Sherrie Zantea (Candy)

http://www.wowps2017.com

Sherrie Zantea (Candy) has been writing and performing poetry for over 20 years. Candy has collaborated with several celebrities, organizations and Fortune 500 companies throughout her career. Candy is the Founder of CandyWorld Productions, where she produces various plays, musicals and events; “Sherrie’s Sanctuary”, an organization promoting self healing for women. She is the current Slammaster/Executive Director of the Dallas Poetry Slam Organization and can be reached at [email protected].

Rage Almighty is a Boston native and current Dallas resident who has successfully mastered the craft of poetry, hosting and acting. He has made a reputable name for himself through travel and social media evident in the video for his poem “Depression” reaching over 100,000 views on YouTube for example. Some of his greatest accomplishments include being the opening act for hip hop artists Brand Nubian, T.I., and Dead Prez, soul singers Kindred the Family Soul, Chrisette Michelle, Urban Mystic and the Punany Poets as well as world renowned poets Saul Williams and Nikki Giovanni. Rage is the 2013 Dallas Grand Slam Champion, a 4x Dallas Slam Team member, Inkwell Slam Team member, and top 20 finalist at the 2012 Individual World Poetry Slam. His performance credits have earned him two 2014 North Texas Spoken Word Awards for Poet of the Year and Erotic Poet of the Year as well as 2014 National Poetry Award for Best Spoken Word Album “lust.sex.love&heartbrake.(in that exact order)”. Rage is also very much a social activist who focuses on helping young people to express themselves positively through art. Above that, one of his most shining achievement was appearing on national TV in Season 4 of Lexus’ Verses and Flow on TV One. When it comes to creativity, Rage is among one of the best utilizing satire to comment on social issues. He is one of a kind and a legend in the making.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

https://bonniejostufflebeam.com/

twitter: @BonnieJoStuffle

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over 40 magazines and anthologies such as The Toast, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, The Masters Review, Hobart, and Everyman Library’s Monster Verse. She and her partner collaborated on the recently-released audio fiction-jazz collaborative album Strange Monsters. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and created and coordinates the annual Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas. Bonnie is represented by Ann Collette at Rees Literary Agency.

A. Kendra Greene is the Writer in Residence at the Dallas Museum of Art's Center for Creative Connections where she collects oral history from the staff and reinterprets visitor response text into found poetry, performance, and artists books. She started her museum career in Chicago, applying text to the wall one vinyl letter at a time. She first visited Iceland under the auspices of a Stanley Award for International Research, and keeps returning as she writes a book about its startling bloom of museums in the last twenty years, the peculiar ease with which private collections become public places, and how exactly to make a museum of things you cannot see. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction and a graduate certificate in Book Arts from the University of Iowa, where she was a Jacob K Javits Fellow.

Website: http://www.promethea.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rflowersrivera/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rflowersrivera

R. Flowers Rivera is native of Mississippi, she completed a Ph.D. in English, specializing in African American literature and creative writing, at Binghamton University and an M.A. in English at Hollins University in addition to an M.S. in human resource development from Georgia State University and a B.S. from The University of Georgia.

Xavier Review Press published her debut poetry collection, Troubling Accents (July 2013), which received a nomination from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and was selected by the Texas Association of Authors as its 2014 Poetry Book of the Year. Rivera’s second collection, Heathen, has been selected by poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller as the winner of the 2015 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, published by Lotus Press, Inc. and distributed by Wayne State University Press (forthcoming March 2015). Rivera’s work limns and re-imagines the intersections of race, gender, class, orientation, and regional identity.

Rivera was awarded the 2009 Leo Love Merit Scholarship in Poetry in association with the Taos Summer Writers Conference. Her short story, “The Iron Bars,” won the 1999 Peregrine Prize, and she has been a finalist for the May Swenson Award, the Journal Intro Award, the Gary Snyder Memorial Award, the Paumanok Award, the Crab Orchard Series, and the Gival Poetry Prize as well as garnering nominations for Pushcarts. Rivera has been anthologized in Mischief, Caprice & Other Poetic Strategies and included in a book on poetics titled The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Poetry. She has been published in journals such as African American Review, Columbia, Evergreen Chronicles, Beloit Poetry Journal, Feminist Studies, Obsidian, The Southern Review, and UCity Review. Currently, she lives in McKinney, Texas.

Website: http://colinwinnette.net/

Colin Winnette is from Denton, Texas. He is the author of Revelation (Mutable Sound), Animal Collection (Spork), Fondly (Atticus Books), Coyote (Les Figues), and Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio. His novels have been translated into Italian and French.

His prizes include Les Figues Press's NOS Book Contest, the Sonora Review’s 2012 Short Short Fiction Contest, and Heavy Feather Review’s Featured Chapbook Contest in 2014. Colin was also a runner-up for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Award and a finalist for Gulf Coast Magazine’s Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose.

His writing has appeared in Playboy, Lucky Peach, The Believer, and numerous other journals and anthologies. Links to published work can be found in the “stories“ and ”poems“ sections of this tumblr.

Colin now lives in San Francisco with a noisy refrigerator. He buys his books from Green Apple, The Booksmith, Dog Eared, and Alley Cat.

His work is represented by Charlotte Sheedy at Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.

Website - http://darinbradley.com/

Darin is the author of three novels—Noise, Chimpanzee, and Totem (October, 2016). He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and Theory with a concentration in Poetics, which he earned under the direction of theoretical syntactician and linguist Haj Ross. As an academic, he primarily focused on the intersection of contemporary cognitive theory and literary analysis.

Darin has taught courses on writing and literature at the University of North Texas, Furman University, and East Tennessee State University—including specialized topics such as “Apocalypse, Annihilation, and Unrest in Contemporary Media” and “Jules Verne, the Wild West, and Frontier Socialism.” He now conducts workshops and gives presentations independently, most recently for the University of North Texas, Richland College, Texas Woman’s University, Texas Christian University, and Wofford College.

Darin also worked as the principal script writer for id Software, the industry-leading video game studio behind such iconic titles as Quake and Rage. He contributed story development, voice-acting scripts, character creation, and worldbuilding to early versions of id’s most recent title, the re-issue of Doom.

Darin with his wife, Dr. Rima Abunasser. (Photo by Erin Rambo)

Darin with his wife, Dr. Rima Abunasser.

He has worked in various editorial and design capacities for a number of both nonprofit and commercial publications, including Farrago’s Wainscot, an ezine showcasing fiction and poetry in the “literary weird” mode, where he has served as founding editor-in-chief and designer since 2007. He is a co-founder of Goliad Media, an independent publishing, recording, and art production house based in North Texas.

Darin’s books have been praised for “dazzling originality” (NPR Books) and for being “exceptionally polished” (Publishers Weekly). His books have twice been named to Locus Magazine’s Recommended Reading List, and Library Journal listed Chimpanzee among its top indie titles of 2014.

Darin dreams of empty places, and he likes it when things fall apart.

Website: http://paulajanemendoza.tumblr.com/

Paula Mendoza's a reviewer for SCOUT, essay editor for The Offing, and assistant poetry editor at Newfound | Art & Place. Her poems have appeared in Parcel, Bat City Review, Washington Square, Diagram, and elsewhere. She's an MFA graduate from the University of Michigan, and lives in Denton, Texas.