picked up by the government army and been made a child soldier. His memoir, A Long Way Gone, tells his story. John Bensko has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama and a Ph.D. in twentieth-century poetry and narrative technique from Florida State University. He is an associate professor at the University of Memphis. Previously, he taught at the University of Alabama, Old Dominion University, Rhodes College, and, as a Fulbright Professor in American Literature, at the Universidad de Alicante, Spain. Bensko won the McLeod-Grobe Poetry Prize for . He was director of the River City Writers Series for the – season. His books of poetry include Green Soldiers, The Waterman’s Children, and The Iron City. He has also written a book of stories, Sea Dogs. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis. Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation . Currently, he lives in Tucson. He is Dine of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and is currently completing his studies at the University of Arizona. He is the recipient of the – Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Residency Fellowship, and, more recently, a Whiting Writer’s Award. Sherwin has published his poems in American Poet, the Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), Lit...
