Blake L. Bell (Save for a Rainy Day) is an MFA creative writing student at Mississippi University for Women and writes short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Her poetry has been published in Formercactus, and her short fiction in Typishly. Bell teaches creative writing and AP Language and Composition at a public, magnet high school in Louisiana and can be found in the local cafe working, reading, and writing. More updates and readings can be found at blakelbell.com!
Cherie Brown (Hit from Behind) 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.
Charles Sinclair Kowalski (What to Say in a Knife Fight and Other Regrettably Forgotten Lessons from High School German) 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.
Danielle Legault Kurihara (Seasonal Reminiscences) 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.
Sherri Levine (Grammar Lessons) is the author of In These Voices (Poetry Box 2018). She is the recipient of the Lois Cranston Poetry Prize and winner of Poet’s First Choice in the Oregon Poetry Association Contest Fall, 2018. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the Timberline Review, CALYX, Driftwood Press, Verseweavers, Postcard Poems and Prose, and the Sun Magazine. She lives in Portland, OR where she teaches English at colleges and universities. She escaped the harsh weather of upstate New York and has ever since been soaking in the Oregon rain. https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/in-these-voices
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.
Stephen O’Connor (Blind in Darien) is a writer from Lowell, Massachusetts, where much of his work is set. He is the author of the short story collection, Smokestack Lightning, and the novels, The Spy in the City of Books and The Witch at Rivermouth. His work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Aethlon, The Amsterdam Quarterly and elsewhere. A forthcoming comic novel is entitled This Is No Time to Quit Drinking.
Steve Redford (an Interview with…)first came to Japan in 1988. He’s a professor of American literature at Shizuoka University. He’s published ESL textbooks, short stories, and a novel, Along the Same Street. His homepage is here: www.persimmon-dreams@com. A preview of his new novel, When a Sissy Climbs a Mountain in May can be found here.
Meredith Stephens (Total Physical Response in the University Prius) 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.
Gregorio Tafoya (Arab Spring) is the fiction editor at LittleRoseMagazine.com and still wishes he would have been the first writer to lament, in an author bio, about not writing the play Arcadia. He has taught ESL in various American community colleges. You can follow him on twitter @GregorioTafoya.
Jess D. Taylor (Someone Cheated) started her English teaching career 14 years ago with sweet misfits at the alternative Nonesuch School, and now teaches college composition at Santa Rosa Jr College and Sonoma State University. Her essays and stories have appeared in Pidgeonholes, Superstition Review, KQED, Mutha Magazine, Fractured West, Traveler’s Tales, and elsewhere, and she received a Solas Award for her essay “Cuba Libre.” Jess also writes about the food culture for Made Local Magazine in Sonoma County, California, where she raises her 2 young daughters and lots of plants.
Gale Acuff (Revise, Revise) 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.