Contributors
Jared Carter is originally from Elwood, a small town in the central part of Indiana. He was educated at Yale and at Goddard and served two years with the United States Army in France. He worked in textbook publishing in Indianapolis during the 1970s. The first of his three books of poetry, Work, For the Night is Coming (1981), won the 1980 Walt Whitman Award. "He is the rare poet who is rooted in a certain place, which is of course Indiana," one critic has observed, "yet he deals with it in such a way that it is of universal interest." His website is available at
Homer Christensen lives in Folsom, CA, and has been writing poetry for 25 years. He has been published in several poetry journals and was featured on thescreamonline.com. Homer spent August 2003 in County Clare, Ireland on a residential poetry fellowship with Salmon Publishing, where hespent a lot of time hiking along the Cliffs of Moher and drinking Guinness, though not at the same time. An award-winning technical writer earlier in his career, Homer nowdesignswebsites for art galleries at GalleryDB.com and artists at ArtistDB.com. You can read a collection of his early poems at
David Feela is a poet, free-lance writer, writing instructor, book collector, and thrift-store pirate. His work has appeared in regional and national publications, including High Country News's "Writers's on the Range," Mountain Gazette, and in the newspaper as a “Colorado Voice" for The Denver Post. He is a contributing editor and columnist for Inside/Outside Southwest and for The Four Corners Free Press. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments (Maverick Press), won the Southwest Poet Series. His web page can be viewed at
Charles Fishman is director of the Distinguished Speakers Program at Farmingdale State University in New York, and Associate Editor of The Drunken Boat. His books include
Mortal Companions, The Firewalkers, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and The Death Mazurka, which was selected by the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of the year (1989) and nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His 10th chapbook, 5,000 Bells, was released by Cross-Cultural Communications in 2004 in a signed limited edition, and his sixth book length collection, Chopin's Piano, will be
published by Time Being Books in 2005. Please visit our Poet Index to see more of his work in TheScreamOnline. Charles can be reached at .
George (György) Gömöri was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1934. He has been living in England since 1956, where he taught Polish and Hungarian Literature at the University of Cambridge. He published nine books of poetry in Hungarian, one in English and one in Polish and has been translating Hungarian poetry into English with Clive Wilmer, most recenly Miklós Radnóti’s Forced March, Enitharmon,2003.
Michael Knisely currently teaches Composition and Poetry Writing at Southeast Community College in Lincoln, Nebraska. His life in the west and southwest has brought him a scattering of skills and avocations, from cooking in restaurants (in an ascending series of better and better quality joints) to teaching high school English, to learning darkroom photography and doing photography for Modern Dance companies and University Dance programs (in Tucson and Nebraska), to becoming a father (thus a return to the joys of such sports skills as fishing and coaching youth basketball and baseball) of a now 19 yr. old son Noah (the reason for his move back to Nebraska in 1990). Currently, he is putting a manuscript collection of poems together along with a number of other projects: a rulebook for a game he invented, a book of photographs, and a grammar primer. Regarding the grammar book, he says, “I can't stand the rules and all their exceptions, which confound the majority of English learners, so I'm going to streamline grammar as a survival issue, especially for ELL students of the language.
Sara McWhorter was born and raised in Effingham, Illinois, and wrote her first poem in the third grade. It was entitled, "A Ring and a King, What a Neat Thing." It was not a success. She hasa cat nicknamed Noodle who bites her at will, but also has many redeeming qualities. Additionally, she hada dog name Lucky who was not that lucky. May he rest in peace. Currently, she works as a receptionist in Teutopolis, Illinois, where she has accidentally hung up on at least onecustomer a day.
Born in 1939, Feliks Netz studied Polish philology at the University of Silesia. His first book of poetry, Linked by Agreement was awarded a prize as the best debut of 1968. Recently he published the novel Born at the Day of the Dead (1995), the essay “Sufferings of the Young Zh”(2000), the documentary story “At the Corner of Ligonia and Królowej Jadwigi Street” (1997) and a selection of sketches “Great Turmoil”(1996). He has also written many plays for Polish Radio. Netz translates from several languages, mainly from Russian (Alexander Pushkin, Josef Brodsky and many other), and Hungarian. He translated some well-known Hungarian writers such as Tibor Déry, Endre Illés, György Moldova and Sándor Márai (including the latter’s international bestseller Embers). The poetic libretto (by Béla Balázs) to Bartók’s „Bluebeard Castle” was also translated by him for the Polish National Opera production in 1999. He is Literary Editor of the monthly Śląsk (Silesia) in Katowice, Poland.
B. Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer, as well as the Artistic Director of "The Original Theatre" in Boston. His work has appeared in Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art, The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Hawaii Review, Le Guepard (France), Kadmos (France), Prism International, Jejune (Czech Republic), Leopold Bloom (Budapest), Antioch Review, and Prairie Schooner. His website is at
David Radavich's poetry collections include By the Way and Greatest Hits (see Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, or He also writes plays and is currently working on a scholarly book on midwestern drama.
M. J. Rychlewski is a poet and a playwright. His first volume of poetry, Night Driving, was published by the Wine Press in 1984. Over the years his work has appeared in many publications, including Seattle Review, In Print, American Pen, Private Arts, and Conversation. His poem “An Early Work” recently placed in the Polyphony Press anthology The Thing About Second Chances Is.... A theater piece, My Atget, was performed at the VIA festival in Paris in 1994. He lives and teaches in Chicago. He can be reached at mjrychlewski[AT]hotmail.com (replace [AT] with @).
Margaret Szumowski’sI Want This World, published by Tupelo Press, won the Peace Corps Writers award for best book of poetry in 2002. In 2004 she received a grant for exceptional work in poetry by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, She hopes to continue teaching poetry to children, to inner city students, and to women in prison. Currently Szumowski is a professor at Springfield Technical College.
Joe Survant, a native Kentuckian, teaches writing and literature at Western Kentucky University . He is the author of three books of poetry, the most recent of which is Rafting Rise (University Press of Florida, 2002), and one chapbook. His work has appeared recently in Prairie Schooner, Limestone, and Bryant Literary Review. He is the winner of the 1995 Arkansas Poetry Award and a recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. He is currently serving a two-year term as Kentucky's Poet Laureate.
M. L. Williams teaches creative writing at Valdosta State University in Georgia. A grouping of his fine poems appears elsewhere in this issue.