Founding Editors Ray Marsocci, currently an adjunct instructor of writing in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College, holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He began publishing poetry and fiction in the late 1980s, and has since placed his work in a number of national literary journals, including Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Jeopardy, Oxford Magazine, and, most recently, River City and Green Mountains Review. Marsocci taught college composition, research writing, literature, and creative writing for six years, and has done ample freelance editorial work in a variety of fields. Prior to arriving in Rome at Thanksgiving of 2004, Marsocci worked full-time as an editor in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for more than five years, performing substantive editing, copyediting, proofreading, writing, and layout and design work for Callan Publishing, a newspaper and magazine publisher. Simultaneously, he served as Associate Editor with Elixir Press, a nationally recognized independent literary publisher. Reading all poetry and fiction submissions to its magazine and all book and chapbook entries to the press’s contests, his was a decisive voice in all magazine publications through five issues, volumes four and five comprising two editions each, and in narrowing the submission field to a select group of finalists, from among which an outside judge selected a winner. Marsocci subsequently laid out and designed these book and magazine publications, then performed managing editor tasks, including composing press correspondence, clerical and accounting duties, and distribution efforts. Sandra Meek, an associate professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College, is the author of a chapbook, The Circumference of Arrival (2001), and two full-length collections of poems, Nomadic Foundations (2002) and Burn (2005). In 2003, she was awarded the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry and the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry, both for Nomadic Foundations. In 2006, she again received the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry, this time for Burn. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Meek was awarded Editors’ Choice for the 2002 James Wright Award, given by Mid-American Review. Her poems have appeared in Agni, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, Conjunctions, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, and Quarterly West, among others,and have been featured on the Websites Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poetry Net. She has also published essays and reviews on contemporary African, Caribbean, and U.S. literature. Sandra Meek received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Colorado State University where she also served as an Assistant Editor at Colorado Review. After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer, in Manyana, Botswana, from 1989-1991, she earned a Ph.D. in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Denver, where she was a two-time recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award and served as an Associate/Advisory editor at Denver Quarterly. Michael Mejia is an assistant professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College. He is the recipient of a 2006 Literature Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment of the Arts. His novel Forgetfulness was published by Fiction Collective 2 in 2005 and his fiction, nonfiction, and book reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from the journals Agni, Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, 3rd bed, New Orleans Review, Salt Hill, Pleiades, and American Book Review, among others. Mejia has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and in 2003 he received a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. In 1999, for research related to Forgetfulness, he was awarded a travel grant to Vienna, Austria, by the University of Alabama, where he completed his MFA in Creative Writing in 2000. While at Alabama he received an Alumni Fiction Award in 1997 and an honorable mention for the same award in 2000. Mejia also served as an assistant fiction editor for Black Warrior Review, a nationally-recognized literary journal run by students in the University of Alabama’s MFA program in Creative Writing, and from 2001 to 2003, in addition to adjunct teaching courses in composition, literature, and creative writing, he worked as an editorial assistant for The Gettysburg Review, proofreading and evaluating fiction submissions. Mejia is voting member of the Fiction Collective 2 editorial board and has been invited to judge a number of writing competitions, including the novel portion of the Utah Arts Council’s 2005 Original Writing Competition. Mindy Wilson is Managing Editor of The Georgia Review, one of the nation’s most highly esteemed literary quarterlies. With ten years of editorial experience working with nationally known literary journals and scholarly presses, she is skilled in every aspect of editing and publishing, including manuscript acquisition, production, and marketing, and has worked with some of the nation’s most talented writers. For nearly four years (2000-2004) she was managing editor of The Gettysburg Review, a highly regarded literary quarterly, where she coordinated production of manuscripts and artwork from acceptance through publication. Responsible for marketing and business functions as well, she also wrote successful grant proposals and administered funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Wilson was influential in the acquisition and development of scholarly and trade book manuscripts in her role as assistant editor at the University of Alabama Press (1997-2000), and she made the primary creative and administrative decisions as editor (1995-1997) of Black Warrior Review, a literary semiannual published at UA, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts (1997) in creative writing (fiction). After moving to Rome in August 2004, Wilson developed a highly successful venture as a freelance editor for the university presses at Georgia, Alabama, and Pittsburgh, among others, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia (www.georgiaencyclopedia.com), a project of the Georgia Humanities Council. Wilson has published short fiction in New Orleans Review and nonfiction in Alabama Heritage.
