Austin Alexis, Charlie Bondhus, Dean Kostos, & Lynn McGee read from their recent books.

Austin Alexis is the author of one full-length collection: Privacy Issues, published by Lotus Press (Wayne State University Press, distribution).  It was selected by California’s poet laureate emeritus, Al Young, to receive the Naomi Madgett Poetry Award.  His two chapbooks, both published by Poets Wear Prada, are Lovers and Drag Queens and For Lincoln & Other Poems.  One of his poems is included in a song cycle entitled Love Poems by composer David Morneau, recorded by Naxos.  His plays have been performed and/or read at The Samuel French Short Plays Festival, Vineyard Theater, the NYC LGBT Center, Performance Space 122 and elsewhere.  His short fiction, essays and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in The Ledge: Poetry and Prose, Paterson Literary Review, Home Planet News, Poetry Pacific (Canada), The Long-Islander and the anthology Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, the first anthology of poetry about television.

Charlie Bondhus’s second poetry book, All the Heat We Could Carry, won the 2013 Main Street Rag Award and the Publishing Triangle’s 2014 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work appears or is set to appear in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Gay & Lesbian Review, CounterPunch, The Alabama Literary Review, and Midwest Quarterly. He is the poetry editor at The Good Men Project (goodmenproject.com).

Dean Kostos’s collections include This Is Not a Skyscraper (recipient of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, selected by Mark Doty, forthcoming from Red Hen Press in April of 2015), Rivering, Last Supper of the Senses, The Sentence That Ends with a Comma, and Celestial Rust. He co-edited Mama’s Boy: Gay Men Write about Their Mothers and edited Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry (its debut reading was held at the United Nations). He translated and compiled a suite of Ancient, Byzantine, and Modern Greek poems for an event sponsored by Rockefeller Foundation.

His work has appeared in over 300 journals, including The Bangalore Review (India), Boulevard, Chelsea, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Mediterranean Poetry (Sweden), The Same, Southwest Review, Stand Magazine (UK), Vanitas, Western Humanities Review, on Oprah Winfrey’s website Oxygen.com, and elsewhere. His libretto, Dialogue: Angel of War, Angel of Peace, was performed by Voices of Ascension. His literary criticism has appeared on the Harvard UP Web site and Talisman. A multiple Pushcart-Prize nominee, and a finalist for the Gival and Jot Speak (UK) awards, he has taught at Wesleyan, The Gallatin School, and CUNY. His poem “Subway Silk” was translated into a film and screened in Tribeca and at San Francisco’s IndieFest. He is currently working on another collection of poems and a memoir.

Lynn McGee recently won the Bright Hill Press manuscript contest and her chapbook, Heirloom Bulldog, is forthcoming in late Spring 2015. Her full-length manuscript, Sober Cooking, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Press in January 2016. Her poems appear in recent or current issues of Storyscape, the American Poetry Review, Sensitive Skin magazine, Right Hand Pointing, Hawai’i Review, The Same and many other journals. With poet Gerry LaFemina, she co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series in Brooklyn, and she works as a news writer for a CUNY college.