Gale Acuff 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.
Cherie Brown 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.
Mr Gopal Prasad Bashyal is Instructor at Educational Training Centre, Palpa, Nepal. He is a Life Member of NELTA. His Optional English series (Grade 1 – 5) is taught as supplementary textbooks in several schools in Nepal. He has published Teaching English to Beginners, ELT Handbook, The Recollections and several ELT and education-related articles in local and national journals and newspapers. He can be reached at gopalbashyal@gmail.com.
Maryah Converse has over 14 years of experience teaching adults and children in a range of contexts, including refugee service organizations, academia and private language schools in Jordan, Indiana, Cairo, New York and New Jersey, and beginning as a Peace Corps educator in Jordan. She has written for publications including From Sac, New Madrid Journal, BLYNKT, Silk Road Review, Newfound, Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Matador Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Her work was nominated Gulf Stream Literary Magazine for the 2017 Best of the Net collection, and she has twice been an honorable mention in the New Millennium Writing Awards. Maryah holds a Masters in Near Eastern Languages, currently teaches Arabic and English as foreign languages in the New York area, and blogs intermittently at bymaryah.wordpress.com.
Patrick Dougherty 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 and a Master of Education from Northern Arizona University, and a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics from the University of Southern Queensland. Additionally, he holds a Doctorate in Education in Administration from Northern Arizona University. He has been an educator for 29 years, working in North America, the Middle East, and Asia. Fourteen of those years he worked as a high school teacher in the US and Japan. Visit Patrick on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ptdougherty.
Dr. Allyson Eamer is a sociolinguist who studies the reflexive relationships between language use, identity, belonging, agency and transnationalism. She teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Her research includes language shift and maintenance over multiple generations of immigrant families in Canada, as well as the sociocultural impacts of linguicide on indigenous peoples around the globe. In 2013, she was made a Fellow of the Nantucket Project for her work on documenting the state of the art use of technology for revitalizing endangered languages.
Michael Greco dabbled as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, California, and now teaches writing in Kyoto, Japan. His first work of fiction, called The Cuckoo Colloquium, was recently published.
Dawid Juraszek is a lecturer in literature and culture of English-speaking countries at a university in Guangzhou, China. His academic background is in English, translation studies, educational leadership, international relations, and environmental management. A published novelist, his fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in a variety of outlets in his native Poland, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
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.
Fiona Malcolm has worked in the field of English Language Teaching for several decades and has been an independent Education Consultant since 2011. She has taught English as a Foreign Language in South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe and has delivered extensive Teacher Training and Development Workshops in these regions too.Fiona is passionate about encouraging the use of creativity in language teaching and has published articles with Beijing Foreign Studies University, the British Council, ELTC and IATEFL YLT Sig to name a few, mainly around the themes of the use of Storytelling and Drama in education, and these have followed on from numerous conference presentations and workshops.Currently based in Scotland, she continues to be globally mobile and shares her knowledge and passion for learning with educators in varied contexts. Fiona can be contacted through www.thefionamalcolm.com.
James Mulhern has published fiction over forty times in literary journals. Three 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 longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has received other awards as well. His writing (novel and short story collection) earned favorable critiques from Kirkus Reviews.
Megumi Ohsumi received her doctoral degree in classical philology. Aside from university teaching, she enjoys studying German and hopes to learn Biblical Hebrew one day. She has previously lived in New York, Michigan, Hawaii, Singapore, and Switzerland. This is her first publication in fiction.
Olivia Or is a settler born on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation. Her interest in language is situated in the heart of her identity as a multiracial person. A writer of poetry and short fiction, Olivia aims to unsettle/queer/madden narratives of post-diasporic belonging on Turtle Island (across the region presently known as the Greater Toronto Area). Her work is deeply tied to her Irish-Cantonese roots. Olivia is an M.A. graduate of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, presently engaged in community organizing and other modes of ‘unproductive’ citizenship in Tkaronto.
Huy V. Phung has been working as an instructor of English and a teacher educator for almost 10 years. He is interested in how languages are learned, are taught and are assessed. Apart from his professional and academic activities, he does graphic design, plays musical instruments and writes fun stuff. Huy Phung can be reached at https://phunghuyedu.wordpress.com.
María Rossana Ramírez-Avila is currently the Coordinator of the Masters program for English Teachers at Universidad Casa Grande and Chair-Elect of TESOL Higher Education Interest Section. She has been teaching for over 20 years. She has also been a teacher-trainer, and a teacher supervisor. She has presented several poster sessions, and workshops locally, nationally, and internationally. She has been a proposal volunteer reader for TESOL since 2013. Most of her work is related to reading and writing in EFL settings.
Beate Sigriddaughter is poet laureate of Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment). Her work has received several Pushcart Prize nominations and poetry awards. New books out in 2018 are Xanthippe and Her Friends (FutureCycle Press) and Postcards to a Young Unicorn (Salador Press). She publishes other women’s writing in her blog Writing In A Woman’s Voice. Visit Beate at www.sigriddaughter.com.
Alex Shishin 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.
Meredith Stephens 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.
Sean H. Toland is currently an Assistant Professor at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan. He has taught English as an international language (EIL) in Japan and Korea at every level from elementary to university and worked as a high school teacher in Canada’s far north. Sean enjoys developing instructional materials and frequently incorporates creative writing tasks into his communicative EIL classes.