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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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J. Kelley Anderson is a fan of comic books, John Milton, tattoos, pulp detective novels, herpetology, folklore, video games, and all things sci-fi and fantasy. Growing up, he wanted to be either a ninja or a maple tree. These aspirations led him to teach college English. He lives in central Ohio, and his work has appeared in 14 Hills, Mosaic, Mind Flights, Absent Willow Review, and elsewhere. His novel, Casting Shadows, is tentatively slated for a January 2012 release.
N.T. Arevalo is a fiction writer and essayist in the thick of first novel revision. Her work has appeared in the Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, and Rose & Thorn Journal. A former policy advocate in the U.S., Arevalo lives in San Francisco and is the founder and editor of This Generation.
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Michael Barber recently retired from publishing and now lives on a lake in Tennessee, where he sails his boat. When the wind isn't blowing, he writes short stories. He and his wife, Michaela, have four children, all scattered. Michael graduated from the University of Connecticut with a B.A. in English. His work has appeared in The Bellowing Ark, The Berkshire Review, Midnight Times, Nuvein, NEWN, The Broadkill Review, Foliate Oak, The Storyteller, and others.
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Kimberly L. Becker is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Words Facing East (WordTech Editions, 2011) is her first book of poetry. Individual poems appear in many journals and anthologies. The Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County (MD) funded her study of Cherokee language, history, and culture in Cherokee, NC. She was awarded a residency at Hambidge Center. Current projects include adapting Cherokee myths into plays for the Cherokee Youth in Radio Project at the Cherokee Youth Center, also in Cherokee, NC.
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Bob Bradshaw lives in California, a state slowly drifting towards Japan. He is a huge admirer of cherry blossoms and Asian poetry. He looks forward to the docking. Recent work of his can be found at Blue Fifth Review, Orange Room Review, Loch Raven Review, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.
John Branscum is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His work, which is preoccupied with the performativity of identity and white trash magical realism, has been published in journals ranging from the Evergreen Review to North American Review. He is working on assembling Red Holler: An Anthology of Contemporary Appalachian Literature, which will be published by Sarabande Books in late 2012.
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Andrea Broxton grew up in rural, southern Alabama and descended from a family of engaging storytellers. She now lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Like most writers, she lives alone with her dog. Her mother always nagged her to write, and the first short story she workshopped ended up in a literary magazine. This only encouraged her. Her work has appeared in Literary House Review, Bicycle Review, Writing Raw, and Skyline.
Jared Carter is the author of Cross this Bridge at a Walk (Wind Publications." His poem, "Prophet Township," which first appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, was selected for the print anthology Best of the Web 2008 published by Dzanc Books. Additional poems and stories may be found on his web site.
Antonia Clark works for a medical software company in Burlington, Vermont, and is co-administrator of an online poetry workshop, The Waters. Recent poems have appeared in The 2River View, Anderbo, Apparatus Magazine, The Cortland Review, The Fox Chase Review, Quay, Soundzine, and elsewhere. She loves French food and wine, and she plays French café music on a sparkly purple accordion.
David Ewald is the author of He Who Shall Remain Shameless (Macromere Press), stories from which first appeared in The Harrow, The Bend, Morbid Outlook, and The Chimaera. Additional fiction and dramatic work have appeared in Eclectica, BULL: Men's Fiction, Denver Syntax, The Bend, Spectrum, and The Corner Club Press. His full-length play Mormania was part of Paragon Theatre's The Trench.
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Jonterri Gadson Debra's daughter. A Cave Canem fellow and recent graduate of University of Virginia's Creative Writing MFA Program in Poetry, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Her poetry has appeared in PANK, Tidal Basin Review, Muzzle, Sugar House Review, and other journals.
Jude Goodwin is this issue's Spotlight Author. She lives Squamish, British Columbia, shares her life with a girl and a dog, and works as a web designer, editor, and illustrator. She has published three books, none of them containing poetry. Her poems have appeared in a variety of online and print journals, including Burnside Review, CV2, Comstock Review, and A Twist of Malice, a poetry anthology. Jude is founder and co-moderator of The Waters Poetry Workshop and director of the Squamish Writers Group.
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Ivy Grimes has poems published and forthcoming in The Associative Press, Weave, WomenArts Quarterly Journal, and elsewhere.
William Reese Hamilton left New York advertising for life in a fishing village on the coast of Venezuela. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, The North American Review, The Adirondack Review, Puerto del Sol, Front Porch, FRiGG, Night Train, Review Americana, and elsewhere.
Thomas J. Hubschman is a regular contributor to Eclectica's Salon and is the author of two novels (Look at Me Now and Billy Boy), a short story collection (The Jew's Wife & Other Stories) and two anthologies of writing from the so-called Third World (The Best of Gowanus: New Writing from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean and The Best of Gowanus II: More New Writing from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean). His short stories and non-fiction have been widely published, including on the BBC.
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Rachael Jennings is a Brooklyn high school teacher and writer. A recent graduate from Middlebury College, where she studied English and American Literatures and Education Studies, Rachael enjoys reading memoirs and metafiction, punctuation, dogs, exploring—and usually, getting lost. She has had poetry published in Mason's Road, Strange Horizons, and Off Course. In "III. Usurper," she wishes to thank James Joyce for letting her live off his language.
Caroline Kepnes lives in Los Angeles, California. Her stories have appeared in The Barcelona Review, Dogzplot, Calliope, Duck & Herring Co. Pocket Field Guide, Eyeshot, Fried Chicken and Coffee, Girls with Insurance, Monkey Bicycle, Night Train, Thieves Jargon, Word Riot, and Yankee Pot Roast. This is her seventh appearance in Eclectica. In 2004 she won the Hemingway Resource Center's Short Story Contest. She has written for television—7thHeaven, The Secret Life of the American Teenager—and print and online media—Entertainment Weekly, E! Online, Match.com, Tiger Beat Magazine, and TV Guide. Her young adult novel The Dig is available in all ebook platforms and her YA pen name is Audrey Hart. She is originally from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and is, of course, a huge Red Sox fan.
Jascha Kessler isProfessor Emeritus of Modern English & American Literature at UCLA. He has published seven books of his poetry and fiction as well as six volumes of translations of poetry and fiction from Hungarian, Persian, and Bulgarian, several of which have won major prizes. In 1989, his translation of Sándor Rákos' Catullan Games won the Translation Award from the National Translation Center (Marlboro Press). His latest volume of fiction, Siren Songs & Classical Illusions: 50 Stories, appeared in December of 1992. He served as Arts Commissioner for the City of Santa Monica 1990-1996 and won a Fellowship in Fiction Writing for 1993-1994 from the California Arts Council. His recent works include a translation of King Oedipus, with a Translator’s Preface in Sophocles, 2 (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). He recently completed a 625-page book of fables, told by an ancient hermit to students up in Carpathian Mountains from 1745 to 1812. The book is called King Solomon's Seal, and it is looking for a bold publisher.
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Julia Braun Kessler is a former Spotlight author. She is a long-time journalist with credits that include publications like Travel & Leisure, Family Circle, Geo, and many others. She is the author of four novels: Presumption, The Third Sister, Jane Austen's Charlotte and the forthcoming Mary Crawford. The piece in this issue's Spotlight is the latest of her memoir pieces, which have appeared in various magazines in recent years, among them Eclectica, Midstream, and California Literary Review.
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R. J. Koshar is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has written academic history since the late 1970s, earning Guggenheim and other awards. In January 2010 while watching a Green Bay Packers game on television, he began to write fiction, for reasons still unclear. Since then he's written two novels, both unpublished, and several short stories and poems, including pieces either published or forthcoming in Sleetmagazine, Blinking Cursor, and Avocet. His story for Eclectica was inspired by history's rich record of small things that topple great powers. He lives in Madison with his wife of 40 years.
Miriam N. Kotzin is Professor of English at Drexel University, where she teaches creative writing and co-directs Drexel's Certificate of Writing and Publishing. Taking Stock (Star Cloud Press 2011) is her third collection of poems, joining Reclaiming the Dead (New American Press, 2008), Weights & Measures (Star Cloud Press 2009) and a collection of flash fiction, Just Desserts (Star Cloud Press, 2010). Nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize, her poetry and fiction have been published in and are forthcoming in Shenandoah, The Southern Humanities Review, Confrontation, Offcourse, Eclectica, and Boulevard. She is a contributing editor of Boulevard and a co-founding editor of Per Contra. Her novels are represented by Don Gastwirth.
Marjorie Mir has edited poetry for Monhegan Commons for the past ten years, and, in that capacity, edited an anthology of the poems published there. Her poetry has appeared most frequently in Atlanta Review and Light. In 2000, she was awarded first prize in Atlanta Review's International competition. She lives in Bronxville, New York, where she is a retired librarian and a member of Poetry Caravan, a group of Westchester writers who share poetry with the residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Regarding "First-born," she says, "The quotation from Thomas Fuller, a church historian, comes from the book God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson, about the writing of the King James Bible. The words leaped off the page at me, and my first thought was, 'Then, who was the younger daughter?' The answer to that question became the poem."
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Andrew Morris lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where he teaches high school English and history. Recently, two of his short fiction pieces were selected as finalists in NPR's Three-Minute Fiction Contest. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in Otis Nebula, NAP Literary Magazine, and EarthSpeak Magazine. He's also a member of the Advanced Poetry Workshop at Bright Hill Press in Treadwell, New York.
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Kelly Nelson lives and teaches in Tempe, Arizona. Her poetry has appeared in Convergence, Blood Lotus, Dirty Napkin, and Furnace Review. She traveled last summer through Slovenia, a country she recommends to all poets since the focal point of the main square in the capital city is a statue of a poet.
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.
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V.K. Reiter has published nine novels, translated over a dozen French novels for publication in the U.S., including Maryse Condé's "Tree of Life" and five of Daniel Odier's "Delacorta" series, ghost written three films, and served as a free-lance editor on several best-selling books. While living in France, she wrote and translated narration for documentary films, was a reader and editor for Les Editions Robert Laffont and spent five interesting years as editor/consultant to Maurice Girodias, publisher of the Olympia Press. At present she has a novel in progress, The Memoirs of Sister Warren Lecroix Falconer, and is also compiling a series of memory pieces, the first of which, "Their Graces," appeared in the July/August 2011 issue. She lives in New York City.
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.
Morgan Grayce Willow has received awards in both poetry and prose from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and others. In 2009, she published the poetry collections Between (Nodin Press) and Silk (Shu Kuang Press), as well as a letterpress chapbook, The Maps are Words (Red Dragonfly Press). Her memoir "Riding Shotgun for Stanley Home Products" appeared in Riding Shotgun: Women Write about Their Mothers (Borealis Books, 2008). A former sign language interpreter, Morgan's essay "Double Language" about the inherent conflict between being a writer and being an interpreter, appeared in Third Coast in 2004. "Signs of the Time" received honorable mention in the Judith Kitchen Prize and appears in the 2011 Water~Stone Review. She lives in Minneapolis.
