ISSUE O.15 FALL 2024 author AND ARTIST BIOS
artists
Mary Beth Ely (Photography)
After 20 years of being a therapist for children and families, Mary Beth Ely became a faculty member in Chatham’s Graduate Psychology Program in 2001, eventually retiring in 2017. In 2007, she became Program Director, and in 2009 created and obtained American Psychological Association accreditation for a doctoral program that had a focus within its curriculum on connections between the natural environment and mental and physical health. This focus also drew her into doing presentations for other health care professions throughout the region on climate change and health. In her retirement, with the pandemic as a catalyst, she began taking pictures of the natural world.
authors
Jonathan B. Aibel, “Looking to Wood End” (POETRY)
Jonathan B. Aibel is a recovering software engineer who lives in Concord, MA, traditional homelands of the Nipmuc. His poems have been published in Barrelhouse, Chautauqua, Pangyrus, Lily Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. Jonathan's chapbook Echoes of Uruk was a semi-finalist for the Tupelo Press2024 Snowbound Prize. http://www.jbaibelpoet.com.
Tyler Ayres, “The Dose” (NONFICTION)
To gather source material, Tyler Ayres has been a machinist, a glass cutter, an intelligence operator, a fine dining waiter, a translator, a yoga instructor, and a knife peddler. He lives for the moment in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, teaching English.
Linda Bamber, “Autonomous Letting Go,” “Snowy Path,” and “Table Set in the Woods” (poetry)
Linda Bamber is a Professor of English at Tufts University. Her poetry collection, Metropolitan Tang, and her fiction collection, Taking What I Like, were both published by David R. Godine. Bamber’s work has appeared in periodicals such as The Harvard Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, The New York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review, Plume and The Missouri Review. Her book on Shakespeare was published by Stanford University Press. She is currently writing a novella based on the cross-country expedition of Lewis and Clark.
Carol Barett, “Early Morning Revelation” and “The Poem You Said to Delay Sending” (poetry)
Carol Barrett has published three volumes of poetry, most recently READING WIND, and one of creative nonfiction. An NEA Fellow in Poetry, she has lived in nine states and in England. Carol's poems appear in JAMA, The Women's Review of Books, Nimrod, Poetry International, and in over sixty anthologies.
Adam K. Bechtold, “After Barbenheimer” (poetry)
Adam K. Bechtold is a Cuban-American poet residing in Central Virginia; a seafarer on merchant ships; and the Managing Editor at samfiftyfour_literary. His work has recently been featured in Rill & Grove and On The High Literary Magazine.
Laura Johanna Braverman, “Sanctums” (poetry)
Laura Johanna Braverman, a writer and artist, is the author of Salt Water (Cosmographia Books, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Reliquiae, Plume, New Plains Review, and California Quarterly, among other journals. She is currently a doctoral candidate in poetry at Lancaster University, and lives in Lebanon with her family.
Lainy Carslaw, “Retreat” (Nonfiction)
Lainy Carslaw is a writer, gymnastics coach, and mother or three boys from Pittsburgh, PA. She has her MFA in Fiction from Chatham and a poetry degree from University of Pittsburgh. Her work can be found with Brevity, Sandy River Review, several editions of The Madwomen in the Attic Anthology, and her local newspaper, The Hampton News.
Brad Clompus, “Unsettled Nature: Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire” (Nonfiction)
Brad Clompus lives in the Boston area. His poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Nashville Review, North American Review, Post Road, Tampa Review, and West Branch.
Ed Gaudet, “come celebrate” (poetry)
Ed Gaudet is a writer and software entrepreneur who lives in Hanover, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Blood & Bourbon, Burningword Literary Journal, The Inflectionist Review, Panoply, Clade Song, Naugatuck River Review, Massachusetts Bards Poetry Review 2024, and Book of Matches, Lit.
William Heath, “Alone With America” (poetry)
William Heath has published four poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, Going Places, and Alms for Oblivion; three chapbooks: Night Moves in Ohio, Leaving Seville, and Inventing the Americas; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, and Blacksnake's Path; a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone. He lives in Annapolis. visit: www.williamheathbooks.com.
Kim Hoff, “A Dictionary of Healing” (Nonfiction)
Kim Hoff is an essayist and poet writing through the lenses of nature and human experience. Kim’s essays have been published in Mass Audubon’s Explore!; Grist Journal; The Journal of Wild Culture; Panorama;Northern Woodlands Magazine; and others. Kim lives with her wife in Northampton, MA.
Judy Kaber, “Back to the Land” AND “Yellow” (POETRY)
Judy Kaber is the author of three chapbooks. Besides having been published previously in The Fourth River, her poems have appeared in joutnals such as Pleiades, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner. Her poem, “Sword Swallowing Lessons,” was featured on “The Slowdown.” Judy won the 2021 and 2023 Maine Poetry Contest. A Maine Literary Award winner, her book, Landscape With Rocks, Sky, Nails, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2025. She is a past poet laureate of Belfast, Maine (2021-2023).
Emily Koester, “Falling LeaveS” (FICTION)
Emily Koester lives in Washington DC, where she works in an international nonprofit focused on education. She lives in a historic cooperative and is active with a local community of writers. This is her first published piece.
Sandy Longhorn, “So Much Happens Beneath Your Feet” (poetry)
Sandy Longhorn is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Alchemy of My Mortal Form. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Longhorn teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Central Arkansas.
James Lowell, “I Called, But No One Answered” (poetry)
James Lowell’s work was most recently short- and long-listed for the Fish poetry prize, and has appeared in journals like Canadian Literature, The Caribbean Writer, English, Fortnight, O Miami, Martha’s Vineyard Times, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Orchard Poetry Journal, and The Sandy River Review.
Katherine Latrans Mariani, “The Church in Kharkiv” (nonfiction)
Katherine Latrans Mariani is an equine-guided coach and founder of Tuono Koń, a nature-based coaching practice. Born in Buffalo, New York, they now live and write from the high desert of New Mexico. The Fourth River is their first publication.
Ellen McGrath Smith, “No Child Left Behind,” “Thank you for the lot,” and “The Alphabets You Ordered Have Arrived” (poetry)
Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Talking Writing, Los Angeles Review, and other journals and anthologies. Books include Scatter, Feed(Seven Kitchens 2014) and Nobody's Jackknife (West End Press 2015). Her chapbook Lie Low, Goaded Lambwas published in January 2023 by Seven Kitchens Press as part of its Keystone Series.
David P. Miller, “A Walk to a Word” (poetry)
David P. Miller’s collections include Bend in the Stair (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021) and Sprawled Asleep(Nixes Mate Books, 2019). His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Reed Magazine, LEON Literary Review, Solstice, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, Kestrel, and Vincent Brothers Review, among other journals.
James Miller, “Aladdin” (poetry)
James Miller is a native of the Texas Gulf Coast, now settled in Oklahoma City. His work has appeared in Best Small Fictions (2021), Hopkins Review, Broadkill Review, San Pedro River Review, Heavy Feather Review,The Atlanta Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Psaltery & Lyre, Soundings East, and elsewhere. Website: jamesmillerpoetry.com.
Jennifer D. Munro, “Specul(um)ating on Birdwatching’s Wonders and Blunders” (nonfiction)
Jennifer D. Munro’s work has appeared in publications such as Salon; Ninth Letter; North American Review; Gulf Coast; Boulevard; Calyx; Full Grown People; and in anthologies such as The Bigger the Better the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty and Body Image. She is a freelance editor. www.JenniferDMunro.com.
Steve Myers, “Endangered Species Stamps” (poetry)
Steve Myers has published a full-length collection, Memory’s Dog, and three chapbooks. A Pushcart Prize winner, he’s published poems in places such as Callaloo, New Ohio Review, SALT, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry and Valley Voices. He heads the poetry track for the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at DeSales University.
Raphaela Pavlakos, “overstimulation” (poetry)
Raphaela Pavlakos is a 4th-year PhD candidate in McMaster University’s English and Cultural Studies department and a poet. Raphaela’s poetry can be found in Ekphrastic Review, Folklore Review, Talon Review, Taj Mahal Review, Word Hoard, Sanctuary: A Cootes Paradise Anthology, and graduate journals like The Lamp. She co-authored a self-published poetry collection called Mythopoesis in 2022 with Georgia Perdikoulias, which is available through Kindle Direct Publishing.
Neda Ravandi, “In which the cool girl tries to keep a one-night stand” (poetry)
Neda Ravandi is an Iranian-American writer from Texas. An alumnus of the Iowa University and Kenyon Review writing workshops, she has work published in So to Speak journal, and forthcoming in the Eunoia Review and EDGE CITY volume 1. She loves Letterboxd, Anne Carson, and the sun, among other things.
Rachele Salvini, “The Ice Storm” (fiction)
Rachele Salvini is the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. She was the runner-up for the 2023 Quarterly West Chapbook Prize, and her first chapbook, Oklahoma Bestiary, is coming out in 2025. Her work appeared in Prairie Schooner, Monkeybicycle, Moon City Review, and others. The Italian version of "The Ice Storm" was originally published on micorrize.
Tanya E. E. E. Schmid, “The Gatherer” (fiction)
Tanya E. E. E. Schmid was a Doctor of Oriental Medicine until 2014 when she started a permaculture farm. Her work has appeared in Valparaiso Fiction Review, Ponder Review, ENO, Sky Island Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, and others. Tanya was a finalist in Ruminate’s The Waking Flash Contest. www.tanyaswriting.com.
Sara Schraufnagel, “Dwellings” (poetry)
Sara Schraufnagel is a poet from Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in Slipstream, New Plains Review, among others.
Karen Elizabeth Sharpe, “Ode to Spring” (poetry)
Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is a poetry editor at The Worcester Review and author of Prayer Can Be Anything, (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems have or will soon appear in On the Seawall, The MacGuffin, SWWIM Everyday, Split Rock Review, Mom Egg Review, and Halfway Down the Stairs, among others.
K Spicka, “Generation,” “Normal,” “Sacrifice,” and “Sweep” (poetry)
K Spicka is a recovering English major living and writing in Omaha, NE. They have one previously published collection, "blue hydrangea morning." Their unpublished work can be found on sticky notes, in half-full notebooks, and in the notes app of their cell phone.
Meghan Sterling, “Rainstorm After a Layoff” (poetry)
Meghan Sterling (she/her/hers) lives in Maine. Her collections are These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books), Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions), Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and View from a Borrowed Field (Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize). You Are Here to Break Apart (Lily Poetry Review Press), is forthcoming in 2025.
Mary Ellen Talley, “Clarity Jitter Bird” (poetry)
Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have been published in journals including Gyroscope, Deep Wild, and Banshee as well as in multiple anthologies. She has three chapbooks: “Postcards from the Lilac City” from Finishing Line Press, “Taking Leave” from Kelsay Press, and “Infusion” online at Red Wolf Journal. Her website is maryellentalley.com.
Mike Wilson, “My Life, a Dream Poem” (poetry)
Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in many magazines and in Mike’s book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic. His awards include the League of Minnesota Poets Award, the Maine Poets Society Award, and the Chaffin/Kash Prize of the Kentucky State Poetry Society. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.