Artists
Stephen C. Behrendt is a native of northeastern Wisconsin who lives now in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife Patricia and their daughters Maia and Mei Grace, and an assortment of rescued dogs and cats. He is George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. An international authority on British Romantic literature and culture, he is also a widely published poet. Refractions, published by Shechem Press, is his fourth collection.
Damon Falke is the author of By Way of Passing, Notes on Paper, Broken Cycles, and two plays produced by Square Top Repertory Theatre, including The Sun is in the West and Canaan. He work is influenced by living throughout the Southern and Southwestern regions of the US.
Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton is a visual artist who works in printmaking, photography, and graphic design. Her books Broken Cycles and A Story of America Goes Walking were published by Shechem Press. Her work has been shown in galleries across the US and published in a variety of journals and full length books. She lives in Spokane, WA, where she teaches visual art.
Charles M Pepiton is a director and teaches theatre at Gonzaga University. His work revolves around creating new work and exploring new potentials for theatre to engage across borders–between people and cultures, between methods and disciplines.
Joshua Mehigan’s first book, The Optimist (Ohio UP, 2004), was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. His second book, Accepting the Disaster, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Born in upstate New York in 1969, he has lived for the past twenty years in New York City, where he currently works as a teaching fellow at Brooklyn College. Mehigan’s poems have been featured in many periodicals, including Poetry, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Ploughshares, on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, and in anthologies such as Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (Penguin, 2008) and Bright Wings (Columbia UP, 2009). Translations of his poems by Christophe Fricker have appeared in the German periodicals Akzente, Krachkultur, and Zeichen & Wunder. Mehigan was awarded Poetry magazine’s 2011 Editors Prize for best feature article of the year. He was also the recipient, in 2011, of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Shechem Press collaborated with Josh on the 2012 Artist Series of Broadsides.
Saara Myrene Raappana is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. She served in Guizhou, China, where she taught English to future English teachers, studies Mandarin, and discusses candy preferences with local children. Saara is the author of A Story of America Goes Walking, published by Shechem Press in May 2016. She is an editor for Cellpoems, a poetry journal distributed via text message that won a 2010 Innovations in Reading Prize from the National Book Foundation. She received her MFA from the University of Florida and has worked with elders and at-risk adolescents; been an international comparative education consultant; edited pop culture ’zines, vocational magazines and literary journals; taught poetry to undergraduates and prisoners; and served pizza. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as Blackbird, Harvard Review Online, The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, Subtropics, and Verse Daily. Her criticism can be found in American Book Review and The Rumpus. Shechem Press also collaborated with Saara on the 2012 Artist Series of Broadsides.
