EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Mary Francois Rockcastle
e-mail Mary

POETRY EDITOR
Patricia Kirkpatrick
e-mail Patricia

FICTION EDITOR
Sheila O'Connor
e-mail Sheila

CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITOR
Barrie Jean Borich
http://www.barriejeanborich.net
e-mail Barrie

MANAGING EDITOR OF
PRODUCTION & MARKETING
Meghan Maloney-Vinz
e-mail Meghan

Mary François Rockcastle is the author of the novel, Rainy Lake (Graywolf Press), which was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award and selected as one of the New York Public Library's 1996 Books of the Teen Age. An essay "Mixed Use in the City" was published in Toward the Livable City by Milkweed Editions (2004). She is currently at work on an ecological novel entitled Green Time. Her writing awards include a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction, a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and a Loft Mentor Award.

Rockcastle grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, and received her B.A. from Douglass College (Rutgers University). She moved to Minnesota in 1974 to do a Ph.D. in English but halfway through decided to focus on creative writing instead. She finished her M.A. with a double emphasis in English and creative writing in 1980. She taught in the creative writing program at the University of Minnesota for four years before joining the MALS faculty at Hamline in 1991. In 1997 she founded Water~Stone Review, a national literary review published by GLS. The Review has won a Pushcart Prize, a bronze award for design excellence from the Minnesota Magazine Publishers Association, and an award from Best American Poetry 2002. In 1999 she received a Distinguished Teaching and Service Award from the Graduate School of Liberal Studies.

Mary François Rockcastle is married to Garth Rockcastle, Dean of the School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Historic Preservation at the University of Maryland. They are exploring life as a commuting couple. They have two daughters, Maura and Siobhan.

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Patricia Kirkpatrick has published a poetry book, Century's Road (Holy Cow! Press), two letterpress chapbooks, Orioles and Learning to Read, and books for young readers, including Plowie: A Story from the Prairie (Harcourt), illustrated by her sister, artist Joey Kirkpatrick. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies What Have You Lost? (Simon and Schuster), The Writing Path (University of Iowa), Minnesota Writes: Poetry (Milkweed), and To Sing Along the Way (New Rivers). Poetry is forthcoming in The Poets Guide to the Birds, edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, Prairie Schooner, and on Saint Paul sidewalks through the Everyday Poetry Project. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts , Bush Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, and in 2006 the McKnight Fellowship Loft Award in Poetry. She received degrees from the University of Iowa and San Francisco State University.

Currently she teaches in the MFA program at Hamline University where
she is Poetry Editor for Water-Stone Review. She also has taught at Macalester College, the University of Texas (Extension), and San Francisco State University, and has conducted workshops and residencies at the Princeton Theological Seminary in addition to many schools, libraries, and associations. She received a Hamline Distinguished Teaching & Service Award and was a 2002 Shannon Institute for Community Leadership Fellow.

Her interviews with notable poets, including Adrienne Rich, Brenda Hillman, Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee, Eavan Boland, and Sharon Olds, are published widely; in 2001 she interviewed W. S. Merwin onstage at the University of Minnesota. Her essay on Minnesota literature, "Where Dakota Drifts Wild in the Universe", appeared in a 1999 Hungry Mind Review issue. She has read and performed her work and work by other writers in Minneapolis (the Loft, Walker Art Center, Patrick's Cabaret), Saint Paul, San Francisco, Seattle, Iowa City, and Texas. As a founding member of the Minnesota Arts Alliance, she initiated creation of the "Silent Witness" figures commemorating women killed by domestic violence which were exhibited in the United States Senate and throughout the country.

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Borich is the recipient of many literary prizes including a Bush Artist Fellowship, two Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships, a Loft McKnight Award in Creative Prose, and a Loft Mentor Award in Poetry. She was one of two writers chosen by Rosellen Brown to receive a Loft McKnight Award of Distinction, and was among those chosen by both Scott Russell Sanders and Gloria Anzaldua to receive Loft Creative Nonfiction Mentor Awards.

About her work Rosellen Brown has written, "She makes accessible (and does so in lovely sentences) emotions which I might easily find--have so often found--either clichéd or opaque. She writes...with a rare deftness, clarity and sense of humor, never strident or defensive, rather self-confident, as if she herself were curious to discover what she is thinking..."

Borich has published prose and poetry in many literary journals including Water~Stone Review, Speakeasy, The Ruminator Review, The Gettysburg Review, 13th Moon, The Greenfield Review, Sinister Wisdom and Sing Heavenly Muse!, and was one of the founding editors of The Evergreen Chronicles. She served as a Loft Mentor Series featured author and mentor for the third time in 2008 and is currently a core member of the Graduate School of Liberal Studies MFA faculty at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She lives with her beloved, Linnea Stenson, and their two goldendoodles, Miss Dusty Springfield and Miss Rosemary Clooney, in south Minneapolis.

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Meghan Maloney-Vinz worked as the Design Coordinator with the Hamline University Graduate School of Liberal Studies Student literary magazine rock, paper, scissors (a journal she helped create) for two years before coming on board with Water~Stone Review. As a student in the MFA program at Hamline, she served on the poetry editorial board for two issues including 2007 when she was Poetry Assistant Editor. Maloney-Vinz also created and managed the branding and design for the Hamline graduate student group, West Egg Literati during her time in the program. In addition to her duties as Managing Editor, she is the Teaching Assistant to poetry editor, Patricia Kirkpatrick this spring.

Maloney-Vinz hails from Lake Mills, Wisconsin, a small town near Madison. She received her B.A. from the University of St. Thomas and taught high school English for eight years at St. Paul Central before leaving the profession to pursue her MFA in poetry. Her poetry manuscript, World, was one of the finalists for consideration of Outstanding Thesis in its genre for 2007. She lives in St. Paul, MN with her partner, Lisa and their daughter, Maeve.

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