Danielle Aquiline
Danielle is a graduate of the MFA program at Columbia College Chicago where she continues to teach First Year Writing. She is also the editorial assistant for College Composition and Communication. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Black Clock, DIAGRAM, Bellingham Review, Bloom and Gay & Lesbian Review. She lives in Andersonville with her partner, Sona, two cats, two dwarf hamsters and two rabbits.

Lindsay Bell
Lindsay Bell is a native of small-town Iowa, where there's not much to do but a lot of space in which to do not much. She recently completed her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Contrary, Black Clock, Columbia Poetry Review, Wicked Alice, and elsewhere. She resides with her husband, David, a seminarian at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and her cat, St. Alphonsus, patron of theologians and vocations, in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. When she is not writing poetry or teaching, she enjoys singing (in concert and in the shower), learning new instruments, attempting new languages, and spending time outdoors.

Margaret Chapman
Margaret Chapman is a poet, fiction writer and educator.  She received her BA in Comparative Religion from Dartmouth College and her MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in December of 2006, where she was the recipient of the MFA Graduation Fellowship in Writing.   She has is a poet-in-residence in the Chicago Public School system, and has taught composition and essay writing at SAIC,  music writing at the Rock'n'Roll camp for girls, and worked as a freelance journalist covering music and new media.   Her fiction and poetry has been featured on Vocalo radio, and in Version and G2.  She is excited about collaboration, experimentation, lists, games, fairytales, making lots of drafts, finding new ways of sharing work, and writing without worrying about making mistakes.

Meredith Clark
Meredith Clark is currently pursuing her MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago, and holds a BA from Oberlin College. She has worked in the editorial departments of FIELD Magazine and Salamander, and is published in Paris Link and The Plum Creek Review. She also currently teaches poetry with Urban Gateways.

Larry O. Dean
Larry O. Dean was born and raised in Flint, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan, during which time he won three Hopwood Awards in Creative Writing, an honor shared with fellow poets Robert Hayden, Jane Kenyon, Frank O'Hara, and Marge Piercy, among others. He is author of numerous chapbooks, including I Am Spam (2004), a series of poems “inspired” by junk email; his poetry has also been internationally anthologized. In addition to writing, he is a singer-songwriter, performing solo as well as with several pop bands, currently, The Injured Parties; he has released several critically-acclaimed CD’s, including Fables in Slang (2001) with Post Office, and Gentrification is Theft (2002) with The Me Decade. Dean was a 2004 recipient of the Hands on Stanzas Gwendolyn Brooks Award, presented by the Poetry Center of Chicago. Contact him at larryodean.com.

Eric Elshtain
Eric Elshtain's book Here in Premonition was recently published by RubbaDucky Press http://rubbaducky.org.   Elshtain is the editor of Beard of Bees Press http://www.beardofbees.com, and his work has appeared in many journals, both in-print and on-line.

Allison Gruber
Allison Gruber is a writer of poetry, plays and short fiction. She holds an MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to her work with Hands on Stanzas, Ms. Gruber teaches college-level courses in creative writing and composition.

Rachel Javellana
A Michigan native, Rachel Javellana is a poet and teaching artist in Chicago, by way of San Diego. She received a BA in English and creative writing from Kalamazoo College, and has spent the intervening years in community work, writing, travel, and trying to find an apartment that won’t go condo. In 2007, she received a Community Arts Assistance Program Grant from the City of Chicago.

Amanda Johnson
Amanda M. Johnson recently received her MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago where she now teaches first year writing courses. Her poetry has been published in Columbia Poetry Review and Mipoesias.

Beth Martinelli
Beth Martinelli has received numerous grants, scholarships and awards for her work, including from Zone 3, the Woodstock-Byrdcliffe Guild, the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo and the Cranbrook Writers Guild. She has taught writing and literature at the University of Maryland, Western Michigan University, Slippery Rock University, and Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, PA. Her work appears in journals such as Southern Poetry Review, Pleiades, Barrow Street and The Threepenny Review, among others, and her chapbook, To Darkness is now available from Finishing Line Press (2007).

Pamela Osbey
A song writer, author, and multi-talented creative spirit, Pam Osbey, has been teaching literary programs with the Poetry Center and the Chicago Humanities Festival. She’s currently the radio host of a literary talk show, “Literary Pizzazz” where she helps to promote new or established writers. Her second novel, When Rainbows Aren’t Enough, will be released in Spring 2008.

Ceclia Pinto
Cecilia Pinto received her Masters degree in writing from the School of the Art Institute. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a number of journals and magazines including Rhino, Fence, and Quarter After Eight. Her short story ‘Monster’ won Esquire Magazine’s 2000 short fiction contest and her haiku took first place in Permafrost’s annual contest in 2002. Her work is anthologized in, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. Her collaborative work with Alice George is appears in the anthology, Saints of Hysteria: A Half Century of Collaborative American Poetry.

Anndell Quintero
Anndell has lived most of her life in Miami, Florida but was born in Panamá City, Panamá. She received her BA from Tufts University and has spent the last year and a half working for a Miami nonprofit in Arts and Entrepreneurship education. Anndell is the Poet in Residence for Inter American Elementary Magnet School where she will teach poetry in Spanish.

Matthias Regan
Matthias Regan grew up in New Hampshire, but has lived in Chicago since 1995. He is the author of several chapbooks, including The Most of It, Codebookcode, and Utility; he is currently finishing a dissertation on populism and poetry at the University of Chicago. He is the co-founder, with Christopher Alexander, of Rubba Ducky Press, which specializes in poetry and political arts.

Parry Rigney
This is Parry's third year as a teaching poet with Hands on Stanzas. She received her B.A. from the University of Notre Dame in 2003 and is currently working toward a Master's in Library and Information Science at Dominican University, focusing her studies on library services for children and teens. 

James Shea
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, James Shea has published poems in various journals, including American Letters and Commentary, Black Clock, Crazyhorse, GulfCoast, jubilat, The Canary, and Verse.

Marissa Spalding
As part of the first graduating class in the Columbia College MFA Poetry program, Marissa Spalding realized her desire to be part of the Chicago poetry community. Spending most of her time between her various jobs with a non for profit for women and children and StoryStudio Chicago where she assists the director, she enjoys foreign film, indie rock and writing letters. She has published very little, but has hopes she will at least be discovered posthumously, though sooner would be much more advantageous.

Cassie Sparkman
Cassie Sparkman received her MFA in poetry from the University of Washington.  Her poetry can be seen most recently in Cimarron Review, 32 Poems, American Poetry Journal, The Laurel Review, Story South, and Pebble Lake Review.  Her poems have also appeared on the Verse Daily web site.  Her work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. Cassie has also been a featured reader at poetry readings in Seattle, Athens, OH, and in Chicago, and is a trained performance artist.  Cassie also teaches with the Evanston Arts Camps and After School Matters.  Cassie currently lives in Lincoln Square with her husband, playwright Aaron Carter, and two old cats.

Joris Soeding
Joris Soeding is the author of Surfaces Diminished and Trees. Otherness. Instance. His poems have appeared in Apocalypse, City Works, Columbia Poetry Review, MiPOesias, Pebble Lake Review, Red River Review, Romantic Outsider (England), and Third Coast Press. He is an Exhibit Interpreter at the Chicago Children’s Museum, a Managing Editor for Another Chicago Magazine, is pursuing an M.A. in Teaching, Language Arts-Elementary at Northeastern Illinois University, and is writing a book-length poem based on horror movies. He resides in the Andersonville neighborhood with his wife, Christa, and cat, Claws.

Laura Van Prooyen
Laura Van Prooyen’s first book of poetry, Inkblot and Altar, was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2006. Recent work has appeared in Slate, The Greensboro Review, Blackbird, and Sycamore Review. She has been a recipient of fellowships from The Virginia Center for Creative Arts and The Ragdale Foundation. She lives in Illinois with her husband and three young daughters.

Michelle Zaladonis