Stephanie Abraham (A Substitute Teacher Gets a Spanish Lesson from a Kindergartener) is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacy Education at Rowan University. She’s an emergent writer of creative nonfiction, including memoir and ethnographic poetry. Apart from her publications in academics journals, she’s published a memoirish autoethnography, “¡Aguacate! Bringing Up Bebe Bilingüe,” in The Autoethnographer, and poetry based on her time as an elementary teacher in the Journal of Language & Literacy Education. She lives between Oaxaca, Mexico and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. More of her work can be found at stephanieabraham.org.
Danny P. Barbare (Caramel Apple Cider) is an award winning poet. His poetry has appeared in over 1500 online and print journals locally and abroad. Most recently his poetry has appeared in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Rapid River Review, Cantos, Poetry Hall, Blue Unicorn, South Carolina Bards, as well as many other print and online journals. His poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net by Assisi Online Journal of the Arts and Letters and has won The Jim Gitting’s Award at Greenville Technical College. He lives with his family in Greenville, South Carolina.
FERN G. Z. CARR (Of Course I Think to Myself) is a former lawyer, teacher, and past president of both the BC Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Kelowna Branch) and Project Literacy Central Okanagan Society. A full member of and former Poet-in-Residence for the League of Canadian Poets, this Pushcart Prize nominee composes poetry in six languages including Mandarin. Her poetry collection is entitled Shards of Crystal (Silver Bow Publishing). She also curates her poetry YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@ferngzcarr. Carr has been published extensively from Finland to Mauritius and has had her work recognized by the Parliamentary Poet Laureate. The recipient of several other awards and honours, Carr is absolutely thrilled to have one of her poems in permanent orbit around the planet Mars aboard NASA’S MAVEN spacecraft. www.ferngzcarr.com
CDV (Momentum) is from the UK and has lived in central Japan since 2002. Earning two Master’s degrees and a PhD along the way, she has just about taught every age group and worked in every educational environment, but for past 15 years, within the university context.
Patrick “Dr. Pat” Dougherty (Amy) has been an educator for 35 years. He has also worked as a high school history teacher in the United States, an educational researcher in Bangladesh, and has run graduate programs in education in the United Arab Emirates. He is currently a Professor of International Liberal Arts at Akita International University in Akita, Japan. When not writing textbooks on grammar, articles on language pedagogy, or conducting research on student and faculty motivation, he likes to reflect and write poetry and short stories which are often focused on his experiences in the classroom.
Titus Green (Sleeping Princes and Sozzled Kamikazes) was born in Canada but grew up in the UK. His fiction and non-fiction has appeared in numerous online and print magazines, including The Collidescope, Adelaide Literary Magazine, HORLA, Literally Stories, Sediments Literary Arts, Fear of Monkeys, Stag Hill Literary Journal, The Chamber, S.A.V.A Press and The Font. He teaches English as a foreign language for a living. His published work can be found at http://titusgreenfiction.com/
Jaipreet Grover (The Family Tree) holds a Masters degree in Human Resource Management. She has anexcellent academic record both at school and college level. At present, she is working as a teacher in a renowned school in Pune, India. As an educationist, she has been appreciated for her creative work and innovative teaching aids. She was bestowed with the Teachers’ Recognition Award in 2019. She loves to pen down her thoughts in the form form of motivational and message-driven poems. Her work has been appreciated and published in national and international platforms, e-zines, and a school magazine. For her, learning is a continuous process and she keeps add medley in varied spheres.
Paul Hostovsky (Deaf Interpreter) is a sign language interpreter and Braille instructor living in Boston. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. Website: paulhostovsky.com
Phil Huffy (Two Poems: Offside & Preposition) is a poet. His work has appeared in such publications as Lighten Up Online and Poetry Superhighway.
Ron Jevaltas (Brushstrokes) lives in rural Wisconsin. He has been teaching elementary, middle school, and high school for 41 years. He’s been recently published in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Calendar for 2023, and in the latest three issues of The Moss Piglet. He is an avid outdoorsman.
Richard Krause (The Polyglot) has three collections of fiction published titled Studies in Insignificance, The Horror of the Ordinary, and Crawl Space & Other Stories of Limited Maneuverability. He also has three collections of epigrams published, Optical Biases, Eye Exams, and Blind Insights into the Writing Process. Krause grew up in an orphanage in Pennsylvania, drove a taxi in NYC for five years, and lived for nine years in Japan, seven of them teaching English at Ibaraki University. Currently, he is retired from teaching at a community college in Kentucky. His website is richardkrausewriting.com.
American Suzanne Kamata (Who am I?) is a permanent resident of Japan. She is the author or editor of fifteen books including the anthology The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan (Stone Bridge Press, 1997), the award-winning short story collection The Beautiful One Has Come (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2012), and the novel The Baseball Widow (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2021). Her work also appears in numerous journals and anthologies including Meridian: The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New Writing and the 2017 and 2022 editions of The Best Asian Short Stories. She has been awarded grants by the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She is an associate professor in the department of Global Studies at Naruto University of Education and serves as fiction editor of Kyoto Journal.
Jared Michael Kubokawa (You Don’t Just Get To Change Your Mind) 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.
Chandra Bahadur Lama (My Experience: Reading is an Intellectual Inebriation), an aspiring writer and translation practitioner with a Master’s Degree in English Education, is an English teacher. He is also a member of the executive committee of the Society of Translators Nepal. His love for literature, combined with a passion for travel and trekking, has shaped his unique perspective on life. In his philosophical framework, he discerns the quintessence of human existence to reside inherently within the domain of literature.
Sohyeon Lee (Second Language Learning, Teaching, and Growing: My EFL Story) is a second-year MA student in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. With a background spanning two decades in teaching L2 English to adolescents in various public schools in Seoul, Korea, she had the privilege of working extensively in curriculum design, instructional development, and textbook publications through her employment with the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education. Her growing interest in Language Testing and Assessments has driven her to explore the intricacies of evaluating L2 English productive skills, particularly in the domains of speaking and writing. She is deeply committed to addressing validity and fairness issues in L2 English assessments within EFL contexts, aiming to promote fairness and justification in language assessment practices.
Jenny Lester is author of the poem, Learning.
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.
Janet McCann (CLEANING OUT) is a crone poet who taught creative writing and other vices at Texas A&M University for 47 years. Her latest book is Life List, (Wipf and Stock, 2022); the next-to-last, The Crone at the Casino (Lamar U. P. 2015). Widowed and retired, she lives in College Station with her two dogs.
Jennifer McClung (You Couldn’t Tell Who the Back Row Students Were) teaches writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Originally from Detroit, she lived and worked in Taipei, Taiwan and Vancouver, Canada, before making Anchorage her home. She holds Masters degrees in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and in Theological Studies. Her interests include mindfulness, social justice, and Indigenous pedagogy, and in recent years, she has reconnected with a desire to write. Her creative work has been published in Wildheart Magazine.
Lekha Murali (The Novelist) grew up in India, before settling down in the US. Her inspirations are drawn from the ebb and flow of everyday life. Her poems have been published in the Write City Magazine and Catharsis Magazine. She has also designed and illustrated two children’s books that were self-published through IngramSpark. Find her at https://lmexpressions.com.
Susan Rubinyi (Mr. Pann) is the author of NATURAL GENIUS: THE GIFTS OF ASPERGER’S SYNDROME (Jessica Kingsley Publishers), Susan Rubinyi has published numerous articles and stories both in Speculative Fiction and Cross-Cultural publications. Co-Editor of AURORA: BEYOND EQUALITY (Fawcett Gold Medal), she has taught in France, Spain, Hawaii, and the Pacific Northwest.
Muhammad Khurram Salim (For Bread, Not Money & The Mind Code): I was born on the 23rd of June, 1967, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I started taking an interest in writing when I was a child and wrote poems and short stories for the Bangladesh Observer newspaper, from 1977 to 1985. I was awarded a silver medal in Shankar’s Children’s Competition of India (1983) for a short story I wrote. I have been published in various anthologies and magazines, over the years. I take a keen interest in writing stories and novels, poetry and plays and essays too. Many of my writings have been published, online, over the years. I have lived in the U.K. most of my life, but have spent some of my years studying and writing in Bangladesh and the USA too. Writing and creativity make my life most enjoyable.
David Sheskin (Pesky Porcupine) is a writer and artist who has been published extensively over the years. Most recently his work has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Satirist, Chicago Quarterly Review, Tamarind, Shenandoah and The Journal of Irreproducible Results. His most recent books are Art That Speaks, David Sheskin’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Outrageous Wedding Announcements. A former university professor, he is the author of The Handbook of Parametric and Nonparametric Statistical Procedures.
Helga Gruendler-Schierloh (DENGLISCH) is a bilingual writer with a degree in journalism and graduate credits in linguistics. After working as a language instructor, as well as specializing in transcribing and translating Old German script (Suetterlin) documents, Helga revived her life-long passion for literary endeavors. Her articles, essays, short stories, and poetry have appeared in the USA, the UK, Canada, and South Africa. Her debut novel, Burying Leo, won second place in women’s fiction during Pen Craft Awards’ 2018 writing contest.
Shizhou Yang, (Pondering Over a Tomato Soup) PhD (La Trobe University, Australia, 2011), postdoctoral visiting scholar at Purdue University (2014-2015), has taught English at a Chinese university for 20 years. He now teaches creative writing, composition and other courses at Payap University in Thailand. His research interests include L2 writing, identity and language teacher development. His publications have appeared in international journal such as Journal of Second Language Writing and L2 Journal. His Routledge monograph Autobiographical writing and identity in EFL education explores pedagogical potential of life writing in the EFL context. He also presents at international conferences frequently. Additionally, he serves as a reviewer for six international journals and as an associate editor of MEXTESOL Journal non-refereed articles. In his free time, he enjoys writing a few lines.