Comings and Goings

Lineup co-editor Patrick Shawn Bagley has announced he is stepping down to devote more time to his novel Bitter Water Blues, and future projects. I'm grateful for Patrick's willingness to take on a labor of love, to help shape The Lineup from concept to finished chapbook last year and this year. Best of luck, my friend.

Patrick gave us ample time to find his successor, poet and police officer Sarah Cortez, who, besides writing some of the most powerful poems in Lineup #1, co-edited The Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, on sale tomorrow. Richie, Anthony, and I welcome Sarah and look forward to what she'll bring to The Lineup.

Index of Lineup Contributors

Browse Bios by Issue:

Issue 3 (2010)
Issue 2 (2009)
Issue 1 (2008)


Issue 3 (2010)

Patricia Abbott
Joe Barnes
Henry Chang
Reed Farrel Coleman
Sarah Cortez
Michael A. Flanagan
Anne Frasier
James W. Hall
David Hernandez
Amy MacLennan
Carrie McGath
James M. McGowan
Kristine Ong Muslim
David S. Pointer
James Sallis
Jackie Sheeler
Wallace Stroby
Larry D. Thomas
Francine Witte

Edited by Gerald So with Sarah Cortez, R. Narvaez, and Anthony Rainone.

Browse Bios by Issue


Issue 2 (2009)

Patrick Carrington
Reed Farrel Coleman
Sophie Hannah
John Harvey
Janis Butler Holm
Jennifer L. Knox
Amy MacLennan
Carol Novack
Deshant Paul
Karen Petersen
Manuel Ramos
Stephen D. Rogers
Christopher Watkins

Edited by Gerald So with Patrick Shawn Bagley, R. Narvaez, and Anthony Rainone.

Browse Bios by Issue


Issue 1 (2008)

Patrick Shawn Bagley
Ken Bruen
Sarah Cortez
Graham Everett
Daniel Hatadi
Daniel Thomas Moran
R. Narvaez
Robert Plath
Misti Rainwater-Lites
Stephen D. Rogers
A.E. Roman
Sandra Seamans
Gerald So
KC Trommer

Edited by Gerald So with Patrick Shawn Bagley, R. Narvaez, and Anthony Rainone.

Browse Bios by Issue

Christopher Watkins

Christopher Watkins is a poet and songwriter. His debut volume of poems "Short Houses With Wide Porches" was published by Shady Lane Press in April 2008. His second book, a collaboration with visual artist Scott Sandell entitled "Adult Life Jackets," will be published in Spring 2009 by Deepwater Editions. Watkins has poems published or forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, Slipstream, The GW Review, Euphony, Talking River, The Southampton Review, and more. He was the Fall 2006 Writer-In-Residence at The Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida. Watkins is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program at The University of Southern Maine. As a songwriter, he has released five albums under the name Preacher Boy. His latest release is "Demanding To Be Next" (Coast Road Records). He has received a Gold Record for his songwriting work with Grammy-Winning artist
Eagle-Eye Cherry. He currently lives in Capitola, California.

Manuel Ramos

Manuel Ramos is the author of six crime fiction novels, five featuring Denver lawyer Luis Móntez. He is a founder of La Bloga, an Internet magazine devoted to Latino literature, culture, news and opinion. He was a finalist for the Edgar® and is the recipient of the Colorado Book Award and the Chicano/Latino Literary Award.

Karen Petersen

KAREN PETERSEN, adventurer, photojournalist and writer, has traveled the world extensively, publishing both nationally and internationally. She is currently at work on Four Points on a Compass, a collection of her poems from overseas. She lives in New York.

Deshant Paul

Deshant Paul graduated from NYU with a degree in American Literature with a concentration on Creative Writing. Deshant’s work has been seen in the pages of NYArts magazine, AMNew York newspaper and other articles in print and online media. Although his freelance work has been largely non-fiction, storytelling remains his true passion and has been since he was 6 years old. Currently Deshant is working within the graphic novel medium to tell his stories with distinct visuals and a serialized format.

Carol Novack

Carol Novack, a former criminal defense and constitutional lawyer in NYC, is the publisher of the multi-media e-journal Mad Hatters' Review. A collection of inventions, "Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack," will be published by Crossing Chaos: Enigmatic Ink in 2010. Works may or will be found in more than 75 journals, including: 5_trope; Action, Yes; American Letters & Commentary; Diagram; Drunken Boat; Exquisite Corpse; First Intensity; Gargoyle; Journal of Experimental Fiction; Lamination Colony; La Petite Zine; LIT; MILK; Notre Dame Review; Otoliths, and Wheelhouse, and in anthologies, including: "The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets;" "Heide Hatry: Heads and Tales" "Online Writings: The Best of the First Ten Years;" and an Italian collection. Writings have been translated into French, Italian, Romanian, and Spanish. Please see Carol's blog for additional too much information: http://carolnovack.blogspot.com.

Amy MacLennan

Amy MacLennan has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, River Styx, Pearl, Linebreak, Cimarron Review, Folio, The Literary Bohemian, Willows Wept Review, and Rattle. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Not a Muse from Haven Books and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems from Ragged Sky Press.

Jennifer L. Knox

Jennifer L. Knox was born in Lancaster, California—once crystal meth capital of the nation, and home to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Space Shuttle.

She received her BA from the University of Iowa, and her MFA in poetry writing from New York University. She has taught poetry writing at Hunter College and New York University.

Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 1997, 2003 and 2006, Best American Erotic Poems, Great American Prose Poems: From Poet to Present, and Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books.

Her work also appears/has appeared/will appear in lots of places like American Poetry Review, Fence, Forklift Ohio, Ploughshares and Verse.

Janis Butler Holm

Janis Butler Holm lives in Athens, Ohio, where she has served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal. Her essays, stories, poems, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her plays have been produced in the U.S., Canada, and England.

John Harvey

John Harvey has enjoyed close to 35 years as a writer, mostly of fiction, and for some 25 of those years he ran Slow Dancer Press and edited Slow Dancer magazine. In 2007, he was awarded the British Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in the field of crime writing. Two collections of his poems have been published, Ghosts of a Chance [1992] and Bluer Than This [1998], both Smith/Doorstop Press. His contributions to The Lineup: Poems on Crime 2 are his first published poems for some time.

Sophie Hannah

Sophie Hannah is a best-selling crime-fiction writer and poet. Her thrillers Little Face, Hurting Distance, and The Point of Rescue have sold over 200,000 copies in the U.K. Her latest thriller is The Other Half Lives.

Sophie’s fifth collection of poetry, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot Award, and in 2004 she won first prize in the Daphne Du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition for her suspense story "The Octopus Nest," which is now published in her first collection of short stories The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets.

Sophie’s poetry is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and between 1999 and 2001 she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She is thirty-six and lives in West Yorkshire with her husband and two children.

Reed Farrel Coleman

Recently called a hard-boiled poet by NPR's Maureen Corrigan, Brooklyn-born and bred Reed Farrel Coleman is a former Executive Vice President of Mystery Writers of America. He has published ten novels--including two under his pen name Tony Spinosa--in three series. His eleventh novel, Tower, co-written with Ken Bruen, was released in September 2009. He has been twice nominated for the Edgar®, Macavity, and Barry Awards. He has won the Shamus (three times), the Barry and the Anthony Awards. He was the editor of the anthology Hardboiled Brooklyn. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Darker Half, Wall Street Noir, Damn Near Dead and several other publications. Reed is an adjunct lecturer at Hofstra University and he lives with his family on Long Island.

A contributor to The Lineup 2 and 3, Reed is a co-editor on Issue 4 (2011).

Patrick Carrington

Patrick Carrington is the author of Hard Blessings (MSR Publishing, 2008), Thirst (Codhill, 2007), and Rise, Fall and Acceptance (MSR Publishing, 2006), and winner of New Delta Review’s 2008 Matt Clark Prize and Yemassee’s Pocataligo Contest in poetry. His poems are forthcoming in The National Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Bellingham Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing in New Jersey and serves as the poetry editor of Mannequin Envy.

The Lineup #2 Ad coming to Crimespree Magazine

Take Cover!

Today I sent a PDF of The Lineup #2's interior to the contributors for proofing. Here's the front cover, photo by Erich Wood, design by John Collis: