January 15, 2009

Ronda Broatch is the author of Shedding Our Skins (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and Some Other Eden (2005). A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and recently for Best of the Web, Ronda is the recipient of a 2007 Artist Trust GAP grant. She received degrees in creative writing, art, and photography from the University of Washington, guided by Nelson Bentley and Charles Johnson. She has conducted poetry workshops with children from grade school through high school. Ronda’s work has appeared in numerous journals in print and online, including Atlanta Review, Rattle, Blackbird, Rhino, and Verse Daily. She is also the mother of two great kids and four unruly blogs.

Herb McClees comes from New England, and now makes his home in Kirkland, Washington. After stops in Texas and Singapore, his childhood interest in science took him to Boston and a bachelor’s degree from M.I.T. in electrical engineering. Against the advice of faculty advisors, Herb chose most of his electives in philosophy and Eastern religion. His professional career spans geophysics, software engineering, organization development, and marketing. Herb began writing poems at fourteen. His early influences were Poe, Sandburg, and Whitman and later, Chinese poetry, Eliot, Yeats, Thomas, Millay, Stevens, and Baudelaire. Herb appears at Seattle-area open mics and is a member of Haiku Northwest, the Redmond Association of Spokenword, and the Washington Poets Association. The Catch is his first published book.