Contributors to our current issue are:
Robert Caisley is the Artistic Director of Idaho Repertory Theatre, and the Founding Producer of the DNA Annual Festival of Very, Very, Very Short Plays and Films. He heads up the newly formed MFA in Dramatic Writing program at the University of Idaho. His plays have been produced at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre, the Norfolk Southern Festival of New Works, and New York’s Stageworks/Hudson’s Play By Play One-Act Festival.
Matt Calvert received a Bachelors degree in Music Education at San Francisco State University while playing trombone in the school's Wind Ensemble. After graduating, he worked for Sirius Connections, a startup Internet Provider located in San Francisco, where he learned about web design as well as the Internet. It
was here that Stick Figure Death Theatre came into being. Calvert continues to work and improve on his website and has moved to Bloomington, IN. He is currently working on a Doctorate in Brass Pedagogy at Indiana University.
Pris Campbell was a clinical psychologist and sailor/traveler when illness forced her to park her vagabond shoes. She started writing poetry in 1999. Her work has appeared widely, including in Limestone Circle, Blackmail Press, Verse Libre, The Dakota House, Erosha, Muse's Kiss, and Peshekee River Poets. She lives in Florida.
Mike Chappell is a third generation folk musician. He frequently performs his own material, using the stage name Mike Mudd. Chappell also
writes poetry and prose. Recently he's been focusing on various multimedia projects. In 2005 he received his Bachelor of Science degree
in Communications from Portland State University.
Peter Ciccariello is a digital artist and poet living in Providence, Rhode Island. His visual interests include inquiry into the processes of organic decomposition and entropy, and the synthesis and manipulation of atmosphere through light and optics. He is Co-owner of The Creative Matrix, an Internet artist community that focuses on both digital and non-digital mixed media art. Ciccariello has been the featured artist at the Tryst Online Journal (Issue XII, March 2005) and has done many shows, including one at Dudley House, Harvard University (February, 2005).
Annie Dawid writes fiction and takes photos in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in Southern Colorado. Her first book, YORK FERRY: A NOVEL also displays her own cover photo. Other photos have appeared in the American Poetry Review and Oregon Focus.
Stephen DeCesare has had work performed in theatres, churches and schools in the United States, Europe, Asia and the Philippines. He has won many competitions, including the Shashalet New Jewish Liturgical Music Competition for his piece "Eili, Eili, Lamo Azovtanu" (from the composition entitled "Lest We Forget"), which was performed in Washington D.C. (2004). Theatres performing his music include the Adirondack Children's Theatre, Academy Players, Heritage Opera Company, and many others. His musical "A Christmas Carol: the musical" has been his most successful composition to date. By December 2005, "Christmas Carol" will have received 150 performances around the U.S. and abroad.
Leonard Dumitriu is a Romanian Composer and the Conductor of the Romanian Opera House.
Elizabeth Flood is an Ohio writer trying to balance work with those
late-night urges to get out of bed and pound the keyboard. Her essay, "The Fall of the Parisian Mystique," is
based on one summer spent in Paris before college.
Lisa Frank received her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. She was both the 2nd and 3rd place winner of Bad Kitty Films' 2000 Short Screenplay contest (both scripts included here) and
also has had work published in The Journal of Popular Culture and the Steptoe Quarterly Review.
Jason Heald is Chairman of the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Umpqua Community College. He holds a Ph.D. in composition from University of Oregon.
Dr. Heald is a prolific composer, with works published by ChoralWeb, UNC Jazz Press, Plymouth Music, Northwestborough Music, and Call of the Wild Publishing. Most recently, Dr. Heald was the Grand Prize winner of the 2004 Cascadian Choral Composition Competition. He was also selected as a finalist in the 21st Annual Ithaca College of Music Choral Composition Competition and has also been the recipient of several ASCAP AWARDS. In addition to his activities as a composer, Dr. Heald is an active conductor and clinician, and is currently conducting the Umpqua Chamber Orchestra, the Roseburg Concert Chorale, and the vocal jazz ensemble, the Umpqua Singers.
Michael Hollister is English faculty emeritus at Portland State University, where he taught for 32 years. His recent work has appeared in the Wisconsin Review, Palo Alto Review, Northwest Florida Review, Dream Fantasy International and elsewhere. The Hollywood trilogy will be completed in 2006. Hollister lives, writes and teaches on the Oregon coast.
John Jarvis worked in classical music radio in Hampton Roads and Hollywood (from 1964-93). During that time he was both an announcer and host of the Opera House broadcasts. He also wrote a number of radio and TV plays. Among them was the award-wining series Behind the Secret Door. Since 1994 he has served as President of StoryCraft, which offers music and writing instruction to the public. He holds a B.A. in English, a M.A. in Humanities, and is a past member of the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAw).
Douglas Knehans is the Director of the Conservatorium of Music at the University of Tasmania. His compositions have been performed, broadcast and recorded by the Melbourne and Canberra symphony orchestras, Opera Australia, and has been played across the USA and Australia and in London, Vienna, Tokyo, Rome, Athens, Sydney, New York and San Francisco, as well as recorded and broadcast by ABC television and Radio, Italian Television, National Public Radio and PBS. His music to a PBS documentary Animal, Vegetable and Mineral was nominated for an Emmy Award. Knehans has been the recipient of numerous commissions, prizes and awards and in 2002 his work seraphic ride, dedicated to the memory of Jacob Druckman, was premiered by National Symphony Orchestra musicians at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.
Vincent Kovar has published work in The Blithe House Quarterly, Pride Magazine, The Southern
Voice and on PlanetOut.com. A graduate of the University of Washington theater program, he lives and works in Seattle.
Timothy M. Leonard is a Vietnam Veteran and
University of Oregon graduate. He's lived, worked and traveled in
Australia, Bali, Bhutan, China, Ireland, Israel, Kuwait, Morocco, Saipan, Spain and
Tibet. His writing and photography have appeared online with Jackmagazine,
GoNomad, IdentityTheory, InkPot literary journal, Babylon Travel
Magazine, zonezero and Poets Against The War. He is a peripatetic
freelance writer and photographer currently living and working in
southwest China.
Sherrie J. Lyons is an Arizona homemaker with a B.S. in Business from Arizona State University. She has penned two sci-fi/fantasy novels, a play, and numerous poems. Her manuscript for the Macava, won third place in the Arizona Authors Association’s unpublished novel contest in 2002. Her poems have been published in Anthology, The Blue Collar Review, and Khamsat.
Kenney Mencher is an Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Ohlone College in Fremont, California. He also taught at the University of Chicago (where he served as curator of visual resources) and Texas A&M. Mencher has exhibited widely, most recently with a solo show at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts in California. He also is a playwright.
][m e z ][ (Mary-Anne Breeze) is an Australian artist well known to the hypertext and net art communities. She writes in a language she calls "mezangelle" in spaces not usually considered a canvas for art or literature, such as email, mailing lists, MOOs, chat rooms and blogs. She was nominated for an Electronic Literature Organisation Award in 2001, the jury writing that "this hybrid language is used to expose and deconstruct the epistemological politics engendered into seemingly 'neutral', technical codes. It is poetically dense, involving and difficult, but also humorous." Of Mez's work, one critic has written ""Mez is without doubt one of the most consistent, prolific, innovative artists working new media today." [more]
Weston Miller is a reformed corporate attorney and retired carpenter now trying to make his living as a fiction writer and writing instructor in Portland, Oregon. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and his work has been published in The Pointed Circle and Red Owl. Shaded Gray is his first screenplay.
Hernan D. Palmieri is an independent and self-taught composer from Argentina. His music is characterized by the use of nonconventional scales or pseudoscales, by the random rhythm and the addition of some Argentinian folk elements.
Daniel Petrov was born in Bulgaria in 1966 and grew up in Munich,
Germany. After a brief stint in medical school he turned to visual
arts. In 1992 he graduated with a BFA in painting and filmmaking
from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1995 he settled in New York
City, where for almost a decade he’s been working as a cameraman,
shooting television news stories and documentaries for European
broadcasters. With an ever-growing output of art, Daniel began
pursuing a career as a painter in 2005. Fascinated with the human figure, he has developed a dynamic and
sensuous visual idiom, mostly paintings in oil and acrylic and drawings in pencil and acrylic. He strives less for realism than psychological acuity.
Online portfolio.
Adriane Rainer has two Masters degrees, one in Professional Writing from Portland State University, with a screenwriting emphasis, and the other in English literature. The Awakening, her first screenplay, was optioned shortly after she wrote it. She has since written three other screenplays and is at work on a fourth. She also writes children's stories.
David See started composing at age 11. See attended Oberlin College Conservatory of Music earning a Bachelor of Music in Composition, having studied with Richard Hoffmann and Randolph Coleman. Mr. See now teaches piano and keyboard accompanying at Suzuki Talent Education of Appalachia in Kingsport, and is pianist with the Kingsport (TN) Symphony Orchestra. His latest compositions include a suite for saxophone quartet, a piano concerto recently performed by Gary Hammond and the Kingsport (TN) Symphony Orchestra, and a series of pieces for two pianos.
Nathan Wright Shirley is a classical composer and pianist. As a composer he was basically self-taught until he began training under the Russian composer Olga Harris, a student of Aram Khachaturian, at age 17. He studied with her for several years, after which his education in composition and piano continued for several more years in various conservatories and colleges until he broke with the academic musical
world for good. Shirley has won various international composition competitions,
including the Andrzej Panufnik International Composers Competition, Krakow 2002, with 'Music for Strings and Marimba.' Since then, Shirley's reputation as a classical composer and performer has rapidly expanded. Today his music is performed and broadcast in Canada, Europe, and the US.
Ron Singer has published stories, satires, poems, essays and an Intro. (to Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair, Bantam). He has just completed Carla, the Copy-Shop Girl,
his third libretto. His work has appeared in publications ranging from
Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review to Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, and from The Windsor Review to The Wall Street Journal.
Singer has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and lives in New
York City, where he has been a teacher since 1976 at Friends Seminary.
Claude Clayton Smith is professor of English at Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio. He is the author five works of fiction and nonfiction plus a variety of poems, plays, essays, and reviews. He received a gold medal from the United Nations committee for the “Decade of Indigenous Peoples, 1994-2004” for his most recent work as co-editor/translator of The Way Of Kinship, the world’s first anthology of Native Siberian literature, published in the spring of 2003. His own work has been translated into five languages, including Russian and Chinese. He holds a BA from Wesleyan, an MAT from Yale, an MFA from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, and a DA from Carnegie-Mellon. His latest book, Lapping America: A Man, A Corvette, and the Interstates, will be published in the spring of 2006 by Burford Books.
Joon Sung is an Asst. Professor of Art at Western Kentucky University. He has two MFAs, one in computer art and one in painting. Sung recently has focused on digital animation as a medium and
subject, using a wide range of techniques and aesthetic approaches in the world of multimedia. His work has been shown at many one-person and group exhibitions, including at the Rocky Mountain Arts Center, Janice Mason Art Museum, Kyoto City Museum, and National Kaohsiung Normal University in Taiwan.
Bill Teitelbaum has published work in Bayou, Carillon, Crab Creek Review, The Pedestal, and Red Wheelbarrow. His short play, "The Death of Saul," appears in the anthology, The Art of the One-Act (New Issues Press). He lives in Lincolnwood, Illinois, a village outside of Chicago.
Tatyana Uspenskaya-Murphy was born in Tver, Russia. She started painting at a
very early age and won numerous youth art competitions during her teens. While continuing her artistic training, she completed her Masters degree in English Language and Literature. She moved to the United States in 1996 and returned to painting professionally, acquiring a wide private clientele in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Her works have been acquired by numerous private collectors and are presented by the American Fine Art Gallery in Dallas. Uspenskaya-Murphy works predominantly in oil, sharing interest both in landscape and portraiture. While carrying the strength of the traditional school of painting, she developed a distinct personal style through delicate color diffusion and whispery brushstroke techniques.
Joel Weishaus is the Resident Writer at Museu do Essencial e do Além Disso, Bibliothecadas das Marauilhas, Rio de Jenerio, Brazil, and a visiting professor at Portland State University. His most recent book is The Healing Spirit of Haiku (coauthored with David H. Rosen). He has widely exhibited Digital Literary
Art, in July, 2005, at the 2nd International Academic Conference of Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies, Texas A&M University. He is a member of the International Association for Jungian Studies and the Oregon Friends of C.G. Jung.
Fred D. White received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa, and his B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Minnesota, where he once studied with John Berryman. He has been teaching at Santa Clara University since 1980. In 1997 he received the Louis and Dorina Brutocao Award for Teaching Excellence. His most recent books are LifeWriting (Quill Driver Books, 2004), and The Well-Crafted Argument (Houghton Mifflin 2002; 2nd Edition 2005). He has had short plays showcased in New York City's East Village, and on the University of Minnesota and Santa Clara University campuses. His recent fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Pleiades; Fantastic Odysseys (ed. Mary Pharr); Rattle; Confrontation; The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, and elsewhere.
Judy Wilson is the Director of Creative Writing at Southwest Minnesota State University. Her work has appeared in various publications including the Southern Literary Festival Anthology, Skylark Literary Annual, Mississippi Review, Der Brennende Busch, Antietam Review, The
Atlantic Monthly's Atlantic Unbound, Caprice, Reed
Magazine, Out of Line Anthology and others. She has received a number of
awards for her fiction including the Southern Literary Festival Award
for Best Short Fiction, the Joan Johnson Writing Award, the Henfield
Foundation's Transatlantic Review Award, and the Truman Capote
Fellowship.
Vicki L. Wilson is a poet, playwright and fiction writer living in upstate
New York. Her work has appeared in journals including The Blue Collar Review
and Salvage. She writes plays to deliver the fascinating conversation and
witty comebacks she doesn't think of fast enough in real life.