Volume Two Contributors
Contributors
Born in Wales, Melisa Annis is now a New York City resident. Currently an MFA student in playwriting at Fordham University, her published works include Walking in Dylan's Footsteps for The Western Mail (UK), and What Is a Title for HowlRound.com. A winner of the Margaret Lamb Prize in fiction, Melisa is also the 2014 recipient of the Fordham Summer Fellowship. Her play, Pit, was produced in 2013 at Theater for The New City, and she has recently closed her one act Fit for a King at the Fordham Studio, directed by Kel Haney.
Stephen Beckwith has published a book of poetry, Epiphamatic Moments; three business books, Establishing Design Rationale, Global Branding for the American Marketplace, and From Mickey to Homer: Licensed Property Strategies; and a biography of Michigan Pioneer Louis Campau, The Last Voyageur. He has worked as a copywriter and senior creative director in Detroit, Chicago, Richmond, VA, and Grand Rapids, MI. He has taught copywriting and marketing at Grand Valley State University, and, for the past 12 years, creative writing at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids.
Dane Cervine was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Poetry Prize and won the 2013 Atlanta Review Poetry Prize and the 2013 Morton Marcus Poetry 2nd Prize. His new book is entitled How Therapists Dance, from Plain View Press (2013), which also published his previous book The Jeweled Net of Indra. His poems have been chosen by Adrienne Rich and Tony Hoagland for awards, and they've appeared in a wide variety of journals including The Hudson Review, The SUN Magazine, Sycamore Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Red Wheelbarrow, numerous anthologies, newspapers, video and animation. Visit his website at: www.DaneCervine.typepad.com.
J. Dee Cochran is an MFA graduate of Bennington College's Writing Seminars and an assistant editor at Identity Theory. Her work has or will appear in CALYX, Laurel Review, The English Journal, GLASSbook: A Journal of Fashion Photography and Poetry, and others.
Eric Duhon is a playwright originating from Lake Charles, Louisiana. He attended college at Northwestern State University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Theatre Performance and Directing. Since graduating in 2007, he has worked in professional theatre as an actor, carpenter, electrician and writer. Previously produced work includes: I Know (F.U.D.G.E. Theatre Co, Boston) and Master Class (Fury Theatre, Chicago).
Malinda Dunlap Fillingim holds a MSW from the University of South Carolina and a Master of Divinity degree from SEBTS, and teaches ESL at a local community college. She has had numerous stories published in various publications and enjoys speaking on issues of spirituality, poverty, and feminism. She lives in Leland, NC and can be reached at fillingam@ec.rr.com.
Elisabeth Frost’s books are All of Us: Poems (White Pine Press, 2011), The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa, 2003), and the chapbooks A Theory of the Vowel (Red Glass Books, 2013) and Rumor (Mermaid Tenement Books, 2009). With Cynthia Hogue, she edited Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (Iowa, 2006). Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere, and she has received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, The Rockefeller-Bellagio Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, among others. Frost is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Fordham University, where she also edits the Poets Out Loud book series from Fordham Press. She can be reached at http://www.elisabethfrost.net.
Ian Ganassi’s poetry, prose and translations have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including, most recently, New American Writing, Mad Hatter's Review (forthcoming), Offcourse, Interim, The Drunken Boat and New England Review, among many others.
David Greenspan’s plays include Jack, The Home Show Pieces, 2 Samuel 11, Etc., Dead Mother, She Stoops to Comedy, Go Back to Where You Are, The Argument and Jonas. These have been produced most notably by the NYSF/Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, The Foundry, Target Margin and Transport Group. An anthology of his plays is published by University of Michigan Press. Acting credits include New York premieres by David Adjmi, Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, Terrence McNally, Richard Foreman, Mac Wellman, solo renditions of Barry Conners’ The Patsy and Gertrude Stein’s lecture, Plays. Guggenheim and Lortel fellowships, an Alpert Award and five Obies.
Rinne Groff’s plays and musicals including Schooner, Comfort Inn, Compulsion, Saved, In the Bubble, What Then, The Ruby Sunrise, Inky, Jimmy Carter was a Democrat, and Orange Lemon Egg Canary have been produced by The Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Trinity Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Yale Rep, the Women’s Project, PS122, Clubbed Thumb, Target Margin, and Andy's Summer Playhouse, among others. TV: staff writer on Weeds, season two. Recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Obie Award grant. Founding member of Elevator Repair Service Theater Company. New Dramatists alum, Dramatist Guild publications committee.
Bernie Hafeli has published ten short stories in literary magazines. In 2013, his first book, the novella Bear Season, was published by Broken Bird Press/The Conium Review. Bernie graduated from the University of Michigan in 1972, and in 2006 received his MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. In between, he wrote advertising, so, in a sense, he’s been creating fiction his whole adult life.
Lorraine Jeffery earned her bachelor’s degree in English and her MLIS in Library Science, and has managed public libraries in Texas, Ohio and Utah for over twenty years. She has won several poetry prizes in state and national contests and has published over thirty poems in various publications, including Calliope, Ibbetson Street, July Literary Press and Rockhurst Review. Her articles have appeared in Focus on the Family, Mature Years and Woman’s Touch, as well as other publications. She is the mother of ten children (eight adopted) and currently lives with her husband in Orem, Utah.
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of eighteen books, an adjunct professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania, a monthly contributor to the Chicago Tribune and Philadelphia Inquirer, and the strategic writing partner in a boutique marketing communications firm. Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir (Gotham Books) won the 2013 Books for a Better Life Award (Motivational Category). Nests. Flight. Sky.: On Love and Loss One Wing at a Time, was published in February 2014 by Shebooks. Most recently, Beth’s ninth young adult novel, Going Over (Chronicle Books), a 1983 Berlin story and a Junior Library Guild Selection, was launched to three starred reviews.
Nancy Kricorian has published three novels--Zabelle (1998), Dreams of Bread and Fire (2003), and All the Light There Was (2013)—and has published poems in numerous literary magazines, among them Mississippi Review, Parnassus, Witness, The Antioch Review, and River Styx. Her essays have been published in The Minnesota Review, Filmmaker Magazine, In These Times, Women's Studies Quarterly, and online at Alternet, The Huffington Post, Common Dreams, Killing the Buddha and Mondoweiss. She lives in New York City.
Devi Lockwood will graduate Harvard in May 2014 with a degree in Folklore and Mythology and a language citation in Arabic. She is writing a book-length work of poems inspired by stories she collected last summer on an 800-mile bike trip along the Mississippi River. Devi is Harvard’s 2014 Gardner and Shaw Traveling Fellow and will spend next year biking in New Zealand, Fiji, Tuvalu, and the U.K. collecting stories about climate change. Her poems have been published in Tuesday Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, Awosting Alchemy, Verse Wisconsin, and are forthcoming in Adrienne. She can be reached, for comments/queries, at devi.lockwood@gmail.com.
John McCarthy's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Pinch, The Minnesota Review, Oyez Review, Salamander, Jabberwock Review, and Midwestern Gothic, among others. He lives in Springfield, Illinois and is the assistant editor of Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program.
JB Mulligan has had poems and stories in several hundred magazines over the past 35 years, has had two chapbooks published: The Stations of the Cross and This Way to the Egress, and has appeared in several anthologies, including multiple volumes of Reflections on a Blue Planet, Inside/Out: A Gathering Of Poets, and The Irreal Reader (Cafe Irreal).
Naomi Shihab Nye lives in San Antonio, Texas. She and her husband, photographer Michael Nye, will never forget the generosity and pride of the people in Syria who hosted them on their journeying there.
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author of the memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist, an Asian American Literary Award Finalist, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee, and the winner of the Grub Street National Book Award. Her novel about the Japanese American internment camps, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award in 2000. She is also a recipient of the U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts; a Hedgebrook alumna; and a faculty member at Goddard College. She has been interviewed widely on motherhood including on The Today Show, 20/20, and The View. Her articles have been published globally.
Purvi Shah furthers the art of transformation as a non-profit consultant, anti-violence advocate, and writer. In 2008, she won the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Service Excellence Award for her leadership fighting violence against women. In 2013, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected as a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Descant, Drunken Boat, Four Way Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indivisible, The Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, and Weber Studies. She loves a mean pecan pie and time in city parks. Discover Terrain Tracks, her award-winning book of poetry, or more of her work at http://purvipoets.net and @PurviPoets.
Joannie Stangeland is the author of In Both Hands and Into the Rumored Spring, both published by Ravenna Press, as well as two chapbooks. Joannie’s poems have appeared in Superstition Review, Crab Creek Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, First Water: Best of Pirene’s Fountain, and other journals and anthologies.
Wally Swist has published several books of poetry, including Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) and Velocity (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013). He is also the co-translator of The Daodejing of Laozi, along with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Press, 2015). His new poems appear in Commonweal and North American Review.
Carolyn Thorman’s novel was put out by Longstreet Press, Peachtree Press published her collection of short stories, and her fiction has appeared in a number of quarterlies including Cincinnati Review, Kennesaw Review, The Pennsylvania Review, Southern Exposure, Story Quarterly, and others. The literary review Illya’s Honey nominated her work for the Pushcart Prize. She’s also received awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and was granted a Maryland State Literary Fellowship. She holds degrees in Law and Anthropology. Currently she teaches at the College of the Mainland, and divides her time between Houston and Malaga, Spain.
Michelle Yasmine Valladares is a poet and filmmaker born in India who lives in Brooklyn. She is the author of Nortada, The North Wind (Global City Press). Her poems have been published in The Literary Review, Upstreet Journal and in the anthologies, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians. She is currently working on the SHALE project, a multimedia piece. She is producer of several films, including the award winning Brazilian film Landscapes of Memory by José Araújo. She is currently Lecturer in Creative Writing at The City College of New York in Harlem.
Teresa Vanairsdale received her undergraduate degree in English/Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University near Spokane, Washington, where she lives. Her poems have appeared in Northwest Boulevard, Yeah Write Review, and RiverLit.
Miles Waggener is the author of two poetry collections: Phoenix Suites (The Word Works, 2003), winner of the Washington Prize; and Sky Harbor (Pinyon Publishing, 2011), as well as two chapbooks: Portents Aside (Two Dogs Press, 2008) and Afterlives (Finishing Line Press, 2013). He lives in Omaha.
Shelly Weathers’ work has appeared or will appear in Redivider, Reed Magazine, and Elohi Gadugi, and has received the 2013 Beacon Street Prize for Fiction, as well as the 2014 John Steinbeck Fiction Award. Shelly holds an MFA from Goddard College and currently lives in Arizona.
Stephen Beckwith has published a book of poetry, Epiphamatic Moments; three business books, Establishing Design Rationale, Global Branding for the American Marketplace, and From Mickey to Homer: Licensed Property Strategies; and a biography of Michigan Pioneer Louis Campau, The Last Voyageur. He has worked as a copywriter and senior creative director in Detroit, Chicago, Richmond, VA, and Grand Rapids, MI. He has taught copywriting and marketing at Grand Valley State University, and, for the past 12 years, creative writing at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids.
Dane Cervine was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Poetry Prize and won the 2013 Atlanta Review Poetry Prize and the 2013 Morton Marcus Poetry 2nd Prize. His new book is entitled How Therapists Dance, from Plain View Press (2013), which also published his previous book The Jeweled Net of Indra. His poems have been chosen by Adrienne Rich and Tony Hoagland for awards, and they've appeared in a wide variety of journals including The Hudson Review, The SUN Magazine, Sycamore Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Red Wheelbarrow, numerous anthologies, newspapers, video and animation. Visit his website at: www.DaneCervine.typepad.com.
J. Dee Cochran is an MFA graduate of Bennington College's Writing Seminars and an assistant editor at Identity Theory. Her work has or will appear in CALYX, Laurel Review, The English Journal, GLASSbook: A Journal of Fashion Photography and Poetry, and others.
Eric Duhon is a playwright originating from Lake Charles, Louisiana. He attended college at Northwestern State University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Theatre Performance and Directing. Since graduating in 2007, he has worked in professional theatre as an actor, carpenter, electrician and writer. Previously produced work includes: I Know (F.U.D.G.E. Theatre Co, Boston) and Master Class (Fury Theatre, Chicago).
Malinda Dunlap Fillingim holds a MSW from the University of South Carolina and a Master of Divinity degree from SEBTS, and teaches ESL at a local community college. She has had numerous stories published in various publications and enjoys speaking on issues of spirituality, poverty, and feminism. She lives in Leland, NC and can be reached at fillingam@ec.rr.com.
Elisabeth Frost’s books are All of Us: Poems (White Pine Press, 2011), The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa, 2003), and the chapbooks A Theory of the Vowel (Red Glass Books, 2013) and Rumor (Mermaid Tenement Books, 2009). With Cynthia Hogue, she edited Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (Iowa, 2006). Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere, and she has received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, The Rockefeller-Bellagio Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, among others. Frost is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Fordham University, where she also edits the Poets Out Loud book series from Fordham Press. She can be reached at http://www.elisabethfrost.net.
Ian Ganassi’s poetry, prose and translations have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including, most recently, New American Writing, Mad Hatter's Review (forthcoming), Offcourse, Interim, The Drunken Boat and New England Review, among many others.
David Greenspan’s plays include Jack, The Home Show Pieces, 2 Samuel 11, Etc., Dead Mother, She Stoops to Comedy, Go Back to Where You Are, The Argument and Jonas. These have been produced most notably by the NYSF/Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, The Foundry, Target Margin and Transport Group. An anthology of his plays is published by University of Michigan Press. Acting credits include New York premieres by David Adjmi, Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, Terrence McNally, Richard Foreman, Mac Wellman, solo renditions of Barry Conners’ The Patsy and Gertrude Stein’s lecture, Plays. Guggenheim and Lortel fellowships, an Alpert Award and five Obies.
Rinne Groff’s plays and musicals including Schooner, Comfort Inn, Compulsion, Saved, In the Bubble, What Then, The Ruby Sunrise, Inky, Jimmy Carter was a Democrat, and Orange Lemon Egg Canary have been produced by The Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Trinity Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Yale Rep, the Women’s Project, PS122, Clubbed Thumb, Target Margin, and Andy's Summer Playhouse, among others. TV: staff writer on Weeds, season two. Recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Obie Award grant. Founding member of Elevator Repair Service Theater Company. New Dramatists alum, Dramatist Guild publications committee.
Bernie Hafeli has published ten short stories in literary magazines. In 2013, his first book, the novella Bear Season, was published by Broken Bird Press/The Conium Review. Bernie graduated from the University of Michigan in 1972, and in 2006 received his MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. In between, he wrote advertising, so, in a sense, he’s been creating fiction his whole adult life.
Lorraine Jeffery earned her bachelor’s degree in English and her MLIS in Library Science, and has managed public libraries in Texas, Ohio and Utah for over twenty years. She has won several poetry prizes in state and national contests and has published over thirty poems in various publications, including Calliope, Ibbetson Street, July Literary Press and Rockhurst Review. Her articles have appeared in Focus on the Family, Mature Years and Woman’s Touch, as well as other publications. She is the mother of ten children (eight adopted) and currently lives with her husband in Orem, Utah.
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of eighteen books, an adjunct professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania, a monthly contributor to the Chicago Tribune and Philadelphia Inquirer, and the strategic writing partner in a boutique marketing communications firm. Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir (Gotham Books) won the 2013 Books for a Better Life Award (Motivational Category). Nests. Flight. Sky.: On Love and Loss One Wing at a Time, was published in February 2014 by Shebooks. Most recently, Beth’s ninth young adult novel, Going Over (Chronicle Books), a 1983 Berlin story and a Junior Library Guild Selection, was launched to three starred reviews.
Nancy Kricorian has published three novels--Zabelle (1998), Dreams of Bread and Fire (2003), and All the Light There Was (2013)—and has published poems in numerous literary magazines, among them Mississippi Review, Parnassus, Witness, The Antioch Review, and River Styx. Her essays have been published in The Minnesota Review, Filmmaker Magazine, In These Times, Women's Studies Quarterly, and online at Alternet, The Huffington Post, Common Dreams, Killing the Buddha and Mondoweiss. She lives in New York City.
Devi Lockwood will graduate Harvard in May 2014 with a degree in Folklore and Mythology and a language citation in Arabic. She is writing a book-length work of poems inspired by stories she collected last summer on an 800-mile bike trip along the Mississippi River. Devi is Harvard’s 2014 Gardner and Shaw Traveling Fellow and will spend next year biking in New Zealand, Fiji, Tuvalu, and the U.K. collecting stories about climate change. Her poems have been published in Tuesday Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, Awosting Alchemy, Verse Wisconsin, and are forthcoming in Adrienne. She can be reached, for comments/queries, at devi.lockwood@gmail.com.
John McCarthy's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Pinch, The Minnesota Review, Oyez Review, Salamander, Jabberwock Review, and Midwestern Gothic, among others. He lives in Springfield, Illinois and is the assistant editor of Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program.
JB Mulligan has had poems and stories in several hundred magazines over the past 35 years, has had two chapbooks published: The Stations of the Cross and This Way to the Egress, and has appeared in several anthologies, including multiple volumes of Reflections on a Blue Planet, Inside/Out: A Gathering Of Poets, and The Irreal Reader (Cafe Irreal).
Naomi Shihab Nye lives in San Antonio, Texas. She and her husband, photographer Michael Nye, will never forget the generosity and pride of the people in Syria who hosted them on their journeying there.
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author of the memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist, an Asian American Literary Award Finalist, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee, and the winner of the Grub Street National Book Award. Her novel about the Japanese American internment camps, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award in 2000. She is also a recipient of the U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts; a Hedgebrook alumna; and a faculty member at Goddard College. She has been interviewed widely on motherhood including on The Today Show, 20/20, and The View. Her articles have been published globally.
Purvi Shah furthers the art of transformation as a non-profit consultant, anti-violence advocate, and writer. In 2008, she won the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Service Excellence Award for her leadership fighting violence against women. In 2013, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected as a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Descant, Drunken Boat, Four Way Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indivisible, The Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, and Weber Studies. She loves a mean pecan pie and time in city parks. Discover Terrain Tracks, her award-winning book of poetry, or more of her work at http://purvipoets.net and @PurviPoets.
Joannie Stangeland is the author of In Both Hands and Into the Rumored Spring, both published by Ravenna Press, as well as two chapbooks. Joannie’s poems have appeared in Superstition Review, Crab Creek Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, First Water: Best of Pirene’s Fountain, and other journals and anthologies.
Wally Swist has published several books of poetry, including Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) and Velocity (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013). He is also the co-translator of The Daodejing of Laozi, along with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Press, 2015). His new poems appear in Commonweal and North American Review.
Carolyn Thorman’s novel was put out by Longstreet Press, Peachtree Press published her collection of short stories, and her fiction has appeared in a number of quarterlies including Cincinnati Review, Kennesaw Review, The Pennsylvania Review, Southern Exposure, Story Quarterly, and others. The literary review Illya’s Honey nominated her work for the Pushcart Prize. She’s also received awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and was granted a Maryland State Literary Fellowship. She holds degrees in Law and Anthropology. Currently she teaches at the College of the Mainland, and divides her time between Houston and Malaga, Spain.
Michelle Yasmine Valladares is a poet and filmmaker born in India who lives in Brooklyn. She is the author of Nortada, The North Wind (Global City Press). Her poems have been published in The Literary Review, Upstreet Journal and in the anthologies, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians. She is currently working on the SHALE project, a multimedia piece. She is producer of several films, including the award winning Brazilian film Landscapes of Memory by José Araújo. She is currently Lecturer in Creative Writing at The City College of New York in Harlem.
Teresa Vanairsdale received her undergraduate degree in English/Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University near Spokane, Washington, where she lives. Her poems have appeared in Northwest Boulevard, Yeah Write Review, and RiverLit.
Miles Waggener is the author of two poetry collections: Phoenix Suites (The Word Works, 2003), winner of the Washington Prize; and Sky Harbor (Pinyon Publishing, 2011), as well as two chapbooks: Portents Aside (Two Dogs Press, 2008) and Afterlives (Finishing Line Press, 2013). He lives in Omaha.
Shelly Weathers’ work has appeared or will appear in Redivider, Reed Magazine, and Elohi Gadugi, and has received the 2013 Beacon Street Prize for Fiction, as well as the 2014 John Steinbeck Fiction Award. Shelly holds an MFA from Goddard College and currently lives in Arizona.