Jack Anderson, a poet and dance writer (for The New York Times and other publications), has published nine books of poetry. His tenth will come out from Hanging Loose Press in early 2009. He has given poetry readings at colleges, bars, coffee houses, houses of worship and, recently, in a gazebo on Long Island and a historic subway car at the New York City Transit Museum.

Christine Beck is the president of the Connecticut Poetry Society. Her poems have been published in Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge, Grayson Press, 2003, Connecticut River Review, Caduceus, Rosebud Magazine and Passager. She is also the Contest Chair for the National Federation of State Poetry Society. Ms. Beck was a practicing attorney for over 20 years and an Associate Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Hartford. Her textbook Forensic Evidence in Court: A Case Study Approach, Carolina Academic Press, published under the name Christine Beck Lissitzyn, was released in fall 2007.

Zan Bockes earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in many magazines, including Poetry Motel, Visions International, The Comstock Review, Cutbank and Phantasmagoria. She has had three nominations for a Pushcart Prize. A current resident of Missoula, Montana, she works as a Residential Sanitation Specialist for her own housekeeping business, Maid in Montana.

Sean Brendan-Brown is a medically-retired Marine and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, who now works as a photographer for the Insurance Commissioner’s investigative division (affectionately called the “yuck unit”). He has published in the Notre Dame Review, Wisconsin Review, The Southampton Review, Hunger Magazine, and the University of Iowa Press anthologies American Diaspora and Like Thunder.

Elizabeth J. Coleman is a graduate of the University of PennsylvaniaLaw School and a member of the New York, D.C. and Georgia Bars. She is president of Professional Stress Management Solutions, Ltd. and of the Beatrice R. and Joseph A. Coleman Foundation for environmental and social justice. Her poetry has appeared in The Raintown Review and numerous other publications, and will appear in the fall 2008 issue of
Connecticut Review.

Cecile Corona’s stories have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Confrontation, Washington Square, Kalliope, The New Orleans Review, and MacGuffin. A Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College, she teaches full-time while writing fiction in Boston. Her new novel, Some Secret Something About Me, is presently under review; the short story of the same title is forthcoming in the summer issue of Pennsylvania English.

Larry Crist lives in Seattle. His poems and stories have recently appeared in Floating Bridge Review, Pontoon, Tapestries, Hawaii Review, Hurricane Review, and Pear, and he is a regular contributor to Real Change, Seattle’s homeless newspaper.

Ellen Dudis has published work in numerous journals, including Runes, Smartish Pace, Cream City Review, Christian Science Monitor, Baltimore Sun and others. Her manuscript Gratitudes looks for a publisher. She lives on a farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Chris Early, imprisoned since 1998, is a gifted malcontent, passionate about coffee, rock and roll, and the arts. With nowhere else to turn, he picked up a book, then another. Then another. And was saved. He is hard at work on his first novel, Dry Country Jones, set in the rural South. His debt to society paid in full, he expects to be freed in 2010. CE is 31. Write him: Chris Early #299765, West Tennessee State Prison —P.O. Box 1150, Henning, TN 38041.

Deborah Flanagan has been published in Poet Lore. She has contributed extensively to the nonprofit sector and has held the position of Director of Development at a range of distinguished arts organizations. At City Parks Foundation she created the reading series CityParks Poetry, and at the Academy of American Poets she helped create the Online Poetry Classroom. A Reiki Master, she has a private practice and also works with patients at Beth Israel Medical Center.

Daniel Gutstein works at the Maryland Institute College of Art (aka MICA) in Baltimore, where he runs the Writing Studio and Learning Resource Center. His poems and stories have appeared in more than four-dozen publications, including Best American Poetry (2006). He has worked as an editor-in-chief, international economist, farm hand, tae kwon do instructor, reporter, theatre arts educator, and learning specialist, and has taught more than four-dozen courses in literature, composition, and creative writing.

Michael Hicks was born in North Carolina and brought up in Gulf
Shores, Alabama on the white sandy beaches of the Gulf of Mexico that Jimmy Buffett sings about. He attended East Carolina University where he graduated in 1994 with a degree in psychology. He owned a surf shop and rented out scooters and jet skis in Gulf Shores until Hurricane Ivan. (Editors acknowledge the Pen Prison Writing Program for permission to reprint Mr. Hicks’ story, which was awarded Second Place in the Pen Prison Writing contest for fiction.)

Paul Hostovsky’s poems appear widely online and in print. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. He has won a Pushcart Prize, as well as the Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Contest, The Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Contest, and The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Award. His new collection, Bending the Notes, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag. He works in Boston as a sign language interpreter.

Seaborn Jones has published poems in numerous journals, including New York Quarterly, Xanadu, Southern Poetry Review, River Styx, Louisiana Review, Poetry NZ, Pearl, and Rockhurst Review. Most recent book, Getaway Car in Reverse, from Steam Iron Press. Awards include Violet Reed Haas Poetry Prize, Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, and Bread Loaf Scholar in Poetry.

Susan Luther, a native of Nebraska, lives, writes and leads poetryseminars in her mother’s and her own adopted home region of the South. Her publications include literary criticism, many poems in journals and anthologies, two chapbooks and a full-length book of poems. “A Tactical Situation” happened in her Huntsville, Alabama neighborhood.

Katharyn Howd Machan, professor of Writing and Women’s Studies at Ithaca College, is the author of 28 published collections, most recently The Professor Poems (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2008) and Flags (Pudding House Publications, 2007). She is also longtime freelance editor for John Briant, author of One Cop’s Story (his NY state trooper autobiography) and the popular series of Adirondack Detective novels featuring Jason Black, all available from Chalet Publishing in Old Forge, NY.

Donna Reis co-edited and contributed to the anthology, Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews, The University of Akron Press (2005). Her non-fiction book Seeking Ghosts in the Warwick Valley was published by Schiffer Publishing, Ltd (2003). She is the author of three chapbooks of poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, Northwestern University Press (1998) and Chance of a Ghost, Helicon Nine Editions (2005).

Robert E. Roberts, D.D.S.,Ph.D.,L.C.S.W., lives in New Orleans, was formerly a dentist, then Clinical Professor of Public Health at Tulane University Medical Center. There, he founded Project Return, an internationally recognized prison reentry program aimed at breaking the cycles of crime sensibly, without causing further harm. Memoirs of his journey into the darkness of our prison systems are found in his book, MY SOUL SAID TO ME, An Unlikely Journey Behind the Walls of Justice. www.mysoulsaidtome.com

Mary Ellen Sanger lived for 17 years in Mexico and has published poetry, essays and short stories in Spanish and English in online and print venues in Mexico and the United States, including an essay in the anthology Mexico, a Love Story (2006). She is currently finishing a collection of stories inspired by the women of Ixcotel State Penitentiary in Oaxaca, Mexico where she spent thirty-three days falsely imprisoned
in the fall of 2003.

J. J. Steinfeld, Canadian fiction writer, playwright, and poet, lives on Prince Edward Island. He has published a novel, Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation (Pottersfield Press), nine short story collections (three by Gaspereau Press — Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized?, Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown, and Would You Hide Me?) and a poetry collection, An Affection for Precipices (Serengeti Press).

Estha Weiner is co-editor of and contributor to Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews (Akron Poetry Series, 2005), author of The Mistress Manuscript (Rivendell Press, forthcoming), and Transfiguration Begins at Home (Tiger Bark Press, forthcoming). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including The New Republic and Barrow Street. She won a 2005 Paterson Poetry Prize and directs NY Writers Nights for Sarah Lawrence College. She is Adj. Assistant
Professor of English at City College of NY.

Sarah White serves on the PEN Prison Writing Committee, reading submissions for the annual contest. She is the author of a poetry collection, Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson (Spuyten Duyvil, 2007) and a chapbook, Mrs. Bliss and the Paper Spouses (Pudding House, 2007).

Barbara Wiedemann, a professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery, is the author of a critical study entitled Josephine Herbst’s Short Fiction: A Window to Her Life and Times (Susquehanna University Press). Her poems have appeared in Kaleidoscope, Blueline, Kerf, Feminist Studies, Paper Street, Acorn and other journals. In 2008 a chapbook, Half-Life of Love, was published by Finishing Line Press.

Kirby Wright was born and raised in Honolulu. He is a graduate of Punahou School. He was an Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellow and holds degrees from University of California at San Diego and San Francisco State University. Wright is the author of the companion novels Punahou Blues and Moloka’i Nui Ahina, both set in Hawaii.

Emma Wunsch has recently published in Natural Bridge, The Bellevue Review, Lit, Fugue, The Brooklyn Review, Passages North, and Inkwell. Her story “Lily of the Valley” was nominated for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. She lives in New Hampshire.

Karen Wunsch has published fiction and memoir in many magazines, including The Literary Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Epoch, the Kansas Quarterly, the North Dakota Quarterly, and Confrontation. She has appeared online in Fringe Magazine, The Arabesques Review, and Apple Valley Review. Her literary criticism has been published in Writing on the Edge; her academic essays in the Illinois English Bulletin, Focus: Teaching English Language Arts, and the Virginia English Bulletin. She is an Associate Professor of English at Queensborough Community College.


FALL 2015

Fiction by Diya Abdo, Cara Bayles, Stephanie Dickinson, Paul Hadella, Joe Jarboe, Donald Edem Quist, Alison Ruth

Poems by Austin Alexis, Byron Case, Courtney Lamar Charleston, Jessica Greenbaum, Brad Johnson, Don Kimball, Thom Schramm, Hasanthika Sirisena, Judith Skillman, Jack Vian, Catherine Wald, JJ Amaworo Wilson, Paula Yup

Nonfiction by Lyle May




BookTalk: The Number of Missing by Adam Berlin
March 25, 2015

4:15-5:30pm
Conference Room, 9th fl.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice
524 West 59th Street
New York, NY 10019

In the months after 9/11, David and Mel meet to drink, give each other comfort and reminisce about Paul—Mel’s husband and David’s best friend. The memories are not all good for David. Before Paul died, the two friends fought, brutally questioning each other’s lives. Fueled by anger and grief and too much alcohol, David stumbles through the city while holding onto a silent promise he’s made to a dead friend: he will wait for Mel to fall so he can catch her. Like the best post-war novels, where catastrophe is not an easy catalyst for plot, where characters go on living but not really, is about New York during a time when the city seemed dead. 

*All book talks are free and open to the public. 
Refreshments will be served.

 





J Journal
jjournal@jjay.cuny.edu
Department of English
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
524 West 59th Street, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10019