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| Z at Cape Kolka in Latvia |
Zinta Aistars, founder and editor-in-chief of The Smoking Poet, is the published author of three books and currently at work on a novel. She is
a publications editor and writer for a health care organization in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was an editor and writer
for LuxEsto, the Kalamazoo College alumni magazine for seven years prior to that. She is a regularly
contributing writer to Southwest Michigan's Second Wave. Her work also appears on many ezines — including Xelas Magazine, Gently Read Literature, Amsterdam Scriptum, Boston Literary Magazine, Cezanne's Carrot, Outsider Ink, Ghoti Fish, Menda City Review, Megaera Magazine, T-Zero, Fiction Attic, Saucy Vox, Ash Canyon Review, ThothWeb, Flash Me Magazine, Spoiled Ink, Her Circle Ezine, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, The Redbridge Review, River Walk Journal, Flashquake, milk magazine, Word Riot, Burning Word, insolent rudder, Bobbing Around, coilMagazine, Poems Niederngasse, The Paper, Poetry Life & Times, QuietPoly Writer’s Magazine, and many others.
Read more of Zinta's work on her Web site. Or, tweet Zinta on Twitter.
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| Andris at Cape Kolka, on the Baltic Sea |
Andris Silis, our music
editor (and occasional photo essayist), is a graduate of the Jazeps Vitols Academy of Music in Latvia with degrees in double bass and music composition. He has played the double bass in the orchestra,
“Riga,” in Latvia, and was principle double bassist in the Keweenaw Symphony Orchestra in Houghton, Michigan (Keweenaw Peninsula). He has played in countless jazz ensembles in
Latvia and the United States. In 1980, he was the guitarist in the Latvian rock group, Zodiak, whose recording, Disco Alliance,
sold more than 20,000,000 copies in the Soviet Union, and is still being sold today. Among Andris’ many compositions
are “Symphony for Orchestra,” “Variations and Sonata for Piano,” “Duet for Double Bass and Cello,”
“Miniatures for Piano,” and many others. Andris lives in Ventspils, Latvia.
Mick Parson’s first collection of short stories, Living Broke, was published in June 2010. He is also the author of two previously published collections of poetry,
Fragments of Unidentifiable Form
and Lines From Another Book of Common
Prayer. His work has appeared online at The Smoking Poet, in The American
Mythville Review, The Dispatch Litareview, The Licking River Review, and featured online at semantikon.com. He has been a small press publisher, literary editor, a teacher, a janitor, a file clerk,
a cashier, and many other things he is trying to forget.
Mick’s
favorite cigar is a Rocky Patel Vintage 92 Junior, and when he can’t get those, he enjoys smoking Picasso or Lino or
Davidoff mini cigarillos. He also loves strong coffee and hot peppers, and has, in the past, eaten raw red serrano peppers
and (on a different occasion) raw jalapenos on a dare to get out of paying his bar tab.
Joannie Kervran Stangeland is poetry editor for The Smoking Poet. In addition to The Smoking Poet, Joannie Kervran Stangeland’s poetry has appeared in
Valparaiso Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ascent, Journal of the American
Medical Association, Horticulture, CHEST, Raven Chronicles, Crab Creek Review, and other publications—as well as
on Seattle-area (Washington) busses. Joannie is the author of two poetry chapbooks—A
Steady Longing for Flight, which won the Floating Bridge Press chapbook award, and Weathered Steps. Her work also appears in the Rose Alley Press anthologies Limbs of the Pine,
Peaks of the Range and Many Trails to the Summit.
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