George Braine (Danny’s Revenge) taught English for 40 years in four countries. In retirement, he lives in Japan. More information could be found at www.georgebraine.com
Patrick Dougherty (Vespers, Hue) 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.
Luke Draper (Traps) is from Portsmouth, UK and has lived in Japan, on and off, since 2009. He works in the university sector and teaches EFL, EAP, and literature. He is currently working on a PhD in Linguistics that explores the links between pedagogical stylistics, interactions in Creative Writing workshops and revisional processes and decisions. He is also the current Publicity Officer for the Literature in Language Teaching (LiLT) SIG. He gained his MA in Creative Writing in 2006 from the University of Chichester, UK. His literary influences include Leonard Cohen, George Saunders and Soseki Natsume.
Jared Michael Kubokawa (Three Poems) is currently an assistant professor in the department of humanities and social sciences at Aichi University in Japan and has been working as an EFL teacher for the past 15 years in Japan, Malaysia, Italy, Ukraine, and Abu Dhabi. His research interests include second language writing, second language creative writing, multilingual/translingual creativity, learner and teacher agency, and teacher education. He has published academic research, creative writing, and journalistic articles in various international journals and websites. More information on Jared can be found here: https://jaredkubokawa.wordpress.com.
Edith Gallagher Boyd (That Moment in Montmartre) is a graduate of Temple University and a former French teacher. She and her family moved to Jupiter, Florida in 1990. She is an avid sports fan with special affection for the Philadelphia Eagles. She is the author of the short story collection “ Dancing in Winter and Other Stories.” Her work can be found here: edithgallagherboyd.com
floyd h. graham III (chasing the rIsing sun) was carried on the wings of wanderlust to Japan over 20 years ago. It’s still the only time in his life he has flown first class. He majored in Philosophy and American Studies as an undergraduate and holds an MA in Second Language Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Baseball was his first love, but he enjoys surfing and snowboarding when he can these days.
Titus Green (Deja vu in Dammam) was born in Canada but grew up in the UK. He has worked in English language teaching for 23 years and has taught in South Korea, China and Saudi Arabia for extended periods of time.
His short fiction has appeared in numerous online and print magazines, including The Font, The Chamber, The Collidescope, Adelaide Literary Magazine, HORLA, Literally Stories, Coffin Bell Journal, Sediments Literary Arts, Stag Hill Literary Journal, Sediments Literary Arts, Ramingo’s Porch, Empty Sink Publishing and Nalubaale Magazine. Currently, his two writing goals are to find a publisher interested in compiling a collection of his short fiction and to complete an autobiographical novel. His work can be found at: http://www.titusgreenfiction.com
Brian Grover (The Married Rocks) is creator of the ELTon-nominated classroom game Truth or Dare for English Language Learners and author of the first ever “multi-touch” iBook for ELT, Catalyst: A Conversation Taskbook for English Language Learners. Outside of language teaching, Grover has published a breakthrough outdoor guidebook, BC Car-Free: Exploring Southwestern British Columbia Without a Car and a collection of short fiction and poetry called Elegant Corpses. Recently retired from the English Education Department of Andong National University in South Korea, Grover logged over 30 years in the TESL trenches in Canada, Japan and France. Grover is an avid long-distance cyclist and accomplished photographer. He can be reached through http://www.speekeezy.ca/ or you can tweet this twit @SpeekeezyDotCa.
Jaipreet Grover (The Magic Words) holds a Masters degree in Human Resource Management and has four years of experience in corporate HR and consulting services. She has an excellent academic record both at school and college level. At present, she is working as a teacher in a renowned school in Pune, India. She was bestowed with the Teachers’ Recognition Award in 2019, an award which she will cherish for the rest of her life. She loves to pen down her thoughts in the poems. For her, learning is a continuous process and she keeps add medley in varied spheres. Her “denim designs” and “bottle art” are the most admired one.
Jennifer Igawa (De Zoet Does Japan) has been teaching English in Japan for 35 years. Her current research is on the use of flash fiction as a tool to promote active and meaningful discussion in the language learning classroom. She also moonlights as a translator of academic texts. During her free time, she likes to read novels and tend to her garden.
Andrew Innes (L’espirit de L’escalier: A Mancunian in Japan) is from Cheshire near Manchester in England and now lives in Himeji where he has resided since 2002. He divides his time between teaching at Mukogawa Women`s University, Himeji Dokkyo University, Kobe Shoin Women`s University and various freelance classes around the Kansai area. He has written on whether teachers can detect if students have used machine translation in their work and the tell-tale signs that they have; and the use of video in class to reduce transactional distance during online teaching. His forthcoming book The Short Story Collective touches on various themes of interest such as how technology can blur the boundaries of our identity (Generation C), psychedelia (Pattern Separation), Cancel culture (Ms. Representation), Othering (The Gaijin Parade), Buddhism (The Koan), The Korean Wave (Veritas), Tourist pollution (When in Rome), New ageism (Digital Detox), horror (The Rotten Mikan), and metamorphosis (The Short Story Collective) among others. He has written three stories for The Font and had a story published in Tokyo Weekender.
Julie Allyn Johnson (Early Lightning), a sawyer’s daughter from the American Midwest, began writing poetry after her retirement from IT work in 2017. She loves hiking, gravel-travel photography, riding bikes, altered books and collage, reading and writing poetry and exploring trails in the Rocky Mountains. Her work has been (or soon will be) published in Lyrical Iowa, Typishly, The Esthetic Apostle, Chestnut Review, SPLASH!, The Loch Raven Review, Better Than Starbucks, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Into the Void, Poetry and Covid, Phantom Kangaroo, Haikuniverse, The Disappointed Housewife, Coffin Bell, Anti-Heroin Chic, Kitchen Sink Magazine, Space and Time Magazine, Ethel Zine, The Metaworker Literary Magazine and The Briar Cliff Review.
Hardy Jones (Teaching is a Women’s Job?) is a Creole/Cajun educator and author in New Orleans. He is a two-time Pushcart Nominee, the author of the novels Every Bitter Thing, International Love Supreme, the memoirs People of the Good God, Resurrection of Childhood, and the story collection Coconuts and Crawfish. He is the co-author of the memoirs Wal-Mart Girl, When I was a Child, and A True Story of Child Labor. Please check out his books at this link
His creative nonfiction won two grants. His stories were anthologized in the 2009 Dogzplot Flash Fiction Anthology, The Best of Clapboard House Literary Journal, Southern Gothic: New Tales of the South, and Summer Shorts II. He is the co-founder and Executive Editor of the online journal Cybersoleil (www.cybersoleiljournal.com).
Hardy holds a Ph, D. in American Literature from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Memphis, and a M.A.T. in Secondary English Education from the University of New Orleans. He taught in universities for 18 years and is a certified teacher. His website is www.hardyjoneswriting.com and he is on Twitter @HardyJonesWrite. Hardy splits his time between New Orleans, Louisiana and Si Sa Ket Province Thailand.
Jessica Kirzane (Perfect) is the assistant instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago and the editor-in-chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. She was a 2018 Pedagogy Fellow and a 2017 Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, and has written about Yiddish studies pedagogy for In geveb, Pedagogy & American Literary Studies, and Teach Great Jewish Books. She is also a literary translator from Yiddish and her translations have appeared in Columbia Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, Jewish Currents, Pakn Treger, and elsewhere. She is the translator of Miriam Karpilove’s Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle against Free Love (Syracuse University Press, 2020).
Wan Li (Hybrid Identities: Teaching while Learning) has taught English at the high school and college level at several educational institutions in southern China, both private and public. She studied English, Pedagogy, and TESOL at Hainan University, Hainan Normal University, and University of St Andrews. Having lived both in big cities and small towns, she hasn’t yet decided which she likes more.
Michael Lin (The Joy of Teaching English as a Foreign Language in Japan) is an Asian-American from Los Angeles, California and has been teaching EFL in Japan since 2011. He enjoys teaching university students and is currently teaching English as an adjunct instructor at Konan University and Konan Women’s University. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Biola University, and his research interests involve task-based language teaching, content-based instruction, student motivation, facilitating learner autonomy, and integrating CALL in the EFL classroom. A lifelong learner, you can often find him at a local university library or at a local café googling something of interest.
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.
James Mulhern’s (Word of the Day) writing has appeared in literary journals over one hundred and fifty times and has been recognized with many awards. In 2015, Mr. Mulhern was granted a writing fellowship to Oxford University. That same year, a story was longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His novel, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, is a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019. He was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2021 for his poetry.
Sarah Somerset (The Phone Company that won’t do Business on the Phone) 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 (Aisatsu- The Importance of being Seen and Noticed) is from Adelaide and teaches English at Tokushima University, Japan. Her work has appeared in Transnational Literature, The Journal of Literature in Language Teaching, the Writers’ and Readers’ Magazine, and in chapters in anthologies entitled What’s Cooking Mom? Narratives about Food and Family, The Migrant Maternal: “Birthing” New Lives Abroad, and Twenty-First Century Friendship, all published by Demeter Press, Canada.