Contributors, January 2011


Dave Allen is the Director, Insights & Digital Media at NORTH, a Creative Brand Agency in Portland, Oregon, where he pro­vides Digital Brand Strategy for the company’s clients.

He start­ed his career as a musi­cian as the found­ing mem­ber and bass play­er for the post-punk band Gang of Four. Since 1993 he has been a thought leader on how the Internet cre­at­ed a per­ma­nent soci­etal and cul­tur­al shift, dis­rupt­ing many indus­tries and chang­ing the way peo­ple inter­act with brands.

Dave’s per­son­al web­site: I Am Dave Allen

Mike Bailey-Gates was born in 1993 in Rhode Island, USA. He became inter­est­ed in pho­tog­ra­phy at the age of thir­teen when he began tak­ing pho­tographs of the land­scape in his sur­round­ing coun­try­side. Over time the hob­by pro­gressed into a pas­sion for por­trai­ture and fash­ion. Michael is cur­rent­ly liv­ing in New England with his fam­i­ly and work­ing as a photographer.

Erin Bealmear has been pub­lished in The New York Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Margie, XConnect, The Cortland Review, The Santa Clara Review, Opium, and Main Street Rag, among oth­ers. She was also award­ed a South Carolina Review poet­ry award and was a final­ist for the New Issues Poetry Prize.

Delphine Blue: as a 25-year vet­er­an of the New York radio, club and par­ty scene, Delphine Blue has cov­ered every­one from B.B. King to Debbie Harry to Brian Ferry to Keith Carradine. She was there the night Public Image Ltd start­ed a riot at the Ritz, was able to get Sinead O’Connor to sing an impromp­tu acoustic song in the mid­dle of an inter­view. Her range extends beyond music—her series on artists includ­ed Ross Bleckner, who waxed poet­ic about his mul­ti­ple pet dachshund.

Delphine cur­rent­ly hosts her show Shocking Blue on WBAI 99.5FM Thursday and Friday morn­ings from 10am-noon EST, and her oth­er radio show The Rest Is Noise on eastvillageradio.com where her show is rat­ed #1 of the 84 week­ly music shows on this six-year old inter­net sta­tion. Her inter­views can be heard on the inter­net sta­tion Art International Radio. She does com­mer­cial voiceover work and has been involved in cre­at­ing cat­walk sound­tracks for design­ers such as Betsey Johnson and Nanette Lepore in Bryant Park. She’s also super­vised music for film and com­mer­cials and curates music for events and parties.

Mel Bosworth is the author of Freight (forth­com­ing 2011, Folded Word Press) and Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom (Brown Paper Publishing, 2010). Mel lives and breathes in west­ern Massachusetts.

Rae Bryant’s “Stage Play in Five Acts of Her: Matinée” can be found in the Summer 2010 Issue of BLIP Magazine. Her sto­ries also appear in PANK, Annalemma, Kill Author, and Word Riot among oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. Forthcoming are works in Gargoyle Magazine, Big Muddy and Puerto del Sol. She lives in Maryland with her hus­band and two chil­dren where she is com­plet­ing a nov­el as part of her grad­u­ate the­sis at Johns Hopkins University.

Timothy Buckwalter lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has been exhib­it­ed nation­al­ly and inter­na­tion­al­ly. He is cur­rent­ly at work on a three-part exhi­bi­tion series, “Life Of The World To Come,” that com­bines the work of main­stream artists with pieces from artists with dis­abil­i­ties. Buckwalter is also the sub­ject of an upcom­ing solo show, “Let’s Get Tight,” at Mina Dresden Gallery in San Francisco.

Valerie Chiang was born in Taiwan in 1992, and cur­rent­ly resides in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her inter­est in pho­tog­ra­phy began when she joined the pop­u­lar pho­to-shar­ing web­site Flickr. What start­ed out as a mere hob­by quick­ly pro­gressed into a pas­sion for fine art and fash­ion photography.

Photography is the medi­um Valerie uses as a method of escapism. By apply­ing a myth­i­cal, almost enig­mat­ic aes­thet­ic to her work, Valerie always strives to offer view­ers an oppor­tu­ni­ty to stretch their imag­i­na­tions and form their own sto­ries from her pho­tographs. She incor­po­rates ele­ments of both real­ism and sur­re­al­ism into her work, thus cre­at­ing a world filled with day­dreams, night­mares, and every­thing in between.

Daniel Crocker is the author of People Everyday and Other Poems, Do Not Look Directly Into Me, and The Cornstalk Man. He’s a grad­u­ate from the Center for Writers and has recent­ly had work in The Lost Angeles Review, The Chiron Review, and Night Train.

Courtney Eldridge is the author Unkempt, a short sto­ry col­lec­tion, and The Generosity of Women, a nov­el. She is cur­rent­ly edit­ing two new books, one of which is a young adult nov­el, writ­ten in col­lab­o­ra­tion with visu­al artists, pri­mar­i­ly teenagers, from around the world, and chan­neled through Saccades Project. She lives in Los Angeles.

Karla Eoff is a free­lance copy edi­tor, who now lives in Taos, New Mexico. She is pres­i­dent of the board of Taos Local Television and a mem­ber of Metta Theatre.

Kimberly Ford turned to writ­ing full-time, after earn­ing her Ph.D. in Spanish and French Literature. She has since pub­lished essays, reviews and short fic­tion in a wide vari­ety of mag­a­zines includ­ing The BelieverRedbook, Literary Mama, Lucero, and The Threepenny Review, among oth­ers. She also wrote a best-sell­ing non­fic­tion book, Hump: True Tales of Sex After Kids (St. Martin’s, 2008) that led her hus­band to ask her to start pub­lish­ing under her maid­en name. Her proud­est lit­er­ary moment was hav­ing her short sto­ry “Generation” cho­sen as an O. Henry “Recommended Story” in 2009. Kimberly lives in Northern California with her hus­band and kids.

Alicia Gifford is a short fic­tion writer liv­ing in the Los Angeles area. Her work has appeared in lots of swell places that include The Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative Magazine, Hobart, The Los Angeles Review, Pank, Confrontation, and more jour­nals and anthologies.

Bill Gilliland is an archi­tect based in West Hollywood, California. A trans­plant from NYC in 1987, he is a third-gen­er­a­tion Texas native with not much of a dis­cernible accent and has nev­er owned or worn cow­boy boots. You real­ly only need them for horse­back rid­ing or attend­ing cer­tain Hollywood events when non­ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion of cul­tur­al roots serve your purpose.

W.F. Lantry, a native of San Diego, won the 2010 CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Poetry Prize, and Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize in Israel. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Prairie Fire, Literal Latté, Asian Cha, Now Culture and Aesthetica (UK). During the last twelve months, his work has been pub­lished in four­teen sep­a­rate and unique coun­tries, includ­ing Texas. He cur­rent­ly works in Washington, D.C. and is a con­tribut­ing edi­tor of Umbrella: A Journal of Poetry and Kindred Prose.

David Laskowski lives in Madison, Wisconsin and teach­es at Edgewood College.

Matthew Levin was born in 1968 and raised in Los Angeles, California. His moth­er, Sheree Rose, got into the LA punk scene in the late 1970’s, after her divorce, and intro­duced her young son to the music, art, and cul­ture of the time. He stud­ied film at the University of Oregon, and cur­rent­ly lives in Washington, DC, where he works as a filmmaker/screenwriter.

Elijah Majeski is a six­teen-year-old boy who is grow­ing up in the sub­urbs of south­east Michigan. For rea­sons he is unaware of, at age twelve he began to take pho­tos of his home and fam­i­ly. Despite a lack of any direc­tion, he devel­oped a strong pas­sion for pho­tog­ra­phy and has­n’t stopped tak­ing pho­tos since. His art aims to blur and cross the lines between dream and real­i­ty, hop­ing to por­tray the joys and dif­fi­cul­ties of grow­ing up.

Laurence Martel-Olivier is a sev­en­teen-year-old pho­tog­ra­ph­er, liv­ing in Montréal, Canada. She began tak­ing pic­tures at the age of five, when her par­ents gave her a cam­era, and has since been pro­filed in pub­li­ca­tions such as Elle Girl Korea, PhotoIcon, Dousée Magazine, Uppercase Magazine, and many more.

John McKernan is now a retired com­ma herder. He lives—mostly—in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a select­ed poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has pub­lished poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review and many oth­er magazines.

Rick Moody is the author of five nov­els, three col­lec­tions of sto­ries, and a mem­oir, The Black Veil. His most recent work is The Four Fingers of Death (July 2010, from Little, Brown and Company), a nov­el, and in 2012 he will pub­lish On Celestial Music, a col­lec­tion of essays. He also plays music in The Wingdale Community Singers.

Tara Violet Niami is a sev­en­teen-year-old Australian-Iranian American, born in New York City,and cur­rent­ly resides in Los Angeles. “The book I select­ed is one of my all-time favorites, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It had a pro­found effect on me, and my pho­to­graph visu­al­izes an image I found to be one of the most pow­er­ful moments in the book.”

Tara’s inter­views have appeared in Coming Up Strong, Privelidge House, Studio Fludd (an Italian art col­lec­tive), Saccades Project, Recordis Photography, and a pho­to­graph in Edie Magazine. She has been award­ed include a region­al gold key, two sil­ver keys, and three hon­or­able men­tions in the region­al Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for pho­tog­ra­phy and a nation­al gold medal. Her oth­er work includes pho­tographs tak­en for Babe’s and Ricky’s Inn, her father’s doc­u­men­tary on the blues club of the same name in South Central LA (2009), a pho­to­graph select­ed by President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities for a pri­vate, year-long exhi­bi­tion in their offices in Washington D.C. (2010), as well as a pho­to­graph select­ed for Leave Me Here, a European pub­li­ca­tion and exhib­it curat­ed by Laurence Tarquin Von Thomas (2010). View her port­fo­lio port­fo­lio here.

Jon Patrick has been work­ing in menswear for twen­ty years, and in 2009, he start­ed The Selvedge Yard, a blog for his own cre­ative out­let. True to its name, what began as a place for the widest pos­si­ble range of his per­son­al inter­ests and inspi­ra­tions, TSY has since been called a motor­cy­cle blog by some, and a fash­ion blog by oth­ers, to which J.P. says, “Yes, thank you.” Having focused his ener­gies on writ­ing ‘a his­tor­i­cal record of anar­chy, alche­my & authen­tic­i­ty,’ Patrick is now tak­ing the next step with The Selvedge Yard, work­ing on spe­cial projects—interviews, short films, books—and var­i­ous col­lab­o­ra­tions with both the old guard and a new gen­er­a­tion of artists and artisans.

Greg Pierce’s sto­ries have appeared in Avery, Electric Literature (forth­com­ing), Conjunctions.com, Confrontation, and Berkeley Fiction Review. He is cur­rent­ly work­ing on a cham­ber musi­cal, Andra, with com­pos­er John Kander. He is also learn­ing to bake bread. His mul­ti­me­dia stage adap­ta­tion of Murakami’s nov­el The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (co-writ­ten with Stephen Earnhart) pre­miered at the Ohio Theatre in NYC in 2010, and will be fea­tured at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2011. He’s work­ing on his MFA in fic­tion from Warren Wilson College, and lives with his part­ner in NYC.

Shelagh Power-Chopra’s work appears or is forth­com­ing in Metazen, Electric Lit’s Outlet Blog, Gargoyle, The Significant Objects Project, Used Furniture Review, and elsewhere.

Nicholas Ripatrazone is the author of Oblations (Gold Wake Press 2011), a book of prose poems. His writ­ing has appeared in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, The Mississippi Review, The Collagist, Sou’wester, SmokeLong Quarterly and Beloit Fiction Journal.

Andrew Roe’s fic­tion has appeared in Tin House, One Story, Glimmer Train, The Cincinnati Review and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. A three-time Pushcart Prize nom­i­nee, he lives in Oceanside, California.

Sheree Rose is a Los Angeles-based artist, whose films, videos, per­for­mances and pho­tographs have been shown at muse­ums and gal­leries all over the world, includ­ing the Tate Museum of Modern Art in Liverpool, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Beginning in 1981 as the staff pho­tog­ra­ph­er for Beyond Baroque Literary Center in Venice, California, she doc­u­ment­ed the grow­ing music, lit­er­ary and art scene in Los Angeles. She col­lab­o­rat­ed with her late part­ner, Bob Flanagan, in an inter­ac­tive art instal­la­tion which opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1992 and trav­eled to the New Museum of Modern Art in New York. She co-pro­duced the Sundance-Award win­ning doc­u­men­tary, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, 1996. After Bob’s death, Sheree par­tic­i­pat­ed in an inter­na­tion­al art show in Tokyo, Japan where she exhib­it­ed “Boballoon,” a 20-foot high sculp­tur­al homage in Bob’s hon­or. Sheree received an MFA in Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine.

Dale Rothenberg is a nine­teen-year-old musi­cian and pho­tog­ra­ph­er study­ing jazz piano and pho­tog­ra­phy at Oberlin College & Conservatory in Ohio. He grew up in Connecticut and start­ed tak­ing pho­tos in 2006 when he picked up his father’s 35mm cam­era. Since then, he has expand­ed to many dif­fer­ent for­mats and styles of pho­tog­ra­phy, and his work has appeared in var­i­ous books, news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, and online publications.

James Russel is your poet lau­re­ate of vul­gar­i­ty. He lives in New Jersey, on pur­pose, because some­one ought to. “The Gay Bomb” is his first pub­lished work, from the eter­nal­ly revised short sto­ry col­lec­tion, “A.D.D. Bombs.” It was a real Pentagon project. Millions of our tax dol­lars spent try­ing to make Al Qaeda queer while we cut edu­ca­tion spend­ing! Rome wasn’t burned in a day.

He recent­ly com­plet­ed his sec­ond nov­el, Jesse Rules in ’94, the diary of Jesse Amos, a grunge-age Holden Caulfield obsessed with Catholicism, los­ing his vir­gin­i­ty, earn­ing your vote for stu­dent coun­cil pres­i­dent, and get­ting away with mur­der. Would-be pub­lish­ers can e‑mail eclecticjf@aol.com to pay him hand­some­ly for this tome.

David Ryan’s fic­tion has appeared in BOMB Magazine, The Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Tin House, Alaska Quarterly, Hobart, New Orleans Review, and the anthol­o­gy, Flash Fiction Forward, among oth­ers.

Douglas Silver’s work has appeared or is forth­com­ing in Hobart, The Briar Cliff Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Our Stories, and else­where, and has been a final­ist in com­pe­ti­tions by Narrative Magazine and Glimmer Train.

Erik Smetana’s father was reared near an Arkansas water­mel­on patch, his moth­er on the out­skirts of Motown. Examples of Erik’s work can (or soon will) be found in some form or fash­ion at Birmingham Arts Journal, 52nd CityThieves Jargon, Monkeybicycle, Annalemma, and PANK among oth­ers. More infor­ma­tion about Erik can be found at .

Kevin Spaide is from Auburn, New York. His sto­ries are in Witness, Per Contra, Necessary Fiction, Identity Theory, Frigg and sev­er­al oth­er pub­li­ca­tions, both online and in print. He lives in Madrid with his wife and son.

Michael D. Snediker is the author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (University of Minnesota Press), as well as Nervous Pastoral (dove|tail press) and Bourdon (White Rabbit Press,forthcoming). His poems have appeared in venues includ­ing Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Jubilat, and The Paris Review. He teach­es American Literature at Queen’s University, Ontario.

Chuck Stephens is a free­lance writer and Contributing Editor to FILM COMMENT. He lives and teach­es in Nashville, Tennessee.

Oliver Taylor is a six­teen-year-old pho­tog­ra­ph­er, liv­ing in England with sev­en cam­eras old­er than him and the words of a Chilean poet.

Edmund White’s many nov­els, mem­oirs, and works of lit­er­ary and cul­tur­al crit­i­cism include A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, Genet: A Biography, My Lives, Arts and Letters, Hotel de Dream, and most recent­ly, City Boy, a mem­oir about New York in the 1970s. Along with six oth­er gay writ­ers, he formed a lit­er­ary club known as the Violet Quill. In 1982, he helped found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. He is a mem­ber of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Officier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres, and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a mem­ber of the fac­ul­ty of Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing. He lives in New York City.

Bill Yarrow is the author of WRENCH (erbac­ce-press, 2009) and “Wound Jewelry” (new aes­thet­ic, 2010). His poems have recent­ly appeared in BLIP, PANK, Poetry International, Magma, DIAGRAM, Ramshackle Review, LITSNACK, and Blue Fifth Review. He lives in Illinois.