Issue 21: Grief

Single Issues > 2011 > Issue 21: Grief > Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Matthew Burns holds a PhD in creative writing from Binghamton University where he was a managing editor of Harpur Palate. His poem “Rhubarb” won the 2010 James Hearst Poetry Prize and his other poems and essays have appeared in Folk Art, Ragazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, Memoir (and), and others. He is an assistant professor of English at Heritage University. As he writes this, he is two days into a 2700-mile drive between New York and Washington State.

Bethany Carlson is an MFA candidate at Indiana University and an associate poetry editor for the Indiana Review. She has poems forthcoming in The Cream City Review and The Bellingham Review. Access more of her brain’s meandering rabbit trails on Twitter @bcarlson518.

Born in Boston in 1943, Elizabeth Biller Chapman lives and works in Palo Alto, California. Her work has appeared in Sand Hill Review, Water-Stone Review, and Poetry, among others. Her chapbook, Creekwalker, was published by (M)other Tongue Press (1995). Robert Creeley selected her poem, “On the Screened Porch,” originally presented in Poetry, for inclusion in Best American Poetry, 2002. She has seen two full-length collections into print: Candlefish (University of Arkansas Press, 2004) and Light Thickens (Ashland Poetry Press, 2009). Now retired, she previously worked as a college teacher of Shakespeare and a psychotherapist in private practice.

David Feela has been writing in the attic since retiring from his high school teaching gig. His newest book of essays, How Delicate These Arches: Footnotes from the Four Corners, will be available this fall from Raven’s Eye Press, or by leaving a self-addressed stamped envelope outside his attic door.

Dyana Herron is a Tennessee native who now lives in Philadelphia, after stopovers in Atlanta, Boston, and Seattle. She is a graduate of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA in creative writing and for the past two years has been a regular contributor to Image Journal’s Good Letters omniblog.

Kendra Langdon Juskus is a writer and editor and a student in the Spalding University MFA program. She was a finalist for the 2010 Janet McCabe Poetry Prize, and in addition to Ruminate, her writing has appeared inFlourish, Catapult, PRISM, and Books & Culture. Originally from New York’s Hudson River Valley, she is enjoying the wide skies and fertile gardening ground of Illinois, where she lives with her husband, Ryan.

Christopher Martin lives in Acworth, Georgia, with his wife Deana and son Cannon in an old house between Red Top Mountain to the north and Kennesaw Mountain to the southeast. Chris is a graduate student at Kennesaw State University, and his writing has appeared in Still: The Journal, Loose Change Magazine, New Southerner, and American Public Media’s On Being blog, among other publications. He edits the online literary magazine Flycatcher: A Journal of Native Imagination and is at work on a collection of essays titled Native Moments: An Ecology of Fatherhood. Aside from writing, Chris enjoys spending time with his family, especially outdoors, and he coaches his little brother’s basketball team, the Owls, every season. (Cannon is not only the team’s biggest fan, but also their official mascot, “Lil Hoot.”) Chris and Deana are expecting a daughter, Opal Mary, in September. In fact, she should be here as this issue goes to print!

D.S. Martin is a poet and teacher. He and his wife have two virtually grown sons, and live just north of Toronto. He’s the award-winning author of two poetry collections—Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). Visit his website: www.dsmartin.ca and his weekly blog about Christian poetry—www.kingdompoets.blogspot.com.

Tyler McCabe is the program coordinator of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA in Creative Writing program and managing editor of Image Journal’s bi-weekly newsletter ImageUpdate. His writing has appeared in SPU’sLingua art journal and Etc. magazine. Originally from Vancouver, Washington, he has recently settled in Seattle’s lovely Queen Anne neighborhood, where he plans on crafting his first book-length work of nonfiction.

Sarah McFalls is a native Tennesseean and lives in Knoxville. When she is not painting, she works as the collections manager for The Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture at the University of Tennessee. Her work has been featured in juried shows in Tennessee, Illinois, and Georgia. She writes: “I began to paint the landscape of ‘Down the Road’ from some photographs I had lying around and quickly discovered that I didn’t need the picture to paint the place. I knew what it looked like. I knew what it felt like, and I knew how it made me feel. I just had to paint until the image was done. The importance I gave to the specificity of place vanished, and the landscape soon became a skeleton to support an unconventional handling of media.”

Maureen Doyle McQuerry is a novelist, poet, and teacher. She has three young adult books coming out in the next two years—The Peculiars, a steam-punk adventure, Beyond the Door, and Time Out of Time(Abrams/Amulet). Her poetry is in many literary journals and in the award-winning chapbook Relentless Light. She teaches writing at Columbia Basin College and is a teaching artist with the Washington State Arts Commission. She is also a founding member of Washington State’s newest website devoted to young adult literature, YA-WA (www.ya-wa.com). You can find out more at www.maureenmcquerry.com.

David Oestreich lives in Northwest Ohio with his wife and three children. In addition to writing, he enjoys fly-tying and photography. He is also an amateur herpetologist and probably drives all the real herpetologists crazy. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Minnetonka Review, Hobble Creek Review, Eclectica, and Tar River Poetry.

Beth Paulson’s poems have appeared widely in small magazines and anthologies. She has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, including  one in 2010. Her poetry collection, Wild Raspberries, was published by Plain View Press in 2009. Beth lives on Colorado’s Western Slope where she teaches writing and creativity workshops. She climbs in the mountains there as well as in Italy and Switzerland. You can read more of Beth’s poetry at her website, www.wordcatcher.org

Nancy Priff’s fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, The Literary Review, The Dan River Anthology, The Bucks County Writer, and other publications. She has an MFA in fiction writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University and received a 2003 Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Also, she has written or edited more than 100 books, videos, DVDs, and online courses on nursing and medical topics. Nancy lives in Ambler, Pennsylvania, with her husband John in a mill worker’s house, circa 1830, which they have renovated over the years.

Tania Runyan’s poems have appeared in dozens of publications, including Poetry, The Christian Century, and the anthology A Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare. Tania has been awarded an NEA grant for 2011 and the 2007 Book of the Year Citation by the Conference on Christianity and Literature for her chapbook, Delicious Air. Her first full-length collection, Simple Weight, came out from FutureCycle Press in 2010. WordFarm will release her second collection, A Thousand Vessels, in 2011. Tania spends her days writing, tutoring high school students, playing Celtic fiddle and mandolin, gardening, and managing three boisterous children.

Adrianne Smith, originally from Las Cruces, New Mexico, moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to study art and creative writing at Belhaven University. She graduated this spring, and now manages a Chinese restaurant to pay the bills. She was awarded honorable mention in the 2009 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and second place for poetry in the 2010 Southern Literary Festival.

Joel Sheesley is a painter who lives in the suburbs of Chicago. He graduated with a BFA in painting and drawing from Syracuse University School of Art and from the University of Denver School of Art, with an MFA in painting and printmaking. He teaches art at Wheaton College. His work has been exhibited regularly in Chicago, including at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2010, and in other cities across the country. Mr. Sheesley received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. In 2008 Mr. Sheesley’s painting was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University.

Deborah Sheldon has painted all her life and majored in fine arts in college, but she just started exhibiting in the past seven years. Recently, her work was featured in two solo shows in Spokane, Washington. Deborah also won first place in a 2010 juried show for the Chase Gallery in Spokane. Deborah writes: “As far as memory goes, it has always been art for me. But my real pivotal moment as an artist was August 26th, 2009 at 11:00. My dad died. The mix of grief, loss, and unanswered questions filled me. I purposed to work through that in my artwork. It was painful and wonderful. Another mystery to me is how the paintings seem to draw viewers in who are in the grip of grief. I have had many opportunities to cry, share, and finally accept with people-—the images being the catalyst. We are bonded by our shared experience. It has been an unexpected gift and a season of Hope.”

Michelle Tooker grew up in an area known as Poets Corner in Middletown, New York. Now, she shares a house in suburban Philadelphia with her husband and rambunctious cat. By day she works in marketing and by night she writes poetry. She’s been to thirty-four countries and plans to visit at least one hundred. It’s difficult to pick a favorite place, but she has a special affinity for Burma. She actively raises awareness about the human rights atrocities occurring within the country, and, in August, she hosted “Artists Against Censorship,” a literary fundraising event that benefited the U.S. Campaign for Burma. Michelle’s work has appeared in the Asia Literary Review, the Schuylkill Valley Journal, Ampersand, Foundling Review, Poetry Quarterly and other journals. You can follow her at michelletooker.wordpress.com.

A West Virginia native, Jessie van Eerden holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, The Oxford American, River Teeth, and other publications. Van Eerden was selected as the 2007-2008 Milton Fellow with Image and Seattle Pacific University for work on her forthcoming first novel, Glorybound (WordFarm, 2012). She lives with her husband Mike in Ashland, Oregon, where she teaches at The Oregon Extension of Eastern University and the low-residency MFA program of West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Mary Kathryn Wiley graduated with a degree in English from Mercer University, where she won the Sophie Oxley Clark Williams Outstanding Essay Award for a paper on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—“Suffering and Solitude as the Companions of Art.” After a few brief but formative years in Kinshasa, Zaïre, Mary Kathryn grew up in rural Georgia as the fourth of six children. She currently lives in Macon, Georgia, with her cat Owen. She attends an Episcopal church and works for a local nonprofit serving inner-city youth. She enjoys the films of Federico Fellini, the literary works of modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, J. D. Salinger, and Virginia Woolf, and the TV shows of Joss Whedon. Her poetry and short stories have previously been published in The Dulcimer.