Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926) born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, understood the power of words. At a lover’s urging, he changed his name to Rainer, which he thought sounded more masculine. He is probably the best-known 20th-century German-language poet, best known for his Duino Elegies, his Sonnets to Orpheus, and his New Poems. In the Duino Elegies—his most important work—and his other poems, Rilke combined knowledge of classical literature with a mystical sense of existence and religion.
Maria Picone is a student at Goddard College’s low-residency MFA program and has degrees in philosophy from Rice and Princeton. She taught herself French after she attended a Descartes seminar as an undergraduate, in which she was the only one who couldn’t read French. Since then she has read not only philosophy but a wide range of literature in the original. She also has a personal affinity for French because she grew up hearing her grandmother often sing or curse in the language.
David Mason lives and writes and travels with his wife, Chrissy. Two new books will appear in 2014: Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade and Davey McGravy: Tales for Children and Adult Children. He is Poet Laureate of Colorado, and also has a home in Oregon.
Rachael Briggs, when she’s not writing poetry, works as a research fellow in philosophy. She splits her time between Griffith University in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, and the Australian National University in Canberra, ACT, Australia. She has published poems in Rattle and The Tower Journal, and likes to perform at a variety of Brisbane venues, including Words or Whatever, Speedpoets, Riverbend Poets, Whispers Salon and the Queensland Poetry Festival.
D.R. Goodman, a native of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, studied biology at Reed College in Oregon and philosophy at UC Berkeley, before leaving academia to practice writing and martial arts. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is founder and chief instructor at a martial arts school. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Crazyhorse, Notre Dame Review, Seattle Review, Tampa Review, Whitefish Review, and many others; and in the 2005 anthology, Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets, William Baer, editor.
Chris Childers teaches at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware. He is hard at work translating a volume of Greek and Latin lyric poetry for Penguin Classics.
Cheryl Diane Kidder has a BA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her work, nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared or is forthcoming in: CutThroat Magazine, Weber—The Contemporary West, Pembroke Magazine, Able Muse, decomP Magazine, Tinge Magazine, Brevity Magazine, Brain,Child Magazine, Identity Theory, In Posse Review, and elsewhere.