Contributors
L. Ward Abel, poet, composer and performer of music, teacher, retired lawyer, lives in rural Georgia, has been published hundreds of times in print and online, and is the author of Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006), The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008), Torn Sky Bleeding Blue (erbacce-Press, 2010), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Cousins Over Colder Fields (Finishing Line Press, 2013), Roseorange (Flutter Press, 2013), and the forthcoming Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016).
Terry Barr has had essays published in The Bitter Southerner, Red Truck Review, and Hippocampus, among other journals. His collection, Don't Date Baptists and Other Warnings From My Alabama Mother, will be published in 2016 by Red Dirt Press. He lives in Greenville, SC, with his family.
Rachael Avery Barton has worked in some form of education since she was 16. Her high school after-school job was working as a preschool aid and everything just fell into place from there. She graduated from UMASS Amherst in 2009 with a BA in History. She got her official teaching start as a lead preschool teacher for a year while she attended undergrad; then she was a sped paraprofessional for 2 years at the elementary school level. After that she went on to receive her MAT from Tufts University in history secondary education. She spent her first full-time teaching year teaching 11th grade US history in Billerica High School before she decided..."I HATE teaching high school!" She then got a job in Leominster as an 8th grade world history teacher where she has been for the past 5 years. She loves teaching middle school, considers “it is where I am meant to be.” At her school she serves as one of 5 site council members working closely with the administration and school committee to draft and enact district middle school policy. Additionally she runs the Washington DC trip and serves as a middle school curriculum developer for the district’s history department. She helped to create the current 8th grade world history curriculum map and Common Core alignment.
Michael Everett Capuano is serving his ninth term as a Representative in Congress for Massachusetts' Seventh District. He is the senior Massachusetts member on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Financial Services Committee. He was named to the House Ethics Committee in 2013. When Democrats took back a majority in the House, Mike was appointed to head the Transition by Leader Nancy Pelosi. He was also appointed to chair the Special Task Force on Ethics Enforcement, which resulted in the establishment of the Office of Congressional Ethics, and what the Washington Post called “a significant improvement over the current process.” Moved by the story of a young man forced out of school and into hiding after telling authorities of a crime he witnessed, Mike filed the "Young Witness Assistance Act" to create a grant program at the Department of Justice for locally developed juvenile witness assistance initiatives. Mike co-founded and co-chairs the Congressional Caucus on Sudan and South Sudan. He has emerged as a leading Congressional voice, traveling to the region, securing $50 million for peacekeepers and advocating for a strong response to the humanitarian crises there. Prior to serving in Congress, Mike was the Mayor of Somerville, MA from January of 1990 through January of 1999. He was born in Somerville, graduated from Somerville High School, received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College in 1973, and a law degree from Boston College Law School in 1977. Mike is married to Barbara Teebagy Capuano. They have two sons, Michael and Joseph.
John Garmon is a writing assistant at the College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas. His poems and stories have been in Radius, Commonweal, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Paradise Review, Southern Poetry, Florida Review, Passages North, and many other places.
Peter Grieco teaches writing at Niagara University and studies French in Buffalo, NY, his native city. His series of semi-procedural verse, "At the Musarium," is updated regularly at http://pjgrieco.wordpress.com/
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had 9 one person shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Allen Memorial Art Museum, New York Univesity, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright Knox Art Gallery. Since 2007 his paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 230 on line and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock Krasner grants, The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and in 2010 he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. He currently teaches art to retired public school teachers at the United Federation of Teachers program in Brooklyn.
Ken Hawes has been teaching prospective secondary teachers at Wellesley College for thirty years. He also teaches writing and educational policy there.
Phillip James is the History Department Coordinator at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He has 30 years of teaching experience, offering courses in American history and philosophy.
Jake Sandler publishes visual typewritten poetry under the name Rio Jones. His work has been featured on The Huffington Post, Poetry.org and Aplus.com. He is currently writing from the town of Nahuala, Guatemala.
Tim Kahl [http://www.timkahl.com] is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) and The String of Islands (Dink, 2015). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup (http://greatamericanpinup.wordpress.com/) and the poetry video blog Linebreak Studios [http://linebreakstudios.blogspot.com/]. He is also editor of Bald Trickster Press and Clade Song [http://www.cladesong.com]. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center.
Kenneth Kesner lives in Shan State of Myanmar, has poems included in The Criterion, Danse Macabre du Jour, The Inflectionist Review and Subterranean Blue Poetry, and is a long-time student of Tae Kwon Do.
Beth Konkoski’s work has been published in journals such as The Potomac Review, Gargoyle, Saranac Review and Mid-American Review. She is a high school and college English teacher living in Northern Virginia.
Véronique Latimer was born and raised in the Boston area, but has also called France, Morocco and New York her home. She studied art and a lot of other things at Vassar College (B.A., 1997) and Parsons the New School of Design (M.F.A. painting, 2004). Her illustration debut stemmed from entering parenthood and having some voracious readers in the house. She was lucky to study Children’s Book Illustration with some great people and to have access to a fantastic library for constant inspiration. She also teaches high school and does a lot of doodling in her lesson planning book during hall duty.
Tennae Maki is a weekend writer that works for an architecture firm. She holds a Master's degree in Art History, where she studied architecture zines and urban planning. She is also the audio archivist for a Brooklyn-based arts radio station. Her work has been published in numerous print and digital literary journals, including 491, Spillway, Eunoia Review, Futures Trading, The Bicycle Review, Lone Star Poetry Magazine, and Belleville Park Pages.
A resident of New York, Stephen Mead is a published artist, writer, maker of short-collage films and sound-collage downloads. Google Stephen Mead and the genres of either writing, art, or both, for links to his multi-media work.
Jennifer Minotti is a Visiting Artist at the Center for Women's Health and Human Rights at Suffolk University. She is an award winning Web designer, information architect, researcher, and writer. She is Founder of the Women’s Writing Circle and Co-Director of The World's Very First Gratitude Parade. She is a graduate of Boston University (B.S.) and Columbia University (M.A.,M.Ed). She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and two children.
Jefferson Navicky's plays have been produced in The Boston Theater Marathon and The Maine Playwright's Festival. Other writing has been published in Hobart, Birkensnake, Octopus, The Cafe Review and Unbroken. He teaches English at Southern Maine Community College, and lives in Freeport, Maine with his partner, Sarah, and his restlessness. "A Road That Happened to be Broken" was originally produced as a part of The Maine Playwright's Festival a few years ago.
Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly. His poetry and interviews have appeared in Nimrod, Portland Review, Kestrel, Cream City Review, Poetry Salzburg, Boston Poetry Magazine, The Journal, Gertrude, The Bacon Review, and many others. He has published a travel guide, Best Choices In Northern California, and Time Lines, a book of poems. He lives in Marina, California.
Born in New Hampshire in 1955, raised on the campus of Phillips Academy, Andover, the second of five children, Abbie Owen Read grew up with access to the natural world as well as superior facilities on campus where her father was an instructor in English and Theater. She spent her junior year of high school living in France, as a student in the School Year Abroad Program. The coast of Maine became an integral part of the family’s life when her parents began spending part of the summer on Matinicus Island, in Maine, where her parents had purchased property in the 1950s. Her art education began early, not only under the tutelage of her mother Sally, who was a visual artist, but also under Virginia Powell who taught at Abbot Academy and which Abbie attended. At Oberlin College in the 1970s Abbie majored in both studio art and art history, studying with Paul Arnold, Eleanor Johnson, Athena Tacha, John Pearson and others, then went on to teach painting, printmaking and drawing at Concord Academy in Concord, MA where she stayed until she and her husband moved to Ann Arbor, MI in 1989. In 1991 Abbie received her MFA from the School of Art at the University of Michigan where she was a student in the short lived Mixed Media Program under Carol Ann Carter. Following graduate school she attended Michigan State University where she studied landscape design then started ARTgarden, a landscape gardening business. She and her husband Bart finally moved permanently to mid coast Maine in 1998 where she relocated ARTgarden, and enjoyed working with her clients until a life altering accident in 2011 motivated her to finally dedicate her days exclusively to her art. Her studio on Appleton Ridge in Appleton retains the name ARTgarden where ideas germinate, develop and mature. While printmaking was her particular passion for many years, early on she also drew and painted watercolors of the landscape of Maine and around New England, learned how to make paper, and in graduate school studied welding, rustic furniture making, furniture design, assemblage, oil painting and figure drawing. As a passionate gardener, she finds that the natural world has always in some way informed her art. As a graduate student she taught herself the rudiments of making books but it wasn’t until she began taking classes with Rebecca Goodale in Maine that she began to hone her skills in Book Arts. While not calling herself an expert in that field, she incorporates these skills, as well as her passion for collecting old books and odd objects, into her constructions.
Miriam Sagan blogs at Miriam's Well (http://miriamswell.wordpress.com). She is the author of 25 books, including the recent collection, Seven Places in America: A Poetic Sojourn. She recently won the New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award in Poetry and has received the Santa Fe Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. She also does text and grassroots installations — most recently at Salem Art Works and at The Betsy Hotel. Her second novel, Black Rainbow ,is forthcoming this fall from Sherman Asher Books.
Felino A. Soriano is a poet documenting coöccurrences. His poetic language stems from exterior motivation of jazz music and the belief in language’s unconstrained devotion to broaden understanding. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies. Recent poetry collections include Forms, migrating, Of isolated limning, Mathematics, Espials, watching what invents perception, and Of these voices. He edits the online journal, Of/with: journal of immanent renditions. He lives in California with his wife and family and is a director of supported living and independent living programs providing supports to adults with developmental disabilities. Visit felinoasoriano.info for more information.
Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college. Over 250 of her poems appear in over a hundred online venues and in anthologies in the US, UK, Canada, and further abroad. The natural world is often her framework; she also considers the stories of people and places around her and personal histories. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.
Arthur Unobskey has a BA from Yale '89; MAT from Brown '91; and Ed.D. Educational Administration from Boston College '06 His dissertation was on math curriculum development. He taught for 10 years at the middle school and high school level in both suburban and urban schools. He worked for 12 years as a principal — 6 years at Concord Middle School in Concord, MA and 6 years at Irving Middle School in Boston, Massachusetts. He has been Assistant Superintendent in Gloucester, Massachusetts since August 2015.
Isa Kaftal Zimmerman has been Superintendent of Schools (Lexington, Easton, Acton-Boxborough School Districts), High School Principal (Hamilton-Wenham) and Assistant Principal (Reading), junior high school teacher (Newton) and Division Director of the Technology in Education Program and Associate Professor at Lesley University, and Senior Fellow at the UMass Donahue Institute and the UMass President’s Office. She was President of the Massachusetts Affiliate of ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) twice and is currently the Executive Director. She received her BA from Cornell University and her MAT and Ed. D. from Harvard University. Among other publications, she co-authored a book entitled Designing and Teaching Online Courses (Teachers College Press).
