Julia Morris Paul is an attorney in private practice in Manchester, with an emphasis on elder law. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, among them: RUNES, Connecticut River Review, Broken Bridge Review , Common Ground Review and Caduceus. She has received awards from Artists Embassy International’s Dancing Poetry Contest, Late Blooms, and the Arthur Anthony Cultural Arts Foundation. The East Haddam Stage Company selected one of her poems to be performed as part of its 2008 production, Plays and Poetry. She is membership chair of the Connecticut Poetry Society and a director of the Riverwood Poetry Series.

Victoria Rivas has been published in many journals including a poem about her other passion, martial arts, in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts. Poems about her hometown, Erie, PA, have been included in two anthologies, Working Hard for the Money from Bottom Dog Press and Along the Lake edited by Sean Thomas Dougherty. Recebt poems about her math students. “Keisha’s Gone” placed 43rd in the 77th Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition. “Balancing Equation” was published in The Cleave poetry webzine. She has one chapbook Doing Laundry, Victoria was on the board of directors for the The 8th Annual National Poetry Slam Championship & 1997 Connecticut Poetry Festival, and the 2001 and 2003 Connecticut Poetry Festivals. She was also an alternate on the 1998 CT Slam Team.

A performance poet since 1998, Terri Klein has been published in numerous journals. Her first chapbook, You Know Who You Are, appeared in 2005. She is a member of the Not Just Any Tom, Vic, and Terri poetry ensemble, whose debut CD, Revelation, came out in 2007. Terri is also co-producer of Poetry Salon, an annual event in Waterbury since 2009. She is a member of the poetry critique group Artemis Rising, the acting troupe Vintage Players, and the playwrights’ group Floating Theater. Her poetry and plays have been presented on stage as part of Plays and Poetry (East Haddam: 2006, 2008, and 2010) and Word-Art 2011 (Canton). She is also the editor of CTPoetNews.

Pat Hale has written poetry and stories since she was a little girl. Certified as an Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) workshop leader, she facilitates a writing group in West Hartford, and believes that writing is an art that belongs to everyone. She is a member of the writing group Partners in Poetry. In recent years, her poetry has appeared in CALYX Journal, Sow’s Ear, Long River Run, Dogwood, Connecticut River Review, and Long River Run II. Her awards include CALYX’s 2005 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, first prize in the Connecticut Poetry Society’s 2007 Al Savard Poetry Competition, and the 2011 Sunken Garden Poetry Award. In 2009, she was a resident at Hedgebrook, the women's writing retreat on Whidbey Island, Washington. Her 2011 chapbook, Composition and Flight, contains many of the poems written there.

Bruce Hale is a latecomer to poetry, inspired by his sister Pat. He is a frequent open mike participant in Central Connecticut and had his first feature at The Buttonwood Tree in May 2011. Bruce brings to the board 35 years of experience in business and non-profit organizations. Specific skills include marketing, publications, programming, process improvement, fund-raising and product/service innovation.

Kate Rushin is the author of The Black Back-Ups (Firebrand Books). Her “The Bridge Poem” appears in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, a ground-breaking feminist anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Her work is widely anthologized and has been published in such journals as Callaloo. A Connecticut resident, Kate currently teaches creative writing at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts. Previously, she taught at Wesleyan University as Associate Professor and Visiting Poet.  She has read and presented workshops at HillStead Museum’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, and has led workshops for the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies and Cave Canem Foundation. She has served as a judge for the Connecticut State University-IMPAC Young Writers Award, the Connecticut Poetry Circuit Student Poetry Contest, and the NEA’s/Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Out Loud. Kate received her B.A. from Oberlin College and her M.F.A. from Brown University. She is a former Fellow of The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a graduate fellow of Cave Canem Foundation.

Essayist, poet, and sometime fiction writer David K. Leff’s new book of poetry, Depth Of Field, Poems & Photographs, steps beyond words to link verbal experience with his own poignant photographs. Words and pictures tell parallel stories, amplifying the reader’s encounter. The Price of Water, David’s first poetry collection, offers lyrical meditations on the relationship we have as individuals and as a society to nature, our past and each other. David’s first nonfiction book, The Last Undiscovered Place, is a memoir about our own neighborhoods (usually the last place we look for anything important). His second, Deep Travel: In Thoreau’s Wake on the Concord and Merrimack, ties together diverse phenomena from geology to ethnicity to literature to show places in time as well as spatially. David is a frequent contributor to the Hartford Courant and has written a column for his local weekly paper. His essays have been published in Appalachia, Canoe and Kayak, The Encyclopedia of New England, Yankee, and elsewhere. His most recent short story appeared in Hawk & Handsaw in 2009. You can visit him at his website: http://davidkleff.typepad.com/.