Contributors

Contributors for Issue 3 Spring 2020

George Rollie Adams is a writer, educator, historian, and storyteller. He grew up in southern Arkansas. At the Strong National Museum of Play, Adams led the development of the world’s most comprehensive collection of historical artifacts and documents related to the critical role of play in learning and human development. As part of that process, he acquired the National Toy Hall of Fame, founded the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, and launched the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He also established the American Journal of Play and received national recognition for innovative museum leadership. Adams continues to live in New York’s beautiful Finger Lakes region. He now writes fiction, and his work has won numerous awards. Because he comes from a family of quilters, quilting figures prominently in his work. He and his wife have three adopted daughters, each from a different part of the world.

James Lucious Boykins III (AKA Chi TheRealist) is a multifaceted rapper, singer, actor, and spoken word artist. Born in Chicago and raised in Rochester NY. he has been nominated in his hometown twice for Hip-Hop Male Artist of the Year, three times for Best Male Poet, twice for Best Music Video, and for Album of the Year (When We Party.) Check him out on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

David James Delaney divides his time between Rochester, Quebec and Florida. He writes poetry, short stories, plays and the occasional essay/memoir. He enjoys painting (oil, watercolor and acrylic: His latest work graces the cover of Poet William Heyen’s Vehicles), played hockey in his youth, BUT  his grandfather Frank hung around with “One Eyed” Frank Mcgee and the other players of Ottawa’s “Silver Seven” Stanley Cup champions at the turn of the 20^th century.

Margaret Erhart’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, Hypertext Magazine, Nashville Review, and Cagibi. Her novel, The Butterflies of Grand Canyon (Plume), was a finalist for an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. She lives and works in Flagstaff, Arizona. Learn more about Margaret HERE.

Laura Foley is the author of seven poetry collections, variously honored with the Foreword Book of the Year Award (Silver), finalist for the NH Writer’s Project’s Outstanding Book of Poetry, and the Bisexual Writer’s Award. Her most recent book, Why I Never Finished My Dissertation, received a starred Kirkus Review and was among their top poetry books of 2019. Her collection It’s This is forthcoming from Salmon Press in 2021. Her poems have won numerous awards, and national recognition—read by Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion and The Writers Almanac. At Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Master Chorale performed composer Dale Trumbore’s “How to Go On,” based on her and two other poets’ work. 

Iseult Grandjean is a German-French journalist and writer living in Vienna, Austria. She is currently preparing a doctoral dissertation about the geopoetics of climate change, philosophy and space being also the spine of her writing. She works as cinema editor and freelance writer for different journals and magazines and her prose has been published in literary journals or anthologies in Europe and overseas, lastly The Offing. Feeling most secure as well as most free in her native tongue yet also fascinated by the nature of different languages, she has taken up self-translating her short stories into English or French.

Mary A. Hood is the author of The Strangler Fig and Other Tales (2004 Altamira-Rowman & Littlefield), RiverTime: Ecotravels on the World’s Rivers (2008 SUNY Press), and Walking Seasonal Roads (2012 Syracuse University Press.) She has published several collections of poetry, articles on conservation and the environment, and served as poet laureate of Pensacola, Fl.     

Sheila Kinsella is a Brussels based writer. Her short stories draw inspiration from her Irish upbringing. An avid watcher of people’s behaviour, and blessed with abundant natural curiosity, Sheila lures the reader into a shrewdly observed world via imagery and comedy. Sheila graduated with an MA in Creative Writing (Distance Learning) from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom in 2017.

Jill McDonough is the author of Here All Night (Alice James, 2019), Reaper (Alice James, 2017), Where You Live (Salt, 2012), and Oh, James! (Seven Kitchens, 2012). The recipient of three Pushcart prizes and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and Stanford’s Stegner program, she taught incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program for thirteen years. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Nation, The Threepenny Review, and Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA program at UMass-Boston and offers College Reading and Writing at a Boston jail. Her fifth poetry collection, Here All Night, is forthcoming from Alice James Books.  Her website is jillmcdonough.com.

Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is an adopted son of the City and State of New York. The son of a teacher and a poet, he came of age in his native country during a tragic period of its history, when many thousands of young men and women, were unconstitutionally detained, tortured, and often murdered. His poems bear the memory of those times and also embrace his life in the United States, his home for many years. What he loves and troubles him as a citizen of two countries bears its presence in his poems. His writing has appeared, in English and Spanish, in Argentina, Germany, Spain and United States). In addition to that, he released a chapbook of poems in collaboration with Madalasa Mobili, published by Seranam Press, called “Three Unknown Poets.”  

Bruce Morton is Dean Emeritus of the Montana State University Library. Having spent his childhood in the shadow of Newark in North Arlington, New Jersey, he now splits his time between Bozeman, Montana and Buckeye, Arizona. His volume of poems, Simple Arithmetic and Other Artifices, was published in 2015. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various magazines and anthologies, including, most recently, Muddy River Poetry Review, San Pedro River Review, Main Street Rag, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and Better Than Starbucks.I have very fond memories of Newark in the 1950s when I attended the museum’s Saturday morning youth art program.

Robert L. Penick has previous work published at The Hudson Review, North American Review, and Quiddity.

Gianna Sannipoli is a student at Masaryk University. Her poetry has been published in Gold Dust Magazine, The Wild Word, Panoply, One Sentence Poems, London Grip, and is forthcoming in Dodging the Rain and Edify Fiction. She is a reader for San Antonio Review, living in Brno, Czech Republic.

Celeste Schantz is the editor of Mason Street. She was the runner-up for the 2018 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry, judged by Terrance Hayes. She was the recipient of a full endowment to attend the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, where she studied creative nonfiction with the author Helen Macdonald. Her poems appear in Solstice, Stone Canoe, One Throne Magazine, Poetry International, and other publications. She was a finalist in Fugue journal’s 2018 annual prose writing contest. Her essay “Lake Under the Sea” appears in Fugue’s spring 2019 issue.
Celeste lives with her teenage son in Western NY, where she supports his differently-abled schooling and inclusion programs and champions autism rights.

G. E. Schwartz is a poet, short factionalist, playwright and performance artist. He’s the author of Only Others Are (Legible Press), World (Furniture Press), Thinking In Tongues (Hank’s Loose Gravel Press), as well as the forthcoming Murmurations (Wheeler Hill) and Chaos & Old Night (Legible Press.) He lives in Upstate New York.

Sejal Shah is the author of the debut memoir in essays, This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming June 2020—available for pre-order now). Her essay collection explores race, place, belonging, and South Asian American identity. The daughter of Gujarati parents who immigrated to the United States from India and Kenya, Sejal grew up in Rochester, New York. Her short stories and essays appear widely in print and online—including Brevity; Conjunctions; Kenyon Review; The Literary Review; The Margins; The Rumpus; Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America (Seal Press); and others.

Charles and Caroline Todd are the New York Times Best Selling authors of the Inspector Ian Rutledge mysteries and the Bess Crawford mysteries. Their works have received the Mary Higgins Clark, Agatha, Macavity and Barry awards along with nominations for the Anthony, Edgar, Agatha, and Susan Dunlop Memorial awards. Charles and Caroline have the rich storytelling heritage of the south. Both spent many evenings on the porch listening to their father and grandfather reminisce. A maternal grandmother told marvelous ghost stories. This tradition allows them to write with passion about events before their own time. And two uncles/great-uncles who served as in WWI aroused an early interest in the Great War.

Tammy Wells graduated from RIT with a BFA in visual media from the School of Photography of Arts and Science in 2017. She is a participant with the #inbetwinsus project; a collaboration of Deaf women photographers, shooting images of residents sheltering in place through house windows. The photographers are capturing historic COVID 19 pandemic moments. The photograph above, “Vivian with her Dog” was taken by Tammy Wells.

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory(Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A twenty two-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Laux/Millar Prize, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, and others. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a poetry editor and literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, North American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.