Contributor's Notes, Eclectica Magazine, v27n3, Jul/Aug 2023

Jul/Aug 2023

Tom Dooley co-founded Eclectica in 1996 and serves as its Managing and Fiction 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.

Evan Martin Richards is Eclectica's Poetry Editor. He grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and lives in Chicago. He received his MA in Writing and Publishing from DePaul University, where he worked as a writing tutor and facilitated creative writing and EdD candidate writing groups. His poetry has appeared in Poetry East and Eclectica. He has read fiction for Another Chicago Magazine and served as a poetry judge for the Golden Shovel Anthology Competition hosted by Roosevelt University. He works as an editor, both freelance and in the nonprofit management field.

Stuart Ross is Eclectica's Review Editor and a former Spotlight Author. A writer from Queens living in Chicago and a graduate of the University of Notre Dame's MFA program, he is the author of the novel Jenny in Corona (Tortoise Books, 2019). His work has appeared in Diagram, Expat Press, HTML Giant, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing, The Awl, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and many others.

Marko Fong is Eclectica's Nonfiction Coeditor. A former Spotlight Author, he lives in North Carolina with his wife, dog, and two cats. He's written fiction and non-fiction for many years, and publications include Solstice, Prick of the Spindle, RKVRY, and Volleyball Magazine.

Kris Broughton has had stories published in Carve, Exquisite Corpse, Bridge Eight, Fiction Attic, Joyland Literary Magazine, and Eclectica. He lives in John's Creek, Georgia, where he toils ceaselessly in the IT industry as a software sales professional. He is also at work on an experimental novel exploring the boundaries of African American identity in the 21st century.

Laura Canon was born in Lexington, Kentucky, graduated from NYU, and now lives in Henderson, Nevada. Previous publications include Jersey Devil, The Write Launch, Cleaning up Glitter, and the Eunoia Review. She owns a rabbit named Sophie who is quite shy but can jump as high as Nijinsky. "The Man from Lake Diablo" is based in part on a dream. You can find her at laurac@c.im on Mastodon and at the Etsy shop Mad Poets Society.

Nicholas Clemente is a writer living in New York City.

David Comfort is the author of The Insider's Guide to Publishing from Writer's Digest. His other popular nonfiction titles are from Simon&Schuster and Kensington. His literary essays appear in Pleiades, Montreal Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, UK's The Philosopher, Free Inquiry, Juked, and Stanford Arts Review. His short fiction appears in Evergreen Review, 3AM magazine, Morning News, Eclectica, and other journals. He is a Pushcart Fiction Prize nominee and finalist for Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren, Narrative, and Glimmer Train awards.

Michael Dooley provided the photo art for this issue. After receiving a degree in Photography from the Fashion Institute of Technology, he worked for many years as a still photographer and a chief lighting technician in the film and video industries in New York City. A second degree in Environmental Geology led him into a second career as an environmental consultant, but also into the jungles of the Amazon, the foothills of the Himalayas, the ruins of Guatemala, and other exotic habitats—with his camera.

Rebecca Dempsey lives in Naarm / Melbourne, Australia. Her work has previously appeared in Eclectica Magazine, and recent pieces feature in Panoply Magazine, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and Bluepepper.

Jennifer Dunn has appeared in CMF Magazine, The Woven Tale Press, and Trident. She holds an MA in English Literature and lives in Nova Scotia.

Iyesatta Massaquoi Emeli is a Sierra Leonean-American short story writer and an emergency medicine physician. In 2002, she won the Richard J. Margolis Award for her short story collection about the impact of war on Sierra Leone's children. Her story "The Prayer Session" was published in the New York Times Magazine and her work has also appeared in the Boston Globe and the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Maggie Fulmer lives and writes in Cincinnati, Ohio, but is a proud product of Kentucky. Her work has been featured in Atlas+Alice, Olney, Bullshit Lit, and others. She is a founding editor of the indie literary magazine Many Nice Donkeys. You can find her on most corners of the Internet (@mfulms21) talking about boy bands, books, and reality television. She can not do a cartwheel.

Michael Aaron Gomez is an online editor from southern Philippines. His stories have appeared in publications—online and print—from the Philippines, Malaysia, and the United States, such as Fiction International. He has also received a Palanca Award (his home country's highest literary prize) for a full-length play.

Erica Goss is this issue's Spotlight Runner-Up and the author of Night Court, winner of the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Her flash essay, "Just a Big Cat," was one of Creative Nonfiction's top-read stories for 2021. Recent and upcoming publications include The Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Gargoyle, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes, and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.

Peter Grandbois is the author of 14 books. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard and teaches at Denison University in Ohio.

David Guaspari was trained as a pure mathematician and considers himself to be, of all post-19th century mathematical logicians, the funniest. In addition to technical papers, he has published short fiction, essays, humor, and reviews, and has had plays performed in states totaling 326 electoral votes as well as five foreign countries. A member of the Dramatists Guild, he lives in Ithaca, New York.

Rosalie Hendon (she/her) is an environmental planner living in Columbus, Ohio. Her work is published in Change Seven, Pollux, Willawaw, Write Launch, and Sad Girls Club, among others. Rosalie is inspired by ecology, relationships, and stories passed down through generations.

Thomas J. Hubschman is a regular contributor to Eclectica's Salon and is the author of Look at Me Now, My Bess, Billy Boy, Father Walther's Temptation, Song of the Mockingbird, and The Jew's Wife & Other Stories, as well as three science fiction novels. His work has appeared in New York Press, The Antigonish Review, The Blue Moon Review and many other publications. Two of his short stories were broadcast on the BBC World Service. He has also edited two anthologies of new writing from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and he was the founding editor of the pioneering online publication Gowanus. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, which remains his chief inspiration.

David Jalajel is the author of Moon Ghazals (Beard of Bees Press, 2009), Cthulhu on Lesbos (Ahadada Books, 2011) and Rhyme & Refrain (University of the Western Cape, 2017). His work has appeared in a number of online and print journals, including Otoliths, Shampoo, experiential-experimental-literature, Recursive Angel, The New Post-Literate, and Gulf Coast. Poems in the "qasida" series have appeared in The Ghazal Page, Anti-, Lynx, Mizna, and Eclectica.

Dennis Kaplan is a Chicago native, transplanted to Oakland, California, where he writes computer code by day and other things by night. His fiction has appeared in Rockvale Review, Eclectica, Eureka Literary Magazine, Oxford Magazine, Grue, and others. He and his wife, Sharon, are co-editors of The Workplace Anthology.

Stephanie Karas is a Lewis University graduate and the former Managing Editor for Jet Fuel Review. Her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Disquiet Arts, Creative Communications, 30 N, Lewis Voices, Quirk, Full House Literary, Wrongdoing Magazine, and elsewhere. She is pursuing her master's degree in clinical mental health counseling and working as a graduate assistant in her school's writing center.

Dan Lawrence received his MFA from Columbia University, where he was a Graduate Fellow and Fiction Editor of Columbia Journal. After a career as a magazine editor with Time Inc. and Reed Elsevier, he recently returned to writing fiction. In the past 18 months, more than a dozen of his stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologies. He was a finalist for the 2023 James River Writers Best Unpublished Novel Contest, the 2022 Tennessee Williams Fiction Prize, the 2022 Watertower Press Novel Writing Contest and the Summer 2021 Novel Slices Contest. He is also the founder and principal of Richmond Editorial Service.

Alison McFarlane (she/her) is a poet from Ontario, Canada, with a passion for all things creative—with a dual degree in English Literature and Media Studies. Her first published poem, "Fowl Hen Song," was printed in Trent U's Absynthe Magazine in 2022.

Marshall Moore is this issue's Spotlight Author. He is an American author, publisher, and academic based in Cornwall, England, and the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is a memoir titled I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing (Rebel Satori Press, 2022). He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University, and he teaches at Falmouth University.

Ellen Notbohm has been published in more than 25 languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. Her short prose and poetry have most recently appeared in Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Well Read, and Story Circle Journal.

M.C. Schmidt is this issue's Spotlight Runner-Up. He recently appeared in EVENT, Spectrum Literary Journal, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel The Decadents (Library Tales Publishing, 2022). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University.

Shyla Ann Shehan (she/her) is an analytical Virgo from the US Midwest. She received an MFA from the University of Nebraska where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Naugatuck River Review, Midwest Quarterly, Drunk Monkeys, The Decadent Review, and elsewhere, and she was nominated for a Pushcart in 2022. She's an editor for The Good Life Review and lives in Omaha with her partner, children, and three cats.

Santana Shorty is a writer and poet from northern New Mexico. She received her BA from Stanford University and is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work focuses on New Mexican landscape and culture, and multiracial upbringing and love. Her poetry was recently published in Paperbark Literary Magazine and Identity Theory Literary Journal. She is also working on her first novel. She is a member of the Navajo Nation and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Ann Skea lives in Australia. She is the author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE Press, Australia) and has been contributing reviews to Eclectica Magazine since our very first issue back in October of 1996.

Susanna Skelton (she/her) is a writer pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Western Kentucky University. Born and raised in Southern Appalachia, when she's not writing or teaching, she can be found browsing the aisles of thrift stores or taking care of her (too many) house plants. She has had work featured in the Sequoya Review, Eclectica Magazine, STRIKE Magazine, and The Attic.

Jack Tisdale lives on an island in Maine. His short stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines, including Pleiades, Indiana Review, and Portland Review.

Steve Vermillion is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. He has had many works of short fiction published in both online and print magazines as well as Eclectica Magazine itself. He has also been nominated for a "Best of the Net" award.

Thomas Wolf was born, raised, and educated in the Midwest. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He is the co-author with his wife, Patricia Bryan, of two true crime books: Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America's Heartland (Algonquin Books 2005) and The Plea: The True Story of Young Wesley Elkins and His Struggle for Redemption (University of Iowa Press 2022). Tom has also published various essays on baseball and American culture. He is the author of The Called Shot: Babe Ruth, the Chicago Cubs, and the Unforgettable Major League Baseball Season of 1932 (University of Nebraska Press 2020). The Called Shot was named "best baseball book of 2020" by Sports Collectors Digest and was a finalist in 2021 for the prestigious Seymour Medal. Tom's Instagram account is thecalledshot.

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and writer in New York City.