February 8th, 2016

Alexis Rhone Fancher is the author of How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen and other heart stab poems, (Sybaritic Press, 2014), and State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, (KYSO Flash Press, 2015). Find her poems in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Slipstream, Fjords, H_NGM_N, great weather for MEDIA, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles, Chiron Review, Quaint Magazine, HOBART, Menacing Hedge,and elsewhere. Since 2013 she’s been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and four Best of The Net awards. Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly, where she also publishes “The Poet’s Eye,” a monthly photo essay about her ongoing love affair with Los Angeles. www.alexisrhonefancher.com

Beth McIlvaine stumbled into a spoken word tent at Lollapalooza when she was 13 and it changed her life. She was published in 51%, The Valley of Contemporary Poets Anthology, Don’t Blame the Ugly Mug: An Anthology, and some other publications she can’t remember because that was ages ago. More recently, she was published in the anthology Like a Girl from Lucid Moose Press and the online journal Damfino. She co-hosted the once-infamous Java Gardens reading in Huntington Beach with partners in crime Elmo Martin and Victor Infante and attended the National Poetry Slam as an alternate for the Laguna Beach team. But that was all before academia got a hold of her. A couple decades and four degrees later she thought maybe she should do that poetry thing again. She just completed her PhD in Biostatistics from USC’s Keck School of Medicine and lives in Altadena in a tiny house that faces the mountains.