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Tom Dooley co-founded Eclectica in 1996 and serves as its Managing Editor. In the 12 years between earning a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago and a MPA in municipal management from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he taught middle and high school English in Alaska, Arizona, and Wisconsin, amassing fond memories, dubious experiences, and debt. Two careers post-teaching later, he now creates spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides for the man by day, edits Eclectica by night, and feels very grateful for the blessings he has received—chief among them being married to the sweetest gal and the best poet he knows. He and said gal reside in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with enough rescued lapdogs to field a diminutive Iditarod racing team and the empty-nest echoes of two amazing Haitian-American children who have flown the coop.
Colleen Mondor is Eclectica's Review Editor. She also reviews for Bookslut, the Voices of NOLA, and Booklist. Short story excerpts from her novel on Alaskan aviation have recently appeared in failbetter and Storyglossia. She maintains a daily blog on all things literary (and sometimes not) at her site, Chasingray.com.
Elizabeth P. Glixman is Eclectica's Interview Editor. Her fiction and poetry have appeared online and in print in Wicked Alice, In Posse Review, 3 A.M. Magazine, Tough Times Companion, a publication of The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Her Circle Ezine, Frigg, and Velvet Avalanche, an anthology of erotic poetry. Besides Eclectica, her author interviews, articles, book reviews, and creative non-fiction pieces have appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Whole Life Times, Spirit of Change, Hadassah Magazine, and the anthologies Chocolate for A Woman's Soul II and Cup of Comfort For Women. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks: A White Girl Lynching (Pudding House Publications, 2008), Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other Love Poems (Pudding House Publications, 2010), and The Wonder of It All (Alternating Current, 2012). Elizabeth's story, "Mother's Bony Behind," was chosen one of the notable online stories of 2006 by the Million Writers Award. Elizabeth is an animal lover, and she has a blog devoted to shelter animals, especially those at kill shelters.
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Jennifer Finstrom has been the Poetry Editor of Eclectica since the fall issue of 2005. This is her final issue in that capacity. A former Spotlight Author, she teaches in the First-Year Writing Program, tutors in writing, and facilitates writing groups at DePaul University. Recent publications include Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Escape Into Life, Gingerbread House Literary Magazine, and NEAT. For Silver Birch Press, she has work appearing in The Great Gatsby Anthology, the Alice in Wonderland Anthology, and in Ides: A Collection of Poetry Chapbooks.
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Pamela Mackey is Eclectica's Copy Editor. She teaches English at a community college in central New York. Earlier in her career, she wrote feature stories for newspapers, including The New York Times. Even earlier, she was a researcher and editor in the magazine industry, holding staff positions at LOOK and Saturday Review magazines. She writes poetry and is the mother of a gifted young novelist.
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Tamara M. Brenno-Uribarri served as the fiction co-editor for this issue. She received her masters in creative writing and literature theory from Hollins University. She lives in Albuquerque with her husband Dominic and teaches English at the University of New Mexico.
Jay Baruch lives in Rhode Island, where he practices emergency medicine and teaches at the Alpert Medical School at Brown University. His short story collection, Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (Kent State University Press, 2007), was Honorable Mention in ForeWord Magazine's 2007 Book of the Year Awards in the short stories category. His fiction has appeared in Other Voices, The Battered Suitcase, Bryant Literary Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Inkwell, Segue, Ars Medica, Salt River Review, Tattoo Highway, and others.
Kevin Brown resides in Cleveland, TN, where he teaches English and writes. His poems have appeared in The New York Quarterly, REAL: Regarding Arts and Letters, Connecticut Review, South Carolina Review, h2so4, Folio, and Quercus Review, among other journals. He has also published essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe, InsideHigherEd.com, The Teaching Professor, and Eclectica. He has one book of poetry, Exit Lines (Plain View Press, 2009), as well as a forthcoming book of scholarship: They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Jessie Carty's poetry and non-fiction have appeared in publications such as MARGIE, Main Street Rag, and Form21. Her first chapbook, At the A & P Meridiem, was released by Pudding House Publications in 2009. Her first full length collection, Paper House, will be released in the spring of 2010. Jessie is also the editor of Shape of a Box, YouTube's first literary magazine.
Joseph Cassara is a student in The Writing Program at Columbia University. He lives in New York City.
Nitoo Das teaches English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She was born in Guwahati, but came to Delhi in 1994 for her higher studies and decided to stay on and learn various survival skills in this ancient city. Her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University dealt with constructions of the Assamese Identity under the British (1826-1920). Das runs a blog, which she began as an experiment more than four years ago while working on a research project (with Sarai, CSDS) on poetry as hypertext. Her interests include fractals, caricatures, comic books, horror films, and studies of online communities. She is one of the featured poets on Poetry International's web page on India. Her poetry has been published in online sites like Pratilipi, Muse India, and Poetry with Prakriti, as well as in several anthologies. Das's poetry works with voice, soundscape and comic defamiliarisation. Her first collection, Boki, was published by Virtual Artists Collective, Chicago, in September 2008. Regarding her poem "Matsyagandha," she says it "requires some basic knowledge about the Indian epic, Mahabharata. It can be read as a poem that deals with issues of caste, class, and gender. The poem is angry, but not hysterically so. The use of the form of the dramatic monologue allowed me intense involvement as well as distance. The woman's body, its smells, the ‘inferiority' that sticks to the skin, work that's devalued, etc are the larger, more universal ideas in this poem."
Adam Chambers resides in Connecticut with his wife and four children. He attends the MFA program in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, and has had work published in the journals Foliate Oak, 2River, and forthcoming in the journal Alba. In his past lives, he has worked with people with developmental disablities and been an over-the-road truckdriver.
Drew Dillhunt lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle and is co-author, with his father, CX, of the chapbook Double Six (Endeavor, 1994). His writing has appeared in Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem, The Pitkin Review, and Tarpaulin Sky. He’s the author of the poetry manuscript Materials Science, which was selected as a finalist for the National Poetry Series 2009 Open Competition. He has released two albums of his songs, including one with the band Fighting Shy.
D. E. Fredd lives in Townsend, Massachusetts. He has had fiction and poetry published in over one hundred literary journals and reviews. He received the Theodore Hoepfner Award given by the Southern Humanities Review for the best short fiction of 2005 and was a 2006 Ontario Award Finalist. He won the 2006 Black River Chapbook Competition and received a 2007 Pushcart Special Mention Award. He has been included in the Million Writers Award of Notable Stories for 2005, 2006, and 2007, and was a finalist for the 2008 St Lawrence Book Award. This is his second appearance in Eclectica.
John Givens was born in Northern California, got his BA in English literature at the California State University Fresno and his MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa, where he was a Teaching/Writing Fellow. He was a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea for two years, he studied language and art in Kyoto for four years, and he worked as a writer and editor in Tokyo for eight years. For fifteen years, Givens worked in branding consultancies, design studios, and advertising agencies in New York and San Francisco. He has published three novels in the US: Sons of the Pioneers, A Friend in the Police, and Living Alone; short stories have appeared in various literary journals. His non-fiction publications include A Guide to Dublin Bay: Mirror to the City and Irish Walled Towns, both published by The Liffey Press in Dublin. He is currently finishing a long novel set in seventeenth-century Japan.
William Reese Hamilton lives in Choroní, a fishing village on the coast of Venezuela, set below a mountainous cloud forest, in a region that produces the finest cacao in the world. His stories have appeared in a number of print and online publications, including The Paris Review, The North American Review, The Adirondack Review, Puerto del Sol, Night Train, and Review Americana.
Lauren Henley is a first year MFA student at Pacific University of Oregon and this issue's Spotlight Author. Her poems have also appeared in White Pelican Review and are forthcoming in Electric Velocipede and Hayden's Ferry Review. Lauren is part of a spoken word music project called Carry The Fire, and in her free time she substitutes in special education. In the future she plans to teach creative writing at the college level, buy a yurt and some land, and travel. You can access Lauren's spoken word project (featuring drummer and composer Jonathan Maule) by clicking on the link provided.
Niranjana Iyer is a writer from Ontario, Canada, whose work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Smithsonian Magazine, and SmokeLong Quarterly, amongst other venues. Her blog is called "Brown Paper" (see link).
Stanley Jenkins has appeared in Amelia, 32 Pages, The Blue Moon Review, CrossConnect, and the Oyster Boy Review. A former Spotlight Author, Stanley is a regular contributor to Eclectica's Salon and holds the record for greatest number of appearances in our issues. He lives and works in Queens, New York.
Lucy Jilka lives and works in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in kill author, 580 Split, American Voice, WordWrights, and So To Speak.
Saudha Kasim has a bachelor's degree in architecture and a master's in visual communication. She has worked as an illustrator, graphic designer, and content writer. She lives in Bangalore.
R. Christopher Knight has appeared in Pindeldyboz, Storyglossia, and Menda City Review. He lives with his wife, Sally, and their dog, Mali, in northern California. If he has learned anything in his long life, it is that one cannot always trust the furniture.
Dorothee Lang is a writer, web freelancer, and the founding editor of BluePrintReview. She lives in Germany and is into skies and microformats. Recent publications include elimae, Nanoism, The, Dogzplot, Eclectica, Wheelhouse, and Locus Novus. For more about her, visit her website.
Tom Lombardo is the editor of After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, an anthology featuring 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 nations. He is Poetry Editor of Press 53, a literary publisher in Winston-Salem, NC. His poems have appeared in many journals in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and India, including Southern Poetry Review, Subtropics, Ambit, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Kritya: A Journal for Our Time, Orbis, Salamander, Ars Medica, Pearl, Asheville Poetry Review, and others. His criticism has been published in New Letters, North Carolina Literary Review, and South Carolina Review. His essays and other nonfiction have appeared in Chrysalis Reader, IEEE Spectrum, Leisure magazine, and other publications. Tom's nonfiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Press, 2009. Tom has taught courses in Aesthetics and in Creative Writing at the Atlanta College of Art. He was the founding editor-in-chief of WebMD, the world's most widely used health web site, and he lives in Midtown Atlanta, where he works as a freelance medical editor. He earned a B.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University, an M.S. from Ohio University, and an M.F.A. from Queens University of Charlotte.
Pascal-Denis Lussier is a freelance writer and journalist. His obsessions include music (the good kind!), The Simpsons, and unearthing structure in all things. His background includes Linguistics, Philosophy, and Literature. He's written countless articles on jazz, theoretical linguistics, and on semiotic theory for numerous newspapers, academic journals and magazines, but he mostly earns his living by writing for large corporations and small software firms, something he's trying hard to get away from. He currently lives in Montreal, Canada.
Erika Lutzner is working toward an MFA in poetry while running Scapegoat Review, an online journal, and hosting Upstairs at Erika's, a monthly salon series at her Brooklyn loft. She also runs New Poets For Peace, which you can find out more about in Poets and Writers March/April Issue. She writes for Poetry International's Weblog, and you can find her poetry on the Internet Highway. She lives in Brooklyn with her three beautiful cats and boyfriend and dreams of a perfect world. The piece appearing in this issue came to her when she was writing a series about Szymborska. Regarding Szymborska, she says, "Her work brings out a zen-like quality in me, makes me reflect and become still. I stop and think of the world in a new way. she has the ability to allow me to change my thinking process."
Adam Marston is a D.C. writer and an undergrad at George Mason University. He has forthcoming work in decomP and the Northville Review. Right now he's reading Fernando Pessoa. He is fascinated by theories of misunderstanding and paradox and doesn't think it's possible to be stupid.
Sriya Narayanan lives in Chennai, India, where she works for a newspaper in their marketing division and writes feature articles for them part-time. She writes poetry and short fiction based on everyday personal or second-hand experiences. She's passionate about animal welfare and has focused her efforts on adoption of shelter animals—something you can read more about at her blog.
Anne Leigh Parrish has won first place in a number of fiction contests, including those sponsored by American Short Fiction, The Pinch, and Clackamas Literary Review. Her work has also appeared in and been recognized by The Virginia Quarterly Review, Carve Magazine, Meridian, Glimmer Train, Arts & Letters, Painted Bride Quarterly, Amarillo Bay, and Storyglossia, among other publications. This is her second appeared in Eclectica. The title of her current story derives from her first experience of summer in the Pacific Northwest, where at latitude 47, daylight can last until ten p.m., and darkness falls so slowly that even if watching the sky, one can never quite see the final coming of night.
Gilbert Wesley Purdy has published poetry, prose and translation in many journals, paper and electronic, including: Jacket Magazine, Poetry International (San Diego State University), The Georgia Review (University of Georgia), Grand Street, SLANT (University of Central Arkansas), The Evansville Review (University of Evansville), Rattle (online), Consciousness Literature and the Arts (University of Wales, Aberystwyth), Orbis (UK), Eclectica, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Links to his work online and to a selected bibliography of his work in paper venues appear at his Hyperlinked Online Bibliography.
Kristin Roedell is a wife, mother, and retired attorney living in Lakewood Washington. She has been published in the online magazines Breath and Shadow, Switched on Gutenberg, Flutter, Damselflypress, Chantarelle's Notebook, and Ginosko. Other works will appear in Open Minds Quarterly, PoetrySz: Demistifying Mental illness, and Quill and Parchment (featured poet January, 2010). Her chapbook Seeing in the Dark was recently published by Tomato Can Press, and will be reviewed by Quill and Parchment.
Lydia Theys lives in Connecticut with her husband and a pleasing mixture of great big kids, pudgy cats and a wee dog. Her work has appeared online and in print, including Cezanne's Carrot, flashquake, Opium, Defenestration, Yankee Pot Roast, Moondance, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and KRCB public radio.
Carolyne Whelan received her MFA in cross-genre at Chatham University. Her work has appeared in Chapter & Verse, Ms. Guided, and decomP, among others, as well as in a collaborative chapbook, Are You Free? (Glass Key Press, 2009). She lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she works as a bicycle mechanic and freelance writer.
