Contributors to Volume Eight, 2020
Sarah Anderson holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She has 15 years of high school teaching experience. With her husband, she owns and operates The Word Barn in Exeter, NH, a gathering space for literary and musical events, where she runs a reading series (The Silo Series) as well as writing workshops. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including The Hunger Journal, December Magazine, Off the Coast, and The Café Review.
Karen Lucrece Bates has lettered hundreds of comic books for Bongo Comics and Bapper Books. She also edits, writes and designs for their publications as well. Sometimes she draws pictures for greeting cards, picture books, textbooks and now, poetry. She does most of it on a computer in her home in Los Angeles, which she shares with four cats and one husband.
Ian Boothby is an Eisner Award winning writer known for his work as the lead writer on The Simpsons and Futurama comics. Boothby currently writes cartoons for The New Yorker and MAD Magazine with Pia Guerra, as well as writing and co-creating Exorsisters for Image Comics with artist Gisele Lagace and the Scholastic graphic novel series Sparks! with artist Nina Matumoto.
Rachel Caruso-Bryant is from Florida. After five years in Saudi Arabia, she is enjoying winters in the UK. Second only to writing is her love for traveling. Her husband and cats keep her both grounded and effervescent. She enjoys writing about cultural identities and displacement, her experiences abroad, and what it means to be a woman of the world. Her poems have appeared in the Crossways Literary Magazine, The Stark Poetry Journal, Voice of Eve, Gambling the Aisle, The Skinny Poetry Journal, A Lonely Riot, Gravel, The Red Eft Review, HitchLit Review, and more.
Cecil Castellucci is the award winning and New York Times Bestselling author of books and graphic novels for young adults. Her two newest graphic novels are Girl on Film (Boom!) and The Plain Janes (Little, Brown) and she is currently writing Batgirl for DC Comics. Her short stories and short comics have been published in literary magazines and many other anthologies. She has written two opera librettos, Les Aventures de Madame Merveille (World Premiere in 2010) and Hockey Noir: The Opera (World Premiere 2018). She is a two-time MacDowell Fellow. She lives in Los Angeles. www.cecilcastellucci.com
Claire Caviglia’s ten-minute plays include Night with No Stars, The F Word, and Red Wine Stains. Claire most notably writes one acts for high school performers and her play, How to Roommate, published by Heartland Plays, has been performed by schools across the United States. Claire recently received a business degree in hospitality management from the University of Denver and currently resides in Hong Kong. She can be reached at [email protected]
Nidhi Chanani was born in Kolkata, India and raised in California. She holds a literature degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She creates illustrations that capture love in everyday moments. In 2012 she was honored by the Obama Administration as a Champion of Change. Her illustrations are often featured at Disney Parks. She’s the author of Pashmina, the graphic novel, Shubh Raatri Dost/Good Night Friend, a bilingual board book, and illustrator of the picture book I will be fierce. Nidhi draws and dreams in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and kid.
everydayloveart.com
Jason B. Crawford is a black, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as Wellington Street Review, Barren Magazine, The Amistad, and Kissing Dynamite, he is also the Editor in Charge for The Knight’s Library Magazine. His chapbook collection Summertime Fine is a Short List selection for Nightingale & Gale. Website: JasonBCrawford.com Instagram: jasonbcrawford Twitter handle: @jasonbcrawford
James Ducat’s work has appeared in CutBank, Apogee, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Inflectionist Review, and others. He lives with his son and dog in a house painted pink.
Megan Fritts is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She spends her free time reading fiction and poetry, running, and benefiting from her partner’s obsession with Roman antiquity. She is slowly but surely coming to deeply appreciate the Midwest.
Bonnie Milne Gardner is an award-winning playwright and life-long Dramatists Guild member. She’s written over 35 plays, with productions by San Diego’s Human Rights Theatre Festival, Cleveland Play House, CATCO, Kent State University, Edward Albee Playwrights Conference, and The New School for Drama in NYC. Recently, she was included in The Best 10 Minute Plays of 2019 by Smith and Kraus. A two-time winner of the Ohio Arts Council Excellence in Playwriting grant, her book, The Emergence of the Playwright-Director in American Theatre, was published in 2001 by Edwin Mellon Press. She currently lives in Asheville, NC.
Joanna Gordon is a writer from the gentrified swamplands of East Honolulu. She graduated from the University of Hawaii at Manoa with a degree in English and completed a Masters in Fine Arts at Western Washington University. Her poems and prose have been published with Cherry Tree, The Tenderness Project, Blood Tree Literature and more. She has performed across national stages across the country as well as full length spoken word productions. Her writing is interested in discussions of white privilege, diaspora, trauma, and tenderness. On her spare time, Joanna enjoys scalding cups of coffee, hiking, bright lipstick and the company of great friends.
Pia Guerra is a Canada based cartoonist and comic book artist who came into prominence for her work as an artist and co-creator of Vertigo’s best selling series, Y – The Last Man with writer Brian K. Vaughan. She has won several awards for her comic book work including the industry’s highest honor, the Will Eisner Award. A frequent contributor to The Nib, a collection of her work, Me the People, has been published by Image Comics. Her humor cartoons regularly appear in MAD Magazine and The New Yorker.
Lisa Halpern is an Emmy nominated writer/director/producer. She was a resident playwright at the Seattle Repertory Theatre 2013-2015. Her play Flying Through Blue was a PlayPenn Finalist, an O’Neill Center Semi-Finalist and had staged readings at the Great Plains Theater Conference, Uprooted Theater’s Playwrights Festival, and the NW Playwright’s Alliance. Her play Margarita Stands had a reading at The Seattle Repertory Theater and was a finalist in We Broadway’s New Play competition and the Ashland New Play Festival. Lisa collaborated on a screenplay with Marta Kauffman (Co-creator of Friends/Grace & Frankie) and is an alumna of Hedgebrook, the women writers retreat, where she studied with Robin Swicord and Winnie Holtzman.
Zebulon Huset is a San Diego-based writer/photographer. His writing has appeared in The Southern Review, Louisville Review, Meridian, North American Review, Portland Review, Texas Review and Roanoke Review among others. He publishes a writing blog (Notebooking Daily) and his flash fiction submission guide was featured at The Review Review.
Monet Lessner is an educator by day and writer by night (when her kids sleep). Too many of her daily calories come from coffee, which she needs to keep up with her three kids and late-night writing tendencies. You can read her work online at Edify Fiction, Literary Mama and the Ruminate blog, or in print in the anthology, Nature’s Healing Spirit by Sheri McGregor and Silver Needle Press. You can also listen to her read the hilarious and terrifying story of her firstborn’s birth at Listen to Your Mother.
Jacqueline Briggs Martin is the author of twenty-one picture books for children including Snowflake Bentley, Caldecott Medal winner in 1999. Her books have been named to Smithsonian’s and Kirkus Review’s “Best Book” lists. In 2018 Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Re-mix (co-written with June Jo Lee) received an Orbis Pictus Honor Award and a Sibert Honor Medal. Creekfinding: A True Story received the Green Earth Award for Environmental Writing for Children and a Riverby Award, for exceptional non-fiction natural history. Martin is a faculty member of Hamline University’s Low Residency MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults.
Donnelle McGee is the author of Ghost Man, a novel (Sibling Rivalry Press), Shine, a novella (Sibling Rivalry Press), and Naked, a collection of poetry (Unbound Content). He earned his MFA from Goddard College. He is a faculty member at Mission College in Santa Clara, California. His work has appeared in Controlled Burn, Colere, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Home Planet News, Iodine Poetry Journal, Permafrost, River Oak Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Willard & Maple, among others. He also serves as the Lead Poetry Editor for Clockhouse. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Adam McOmber is the author of The White Forest: A Novel (Touchstone) as well as two collections of queer stories, This New & Poisonous Air and My House Gathers Desires (BOA). His new novel, Jesus and John, is forthcoming from Lethe Press in June 2020. His work has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review and Diagram. He teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Thorbjørn Petersen is a Danish cartoonist and illustrator living and working in Århus. He has collaborated with different artists and writers such as Steven T. Seagle (in the Eisner-nominated anthology, Get Naked) and Cecil Castellucci. He has also worked with several Danish artists and writers in the Ping Award-nominated Danish humor magazine, Fiesta Magasinet. Thorbjørn is a fanatic dog person and a huge fan of nostalgia and old American and Franco-Belgian comics.
Travis Price is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at North Carolina State University. His work has appeared in pioneertown and The Collagist. He has lived up and down the East Coast and, most recently, in Uruguay.
Phyllis Root has written more than fifty picture books for children. Her book Big Momma Makes the World won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and both Plant a Pocket of Prairie and One North Star have won Riverby Awards for exceptional non-fiction natural history. She has also written Searching for Minnesota’s Native Wildflowers: A Guide for Beginners, Botanists, and Everyone In Between, and her wildflower reports from the field with Kelly Povo can be heard on Minnesota Public Radio. Root is a faculty member of Hamline University’s Low Residency MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults.
A two-time National Book Award Finalist, Laura Ruby writes fiction for adults, teens and children. She is the author of the Printz Medal winning novel Bone Gap, as well as the history fantasy Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All. Other works include the Edgar-nominated children’s mystery Lily’s Ghosts, the ALA Quick Pick for teens Good Girls (2006), a collection of interconnected short stories about blended families for adults, I’m Not Julia Roberts (2007), and the York trilogy. She is on the faculty of Hamline University’s Masters in Writing for Children Program. She makes her home in the Chicago area.
Lucas Shepherd’s poetry has received two Pushcart Prize nominations, and his creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Hobart, and Hawai’i Pacific Review. He served in the United States Air Force from 2006-2010, where he was a flightline mechanic. Currently he teaches English in Tyler, Texas.
Noel Sloboda is the author of the poetry collections Our Rarer Monsters (sunnyoutside, 2013) and Shell Games (sunnyoutside, 2008) as well as several chapbooks, most recently Risk Management Studies (Kattywompus Press, 2015). He has also published a book about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein. He teaches at Penn State York.
Sherri L. Smith is the author of several award-winning young adult novels, including the 2009 California Book Awards Gold Medalist, Flygirl, and the Southern California Independent Bookseller Award winning novels, Pasadena and The Toymaker’s Apprentice. Her books appear on multiple state lists and have been named Amelia Bloomer and American Library Association Best Books for Young People selections. Sherri has worked in comics, animation, and construction. Currently, she teaches in the MFA Writing program at Goddard College and for Hamline University’s Children’s Writing MFA. She returns to World War II with her latest novel, The Blossom and the Firefly. Learn more at www.sherrilsmith.com
A finalist in the 2019 National Poetry Series contest,
David Swerdlow is the author of two collections of poetry: Bodies on Earth (Wordtech Editions, 2010) and Small Holes in the Universe (WordTech Editions, 2003). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Denver Quarterly, West Branch, The Laurel Review, American Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, and many other distinguished journals. His first novel, Television Man, is now available from Czykmate Productions. He teaches literature and creative writing at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
Tonya McKenna Trabant is a CoachEducatorPoetMom formed by her Alaskan birthplace. Her current residence in northcentral Wisconsin includes a swimmable lake shared with her partner, two near perfect children, a rescued dog, and some not-yet-laying hens.
Kip Wilson is the author of White Rose, a YA novel-in-verse about anti-Nazi political activist Sophie Scholl. White Rose won the 2017 PEN New England Susan P. Bloom Children’s Book Discovery Award, the 2019 Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children’s Literature, and received four starred reviews. It was published on April 2, 2019 with HMH’s Versify imprint. Kip holds a Ph.D. in German Literature and wrote her doctoral dissertation about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She’s lived in Germany, Austria, and Spain, and currently calls Boston home.
Issam Zineh was born in Los Angeles. As a teenager he moved to the northeastern United States where he lived on Cape Cod and Boston, MA. During his time in Boston, he served on staff and as editor-in-chief of Spectrum, the literary-arts magazine of Northeastern University. He has lived and worked up and down the east coast and now lives in Baltimore, MD with his partner and three daughters. His poems have appeared in numerous publications including California State Poetry Quarterly, Coracle, JAMA, Mudlark, Nimrod, and The Seattle Review.