Paul David Adkins (He/Him/His) served in the US Army from 1991-2013, serving so long in Iraq that he is eligible for citizenship there. He lives in Northern New York, which has more ice cream stands per 100,000 people than anywhere else in the world. He holds a MA in Writing and Oral Tradition from The Graduate Institute, Bethany, CT. He counsels soldiers and teaches students in a correctional facility. Publications include River Styx, Whiskey Island, Longleaf Review, Connecticut River Review, Baltimore Review, and Pleiades. (https://www.litriotpress.com/paul-david-adkins)
Phyllis Carol Agins has long found inspiration in Philadelphia, PA. Two novels, a children’s book, and an architectural study were all published during her years there. Recently more than 45 short stories have appeared in literary magazines, including Art Times, Eclipse, Lilith Magazine, Pennsylvania English, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Verdad, Santa Fe Writers Project, and Women Arts Quarterly Journal. For many years, she divided her time between Philly and Nice, France, adding the Mediterranean rhythms to her sources of inspiration. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a family of squirrels made their home in her attic. None of her squirrel research had predicted this event. Visit: phylliscarolagins.com.
Karima Alavi has been lucky enough to travel and study in a variety of places. As a graduate student, she studied in Iran and returned there to teach English just as the Islamic Revolution was erupting. (She stayed for the entire conflict.) For the last nine years, she has been teaching Humanities and Creative Writing in a decidedly more mellow place, the New Mexico School for the Arts. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Texas State University. Her short stories have appeared on National Public Radio (All Things Considered), in Sufi Magazine, and in online journals such as the Santa Fe Writers’ Project and Tom Howard Winning Writers. Karima lives in the village of Abiquiu, New Mexico, where the howl of coyotes and the prowling of skunks inspire her to stay inside at night and get more writing done.
Peter Barlow’s first collection of Little Black Dots was published by Chatter House Press in 2017. His stories have appeared in Rosebud, The MacGuffin, The Homestead Review, Red Rock Review, Underground Voices, and Per Contra, amongst other places. When his wife and autistic son allow it, he serves as an adjunct professor of English at the University of Detroit-Mercy; he doesn’t talk about his day job because nobody believes what it is anyway.
Michele Battiste is the author of three poetry collections: Ink for an Odd Cartography and Uprising, both from Black Lawrence Press, and Waiting for the Wreck to Burn, which received the 2018 Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, Memorious, and Mid-American Review, among others. Michele has taught writing workshops for Wichita State University, the Prison Arts Program in Hutchinson, KS, Gotham Writers’ Workshops, and the national writing program Teen Ink. She lives in Colorado.
Victor Basta is a full-time investment banker, who assists African companies with fundraising. He dreamt of becoming a professional chess player but wasn’t good enough. In 2019, he began writing poetry, and his poems have been published in Grub Street Annual Review, Poet Speak Magazine, and Indolent Books. New work is forthcoming in the Pisgah Review. Victor was born in Cairo, emigrated to the US as a child, and currently lives in London and New York.
Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal. bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Before graduating to a fixed (and very small) income, he spent twenty-five years supporting his poetry habit with IT jobs that aren’t nearly as lucrative as you’d expect. Recent/upcoming appearances in Red Coyote Review, Deep South Magazine, and Aromatica Poetica, among others.
Timothy Caldwell retired from Central Michigan University in 2010 after 40 years of training professional singers, musical theatre performers, and school music teachers. He began his academic career a year after returning from serving in the Army during the Vietnam conflict. Because he was a veteran of a needless war, he was angered by the similarly pointless American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The outcome of his disgust and sorrow over the Iraq war was a semi-autobiographical novel, The Chaplain’s Assistant: God, Country, and Vietnam, published in 2009. One reviewer called it “. . . the next generation anti-war novel.” In 2011, he attended writing classes at the Hudson Valley Writers Center and discovered the genre of personal essays. Journals and reviews that have published his writing include Sliver of Stone, Diverse Voices, Penmen Review, AmarilloBay Literary Journal, Crab Creek Review, and Lunch Ticket.
Books in Mary Cresswell’s editorial life included astronautics, symbolic logic, cataloguing seaweeds, saving the kakapo parrot, and earthquake prediction. That last spirit accompanied her move from Los Angeles to New Zealand, where she went over to the dark side and now writes poems. In 2015, Canterbury University Press published Fish Stories, her experiments with ghazals and glosas; her most recent book is Body Politic (The Cuba Press, Wellington NZ, 2020). This is her first appearance in Glint, and she’s happy to be here with you.
Marie Davis-Williams grew up in a coal mining town in Northeastern Pennsylvania and her writing often focuses on the lives of the immigrants who were drawn there in the early 1900s. Her work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories and Adanna Literary Journal. “Anthracite,” a short story, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Celeste Hamilton Dennis is a fiction writer and essayist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in ENTROPY, Lunch Ticket, Gravel, Literary Orphans, Queen’s Mob Teahouse, and more. She’s from the first planned suburb of Levittown, New York, and spent most of her formative years in a bowling alley. You can find her awkwardly fumbling on Twitter @celestehdennis.
Nancy Ford Dugan’s short stories have been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in over 35 publications, including The Diverse Arts Project, After Happy Hour Review, Limestone, Caveat Lector, Crack the Spine, Cimarron Review, Passages North, The Minnesota Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, The MacGuffin, Epiphany, Delmarva Review, Hypertext, Paragon Journal, Slippery Elm, Superstition Review, and Tin House’s Open Bar. She lives in New York City and previously resided in Michigan, Ohio, and Washington, DC.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her newest poetry collection West: Fire: Archive will be published by Mountain/ West Poetry Series in 2021. Her other poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017), Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her biography on Charmian London, Jack London’s wife will be published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2020. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
Doris Ferleger is the winner of the New Letters Poetry Prize, Robert Fraser Poetry Prize, and the AROHO Creative Non-Fiction Prize, among others. She is the author of Big Silences in a Year of Rain, As the Moon Has Breath, Leavened, and When You Become Snow. Among many accolades about Ferleger’s work, Aliki Barnestone writes: “These memorable poems keep singing with their insistent beauty.” Published in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, L.A. Review, and South Carolina Review, she is a former Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. Her work has been a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, Cod Hill Poetry Prize, and Washington Poetry Prize. Ferleger holds an MFA in Poetry and a Ph.D. in psychology and maintains a mindfulness-based therapy practice in PA.
Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Lit Windowpane (2008), Girl on a Bridge (2010), and five chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Diode, Ecotone, Indiana Review, Puerto del Sol, Verse Daily and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer’s Center for her book Lit Windowpane, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.
Michael Garriga comes from a long line of notable outlaws and storytellers along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. He is the author of the flash fiction collection The Book of Duels (Milkweed Editions, 2014); one of those stories was included in the 2015 Best Small Fictions anthology. Though he’s worked as a bartender and soundman in a blues bar, he currently teaches creative writing at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and two sons and a clowder of cats.
Caroljean Gavin’s work has appeared in places such as Pithead Chapel, The Conium Review, Moon City Review, Bending Genres, and Barrelhouse. She is the editor of What I Thought of Ain’t Funny, an anthology of short fiction based on the jokes of Mitch Hedberg. She lives in Winston-Salem, NC with her two rambunctious sons and a one-eyed Shih Tzu called Moxie. Currently she is working on a novel, a story collection, a nonfiction chapbook, yoga teacher training, and growing gold roses in Animal Crossing.
Priscilla Gonzalez is a second career student finishing her Bachelor of Art Education at Colorado State University. She is a lifelong learner committed to culturally responsive teaching and using art to promote social justice issues. Her area of concentration is metalsmithing but she also enjoys drawing, particularly with ink. She is the mother of two awesome boys and a proud wife of a supportive husband.
Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.
In a past century Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. He’s a retired math professor, has won two poetry chapbook prizes and published three collections, the most recent being The Dog’s Meow, Uncollected Press, 2019.
Rich Ives’ books include Light from a Small Brown Bird (Bitter Oleander Press–poetry), Sharpen (The Newer York—fiction chapbook), The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking (What Books—stories), Old Man Walking Home in the Dark (Cyberwit—poems), A Servant’s Map of the Body (Cyberwit—fiction), and Tunneling to the Moon (Silenced Press—hybrid). He has recently finished a five-volume novel including more than 3,000 insect characters who might actually be people.
Frank Jamison‘s work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Nimrod, South Carolina Review, Big Muddy, and many others. His poems have won the Robert Burns/Terry Semple Memorial Poetry Prize and the Libba Moore Gray Poetry Prize. He has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent short story, an excerpt from his novel The Town Upstairs (unpublished) appeared in Arkana. You can listen to him read it at https://arkanamag.org/2020/04/28/catfish/. He is a member of the Tennessee Writers Alliance, the Tennessee Mountain Writers, the Knoxville Writers’ Guild, and the Alabama Writers’ Conclave. Frank lives and writes beside the Tennessee River in Roane County Tennessee. In his spare time, he is Chairman of the Board of a community bank though he prefers to spend as much time as possible in the backcountry of the Cumberland Plateau hiking, backpacking, and helping to build the Cumberland Trail.
Jessie Janeshek’s full-length collections are MADCAP (Stalking Horse Press, 2019), The Shaky Phase (Stalking Horse Press, 2017), and Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). Her chapbooks include Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press, 2016), Rah-Rah Nostalgia (dancing girl press, 2016), Supernoir (Grey Book Press, 2017), Auto-Harlow (Shirt Pocket Press, 2018), and Channel U (Grey Book Press, 2020). A fan of film noir, lipstick, true crime, deer, sleeping, David Bowie, and cats, she lives in West Virginia. Read more at jessiejaneshek.net.
Claire Keyes is the author of two books of poetry, The Question of Rapture and What Diamonds Can Do. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Rattle, Calyx, The Georgia Review, and Persimmon Tree, among others. Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition. Professor Emerita at Salem State University, she lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts where she conducts a monthly poetry salon.
David Kirby teaches English at Florida State University. His latest collection is More Than This, and he is writing a poetry textbook called The Knowledge. One thing few people know about him is that he is a crack shot. His farm-girl mom taught him how to shoot her single-shot .22 and paid him ten cents for every cottonmouth moccasin he knocked off that otherwise would have menaced their sheep and horses. Kirby taught riflery as a camp counselor but has since given up weaponry for the pen, though he says that the lessons of sharpshooting apply to the writing of poems as well: preparation, patience, steadiness over time, making sure you hit your target.
Tricia Knoll lives with two dogs in the woods of Vermont, a daily practice that has served her well in the time of COVID-19. Much of her poetry is eco-poetry as collected in Urban Wild, Ocean’s Laughter, Broadfork Farm, and How I Learned To Be White which received the 2018 Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry (Antrim House). Website: triciaknoll.comriter
Eve Krakow is a writer and translator living in Montreal, Quebec. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in JMWW, lichen literary journal, Maisonneuve and SHY: An Anthology. While she is not much of a gardener, she did try a small vegetable patch in the city when her kids were little, but gave up after the squirrels insisted on sampling all the tomatoes before they were ripe. You can find her on Instagram @ekrakow.
Zinat Lalani was born in Kenya and studied for a B.A. in History and Political Science in Ireland. She subsequently taught secondary school in Uganda and Malaysia. She migrated to Canada in the mid-seventies and spent a year meandering over Western Canada hopping from town to town working for an inventory company. After brief spells of being employed as a waitress and at other clerical jobs, she returned to university for a social work degree and started work with a child protection agency. She began indulging her interest in writing as she neared the end of her social work career and plunged more seriously into it at retirement. She has published in Acta Victoriana and is currently working on a novel.
Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country. Some publications/ acceptances are in Blue Earth Review, Chautauqua Journal, New American Writing, Paterson Literary Review, and Spillway; also anthologies Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press) and What I Hear When Not Listening (best Sonic Boom poems, Vol. I).
Mario Loprete is a graduate of the Accademia of Belle Arti in Catanzaro, Italy. He describes painting as his first pure love, sculpture as his voluptuous and sensual lover. Sculpture stimulates different emotions, touches prohibited cords. “I only live nine hours from New York,” he writes. “9 hours, the duration of the flight that will take me from my city to NYC, the ‘Eldorado’ for those who make art. I think that The Big Apple is the point of arrival and, from there, a point of departure for those who create art in a professional way. I have a dream: my image on the cover in the September 2068 magazine of Forbes, which celebrates the 100 birthdays of the richest and most influential living artists in the world…”
John McKernan grew up in the middle of Omaha, Nebraska in the middle of the USA and recently retired from herding commas after teaching for many years at Marshall University. He lives in Florida. His most recent book, Resurrection of the Dust, contains selected poems. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Field, and elsewhere.
Patricia L. Meek won AWP Intro for Fiction with “The Crucified Bird.” “Weather” was a 2016 finalist for the Rita Dove Award in Poetry. Her writing has recently appeared in Ghost Town Literary Journal, Euphony Journal, Penman Review. Her poetry video series, Dialogue with Georgia O’Keefe, has been showcased at Rabbit Heart Poetry film festival and the Santa Fe Film Festival. Patricia is the author of NOAH: a supernatural eco-thriller, published by All Things That Matter Press. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Wichita State University, and an MA in Counseling from Southwestern College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is currently an Outpatient Clinician (LPC) in Southern Colorado. Website: patricialmeek.com
Ann E. Michael’s collection The Red Queen Hypothesis is slated for publication in 2021 (Salmon Poetry). Her previous books include Water-Rites, The Capable Heart, Barefoot Girls, and others. She tends her garden, watches clouds, and educates college students in Center Valley, PA. Her first book, More Than Shelter, has a title perhaps more appropriate for 2020 than 2006. Or else she is more prescient than she knows. You can find her blog at www.annemichael.wordpress.com.
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and, for many years, has been one of New York’s adopted sons. Most recently, his poems have appeared in Spirit Fire Review, New Feathers Anthology, Thimble Literary Magazine, Red Wheelbarrow Review, and The Journal of American Poetry. New work is forthcoming in Mason Street and The Worcester Review. He also co-wrote Three Unknown Poets with Madalasa Mobili, a poetry chapbook published by Seranam Press.
James Owens’ most recent book is Mortalia (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including publications in Adirondack Review, The Shore, The Honest Ulsterman, and Southword. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in a small town in northern Ontario.
Cory Robertson currently lives in Los Angeles with her partner and three cats. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in English, and her fiction has appeared in Gone Lawn and Dear Damsels. In addition to reading and writing, she likes musical theater, playing the violin, and learning new skills like ice skating and guitar.
Rick Rohdenburg received an M.A. from the Writers’ Workshop at Brown University, then spent thirty-five years in IT, primarily as a systems analyst. This excerpt is from his perennially unfinished memoir, Crows Fly from My Mouth. Primarily a poet, this is his first prose publication. He did not begin publishing until past sixty. Other work has appeared in the Chestnut Review, Laurel Review, Raleigh Review, Angle (UK), and others. Now retired, he and his wife live in Atlanta, Georgia, together with a mindful tabby, a greyhound, and all the attendant Sturm und Drang. He plays poor chess and worse golf but has achieved a transcendent mediocrity in fly fishing.
Rochelle Jewel Shapiro is the author of Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster, 2005) and indie finalist, Kaylee’s Ghost (2012). Like her Russian grandma, Rochelle works as a psychic. She’s published essays in The NYT (Lives), Newsweek, and more. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Entropy, Moment, Iowa Review, and more. In 2019, she was nominated for Best of the Net. Aside from her psychic work which she does by phone, she teaches writing at UCLA Extension. https://rochellejshapiro.com @rjshapiro
Born in Cao Lanh, Vietnam and raised in Camden, NJ, Vanni Thach received a BA at Bates College, Lewiston, ME, graduated from McNeese State University, with an MA in Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing. Vanni has received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in prose and is currently working to finish, revise, and edit a novel.
Alison Thompson is an Australian poet and short story writer. Recent publication credits include The Griffith Review (AUS), Sky Island (2018), and Cathexis Northwest (2019). She also received a Highly Commended in the Bridport Poetry Prize (2018). Her chapbooks – Slow Skipping (2008) and In A Day It Changes (2018) – are published by PressPress. (www.presspress.com.au)
Rachel Tramonte lives in Cleveland, OH. Her work has appeared in Bluestem Magazine, Broad River Review, The Broken Plate, The Cape Rock, Carbon Culture Review, Common Ground Review, Door is a Jar, Emrys Journal, Evening Street Review, GNU Journal, Green Hills Literary Lantern, HitchLit Review, Hobart, The Indianapolis Review, Jelly Bucket, Mantis, Slab, S/Word, These Fragile Lilacs, Third Wednesday, and Whistling Shade. Her poem “Dead Letter Mail” has been nominated for the 2018 Sundress Best of the Net award. She received her MA in English and Creative Writing from Binghamton University. She lives and writes in Cleveland, OH with her partner and their two daughters.
Robert Wexelblatt is a professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published seven fiction collections; two books of essays; two short novels; two books of poems; stories, essays, and poems in a variety of journals, and a novel awarded the Indie Book Awards first prize for fiction. Thanks to a professional life spent mostly with people who are always around nineteen years old, and also having failed to resolve any of the problems of his own post-adolescence, he feels younger than he is.
Megan Wildhood is an empathic, neurodiverse lady writer, MSW student, unique-earring collector and social transformation advocate in Seattle who helps her readers feel genuinely seen as they interact with her dispatches from the junction of extractive economics, mental and emotional distress, disability and reparative justice. She also coordinates an e-list, where she offers bi-monthly meditations for people who hate meditating and resources for socially and economically marginalized folks. She hopes you will find yourself in her words as they appear in her poetry chapbook Long Division as well as an excerpt of her novel manuscript, The Atlantic, Yes! Magazine, Mad in America, The Sun, and many elsewheres.
Glint Literary Journal 