June 17, 2010

Robinson Bolkum was born in Syracuse, New York, and raised in Seattle. He has earned bachelor of science, master of divinity, and master of arts degrees, and considers himself maybe just a little too dumb for Mensa. Employed at a glass factory in Everett, Washington, he works weekends at the nut kiosk at the Lake Stevens Safeway. He has been published only by Rose Alley Press.

See streamed video of this reading (starts at the 5:35 mark).

Vanessa Pepoy’s work was first published by her elementary school’s administration; they liked her short stories. She wrote her first anthropocentric love poem in seventh grade in the midst of her first “serious,” unrequited infatuation. Since then, she has written many other poems for humans and nonhumans alike, publishing her works in school yearbooks, a chapbook, various regional poetry collections, and a subatomic physics-themed creative writing compilation—this last one being the only published work she regrets to date. It was for an end-of-semester assignment in an undergraduate school pass/fail class for little academic credit; her attention wasn’t what it should have been, nor was it later when permitting to have the bollocks put in print sight unseen and unremembered. Now she lives beneath a crust of accumulated embarrassment, an accretion partially formed by the knowledge of her nonretractable, unsavory literary offspring.