Cathy Adams’ (This I Believe ) latest novel, A Body’s Just as Dead, was published by SFK Press. Her short stories have been published in Utne, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Tincture, A River and Sound Review, Crack the Spine, Portland Review, and over forty others internationally. As a faculty member in the Fort Hays State University/Shenyang Normal University system for eight years, she now lives and writes in Shenyang, China, with her husband, photographer, Julian J. Jackson. As a native southerner from the U.S., her writing is mostly rooted in Appalachian culture with the recent addition of Asian characters and ideas.
Willow Barnosky (Outside) is an educator and writer based in San Jose, California. She has taught ESL and EFL in the United States, Japan, and South Korea, and was an English Language Fellow at the University of Rzeszów in Poland. She received her MA in TESOL and a Specialization in Teaching Spanish from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and has a BA in Spanish and Latin American Studies from the University of Pittsburgh.
Cherie Brown (Two for the Price of One) lives in Japan, and currently teaches academic skills at an English-medium university there. Co-author of two TESOL resource books, “Max Vocab: Journeys in the English Language”, and “Partners in the Classroom”, she has also written TESOL materials for “English-to-Go,” an online language teaching and learning resource site, and a wide range of academic material for professional books and journals. Cherie regularly presents teacher-development workshops across Asia through the ‘Teachers Helping Teachers’ organization, a Special Interest Group within JALT (the Japan Association for Language Teaching). She enjoys writing short stories and poetry for pleasure, and tries not to take life too seriously.
Maria Fachal Corbeira (Teaching During the Corona Virus Shutdown) teaches English in Spain and majored in three languages at USC, Spain: English, French and German. She has been teaching English to adults for over 20 years. She took up Chinese many years ago with very limited success but lost her German in the attempt to learn Chinese. While living and working in China, she had the opportunity of meeting some of the most prestigious scholars of Spanish language in the country. Meeting those people and learning about their philosophy of education has completely altered her vision of language teaching and deeply enriched her life. Just like Wu Guanzhong, who became one of the best painters in China after his contact with Western art, she strongly believes that cultural exchange is extremely positive in the context of education for all sides involved.
Andrew Innes (The Rotten Mikan) divides his time between teaching at Mukogawa Women`s University, Himeji Dokkyo University, and various freelance classes around the Kansai area. After passing N1 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, he embarked on a masters in Education and Applied Linguistics with a focus on Systemic Functional Linguistics. He has written on topics such as whether machine translation can be detected by native English teachers, and bias in newspaper articles, among others. In his free time, he likes going hiking and going to the local gym to keep fit.
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s (Daisy) most recent books are Poems: New and Selected (Isobar, 2018, London/Tokyo) and <<terrain grammar>> (theenk Books, 2018, USA), and, as editor, women : poetry : migration [an anthology] (also with theenk, 2017). Her book Plan B Audio is forthcoming with Isobar in 2020. She lives in Hamamatsu, Japan, and email is welcome at janejoritznakagawa(at)gmail(dot)com.
American Suzanne Kamata (Julia in the Desert) is a permanent resident of Japan, and an associate professor at Naruto University of Education. She is the author or editor of 14 published books including the award-winning short story collection The Beautiful One Has Come (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2011); the novel Screaming Divas (Simon Pulse, 2014), which was named to the ALA Rainbow List; Squeaky Wheels: Travels with My Daughter by Train, Plane, Metro, Tuk-tuk and Wheelchair (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2019), recipient of the Half the World Global Literati Award for the memoir; and two books for emerging readers, including the WWII thriller The Spy (Gemma Open Door, 2020).
Originally from Ukraine, Nataliya Kharchenko (Teaching and the Art of Compassion) immigrated to Canada in 2008. She has been teaching EFL/ESL/EAP since 2002 in Ukraine and Canada. She holds a Master of Arts from Kyiv National Linguistic University and a Doctorate in Education from the University of Manitoba. Nataliya currently teaches English for academic purposes at the English Language Centre, the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Her research interests include multilingualism, translanguaging, language acquisition, and heritage language maintenance. She lives in Winnipeg with her husband and their 5-year-old multilingual daughter.
Charles Sinclair Kowalski (Cheating) was born, now lives, and, barring any intensely unfortunate circumstances, will die in Pittsburgh, PA. Outside teaching high school German in a nearby district, he writes humor satire pieces for alt-culture platform The Hard Times, its nerd culture vertical Hard Drive, and his own site, Pittsburgh Unfiltered. Feel free to reach out at pghunfiltered@gmail.com, especially if you’re in town and need to find a good happy hour.
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.
Molly Lynde (Late-Night Musing, Lament, and Things that I would not like to forget) is originally from Sonoma County, California, and now lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has taught modern and medieval French language and literature at Western Michigan University for over 25 years. She is a founding editor of Transference, a literary journal featuring poetry in translation (https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/transference/). Her own poems have appeared in Rue Scribe and are forthcoming in Heron Tree and First Literary Review – East.
James Mulhern’s ( Simply Silly, and Peppermint Candy) writing has appeared or is forthcoming in over one hundred literary journals and anthologies. In 2013, he was 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 longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His writing has earned a Kirkus Star. His most recent novel, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, is a Readers’ Favorite Book Award winner, a Notable Best Indie Book of 2019, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019.
Michael Pronko ( Context for my Outrage – Teaching and Learning after Graduation) became a professor of American Literature and Culture at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo after years of traveling, an M.A. in ESL, an M.A. in Comp Lit and a PhD in English from the University of Kent. His seminars focus on contemporary novels and film adaptations and he teaches classes in American film, music and art.
Michael has published three award-winning collections about Tokyo life and two mystery novels, The Last Train and The Moving Blade. The latter was selected as one of the best indie mysteries and thrillers of 2018 by Kirkus Reviews. Michael has written regular columns for many publications, including The Japan Times, Newsweek Japan, ST Shukan, and Artscape Japan. He runs his own website, Jazz in Japan (www.jazzinjapan.com). More at: www.michaelpronko.com www.facebook.com/pronkoauthor @pronkomichael




Yuan Changming (Heart Renditions, Etymological Insights, and Eight Chinese Trio Characters) started to learn the English alphabet in Shanghai at age nineteen, taught ESL at Tianjin Institute of Foreign Trade, and published monographs on translation before leaving China. With a Canadian Phd in English, Yuan works as a private tutor in Vancouver, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include ten Pushcart nominations, eight chapbooks (most recently East Idioms [cyberwit.net]) & publications in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry & Best New Poems Online, among 1669 other literary outlets across 44 countries.