Contributor's Notes - Eclectica Magazine, v25n2 Apr/May 2021

Apr/May 2021

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.

David Ewald is Eclectica's Nonfiction Editor. A previous contributor, his work has also appeared in Metazen, BULL: Men's Fiction, Denver Syntax, The Chimaera, Spork Press, and Halfway Down the Stairs, among other publications. He is the author of the novel He Who Shall Remain Shameless, and his chapbook Markson's Pier (written with Stuart Ross) was published in Volume XI of Essays & Fictions.

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.

Gilbert Allen has lived in upstate South Carolina since 1977. His most recent books are Believing in Two Bodies (a collection of poems) and The Beasts of Belladonna (a collection of linked stories). "Grammatology" will appear in his next collection of Belladonna stories.

Skyler Arden Barnes grew up in Kansas City. She holds a BA in English & Creative Writing with a publishing concentration from University of Iowa. She got her driver's license at the age of 21 but has yet to own a car. Her work has been featured with or is forthcoming in Black Lesbian Literary Collective, Fools Magazine, and earthwords, among others. She resides in Iowa City.

Molly Bashaw is this issue's Spotlight Author. She had her first book of poetry, The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It, published in 2014 by The Word Works. More recent work has appeared in The New England Review, The New Yorker, Crazyhorse, The Sun, and others. Molly grew up on small farms in New England and upstate New York. She has lived in Germany since 2000, working as a professional bass-trombonist and educator.

Mark Benedict is a graduate of the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College. He has previously published in Columbia Journal, Hobart Online, Menacing Hedge, Rue Morgue, and Tor.com. His publications include short stories, author interviews, and book and movie reviews.

Bob Bradshaw is a recently retired programmer. He is a big fan of the Rolling Stones. Unlike Mick, he is gathering moss and hopes to find a hammock to spend his days in. A longtime contributor to Eclectica, Bob has published many poems elsewhere on the net, including at Apple Valley Review, Autumn Sky DAILY, Dodging the Rain, and Ekphrastic Review.

John Brandon has published four books with McSweeney's Press (Arkansas, Citrus County, A Million Heavens, and Further Joy), and a fifth book, called Ivory Shoals, is forthcoming in June. He has served as the Grisham Fellow at Ole Miss and the Tickner Fellow at Gilman School in Baltimore, and now teaches at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

S.Y. Chen is a materials science graduate student based in Denver, Colorado. She is passionate about her research, good literature, and the juncture between art and science. She spends most of her time reading, writing, and making sure her experiments don't go terribly awry. All of her works are dedicated to her cat and her incredibly supportive partner. She has other works in Colorado's Best Emerging Poets (Z Publishing) and High Grade Journal.

Beau Lee Gambold lives and writes in Virginia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Permafrost, From the Depths, Bluing the Blade, The Rational Creature, Eclectica, Some Kind of Opening, and Passengers Journal. He is in the final drafts of his first novel.

Janis Butler Holm has served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal, and now works as a writer and editor in sunny Los Angeles. Her prose, poems, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her plays have been produced in the US, Canada, and the UK.

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.

Jayant Kashyap is a Pushcart Prize-nominee and author of two pamphlets, Survival (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2019) and Unaccomplished Cities (Ghost City Press, 2020). He reads poetry for Quarterly West and co-founded Bold + Italic.

Ben Kaufman is a Chicago-based writer and multimedia storyteller. He is most interested in stories that disrupt the mundane and force characters to confront their own shortcomings. Kaufman draws upon his own background as a dual-citizen of Israel and the US to tell intimate stories that reveal the broader social implications of personal experiences. Of "Kleptomania," Kaufman writes, "This is the first short story I ever wrote! 'Kleptomania' gave me a chance to revisit my own experiences and mindset as a younger person, and I had a blast writing it. I haven't been able to stop writing short stories since."

John McMahon is a painter and writer who has spent the last 20 years traveling and working. His work can be seen on platforms and publications all across the English-speaking world. His latest novel Hot Season is available on Amazon.

Emily Rose Miller graduated cum laude from Saint Leo University where she received her BA in English with a specialization in creative writing. Her work has been published in Capsule Stories, PopMatters, and Red Cedar Review, among others. She says "The Wages of Estrangement" is a representation of her innate connection to, and simultaneous struggle with, living in the American South." Find her on Twitter @Em_Rose_Miller, or in real life in Orlando, Florida, cuddling with her five cats.

Ted Morrissey is the author of A Concise Summary and Analysis of The Mueller Report, and The 'Beowulf' Poet and His Real Monsters, for which he won the D. Simon Evans Prize for Distinguished Scholarship. His "Cultural Trauma and the Postmodern Voice" is an excerpt from his book Trauma Theory As an Approach to Analyzing Literary Texts: An Updated and Expanded Edition, with Readings (2021). He primarily regards himself as a novelist, however, and his most recent are The Artist Spoke, Mrs Saville, and Crowsong for the Stricken.

Sarah Myers is a graduate student studying behavioral neuroscience, where her research focuses on analyzing computational models of mental illness. The rest of the time, you can find Sarah writing about fashion, science, schizophrenia, human rights, and surviving trauma. She has been published in Eclectica three times and is thrilled to be featured again. Her work has been shared by news and literary magazines including Yahoo! Lifestyle, MSN Lifestyle, Huffington Post, Peculiar Magazine, Free Inquiry, the National Alliance on Mental Illness blog, and more.

Peter O'Donovan is a scientist and writer living in Seattle, Washington. Originally from the Canadian prairies, he received his doctorate from the University of Toronto, studying design aesthetics. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Typehouse Literary Magazine, River Heron Review, Qwerty, and Phantom Drift, among others.

Nathanael O'Reilly is an Irish-Australian poet residing in Texas. His books include (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020); BLUE (above/ground press, 2020); Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 2017); Cult (Ginninderra Press, 2016); Distance (Ginninderra Press, 2015); Suburban Exile (Picaro Press, 2011); and Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010). More than 230 of his poems have appeared in journals & anthologies published in 14 countries, including Antipodes, Anthropocene, Apricity, Cordite Poetry Review, The Elevation Review, Headstuff, Marathon Literary Review, Mascara Literary Review, Rochford Street Review, Skylight 47, Strukturriss, Transnational Literature, Westerly, and The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2017. Follow him on Twitter @nathanael_o..

Mandira Pattnaik writes in India. Her poetry has appeared in The Times of India, Prime Number Magazine, Spark, Not Very Quiet, Panoplyzine, Variant Lit, and West Trestle Review, among other places. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize 2021, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net. She is working on a poetry collection. This is her second appearance in Eclectica Magazine.

H. Roth-Brown is one of this issue's Spotlight Runners-up. They have been writing fiction all their life. Their work has been featured in James Gunn's Ad Astra Magazine, and in 2019 they wrote and directed an original immersive play, "The Monster in the Heart of the Maze."

Edward Salem is a Palestinian American artist and poet, and the founder and co-director of City of Asylum/Detroit, a non-profit that provides residencies for writers in exile under threat of persecution. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and he has had solo exhibitions, screenings, and curatorial projects in New York, Chicago, Paris, Madrid, Beirut, Ramallah, and Thessaloniki. He holds an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alanna Shaikh is a first-generation Muslim immigrant from a rust belt city. Her poetry is influenced by the landscape of Northern New York state where she grew up, daily life, the literature in the seven countries she's lived in, and her work in global health and pandemic response.

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.

Stephen Spicehandler is the author of the novel Run Away on the Heavenly Express which grew out of the short story he wrote titled "To Calvary" published by The Iowa Review. His story "Rotten Apples" will be published by The Madison Review in Spring 2021. A native New Yorker and graduate of Brooklyn College, CUNY, with honors in Comparative Literature, he is now retired from an acting career and non-legal work in corporate law firms. He organized and edited the posthumous collections of poems by Susan Cataldo, Drenched and The Mother Journal, both published by Telephone Books.

William Thierfelder is a writer, artist, and lecturer who divides his time between Portland, Oregon, and New York City. He is also a visiting docent at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Carolyn Wilsey is one of this issue's Spotlight Runners-Up. She lives near the coast and seeks to closely observe and celebrate nature through her writing. The recipient of an MFA in fiction from Emerson College, her poems can be found in Pretty Owl Poetry, Rogue Agent, Stirring, West Marin Review, and The Virginia Normal and are forthcoming in The Bohemian and Appalachian Review. One of her poems was a 2020 The Best of the Net Anthology nomination.