Issue 22: Then and Now

Elizabeth Adilman
Elizabeth Adilman lives on the West Coast of BC. Here she finds inspiration as a writer and workshop facilitator. In January of 2022 at the age of 60, she earned a graduate degree in poetry from the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing program of Pine Manor College. You can find her on Instagram at @elizabethadilmanwriter.

Alice Bloch
Alice Bloch is the author of the memoirs Mother-Daughter Banquet (Minerva Rising Press, 2019) and Lifetime Guarantee (Persephone Press, 1981) and the novel The Law of Return (Alyson Publications, 1983). She reviews theater and opera for Seattle Gay News and coordinates the Meals on Wheels program on Vashon Island, where she lives with her spouse and their two dogs.

Patricia Bollin
Patricia Bollin is a poet, retired bureaucrat, mother and grandmother. She lives with her partner Beth in Portland Oregon. Her poetry has appeared in print and online publications including Stirring: A Literary Collection, The Fourth River, Passager and Mezzo Cammin. Her poems are included in the 2020 anthology Footbridge Above the Falls: Forty-eight Northwest Poets. She serves as board president of Soapstone, a 30 year-old non-profit dedicated to supporting women’s writing (www.soapstone.org).

Melissa Brown
Melissa Brown graduated from Duke University and has a master’s in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She worked as a journalist for MSNBC and for ABC News affiliates in Seattle and Washington DC. She lives in the Washington DC area with her family. Her short stories appeared in Subnivean and Ponder Review. She is attending the Johns Hopkins University master’s program in creative writing and is working on a novel.

Ann Cwiklinski
Ann Cwiklinski started writing short stories while raising four children in rural Pennsylvania. Her stories have won first prize at The Baltimore Review, CentralPA Magazine, and Yorkfest, a local arts festival, and have also appeared in pacificREVIEW, The Flexible Persona, Minerva Rising, Belletrist Magazine (Pushcart nominated), Crack the Spine, and Blackwater Press Short Story Collection 2021. She should have practiced piano more as a child.

Andrea Hansell
Andrea Hansell studied creative writing at Princeton University and earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Michigan. She was a psychotherapist for many years and is now a consultant and scriptwriter for Glowmedia mental health education films. Her essays and short stories have appeared in publications including Lilith, Intima, Minerva Rising, and Lascaux Review. She was named a finalist in short fiction for the Lascaux Prize and the Soul-making Keats Literary Competition.

Billie Hinton
Billie Hinton lives on a small farm named November Hill, where she keeps ponies, bees, native plants, and words. She’s a mom, a grandma, and lives with cats, Corgis, husband, daughter, and a golden retriever who believes in love.

Kerry Langan
Kerry Langan has published three collections of short stories, My Name Is Your Name & Other Stories, the most recent. Her fiction has appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, StoryQuarterly, West Branch, Cimarron Review, Other Voices, The Seattle Review, Literary Mama, Rosebud, Blue Mountain Review, JMWW, Reflex Fiction, Fictive Dream, The Fictional Café and others. She was a recently featured author on the podcast, Short Story Today.

Sarah Lilius
Sarah Lilius is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Dirty Words (Indie Blu(e) Publishined 2021) and six chapbooks including GIRL (dancing girl press, 2017) and Traffic Girl (Ghost City Press, 2020). Some of her publication credits include the Denver Quarterly, Court Green, Fourteen Hills, Boulevard, Massachusetts Review and New South. She has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Prize. She lives in Virginia with her husband and two sons. Her website is sarahlilius.com.

Jessica McDonald
Jessica McDonald holds a degree in English and works in the education system as well as in the fitness industry. Her careers allow her to pursue her passion of empowering individuals to find their inner strength and become the best version of themselves. She has written many stories, but “Can You Hear Me?” is the first she has submitted for publication. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest where she continues to write daily.

Kendall Miller
Kendall Miller is 20 years old and from the small town of Hanover, Ohio. She is currently in her junior year at Belmont University and pursuing a degree in English and publishing. Bouncing back and forth between Ohio and Tennessee, she is chasing her lifelong dream of becoming a writer.

Madeline Norris
Madeline Norris is a junior studying English and Creative Writing at Occidental College. She currently splits her time between Los Angeles and her hometown of Guilford, Connecticut. This is her first publication.

Hari B Parisi
Hari B Parisi’s (formerly Hari Bhajan Khalsa) poems have been published in numerous journals and are forthcoming in The Moving Force Journal, The Bookends Review and Thuya Poetry Review. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, most recently She Speaks to the Birds at Night While They Sleep, winner of the 2020 Tebot Bach Clockwise Chapbook Contest. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband. Her website is haribpoet.com.

Jacqueline Parker
Jacqueline Parker lives in Charlotte, NC with her boyfriend, dog, and a lot of plants. Her fiction often explores loss in its many forms, but occasionally she writes something funny. Her work has been featured in Prime Number Magazine, The South Shore Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere.

Emily Patterson
Emily Patterson received her B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University, where she was awarded the Marie Drennan Prize for Poetry, and her M.A. in Education from The Ohio State University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, Mom Egg Review, The Sunlight Press, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Her chapbook So Much Tending Remains will be published by Kelsay Books this fall.

Julie Rackliffe
The last two years of tragic loss and hidden gifts sent Julie Rackliffe Lucey back to the page to find the path forward. She discovered that sometimes moving ahead means looking back. She has an MS in Nutrition Communication from Tufts University, and has been published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Boston Parent’s Paper, Arlington Advocate and others. This is her first time seeing her beloved personal narrative work in print.

Abiola Regan has an academic background in psychology and a passion for pop culture, both of which inform how she explores relationships in her fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Dreamers Creative Writing, Haunted Waters Press, The Capilano Review, The Lumiere Review, Sledgehammer, and more. You can find her online at abiolaregan.com.

Jennifer Rieger
Jennifer Rieger is a public educator and college professor in the Philadelphia area. She’s been honored with the Franklin Institute 2020 Excellence in Teaching Award, the 2021 Philadelphia Phillies All-Star Teaching Award, and was a semi-finalist for the Pennsylvania Department of Education Teacher of the Year. Along with a nomination for the 2020 Pushcart Prize for Literature, her essay collection, Burning Sage, was released in March of 2022. Jen spends her free time bragging about her son, students, and thousands of graduates.

Emily Shearer
Emily Shearer is a full-time creative, naïf intuitive painter, and yoga/writing/spiritual coach. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcarts and “Best of”’s, and published in Kestrel, Silk Road Review, Please See Me, jellybucket, Fiolet & Wing, emry’s journal online, psaltery & lyre, West Texas Literary Review, Clockhouse and Ruminate, among others. She is the Poetry Consultant for Wide Open Writing. You can find her on the web at bohemilywrites.net.

Deborah Grace Staley
Deborah Grace Staley is an award-winning and bestselling author who had a small part in the beginning of Minerva Rising. She worked as an acquiring editor for the first few issues, but her greatest contribution was in suggesting the Minerva in Minerva Rising. The Roman goddess of the arts. Deborah makes her home in South Florida. She writes and works as a freelance editor among other things.

Alison Townsend
Alison Townsend’s new book is the memoir, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home (2022). She is also the author of two books of poetry, The Blue Dress and Persephone in America, and a short prose collection, The Persistence of Rivers. Her poetry and essays appear widely, in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Parabola, The Southern Review, and Under the Sun, and have been recognized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays 2020. Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, she lives with her climate-activist husband on four acres of prairie and oak savanna in the Wisconsin farm country outside Madison.

Mary Campbell Wild
Mary Campbell Wild is a writer and retired editor and educator. She and her family live in Maryland suburbs that are dangerously close to Washington, DC. Her stories have appeared in deLuge Journal, Corvus Review, and the anthology After Effects. She’s working on a short story collection that shines a light on ordinary people who turn out to be not so ordinary after all. She’s also the author of fiction and non-fiction books for children.

Dulcie Witman
Witty, heartbreaking, and searingly true, Dulcie’s flair is as unique as she is. Professionally, Dulcie has been in private practice as a therapist in Maine for the past thirty years. But her childhood writing came back to haunt her some years later. She earned her MFA from Goddard College. Dulcie runs Wide Open Writing, an organization based on the belief that sharing creative space gives power to the creative process. Visit wideopenwriting.com

Samantha Wright
Samantha Wright is a writer in Sedro-Woolley, Washington State. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in The Ninth Letter, Beyond Words, Prometheus Dreaming, Pontoon Poetry, Cathexis Northwest, among others. Please look for her debut chapbook, Postcards from the West (Moonstone Arts Center, TBA). She currently divides her time between writing and teaching yoga.

ISBN: 978-1-950811-17-5

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