Contributor's Notes - Eclectica Magazine, v4n2, Apr/May 2000

Apr/May 2000

Tom Dooley co-edits Eclectica, teaches high school English, and coaches wrestling in Tucson, Arizona. He is recently engaged.

Julie King has an MA in creative writing and teaches at University of Wisconsin, Parkside. One of her poems appears in Iowa Press's Boomer Girls. A former contributor, Julie is now a co-editor of Eclectica. She is recently engaged.

Jody Amaya graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, where she majored in English (conentrating in writing) and minored in philosophy. At the moment she's a part-time bartender at a local music club and is seeking a teaching certification. In her free time she reads many books, paints and draws obscure pieces of art, and on the side makes and sells original beaded jewelry to a small but loyal following who wear and enjoy her accessories.

Craig Butler spent many years working as a theatrical director and stage manager before deciding that writing was more fun. His short stories have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including MANY MOUNTAINS MOVING, MOBIUS, DARK MOON RISING, INDITER, SATIRE and ROCKFORD REVIEW. His "Life is Whose Cabaret?" was in the Sept/Oct 1999 edition of ECLECTICA.

Kathleen Carbone was born and raised in New York City and now lives in rural New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Melic Review, The Iconoclast, poetrynow, Poetry Tonight, The Chachalaca Review, Mefisto, Octavo and Rattle. She is a 1998 Pushcart Prize nominee. Co-founder of Zeugma, the on-line workshop for poets, Ms. Carbone is also Managing Editor for The Melic Review. She is legally deaf but hears music everywhere.

Claire Cowan-Barbetti is the mother of three children, an independent scholar and coeditor of Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts. Her work has appeared in Janus Head, and has also been published in the on-line journal Moria.

Jason DeBoer has published in The Barcelona Review (Spain), Rampike (Canada), JAAM (New Zealand), Flashpoint (US), Fresh! (US), Mélange (US), and Acid Angel (Scotland). Other recent fiction is forthcoming in Libido. He is also a regular contributor to The Absinthe Literary Review and the managing editor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, an academic journal based at Northwestern University.

Penny Freeland lives and writes in New York City, where she grew up. She holds a BA in English from Queens College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches composition at Queensborough Community College and LaGuardia Community College. Penny has won many awards for her poetry and has appeared in The Ledge, Alternative Arts & Literature, and The Red Booth Review. Her first book of poems, Slanted Duplicity, is soon to be published by, The Great American Publishing Society.

Stanley Jenkin's stories and essays have or will appear in Amelia, 32 Pages, The Blue Moon Review, CrossConnectand the Oyster Boy Review. A former Spotlight Author, Stanley now writes a regular column for the Salon. He lives and works in Queens, New York.

Michael Joseph

A.M. Kiernan has an MFA in creative writing. She has published in Louisville Review, Asylum, Homewords: an Anthology of Tennessee Writers, Calliope, Oxford Review, Frank: International Journal, Passages North, and in Danish for Kannibal Magazine, among others. She has won awards from the AWP and Tennessee Writer's Guild, for short fiction, and was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and for the G. E. Award for Younger Writers. She has been away from writing for the last five years exploring Montana, fly fishing, home-schooling, and raising children to the not-so-bitter end. As the children leave home, she feels she is entering the new world along with them. Eclectica is her first online publishing credit.

Michael LaRocca was born in North Carolina in 1963 and grew up in North Carolina and Florida. He says he's had a long list of career changes, including security guard, copier repairman, systems consultant, and web site consultant. After almost twenty years as a part time writer, he moved to Hong Kong last year and became a full-time writer. His credits include Seeker Magazine, the 1989 American Poetry Anthology, and the 1995 National Poetry Anthology.

Jeff Lowenstein has lived and worked in South Africa, Kentucky, Virginia and Boston during the past thirteen years. He has written a manuscript entitled, "A Place of Importance: A Teacher's Fulbright Year In Post-Apartheid South Africa" about his 1995-1996 year teaching at the Uthongathi School in Tongaat, South Africa.

Don Mager has published some 250 original poems and translations from Czech and German over the last 30 years, including two books: To Track The Wounded On (1986) and Glosses (1995).

Kevin McGowin is a former Eclectica Spotlight Author. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, although there seems to be some confusion as to exactly when. He received his BA from Auburn University and his graduate degrees from the University of Florida, where he taught English for 8 years. He presently teaches Humanities at NC State University in Raleigh, but will be retiring from teaching at the end of Summer 2000. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals and he is the recipient of several prizes, including 1st Place at the 1992 Southern Literary Festival. He is newly single and at work on a novel and a book about the Beatles' White Album's intersection with Blake's Book of Los.

Andrew Morton lives in Birmingham England where he teaches English and supplements his meagre income by writing music for TV and theatre. He has written two original musicals and is currently working on another commission. Some of his music can be accessed on his publisher's website at www.grandunion.co.uk (look under instrumental and Lounge). He reports having built up a good body of short fiction over the last few months, if any potential publishers are interested.

John Palcewski has enjoyed an "eclectic" career as a magazine editor, photojournalist, literary fiction writer, and fine arts photographer. His work (literary and photographic) has appeared in major newspapers throughout the US and abroad via United Press International, and in journals such as Evergreen Review, Kentucky Review, Karamu, etc. Most recently Elecric Acorn, "Ireland's premiere electronic magazine," published "Ahab & Ishmael." John is an American, born in Youngstown Ohio, but after living in New York City, Philadelphia and a number of other big metro areas he moved to Isola d' Ischia, a volcanic island in the Bay of Naples, where he currently resides.

Anne Pepper just finished her Master's degree in creative writing from Iowa State University. She's moving to Bloomington, Indiana, with her fiance, two dogs and antique upright piano, where she plans to acquire a second master's degree in library science. She is the only person she knows who has an extensive blanket collection. Her first choice of occuption was concert pianist, but she couldn't tackle Rachmaninoff's 5th, so that was a no-go. She states "I just adore poetry too much to make it secondary." Currently working as a web master/designer for the Iowa State Parks library, Anne admits to being addicted to electronica and the written word, in whatever form.

Desiree Peterson is an English teacher and self-described "prairie girl." She writes both prose and poetry, and has been published in a variety of Web-zines.

Francis Raven is a student at The Evergreen State College studying the philosophy of mind and language, with a primary interest is in how the works of the later Wittgenstein relate to moral theory. Work has been published in ZineN, Moria, Interzone, A Room Without Walls, Brown Bag Media, ShallowEnd Ezine, The Red Booth Review, Feelings ezine, Apples and Oranges International Poetry Zine, The Part-Time Postmodernist and Progress. A chapbook/novella, "Journey; writ large on a blue or lilac notebook," has just been published by Anabasis and is available from amazon.com.

Elayne Roman is a freelance editor and writer who lives and works in New York City. She is currently at work on her first novel.

Paul Sampson labors heroically as a technical writer for a mammoth corporation. He has been a professional writer and editor for many years, but he prefers to do the kind of writing you can't make a living from. Some of his recent essays and poems appear in The Alsop Review, The 2River View, the British publication World Wide Writers II, and the new anthology Best Texas Writing (Rancho Loco Press). He lives on the outskirts of a small town east of Dallas, Texas.

Ann Skea lives in Australia and is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE Press, Australia). She writes darn good book reviews.

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis and is going back to school after what he describes as wasting many years in hotel mangement. His work has appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Templar Phoenix Review, Black Bear Review, Poetry Motel and a few others.

Travis Talley is 21 years old, just finishing his bachelor's degree in cultural anthropology at the University of West Florida. He was at one time an English major himself, but found that writing about other people's writing made him miserable and decided to study monkeys instead.

Diane Dees Tobiason is a psychotherapist in south Louisiana. She and her husband will soon publish a web site called Princess Cafe, which will be a virtual rock and roll restaurant. She currently has a link in Boomer Cafe to a story on her difficult "relationship" with Jane Fonda.

Maureen H. Tobin is a part-time GED teacher and the proprietress of a small-town bookcafe in Western Iowa. "Tips for This Vicinity" was written when she lived in a larger city and taught in a homeless shelter. Some of her poems will appear in May in the online journals Poems Niederngasse and Mephisto.

Laura Yeackel attends Rutgers University. She is 22 years old, from South Jersey, and when asked to tell about herself, had the following to say: "Listening to women hum always gives me pleasant chills. I've recently developed an interest in superstring theory which I don't understand very much at this point. I make good tea. I've started a list of all the scents in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, so that I might endeavor to smell them all." Her website-in-progress, "The Dangling of the Changeling," is dedicated to one of her favorite poets, Larissa Szporluk.

Frederick Zackel has published two novels and currently teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He has written for Exquisite Corpse: The Journal of Letters and Life, Winedark Sea, 3AMpublishing, Crime Time, WINGS, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction (among others), and is a contributing editor to the on-line literary magazine January.