Red Hen Press authors t’ai freedom ford, Celeste Gainey, Dean Kostos, Heather Aimee O’Neill, Jason Schneiderman in celebration of Hanging On Our Own Bones, the new poetry collection from LGBTQ and feminist icon/activist Judy Grahn.

 
Judy Grahn is a poet, writer, and social theorist. She currently serves as Research Faculty for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California. She is former director of Women’s Spirituality MA and Creative Inquiry MFA programs at New College of California. Her books include love belongs to those who do the feeling (Red Hen Press, 2008), Blood, Bread, and Roses (Beacon Press, 1994), Edward the Dyke and Other Poems (The Women’s Press Collective, 1971), and Hanging On Our Own Bones (forthcoming from Red Hen Press, 2017).

 
t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher, Cave Canem Fellow, and Pushcart Prize nominee. She received her MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. In 2014, she was the winner of The Feminist Wire’s inaugural poetry contest judged by Evie Shocklee and is a 2015 Center for Fiction Fellow. She won the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize from A Room of Her Own Foundation (AROHO). Her fiction has appeared in Black Ivy, The Brooklyn Review, Bronx Biannual, and Kweli, and her poetry has appeared in Drunken Boat, Sinister Wisdom, No, Dear, The African American Review, and more. Her first poetry collection, how to get over, will be released by Red Hen Press in the spring of 2017.

 
Celeste Gainey is the author of the poetry collection, the GAFFER, from Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. Her chapbook, In the land of speculation & seismography (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011), was runner-up for the 2010 Robin Becker Prize. Graduating with a BFA in Film & Television from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, as well as earning an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Carlow University, Gainey was the first woman to be admitted to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) as a gaffer, and has spent many years working with light in film and architecture.
 

Dean Kostos’s collections include Rivering (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012), Last Supper of the Senses (Spuyten Dyvil, 2005), The Sentence That Ends with a Comma (Painted Leaf Press, 1999), and Celestial Rust (Red Dust, 1994). He edited Mama’s Boy and Pomegranate Seeds. His work has appeared in leading journals: Boulevard, Chelsea, Cimarron Review, Cincinnati Review, Southwest Review, Western Humanities Review, and on Oxygen.com. Having taught at Wesleyan, The Gallatin School, and The City University of New York, he also wrote a libretto for Voices of Ascension, and his poem, “Subway Silk,” was translated into a short film by Jill Clark. He is also author of This Is Not a Skyscraper (Red Hen Press, 2015).

 
Heather Aimee O’Neill is a co-author of Obliterations, written with Jessica Piazza (Red Hen Press, 2016). She teaches writing at CUNY Hunter College and is the assistant director for the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, one of New York City’s most prominent writing workshop organizations.

 
Jason Schneiderman was born in San Antonio, Texas, but was raised around the United States and Western Europe. He holds BAs in English and Russian from the University of Maryland, an MFA from BYU, and a PhD from the Graduate Center of CUNY. He is the author of two previous collections of poems: Sublimation Point (Four Way Books, 2004) and Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize. He is also the editor of the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press, 2015). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry, Verse Daily, The Poetry Review, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Schneiderman has received Fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and is the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and lives in Brooklyn with his husband, Michael Broder.