Issue 4: Authors Biographies

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Eric Aaserud grew up in the Pacific Northwest and now lives in Maryland. He has published stories in Gray’s Sporting Journal, Third Coast Magazine, In Posse Review, and South Dakota Review.

Aremu Adams Adebisi is an economist. He has been nominated for Best of the Net, Pushcart, and Best New Poets. His work of poetry, “Force Mechanism”, was adapted into Lucent Dreaming’s first theatrical performance in Wales. He has works published in Storyscape Journal, Lucky Jefferson, West Branch, and elsewhere. He served as a mentor for SprinNG Fellowship and a panellist for the Gloria Anzaldua Poetry Prize. He edits poetry for ARTmosterrific and Newfound and facilitates the Transcendence Poetry Masterclass. 

Holly Eva Allen is a writer currently living in California. She has a degree in English from the University of California. Her work has been previously published in magazines and sites such as Rue Scribe, Blue Unicorn, The Courtship of Winds, and The Slanted House. She is currently working on a Master’s in English at Claremont Graduate University. You can find her work at hollyevaallen.wordpress.com.

Jason Arias lives on the Oregon coast. His debut short story collection, Momentary Illumination of Objects In Motion,was published in 2018 by Black Bomb Books. Jason’s stories and essays have appeared in The Nashville ReviewOregon Humanities Magazine, Harpur Palate, Lidia Yuknavitch’s TED Book: The Misfit’s Manifesto,and multiple literary magazines and anthologies. For links to more of his work please visit JasonAriasAuthor.com. 

Roy Bentley, a finalist for the Miller Williams prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City, has published 8 books; including American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press, who just published a new & selected: My Mother’s Red Ford. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel JournalThe Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Rattle and Shenandoah among others. Hillbilly Guilt, his latest collection of poems, won the 2019 Hidden River Arts / Willow Run Poetry Book Award.

Cathy Bryant has won 29 writing competitions and literary awards, including the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Prize and the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, and her work has appeared in over 250 publications. Cathy’s books are ‘Contains Strong Language and Scenes of a Sexual Nature’, ‘Look at All the Women’ and ‘Erratics’, (poetry), and ‘How to Win Writing Competitions’ (nonfiction). She co-edited the three volumes of ‘Best of Manchester Poets’.  Cathy also runs the Comps and Calls website, listing opportunities for skint writers. She lives in Manchester, UK.

B. R. Dionysius b 1969 in Dalby, Queensland, Australia. (He/him/his) has since lived in Melbourne, Ipswich and Brisbane where he is an English teacher, was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival and in his spare time watches birds. He has recently published work in ACC Progenitor Journal, Blue Earth Review, ginosko literary journal, Juste Milieu Literary Review, October Hill Magazine, Remington Review, Sobotka Literary Magazine, Sky Island Journal, The Mystic Blue Review, The Electric Rail, The Cold Mountain Review and was short-listed in the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize.

Alison Gadsby is a writer living in Toronto. She graduated from UBC with an MFA in Creative Writing and York University with an HBA in Creative Writing and English. She has also attended a writers’ retreat at the Banff Centre. Her work has won awards and scholarships, both at UBC and at York. She is the founder/curator/host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series in Toronto. She is completing a final revision of a novel and continues to work on the short stories in her ‘swimming’ collection.

Kentucky poet, folklorist, and naturalist Sarah McCartt-Jackson‘s work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Indiana Review, Journal of American Folklore, The Maine Review, Tidal Basin Review, and others. She has served as artist-in-residence for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Catoctin Mountain National Park, and Acadia National Park. She is the author of Stonelight (Airlie Press), which won the Phillip H. McMath Award, Weatherford Award in Poetry, and Airlie Prize.

Mark Laliberte is an artist-writer with an MFA from University of Guelph. He has exhibited extensively in galleries across Canada and the USA, curates the online experimental comics site http://4panel.ca, and edits the hybrid art/lit mag CAROUSEL. Laliberte has had pageworks, poems and other print experiments appear in publications big and small, including Ink Brick, Lantern, Poetry, prairie fire, subTerrian and Vallum. Publications include ‘BRICKBRICKBRICK’ (BookThug, 2010) and ‘asemanticasymmetry’ (a riso-printed remixing of selected derek beaulieu’s letraset works / Anstruther Press, 2016). Laliberte is a member of the collaborative writing entity, MA|DE: 2 new collaborative chapbooks were just released at the end of 2020, A Trip to the ZZOO (Collusion Books) and A Barely Concealed Design (Puddles of Sky). More info: marklaliberte.com ma-de.ca

Bill Mohr is a professor in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach.  Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. His critical essays and literary commentary have appeared in journals such as the William Carlos Williams Review, Journal of Beat Studies, Idées d’Amérique, Chicago Review, and the LA Review of Books. His most recent collection of poems, The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana, is a bilingual edition published by What Books in Los Angeles in 2018. His poems have also been translated into Croatian, Italian, and Japanese. He blogs at billmohrpoet.com; his website is koankinship.com.

Neha Mulay is an Australian-Indian writer and a current MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Maine Review, and SAND Journal, among other publications. She is the Web Editor for Washington Square Review.

Eric Paul Shaffer’s Green Leaves: Selected and New Poems will be published in 2022 by Coyote Arts. Shaffer is author of seven other poetry volumes, including Even Further WestA Million-Dollar BillLāhaina NoonPortable Planet; and Living at the MonasteryWorking in the Kitchen. More than 550 of his poems have been published in national and international reviews in fifteen countries and three languages. Shaffer teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Honolulu Community College. 

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, a teacher of French as a foreign language and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Wellington Street Review, Black Bough, Nine Muses, Borrowed Solace, Ligeia, Cordite Poetry, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.


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