Gale Acuff (Last Word) has had poetry published in Ascent, Ohio Journal, Descant, Adirondack Review, Ottawa Arts Review, Worcester Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Arkansas Review, Carolina Quarterly, Poem, South Dakota Review, Santa Barbara Review, Sequential Art Narrative in Education, and many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008). He has taught tertiary level English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.
Roy J. Adams (FewDeL)is a late-comer to the literary life having spent the bulk of his working career stomping out metaphors while researching, writing about and teaching Labor and Human Rights at post-secondary institutions in Japan, China, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. After moving on from his full professor job at McMaster University in Ontario he sought to develop his creative side. During the past decade, his work has appeared in literary magazines in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Singapore and has won places in several anthologies of award-winning poetry. He is the author of Bebop From Beau’s Caboose, a chapbook published by the Ontario Poetry Society in 2018 and Critical Mass, a full book of poetry published by Silver Bow Publishing in 2019. For a more complete bio and contact info see his profile at the League of Canadian Poets.
CG Brik (The Lesson) grew up in San Diego, CA, attended school in New York City, NY, and currently lives in San Antonio, TX. Their occupation is working in an office and taking care of a cat. Writing fiction is currently a hobby.
Phillip Clark (Jambo) earned his BA and MA from the University of Alabama, and many years later his Ed.D. from Temple University, Japan. In what seems a lifetime ago, he lived in Botswana Africa for three formative years. In 1998 he moved to Japan, where he now resides with his wife and two very quickly growing boys. He currently teaches English classes in various universities in the Kansai area of Japan.
Warren Decker (Contract) writes and teaches in Osaka, Japan. He is currently enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Texas, El Paso, and his work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2018, The New Ohio Review, Frogpond, and several other literary journals. He can rarely resist including at least one sentence of self-referential meta-commentary when composing otherwise completely conventional biographical statements. Find links to more of his writing at disorienteering.wordpress.com
Patrick Dougherty (On the Road to Emmaus: A Wednesday before the Chalkface) is a Professor of Liberal Arts and the Director of the English for Academic Purposes Program at Akita International University, Japan. He holds a Master of Arts in History, a Master of Education, and a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics. Additionally, he holds a Doctorate in Education earned at Northern Arizona University. He has been an educator for 30 years, working in North America, the Middle East, and Asia. For fourteen of those years he worked as a high school teacher in the US and Japan.
Kathy Ewing (Dental Floss) has written on such topics as education, books, women’s issues, and dogs, for Belt, The Bark, The Book Group Book, The Plain Dealer, Great Lakes Review, Growing without Schooling, and many other publications. She has taught at all levels, from nursery school to college, and currently teaches Latin at Cleveland State University and a writing seminar at Case Western Reserve University. She has two grown children and lives with her husband in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Her memoir Missing: Coming to Terms with a Borderline Mother was published by Red Giant Books. She blogs at www.kathyewing.com.
“Remembering Martin Joos” will appear, along with other memoir-pieces, in Stuart Friebert‘s A DOUBLE LIFE, to appear from Pinyon Publishing in 2019. In addition to two prose memoirs (most recently First & Last Words/Pinyon 2018), he has published 15 books of poems & 15 volumes of translations; Black Mountain Press will publish a 16th, Shadow of Shadows: Selected Poems of Ute von Funcke in 2019. A founding co-editor of Field & Oberlin College Press, Friebert joined fellow editors in a panel celebrating Field at 100! at the annual AWP Meeting in Portland at the end of March, 2019…
Alan Girling (A Learner of English as a Second Language Describes a Photograph) has taught academic English for over 20 years and has been writing creatively for almost as long. He writes poetry primarily, but sometimes fiction, plays and creative non-fiction. He has been published in such venues as CBC Radio, Panoply, Blue Skies, FreeFall, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly and The MacGuffin. His work has placed in three poetry contests, been displayed in shop windows and read or heard by hundreds.
Mike (Michael) Guest (The Seminar) is Associate Professor of English in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Miyazaki and currently Visiting Professor at Thammasat University, Thailand. Originally from Canada, Guest has written numerous academic papers, guidebooks/textbooks, articles (both newspaper and online), and blog pieces related to English Language Teaching and Learning. But his true labour of love is writing fiction, especially that which revolves around characters of mixed or threatened identities. The Aggrieved Parties is his second novel. Guest’s Goodreads blog ‘Honeyed Badger Feet’ can be seen at Mike Guest’s Blog: Honeyed Badger Feet
Danielle Legault Kurihara (Francesca and Stevick) is a University lecturer of English and French in Matsuyama, Japan, where she co-authored a series of EFL workbooks on teaching speech acts through movies. Her interests lie in pragmatics in EFL and narratives of mixed-heritage people like her son. She has taught in Taiwan, Thailand and Canada. She writes to make sense of her teaching and her multicultural life.
Dianne Loyet is contributor of The Font’s regular column, In Love with Language. She was born and raised in Illinois, and became determined to study languages at the age of nine when her much older brother told her she was a ‘mala puella,’ and refused to explain what it meant. That determination carried her through bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Russian at the University of Illinois in Champaign. She briefly taught Russian but then switched to TESOL, earning an MA from UCLA and a PhD from New York University. She has been teaching composition to advanced non-native speakers of English since 1993. Currently she is an adjunct instructor at the University of Illinois at Springfield Intensive English Program.
Heather Mallett (Unfunny) was born and raised in Canada, educated in Scotland, and worked in Africa. She moved to Japan after marriage ten years ago where she teaches English at Kwansei Gakuin University and Kobe University. Japan is full of surprises which she delights in exploring with her husband.
Chris Mares (European II) left the UK thirty two years ago to teach English in Japan. He never went back. Currently he is teaching ESL at the University of Maine. He has been a travel writer, course book writer, ESL blogger, and teacher trainer. He is currently immersed in the ‘Richard’ project, a collection of over 150 stories that he uses in the classroom. He has found that in the end, it is stories that hold us together.
Mark McGraw (The Roundabout Way) is a writer, translator, assistant professor of Spanish and instructor of Italian. His twenty-year Marine Corps career as an infantry officer included service in thirty-five countries. He is the translator of Joseph Avski’s Heart of Scorpio and One Step from Juárez. His memoir about living and working in Chile, Where We Were Happy, will be published by Lucid later this year.
James Mulhern (Teaching at Fifty-Six) has published fiction in many literary journals and has received accolades. Seven stories were selected for different anthologies of best short fiction. In 2013, he was chosen as a finalist for the Tuscany Prize in Catholic Fiction. In 2015, Mr. Mulhern was awarded a fully paid writing fellowship to Oxford University in the United Kingdom. That same year, a story was long-listed for the Fish Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His writing (novel and short story collection) earned favorable critiques from Kirkus Reviews.
Simon Perchik (Magic, Illusions and Other Realities) is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by boxofchalk, 2017. For more information including free e-books please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. To view one of his interviews, please visit Youtube here.
Simon Rowe (The Gem Polishing Unit) grew up in small town New Zealand and big city Australia. His stories have appeared in TIME (Asia) magazine, the New York Times, the Australian, the South China Morning Post and the Paris Review. He has been a resident of Japan for twenty years.
Alex Shishin (The Case of the Purloined Cats) is an award-winning and anthologized fiction and non-fiction writer widely published in print and online. Shishin’s non-fiction includes the travel memoir “Rossiya: Voices from the Brezhnev Era.” His “Nippon 2357: A Utopian Ecological Tale” and other ebooks are published by Smashwords. He is a recently retired university professor in Kansai, Japan.
Sarah Somerset (My New Job as a Translator) has taught in Japanese universities for nearly twenty years. A brief sojourn with her family for a teaching contract has somehow evolved into two decades. When she began teaching in Japan her children were in kindergarten, and now they are older than her students. She is surprised that despite being from a minority in terms of both gender and ethnicity she has been given more responsibility in the workplace than she could ever have imagined or desired. Her family members have all returned to her country now, but she somehow manages to keep going because she has internalized the ethic of group loyalty, not to mention the look of trust in her students` eyes.
Meredith Stephens (Creating a Tsunami Evacuation Path) is an applied linguist at Tokushima University, on the island of Shikoku, Japan. Most of her writing concerns English language pedagogy in Japan, but she expanded her repertoire after having the opportunity to work with the American expatriate creative writer, Suzanne Kamata. Since then she has written a short story which has been published in Transnational Literature, and essays about intercultural motherhood which have been appeared in What’s Cooking, Mom? Narratives about Food and Family, and The Migrant Maternal ‘Birthing’ New Lives Abroad, both published by Demeter Press.
Mary Roberson Wiygul (Flat Line(s): Death of An English Teacher’s Psyche) was born and raised in Mississippi and has taught high school English in the public-school system there for over twenty years. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post, Hippocampus Magazine, WOW! Women On Writing, and the Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop as well as in many other publications. She is currently working toward an MFA in Creative Writing at the Mississippi University for Women.