Tom Dooley co-founded Eclectica in 1996 and serves as its Managing and Fiction Editor. In the twelve years between earning a Bachelor's in English literature from the University of Chicago and a Master's in public administration from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he taught middle and high school English in Alaska, Arizona, and Wisconsin, amassing fond memories, dubious experiences, and debt. He now works for the government by day, edits Eclectica by night, and feels very grateful for the blessings he has received—chief among them being married to the sweetest gal and the best poet he knows. He and said poet reside in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with four dogs (plus four "permanent fosters"), two cats, and two amazing Haitian-American children.
Gilbert Wesley Purdy is Eclectica's Review Editor. His new book, entitled Edward de Vere was Shake-speare: at long last the proof, is available at Amazon.com. He has published poetry, prose, and translation in many journals, paper and electronic, including Jacket Magazine, Poetry International (San Diego State University), The Georgia Review (University of Georgia), Grand Street, SLANT (University of Central Arkansas), The Evansville Review (University of Evansville), Rattle (online), Consciousness Literature and the Arts (University of Wales, Aberystwyth), Orbis (UK), Eclectica, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Links to his work online and to a selected bibliography of his work in paper venues appear at his Hyperlinked Online Bibliography.
Matthew Allen lives in a small town in Northeast Texas.
Gabriella M. Belfiglio has appeared most recently in the Lambda Literary Review as the featured poet. She has also had writing published in the award-winning anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders, as well as The Dream Catcher's Song, Avanti Popolo, Folio, The Centrifugal Eye, and Potomac Review, among other places. She works as an artist and teacher in New York City.
Greta Bolger is a marketing maven turned small-time shopkeeper in a northern Michigan resort town. When not buying and selling Guatemalan and Mexican imports, she writes and publishes poems and prose in print and online journals, including Thema, The Literary Bohemian, The Chimaera, Short Fast and Deadly, and Third Coast.
Jamie Bruno is the Artistic Director of the Syracuse Shakespeare Festival and the author of The Liberty of Low Expectations: Twelve Dramatic Monologues. His poetry has most recently appeared in Stirring and IthacaLit.
Kathryn Buckley lives in New York and teaches in New Jersey, so she spends lots of time on trains. When she isn't grading papers, reading, or writing, she goes to concerts, spends time with people she is fond of who tolerate her and her strange ways, and uses Fujifilm disposable cameras to take pictures she actually has developed because she prefers the Stone Age to this digital one. She has an MFA in Fiction from The New School and her work has appeared in From the Heart of Brooklyn Volume 2, Toad Journal, The American, Ebibliotekos, and 34th Parallel.
Antonia Clark works as a medical writer and editor. She has taught poetry and fiction writing and is co-administrator of an online poetry forum, The Waters. She is the author of a chapbook, Smoke and Mirrors, and the forthcoming poetry collection, Chameleon Moon. Her poems and short stories have appeared in numerous print and electronic journals, including Anderbo, The Cortland Review, The Missouri Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Rattle, and Softblow. She lives in Vermont, loves French picnics and travel, and plays French cafe music on a sparkly purple accordion.
Dr. Lâle Davidson has appeared in The North American Review, The Little Magazine, Phoebe, and Artists Unite, among others. She has taught fiction writing, science fiction and fantasy, and public speaking at SUNY Adirondack for 20 years. She founded the visiting author series The Writers Project with the help of six years of grants from the National Endowment of the Arts. She graduated from Oberlin College and earned her Doctor of Arts in writing at the University at Albany. She collaborated on the novel Feeding Christine by Barbara Chepaitis (Bantam 2001) and wrote the libretto for Billy and Zelda, an opera commissioned and performed by OperaDelaware in 1999. "Death's Debut" was inspired in part by a folktale called "Death in a Nut" collected by Duncan and Linda Williamson from the Traveling People of Scotland, an indigenous group of nomads.
Reed Fauver likes to receive interesting mail from sharp people: PO Box CM, Bisbee, AZ 85603.
Sean Gill is a writer, playwright, and filmmaker who has studied with Werner Herzog and Juan Luis Buñuel, followed public defenders for National Geographic, and was an artist-in-residence at the Bowery Poetry Club from 2011-2012. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Clackamas Literary Review, Mixer, theNewerYork, Sein und Werden, and The Journal of Experimental Fiction, among others.
Ruth D. Handel is one of this issue's Spotlight Author runners-up and the author of Tugboat Warrior (Dos Madres Press, 2013), Reading the White Spaces (Finishing Line Press, 2009) and poems in literary journals and anthologies. Her full length manuscript has recently been submitted for publication. She has read her poems throughout the New York metropolitan area, and her work has twice been selected in juried competition for performance at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. Ruth teaches poetry courses at an Adult School, facilitates writing workshops, and manages the Poetry Caravan, a volunteer organization that brings poetry to the community. A retired academic, Ruth feels especially privileged to be able to devote time to poetry writing and teaching.
Elizabeth Kerper lives in Chicago and recently graduated from DePaul University with a BA in English literature. She is a contributing editor at N/A Literary Magazine, where her work has appeared. She is overly fond of avocados, rainy days, and the second person, and she can generally be found sitting quietly in the corner with her nose stuck in a book.
Jascha Kessler is this issue's Spotlight Author, an honor he also shared in October of 2010 with his late wife Julia. He has published eight books of his poetry and fiction as well as six volumes of translations of poetry and fiction from Hungarian, Persian, and Bulgarian, several of which have won major prizes. In 1989, his translation of Sándor Rákos' Catullan Games won the Translation Award from the National Translation Center (Marlboro Press). Recent titles include Siren Songs & Classical Illusions: 60 Fables, Revised with a Preface (McPherson & Company, 2013) and King Solomon's Seal: 75+ fables (xlibris, 2013). He served as Arts Commissioner for the City of Santa Monica 1990-1996, and won a Fellowship in Fiction Writing for 1993-1994 from the California Arts Council. This is his fourteenth appearance in Eclectica.
Phillip Larrimore is a visual artist, writer, and garden designer living in Wingate, North Carolina. He has written extensively for Charlotte Viewpoint and more recently for the Charlotte Observer. His visual work appears on his website, and other writings on his blog, Zeitquest.
Sol W. Metzger died in 2004. His memoir, from which "The U.S. Military Government of Germany: A Personal Recollection" is taken, is housed at Temple University.
Marjorie Mir has appeared in a number of anthologies and, most recently, in the Atlanta Review. She is a member of Poetry Caravan, local poets who share their work with residents of care facilities in Westchester County, New York. "Time out of Mind," arose from the simplest and most communal of remarks: "The kettle is on."
Hugo J. Quizhpi was born and raised in New York City. He served in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, where he received recognition for duties rendered during 9/11 and Operation Iraqi Freedom. His poems are inspired by his military experiences and his indigenous Ecuadorian roots. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Tower Journal, Nagari Magazine, Elohi Gadugi Journal, Underwater NY, and WLRN Public Radio. He lives in Miami, Florida.
Matt Savage is a first-time author living in Boston, Massachusetts, where he does advertising things for a living and music things for fun.
E.M. Schorb's latest collection of prose poems is Manhattan Spleen. His novel, A Portable Chaos, is out in a revised edition after originally winning the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction. Recent poetry collections include The Ideologues and Other Retrospective Poems and The Journey. Paradise Square, his first novel, was the winner of the International eBook Award Foundation's grand prize for fiction at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Schorb's work has also appeared in The American Scholar, The Sewanee Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Antioch Review, Stand and Agenda (England), and the New York Quarterly, among others. Most recently, his poems appeared in Measure, Shenandoah, and The Hudson Review.
Benjamin Soileau is a proud Cajun who self-exiled from South Louisiana to the Pacific Northwest in search of the blank page pressed from Douglas fir pulp. His curious tales of the odd beneath the ordinary are written through the lens of a zillion jobs and a habit of questionable living situations. Now reasonably employed, he spends daylight hours behind the wheel of a beer delivery truck in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, Kennedy. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Border Crossing, Fried Chicken & Coffee, B O D Y Literary Journal, Hobo Pancakes, and The Rag.
Ann Starr is the author of Starr Review, the monthly blog review of contemporary visual arts and music. Before taking up the pen for memoir and travel writing, Starr showed widely as a visual artist and lectured about art and medicine throughout the United States and England. Her book, Sound Ideas: The Music of Morgan Powell, will be published in August 2014 by Upper Hand Press.
Nancy Stone lives in Florida, where she writes and teaches. A native of New England with roots reaching back to the 17th century, she finds creative inspiration in the amazing true stories of her ancestors and the places they lived. "Angeline" was based in part on the historic Lighthouse Inn, which sits deserted above the Long Island Sound, its dining room still festooned for a Christmas party that was never to be. Nancy is currently at work on The Resurrected, a novel for young adults, in which she brings many of her dead relatives back to life. Her short fiction has appeared in The Mississippi Review and on the One Teen Story blog.
Ray Templeton is a former Spotlight Author. A Scottish writer and musician, he lives in St. Albans, England. His writing, including poetry and short fiction among other things, has appeared both in print and on the web, and sometimes even other people sing his songs. Recent work can be found in Eclectica, nthposition, Left Hand Waving, and qarrtsiluni. His e-chapbook The Act Of Finding was published in 2009 by Right Hand Pointing, and his collection of prose poems The Skin Still Feels The Stone by White Knuckle Press in 2011. He is a regular contributor to Musical Traditions and a member of the editorial board of Blues & Rhythm magazine.
Scott Urban writes and teaches in the mist-shrouded forests of southeastern Ohio. His most recent collection is God's Will (Mad Rush Books, 2013). Previous collections include Alight, Skull-Job, Night's Voice, and, with Bruce Whealton, Puncture Wounds. He and his family live in a former Amish farmhouse that isn't haunted—yet.
Jay Hansford C. Vest, PhD. is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation, a tribe recognized by the state of Virginia. He is a direct descendent of the 17th century chief Opechancanough who took John Smith captive as a murder suspect during British Colonization of Tsenacomoco (Powhatan Virginia), and he is an honorary Pikuni (Blackfeet) in ceremonial adoption (June 1989). Dr. Vest is a full professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. He is author of Will-of-the-Land: A Philosophy of Wilderness Praxis (2010) and The Bobtail Stories: Growing Up Monacan (forthcoming), as well as more than one hundred scholarly journal articles, chapters in books, and other published writings.