Contributors ~ Riddled with Arrows 2.3

Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, McNeese Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Poem, Adirondack Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Florida Review, Slant, Poem, Carolina Quarterly, Arkansas Review, South Dakota ReviewOrbis, and many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry, all from BrickHouse Press: Buffalo NickelThe Weight of the World, and The Story of My Lives

 

Gale has taught university English courses in the US, China, and Palestine.

Acuff’s “1962” first appeared in SN Review (Winter 2010)

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Carol Barrett holds doctorates in both clinical psychology and creative writing. She coordinates the Creative Writing Certificate Program at Union Institute & University. Her books include Calling in the Bones, which won the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, Drawing Lessons from Finishing Line Press, and Pansies, a work of creative nonfiction, from Sonder Press. Her poems have appeared in JAMA, Poetry International, Poetry Northwest, The Women’s Review of Books, and many other venues. A former NEA Fellow in Poetry, she lives in Bend, OR.

 

Carol began writing poetry to provide some comfort to widowed women.

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Nick Blundell lives and works in West Yorkshire, in the City of Bradford.  He has always loved working and playing with words. Fortunately for thirty years he has been paid to shape them into sentences and stanzas seeking to spark spirituality and search for sense and compassion. 

 

Nick is a minister with the Methodist Church of Great Britain, which means that some of his words are about God who logically doesn’t exist but seems to keep turning up. Paradox and poems help. Certainty certainly doesn’t.

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Nancy Brewka-Clark’s poems, short stories, drama and nonfiction have been published by Adams Media, Three Rivers Press, Red Hen Press, Smith and Kraus, Routledge U.K., YouthPLAYS of Los Angeles, the University of Iowa Press, Level Best Books, Conari/Red Wheel, Holy Cow! Press, FunDead Publications, Little Pear Press, The International Thomas Merton Society, The Boston Globe, and The North American Review and among others. Please visit her website nancybrewkaclark.com for updates on her work. 

For two decades Nancy was the nation’s sole artisan practicing colonial japanning, a three-dimensional combination of painting, gilding and inking. Her work ended up in more magazines than her writing, including The New York Times, People, and a host of others when she provided a piece for a Colombian Coffee ad campaign.

 

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Stephen Briseño‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Memoir Mixtapes, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, 8 Poems, formercactus, Barren Magazine, and Rabid Oak. He lives in San Antonio with his wife and daughter, teaches middle school English, and drinks far too much coffee. Follow him on Twitter: @stephen_briseno 

 

Stephen is always surprised how, now that he is a father, so much of his conversation is about animated dogs and getting a small child to eat something. 

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Tim Burkhardt is a journalist, poet, and fiction writer who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina. When he is not covering local culture or environmental issues for Asheville’s alternative newspaper Mountain Xpress, he likes to dispense with the facts and create surreal modern fantasies. He spends the rest of his time raising his two sons and their rescue cat, Keats. His work can be found at timothyburkhardt.wordpress.com 

Tim has an eclectic resume. In past lives, he has been a carnival worker, a traveling comic book salesman, and a mortuary assistant. More recently, he was the stand-in for Sam Rockwell during the filming of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.

 

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Patrick Cabello Hansel has published poems and prose in over 50 journals, including Hawai’i Pacific Review, Ilanot Review, Lunch Ticket, subprimal, and Ash and Bones.He has received awards from the Loft Literary Center and MN State Arts Board.  He is the editor of The Phoenix of Phillips, a literary journal for and by the people of the most diverse neighborhood in Minneapolis. His book of poems “The Devouring Land” will be published March 2019 by Main Street Rag Publishing.  He blogs about his passion for beauty and justice at spiritwound.blogspot.com  

 

Patrick has served as a Lutheran pastor in bilingual parishes in the south Bronx, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, with his wife and co-pastor, Luisa, who is a mosaic artist. Their two daughters are also fabulous artists.

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Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press, publisher of lesbian/bi/trans poetry. Her poetry collection “slight faith” was published by MoonPath Press in 2018. 

Risa is told she’s had an interesting life: giving birth to her son in a hotel room in Kabul, Afghanistan; running an abortion clinic in Tallahassee Florida; being a member of ACT UP NY in New York City; and volunteering for End of Life Washington, assisting people to use the Washington State Death with Dignity Law.

Denenberg’s “Reverse-Origami” first appeared in The Centrifugal Eye (Winter/Spring 2013)

 

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Ellen Estilai is a writer and artist living in Riverside, CA.  A former arts administrator, she has also taught writing and literature in universities in Iran and California. Her essay “Front Yard Fruit,” originally published in Alimentum, is included in New California Writing 2011 and was selected as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2011. A Pushcart and Orison prize nominee, she has published poetry, essays and fiction in Phantom Seed; Broad!; Snapdragon; Ink & Letters; Heron Tree; (In)Visible Memoirs 2; HOME: Tall Grass Writers Guild Anthology; Writing from Inlandia; Shark Reef and Lady Liberty Lit (forthcoming) among others. 

Ellen has spent much of her career collaborating with artists, writers and agencies to strengthen communities through the arts. Because she and her husband have been immigrants in each other’s native countries, her writing frequently explores the joys and tribulations of the immigrant experience.  

 

Estilai’s “Saffron Prayers” first appeared in Writing from Inlandia (Nov 2016)

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Kari A. Flickinger‘s poetry and short stories have been published in or are forthcoming from Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Eunoia Review, Moonchild Magazine, Quiet Storm, Panoply, MilkJournal, Susurrus, Falcon Scratch, The Daily Californian, and The DVC Inquirer. She is an alumna of UC Berkeley. 

 

When she is not writing, Kari can be found playing guitar and singing to her unreasonably large Highlander cat, and obsessively over-analyzing the details of neighboring trees.

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Lou Hurst is a reader, runner, and writer who lives in Lexington, Kentucky. 

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John Kaprielian has been a photographer since the age of 9, when he built a darkroom in his basement, constructing an enlarger out of an old slide projector. He has worked professionally as a photo editor for over 30 years, and writes a lot of poetry on the side. He has had his images published in magazines, calendars, and an assortment of textbooks. He lives in Putnam County, NY with his wife, son, and several oft-photographed pets. 

 

The letters in John’s photograph in RwA 2.3 are wooden type that belonged to his father, which he inherited after his recent death. The image was to accompany a poignant and touching poem, which got cut, alas. C’est la vie.

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M.L. Kejera is a Chicago based writer of Gambian origin. His work has previously been published, or is forthcoming, in Strange Horizons, Cafe Irreal, and Riddled with Arrows.

 

Most of Kejera’s irrealist stories come to him as dreams first.

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Carla Kirchner is a poet, fiction writer, and English professor who lives in the Missouri Ozarks. Her poetry chapbook, The Physics of Love, won the 2016 Concrete Wolf Press Chapbook Contest. Her writing has received Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations, and her prose has appeared in such places as Literary Orphans, Rappahannock Review, and Unbroken Journal. She is currently at work on a collection of Civil War fairy tales. 

 

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Joel Lipman has employed rubber stamps as a printing tool for over 40 years. His visual poems can be found here. An emeritus professor of English, he lives in Northport, Maine, and Toledo, Ohio. 

Since grading and sorting paper while working in a junk yard as a teenager, Joel’s been fascinated by the details found in old and so-called “obsolete” books. Much of his work as a poet begins with discarded books.

Lipman’s “Hold the pen” first appeared in “The Origins of Poetry”, 
a collection of over 100 works and portions exhibited in 2004 at Woodland Pattern Bookstore [Milwaukee]

 

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M.M. Nickolai is a writer and language artist. She received her MFA in writing from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her art and writing have appeared in publications, exhibitions, and performances around the world. She currently teaches at Hongik University in South Korea, and her website is .monicanickolai.com

Nickolai has retired. She currently resides in a house mounted on chicken legs, flies upon a mortar and pestle, and devours intruders.

 

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Elena Nola has been writing poetry for more than 20 years. She is a 2005 graduate of the University of Texas. Her home on the web is elenanola.com

Elena has predilections for feathers and capes.

 

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Jessica Reisman‘s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her science fiction adventure novel SUBSTRATE PHANTOMS came out from Resurrection House Books May 2017, and her story “Bourbon, Sugar, Grace” appeared on Tor.com in June 2017. Find out more at storyrain.com

Jessica grew up on the east coast of the US, was a teenager on the west coast, and now lives in Austin, Texas. Though she dropped out of high school, she now has a master’s degree and was a Michener Fellow in Fiction while getting it. She’s been a writer, animal lover, devoted reader, and movie aficionado since she was a wee child.

 

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Karen Shepherd lives with her husband and two teenagers in the Pacific Northwest where she enjoys walking in forests and listening to the rain. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in various journals online and in print, but most of her work just lives on her laptop.  Follow her on Twitter @karkarneenee.

 

During the early spring, Karen is incredibly annoying when she points out every blooming trillium during family hikes.

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Claire Smith’s poetry is generally out of this world, but on earth has appeared in journals and anthologies including Spectral Realms, Illumen, and Eye to the Telescope.  Her other home is Gloucestershire, United Kingdom. with her husband, Olly and Ishtar, their spoiled Tonkinese cat. 

      Smith’s “Writing on Swans” first appeared in “V10: 10 Poems 10 Poets” E1, 
edited by Victoria Dovey,  published by The Gloucester Poetry Society 

 

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Mary Thaler is an environmental microbiologist who has done fieldwork for many years in the remote Arctic. She is currently working on the manuscript of a novel about Hans Hendrich, a famous nineteenth century guide from Greenland. Her short stories have appeared in The New Quarterly and Northern Review and can be found on her website marythaler.wordpress.com 

 

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Jane Tims is a botanist, historian, writer and artist living in rural New Brunswick. She has two illustrated books of poetry on the subjects of edible wild plants and covered bridges (published by Chapel Street Editions, Woodstock). She also has six illustrated books of science fiction in the Meniscus Series under the name Alexandra Tims (independently published). In 2016, she won the New Brunswick Writers’ Federation Alfred Bailey Prize for her manuscript of poems about bird song. Her website is janetims.com 

Jane loves putting her knowledge of botany and history to work, building worlds and settings in the past or on other planets.

 

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Pat Tompkins is an editor; her poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Modern Haiku, the Hollins Critic, and KYSO Flash.

A favorite escape from Pat’s desk is swimming outdoors, including in a Norwegian fjord and a Copenhagen canal.

Tompkins’s “The Power of Three” first appeared in a New Zealand journal, Semaphore, in 2009.

 

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Thomas Vaughn is an author of speculative fiction, particularly dark magical realism. He is a byproduct of the debris field of Madison County Arkansas. He continues to reside in the Ozark Mountains, a place he affectionately terms the Archive of Pain. When he is not writing he poses as a college professor with a research specialization in apocalyptic rhetoric and doomsday cults. 

Thomas reports that the only thing fascinating or relevant about himself might be this: As much as he tries, he can’t seem to stop writing.

 

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Marie Vibbert‘s poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and tiny poetry houses around Pittsburgh, among other venues.  She played women’s professional football, rode 17% of the roller coasters in North America, and is a computer programmer from Cleveland, Ohio.  Find out more about her at marievibbert.com 

Marie wrote her first computer game in pencil on notebook paper after a one-day BASIC lesson in sixth grade. It took over twenty sheets of paper, much of it planned ASCII art, and she was never allowed back to the computer lab to type it in.

 

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Thomas R. Winward is an engineer and an avid pursuer of all things sci-fi, fantasy and weird. When not juggling his many hobbies, he spends his time trying to warp his children into gamers. His first published story “Light” was recently released in Gathering Storm Magazine

 

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Aliesa Zoecklein has poems published or forthcoming in Copper NickelSeventh Wave,Carolina Quarterly, and Split Rock Review among others. In 2014, her chapbook At Each Moment, Air won the Peter Meinke Award and was published by YellowJacket Press. Aliesa lives with her wife in Gainesville, Florida, where she teaches writing at Santa Fe College. 

 

 

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