(le) poisson rouge

CA Conrad is a Philadelphia-based poet.

Daniel Nester is a journalist, essayist, poet, editor, and teacher. His new book, How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction, is just out from Soft Skull Press.

Nester's first two books, God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II (2004), are collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His third, The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVOX, 2006), is a collection of poems.

As a journalist and essayist, his work has appeared in a variety of places, such as Poets & Writers, The Morning News, The Daily Beast, Time Out New York, The Rumpus, Bloomsbury Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Bookslut.

He is the former editor of the online journals Unpleasant Event Schedule and La Petite Zine and worked as Assistant Web Editor for Sestinas for McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

His work has been anthologized in such collections as Lost and Found, The Best American Poetry 2003, The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, Isn't It Romantic? 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets, and Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasure of the Pixels.

His poems have appeared in such journals as Coconut, Shampoo, Taint, Gulf Coast, Barrow Street, jubilat, Crazyhorse, Open City, Slope, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other places.

He is an assistant professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, where he teaches creative nonfiction.

Laura Sims is the author of two books of poetry: Stranger (Fence Books, 2009); and Practice, Restraint (Fence Books, Alberta Prize, 2005); and of four chapbooks, including Corrections (Bronze Skull Press, 2006) and Bank Book (Answer Tag Press, 2004). Her work was included in the anthology, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), and individual poems have appeared in the journals: Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Aufgabe, Crayon, CAB/NET, Octopus, First Intensity, 26, How2, Parcel, 6X6, La Petite Zine, Columbia Poetry Review, jubilat, LIT, and Fence, among others. She has published book reviews in Boston Review, Jacket, and Rain Taxi; an overview essay on the work of Diane Williams in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (2003); and the article, “David Markson and the Problem of the Novel,” in New England Review (2008). She is currently writing essays on the short poem, and working on a poetry manuscript, tentatively titled My god is this a man.

Laura grew up in Richmond, Virginia. She attended the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she majored in English and minored in Japanese Studies. After graduating in 1995, she moved to a rural town in Japan’s Tochigi Prefecture as an Assistant Language Teacher with the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Program. She remained in Japan for several years, teaching English at a middle school, a conversation school, and an English-immersion pre-kindergarten.

In 1998, Laura returned to the States to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry at University of Washington in Seattle. When she finished her degree in 2000, she moved to New York City and worked in the Education Department of Japan Society, a non-profit organization. In 2003, she and her husband, Corey Mead, moved to Madison, Wisconsin; for the next five years, Laura worked as an adjunct faculty member at Madison Area Technical College, Edgewood College, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. She taught courses in creative writing, composition, literature, and professional communication, and also co-curated Felix: A Series of New Writing, which invites innovative writer-editors to read their work and discuss their editing and/or publishing projects. In 2006, Laura was awarded a Creative Artists Fellowship from the Japan-US Friendship Commission; the fellowship provided her with a six-month residency in Tokyo.

In 2008, Laura moved back to New York City to begin teaching at CUNY Baruch. She is a co-editor of Instance Press, a curator for the Segue Reading Series, and a volunteer at 826. She lives with Corey and their cat Gomi-chan in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn.