Author Biographies

James Bohen

Jim Bohen is a poet and songwriter living in St. Paul, MN. His poems have appeared in Pinyon Review, the Minnesota Daily, Red Paint Hill, Conclave, and elsewhere. He seeks a publisher for his poetry manuscript “In Transit.” His music CD, “Never Too Late,” contains 12 of the hundreds of songs he's written.

Vanessa Brown

V. Eslinger-Brown is a retired university professor and school dean. She currently works as a nonfiction writing instructor on an adjunct faculty basis at two local post-secondary institutions in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Dr. Brown believes that literature can be transformative, mirroring the transformation of faith.

Joan Connor

Joan Connor is professor at Ohio University and a former professor in Fairfield University's and Stonecoast/University of Southern Maine's low residency MFA programs. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Award, the John Gilgun award, a Pushcart Prize, the Ohio Writer Award in fiction and nonfiction, the AWP award for her short story collection, History Lessons, and the River Teeth Award for her collection of essays, The World Before Mirrors. Her most recent collection, How to Stop Loving Someone, won the Leapfrog Press Award for Adult Fiction and was published in 2011. Her first two collections are We Who Live Apart and Here On Old Route 7. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Chelsea, Manoa, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, The Journal of Arts & Letters, and Black Warrior, among others. She lives in Athens, Ohio and Belmont, Vermont.

John Grey

John Grey is an Australian poet, and US resident. He has recently been published in New Plains Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, and Silkworm. His upcoming work will be in Big Muddy Review, Main Street Rag, and Spoon River Poetry Review.

Alexandria Gurley

Alex Tha Great is a playwright, spoken word artist, and scholar with ties to Illinois, Texas, and California. Her work has been published in journals including Bohemia, Illya’s Honey, The Legendary, and Linden Avenue. She is the author of Black Souls Dance On Beat (2015) and produced an award winning solo show Passport To Womanhood in 2013.

Randel McCraw Helms

Until his retirement from Arizona State University in 2007, Randel McCraw Helms was a professor of English, teaching classes in the Romantic poets and the Bible as literature. He has published five books of literary criticism, including “Gospel Fictions” and Tolkien’s World.” Now he devotes himself to his oldest love, making poems.

Susan Johnson

Susan Johnson has her MFA and PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she teaches writing. Her poems have recently appeared in North American Review, Circe’s Lament, The Kerf, Off The Coast, Helen, and Bryant Literary Review. Her chapbook “Impossible is Nothing” was published by Finishing Line Press.

Dane Karnick

Dane Karnick grew up by the Colorado “Rockies” and lives near Seattle. His poetry recently appeared in Poppy Seed Review, Here/There, Bookends Review, and Eunioa Review. Visit him at www.danekarnick.com.

Michael Keller

Michael Keller is an assistant professor of English at Quincy University, where he teaches American Literature and writing. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of religious and aesthetic experience in American poetry. Apart from teaching and publishing scholarly work, Michael writes poetry in traditional and experimental verse forms, as well as short fiction. His poem “Mohiniyattam” won the Editor’s Choice Award from Towers Literary Magazine in 2009. He lives in Quincy, IL with his wife and son, where he futilely daydreams about owning a motorcycle.

J.S. Kierland

J.S. Kierland is a graduate of the University of Connecticut, and did postgrad at Hunter College where he won the New York City playwright’s award and was admitted into Sigma Tau Delta. He was given a full scholarship to the Yale Drama School and after receiving his MFA became playwright-in-residence at Lincoln Center, Brandeis University, and the Lab Theatre. In Hollywood, he wrote two films, was resident playwright at the LAAT, where he founded the successful LA Playwright’s Group, and went on to join Camelot Artists. He has published a novella, edited two books of one-act plays, written four films, and has over eighty publications of short stories in literary collections, reviews andmagazines around the U.S., including, Playboy, Fiction International, Colere, Trajectory, International Short Story, Bryant Review, Emry’s, Front Range, Muse & Stone, Fiction Attic Press, Mount Hope, and many others. A book titled, 15 of the BEST SHORT STORIES by J.S. Kierland was published in 2014 by Underground Voices, and an e-book was released in 2015 titled, HARD TO LEARN by the same publisher.

John P. Kristofco

John P.(Jack) Kristofco, from Highland Heights, Ohio, is professor of English and the formerdean of Wayne College in Orrville. He has published over five hundred poems and forty short stories in about two hundred different publications, including: Folio, Rattle, The Bryant Literary Review, The Cimarron Review, Grasslimb, Iodine, Small Pond, The Aurorean, The MacGuffin , Sierra Nevada Review, Blueline, Sheepshead Review, Slant, and Review Americana. He has published three collections of poetry, A Box of Stones, Apparitions, and The Fire in Our Eyes with a fourth, The Timekeeper’s Garden, just released this March. He is currently working on a collection of short stories for publication next year. Jack has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times.

Rebeka Porter

Rebeka Porter is a junior at Quincy University. She is majoring in Public Relations and English. Rebeka enjoys reading books and writing during her free time. This fall she will be applying to the JET (Japan Exchange for Teaching) Program for a position as an Assistant Language teacher. She will find out in January of 2017 if she is accepted. If accepted, after teaching in Japan for a few years, Rebeka plans to pursue one of her degrees in that country and/or become an interpreter. If she isn't accepted into the program, Rebeka plans to apply to PR positions and different editing companies in the hopes to pursue one of her degrees.

Erin Redfern

Erin Redfern works as a writing mentor in the Land of STEM (aka Silicon Valley). She spent four years’ worth of mornings in the same chair by the same window, writing her dissertation, no chapter of which she can recall as vividly as the sidewalk scene recorded in “Evanston.” erinredfern.net

Emily Rice

Emily Rice attended the University of Florida and, almost a decade later, got a decent job as a computer programmer and bagging person at a grocery store. She loves working on websites, such as mysadpanda.com (a work in progress).

Andy Tressler

Andy Tressler is a truck driver, a Lego sculpture artist, and an evangelist in an alternate reality. In this universe, he was a Boy Scout, waiter, and meat-processing worker, is now a university instructor of logic, philosophy, and ethics, and will be a nurse, rat owner, and surfer. He was trained at Boston College, but he won't say what for. Andy writes stories down because he forgets about them if he doesn't. His unpublished, non-existent novels include Her Majesty's Revolver and Diary of Teenage Girl with Sharkhead. Andy is Andy's real name, but in the shadowy life outside of stories, he employs A. Psuedonym.

Margaret Vidale

Margaret’s childhood love of reading and writing poetry was an escape, which helped her survive many years of severe abuse. As an adult, she didn’t return to writing until she retired in 2001. Expressing her memories in poems was been cathartic and has helped her branch into other subjects important to her. She is proud and grateful that her poems have appeared in Solstice, Pearl, Third Wednesday, Evening Street Review, Ibbetson Street Press and other small press publications.