Amy Small-McKinney is the author of a collection of poems, Life is Perfect (BookArts Press), and two chapbooks of poetry, Body of Surrender (2004) and Clear Moon, Frost (2009), both with Finishing Line Press. She was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She was the 2011 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, selected by poet, Christopher Bursk. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, for example, The Cortland Review, The Pedestal Magazine, upstreet, APIARY, Philadelphia Stories, Main Street Rag and the July/August issue of The American Poetry Review.
Elliott batTzedek holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation from Drew University; her translation manuscript of “Dance of the Lunatic” by the Israeli Jewish lesbian writer Shez won the 2012 Robert Bly Translation prize, judged by Martha Collins. She is also the recipient of a Leeway Foundation Art and Change Award and a residency at Vermont Studio Arts Center. She is the events coordinator for Big Blue Marble Bookstore, founder of Poetry Business Manager, and co-founder of QuillsEdge Press. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the journals: American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Menacing Hedge,Armchair/Shotgun, Adanna Literary Journal, Naugatuck River Review, Lambda Literary Online, and Sinister Wisdom, and in the anthologies: Passageways: the 2012 Two Lines Translation Anthology, and Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence. Other Shez translations are forthcoming in the English edition of the 2013 Hebrew anthology Israeli Women’s Protest Poetry ed. by Dorit Weisman. She blogs about poetry and translation at thisfrenzy.com.
Open Reading follows, Charles S. Carr, host