Michael Macklin
is an associate editor with The Café Review. Lately, he has been working with local poets and police officers to produce The Portland Police Poetry Calendar 2010. He learned a great deal from his friend and mentor, and fellow digger in the dirt, Jack Myers.
Meghan Cadwallader
began writing as soon as she could read, but her formal education includes a BA in French/English from Hollins University, a Master’s in English from Bucknell University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. Her nonfiction has appeared in So To Speak and is forthcoming in Oyez Review. Her poetry will appear in the Spring 2010 issue of The Fourth River. She is currently planning her escape from Central Pennsylvania where she lives with her partner, Kristen.
Stephen Koharian
Stephen Koharian is a Portland, Maine native and Maine College of Art graduate whose great – grandparents escaped the Turkish genocide of the Armenians during the years of 1915 to 1923, in which 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire. He hopes that through his art, he is able to provoke more discussion about the genocide. His use of the term “Turkishness” in titling some of his pieces is illegal in Turkey. His work was most recently on display in November 2009 at Portland’s Two Point Gallery and was also featured in a cover story in November in the Portland monthly newspaper, The Bollard. More about his artwork may be viewed at, www.stephenkoharian.com
Jessica Goldfinch
Jessica Goldfinch growing up in an urban commune in 1970s New Orleans, she was exposed to unconventional worldviews from a very early age. From her elementary school years at the countercultural Free School through her graduate studies at the University of New Orleans, she focused on studying world ideologies and creatively incorporating them into her art. Her artistic curiosity has led her to travel to places as diverse as Nicaragua, Indonesia, and central India, and she has frequently incorporated both iconographic elements and an Asian sense of balance in her work. Raised as a Secular Humanist but schooled in many other religions from her upbringing, academic studies, and travels, she is fascinated with blind faith as well as religious artwork from an outsider’s perspective. Religious views of mortality infuse her work, and are often framed in scientific depictions of issues of life and death. Since 2000, her artwork has been exhibited in dozens of venues, including museums, universities, art centers, and galleries, in New Orleans and the Gulf South as well as in New York City, Washington DC, and Europe. She maintains her studio and home in New Orleans.
