Contributors

Authors

Jane Bernstein’s most recent books are The Face Tells the Secret, her fifth book for adults, and Gina from Siberia, her first book for children, cowritten with her daughter, Charlotte Glynn. She is a lapsed screenwriter, and an avid essayist, whose recent story, “Still Running,” was chosen for Best American Sports Writing 2018. Jane’s grants and awards include two National Endowment Fellowships in Creative Writing and a Fulbright Fellowship. She is a professor of English and a faculty member of the Creative Writing Program at Carnegie Mellon University.
One of her essays, “Laura Dead…” was in Under the Sun some years ago.

        

Andrew Bertaina’s short story collection One Person Away From You (2021) won the Moon City Press Fiction Award (2020). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, The Normal School, The Forge, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC.

        

        

Sanjiv Bhattacharya is a writer and teacher based in Los Angeles. Originally from London, he moved to LA 20 years ago, where he has written for Esquire and GQ in the UK, as well as the Observer, the Telegraph and others. His work includes profiles, essays, and longform reporting, often about fringe groups and subcultures. He’s been short listed three times for PPA Consumer Magazine Writer of the Year. His first book was an investigation into Mormon polygamy which also spawned a documentary for Channel Four (UK). He teaches nonfiction at the Pacific University MFA program.

        

Born and raised in the UK, Elizabeth Bird is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of South Florida, where she taught for 25 years. She has published over 100 academic articles and seven books, most recently The Asaba Massacre: Trauma, Memory and the Nigerian Civil War (2017) and Surviving Biafra: A Nigerwife’s Story (2018). Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Des Moines Register, The Tampa Tribune, Skeptic Magazine, and others. “Interlude:1941” is her first foray into the personal essay form.

        

Denise Emanuel Clemen’s short stories and essays have appeared in many literary magazines including Under the Sun, Superstition Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Delmarva Review, and Georgetown Review (including an honorable mention for their prize in fiction.) Her nonfiction has been a semi-finalist at the Midwest Review, River Teeth, and for the Penelope Niven Non-Fiction Award/Salem Center for Women Writers. Her work also appears in the anthology Only Light Can Do That (PEN Center USA,) and in Human Parts on Medium.com. She’s a Tin House and Squaw Valley alum and has received fellowships to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Ragdale Foundation. Denise has an MFA from the University of Nebraska, and in 2014 her memoir, Birth Mother, was published by SheBooks. Prior to writing Denise worked as an art model, an au pair, a merchant of her own blood plasma, and an assembly-line worker in a toy factory.

        

Telaina Morse Eriksen is the author of the Amazon bestseller and winner of the 2017 Bisexual Book Award, Unconditional: A Guide to Loving and Supporting Your LGBTQ Child. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Under the Sun, Compose Journal, The Fem, poemmemoirstory, ARS Medica, and in many other online and in-print publications. She received her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is the mom of two adult children and lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Andrew, and their Shetland Sheepdog, Cordelia.

        

Born in Kentucky, J.M. Ferguson, Jr., grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he received an M. A. in English from the University of New Mexico. He taught English Composition at several colleges, and then became a traveling “book man” for several textbook publishers, covering the Mountain West. His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous periodicals, but “Is This How It Is Now?” is his first attempt at a memoir – he hopes more might follow. For fifty-two years he was married to Holly Merki, a planetary geologist who served on the Viking and Voyager space projects. Together they raised three sons. A widower now, he is retired back “home” in New Mexico, while admitting he has resided in eleven states – “one at a time, however,” he hastens to add.

        

 

Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (PEN/Jerard Award), Just beneath My Skin (essays), Girl from Soldier Creek (SFA Novel Award) and the editor of four anthologies, most recently, Understanding the Essay (with Jeff Porter). She has received a Pushcart Prize, a Clarence Cason Award, a Theodore Hoepfner Award, a Minnesota Voices Award, a Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, and a Dean’s Scholar Award. She has been a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for over twenty-three years. She has also taught writing in France, Australia, Italy, Czech Republic, and Spain.

 

Janet Gool was born and raised in Greenbelt, Maryland. She completed an undergraduate degree at Brandeis University. In her twenties, she moved to Israel, studied nursing at Bar-Ilan University, married, and had three children. She worked for many years as a psycho-geriatric nurse and simultaneously pursued her passion for writing fiction and creative non-fiction. Her father and his boat figure greatly in many of her stories and essays. She’s been published in Collateral, Creative Nonfiction, Madcap Review, and Foliate Oak. Janet passed away on February 4th, 2020.

 

Wendy Hammond is a working playwright, screenwriter, and professor. Her plays have been produced off-Broadway and in regional U.S. theaters as well as internationally in London, Rome, Melbourne, and Singapore. She has received a Drama League Award, a McKnight Fellowship, an NEA Grant, and publication by Dramatists Play Service, Broadway Play Publishing, and McFarland & Company. The film of her screenplay, Julie Johnson, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won awards including Best Feature in the Barcelona Film Festival and an Audience Award in Berlin. Wendy has taught playwriting and screenwriting at NYU, Brooklyn College, and other universities. She holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, a Master of Divinity from Yale, and an MFA in Creative Writing-Memoir from Hunter College. She loves to bowl and likes to imagine she’s talented at it.

        

Photo by Kelsey and Melo

Sydney Allison Hinton (she/her) is an emerging writer from Illinois, recently graduated from Fresno State’s MFA program. Her writing focuses on marginalized bodies, mental health, dating, and her family history with pageants. She was the Managing Editor at The Normal School for almost two years and worked in the creative writing office as an editorial assistant for longer. Like a true, corn-loving Midwesterner, she can make an authentic chicken noise and loves homemade BBQ. You can find her on Twitter @pshermansyd and Instagram @syd.happens.

        

Teresa H. Janssen is a career educator, most recently teaching language and history in a public high school. Her prose has been designated a Notable by The Best American Essays and has received the Norman Mailer/NCTE creative nonfiction award, among other honors. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Zyzzyva, Lunch Ticket, Los Angeles Review online, Chautauqua, Anchor, Ruminate, and elsewhere. Teresa has an M.A. in linguistics from the University of Washington.

        

Rae Katz is an entrepreneur in San Francisco. She co-founded Able Health, a healthcare technology company supporting better quality measurement in healthcare. To keep herself sane, she writes. She has work published or forthcoming in Steam Ticket, Stonecoast Review, and Talking River Review, and she has written and published Foul Weather (Pyrite Press), a graphic novel illustrated by Stephanie Davidson.

        

        

Tyler Kennett recently graduated from Marshall University with a degree in creative writing and sports journalism. He is a first generation student from Rock, West Virginia, a small town of less than 50 people. His journalistic work has won dozens of awards, including a SPJ Mark of Excellence and an AP award for audio promotions. His creative work is still finding its footing, but can be found in Et Cetera, Marshall’s literary magazine. He is also a comedian, performing on stage from time to time in bars and burrito joints. Recently graduated, Tyler intends to stay in his home state of West Virginia working as a sports journalist while continuing his passion for writing. He currently resides in Morgantown, West Virginia, with his fiancée Jo.

        

Sarah Kovatch grew up moving around the Midwest. She received her MFA in Creative writing at Oregon State University in 2005. After many years authoring text books and copywriting, she now works as a therapist. Her work has appeared in Barnstorm Journal. “My First Car” is part of an essay collection about motherhood and family life. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and beloved rescue dog.

        

        

Mel Livatino’s essays have appeared numerous times in Under the Sun, The Sewanee Review, Notre Dame Magazine, Portland Magazine, Writing on the Edge, River Teeth, and elsewhere. In the last 15 years ten of his essays, including six from UtS, have been named Notable Essays of the Year by Robert Atwan’s Best American Essays annual. He lives in Evanston, IL, and is retired from teaching English for 36 years in the City Colleges of Chicago. He has finished a collection of essays entitled Wintry Rooms of Love and is currently looking for a publisher. He is also at work revising a book about his wife’s 11-year descent into Alzheimer’s, her death, and the grief of losing her twice, tentatively titled Long Cry of Goodbye: Days and Nights of Alzheimer’s, Death, and Grief.

        

Angela Miyuki Mackintosh is a writer and illustrator living in the Los Padres National Forest. A Pushcart Prize and Best of Net nominee, her work has been published in Writer’s Digest, The Nervous Breakdown, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Eastern Iowa Review, and Exposition Review, among others. She’s editor-in-chief at WOW! Women on Writing and a graphic designer at Mackintosh Multimedia. When she’s not writing or editing, she enjoys trail running, off-roading, oil painting, and cat rescue. She’s working on a memoir trilogy.

        

Anne McGrath was noted in the 2020 Best American Essays series, nominated for a Puschcart Prize, and was the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has work published or forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Ruminate, Entropy, Columbia Journal, The Writer’s Chronicle, and other journals.

        

        

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery

        

        

Rachael Quisel’s short story, “Departure,” was nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. They’ve been accepted into competitive writing programs including a Tin House intensive as well as Mary Kole’s Story Mastermind. They’re currently a Creative Writing and Literature Master’s degree candidate at Harvard University Extension School and at work on a middle grade novel. When not writing, they’re reading the slush pile for the Harvard Review, managing their hospitality business, and being walked by their cats.

        

John Rosenblum started as a classical violist and violinist and has since spent time as a dishwasher, a hippie searching for enlightenment, a commune auto mechanic, a computer programmer, a medical software designer, and a globe-trotting corporate executive. To learn writing, John recalled his roots as a classical musician and found inspired professional writers to teach him in private lessons. John lives in rural Vermont with his family where he’s writing personal history, essays, and a novel about a ’70s hippie commune.

        

Sue William Silverman is an award-winning author of seven works of creative nonfiction and poetry. Her most recent book, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, won the gold star in Foreword Reviews INDIE Book of the Year Award as well as the 2021 Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature. Other nonfiction books include Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, made into a Lifetime TV movie; Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, which won the AWP Award; The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew; and Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir. She teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. www.SueWilliamSilverman.com.

        

Terri Sutton holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College and has taught writing courses and workshops in the Milwaukee area and written critical reviews for Next Act Theatre and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Her essays have appeared in Solstice Magazine, The Best of Milwaukee Writer’s Circle Anthology, and Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife. Currently she is working on a collection of essays about family and politics.

 

        

Alida Winternheimer is an award-winning writer, developmental editor, and teacher living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her works have appeared in Confluence, Water~Stone Review, Midwestern Gothic, and other journals. Two of her short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She teaches fiction classes to incarcerated writers through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and hosts the Story Works Round Table & Reading Series podcasts. When she is not writing, reading, or teaching writing, you can find Alida kayaking, cycling, or being walked by her golden retriever. Connect
with her at www.alidawinternheimer.com.

 

        

Sherri Wise modelled her career on that of Chaucer’s poorly remunerated Clerk who “gladly wold…learn and gladly tech.” She began teaching English at the high school level in 1989, and this inspired her to continue her own studies: both in education and in English. She did this while raising seven sons. After an agony of editing, she finally received her PhD in English in 2017. Since then, she has been focused on non-academic writing. Her work has appeared in Ami Magazine and The Globe and Mail. Sherri is honoured to have “Made of Clay” selected as the winner of Under the Sun’s Fall Emerging Writer Contest. She shares the honour with her late mother, Irene Gurvey, who inspired it.

        

Martha Graham Wiseman grew up in both New York and North Carolina. She has been an acting student, a dancer and choreographer, and an editor. She retired in 2020 from her position teaching literature and writing in the English Department and running the writing center at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. The Georgia Review has published four essays of hers, the latest in Fall 2019. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, and White Eagle Coffee Store Press brought out a long story, Double Vision (2004), as a chapbook. Her “Dreams of Foreign Cities,” a prize-winner in Fish Publishing’s Short Memoir Contest, was published in Fish Anthology 2021, and essays are out or forthcoming from Ponder Review, Santa Ana River Review, and The Bookends Review. She has also published an essay on Proust, book reviews, and translations from French, and she has collaborated on dance-theater pieces at the University of Michigan.

        

Artists

        

Originally from Colorado, Krista Beucler received a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. She was the Editor-in-Chief for Issue 7.2 of the Rappahannock Review, the literary journal published by the University of Mary Washington. She is currently a contributing editor for the Community Cats Podcast blog. Krista is a winner of the Julia Peterkin award, and her creative work has been published in From Whispers To Roars and South 85 Journal. You can find her online at her website (KristaBeucler.com) or on Instagram (@AuthorKrista).

        

Lawrence Bridges is best known for work in the film and literary world. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums, Flip Days, and Brownwood. As a filmmaker, he created a series of literary documentaries for the NEA’s “Big Read” initiative, which include profiles of Ray Bradbury, Amy Tan, Tobias. Wolff, and Cynthia Ozick. His photographs have appeared in the Las Laguna Art Gallery 2020, Humana Obscura, Wanderlust, a Travel Journal, the London Photo Festival, and displayed in the ENSO Art Gallery, Malibu, California.

        

Doug Dabbs is an illustrator, comic book artist, and art professor who has taught visual storytelling in higher education for over a decade. His comic books and graphic novels have been published by Image Comics, Oni Press, 12 Gauge Comics, and Artisanal Media, and he exhibits work internationally and nationally; notably at Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), the National Gallery of North Macedonia, and Shockboxx Gallery (California). His work has been featured in art and literature journals, High Shelf Press, Burning Word Journal, Sand Hills Literary Journal, Coffin Bell, and ArtAscent Art and Literature Journal, and he has been recognized by a number of international illustration competitions including American Illustration, Cheltenham Illustration Awards, Creative Quarterly, 3×3, Communication Arts, and Brightness Illustration Awards.

        

 

Denise Emanuel Clemen began making collages to cope with isolation during the pandemic. Many of her nearly 200 collages were sent as postcards to family and friends. Her 33 collage series about her divorce can be found on Instagram (@DeniseEmanuelClemen).

 

 

 

Anthony Afairo Nze is a digital artist/graphic designer living in Indianapolis. His art works have appeared in journals such as Abstract Elephant, Roadrunner Review, Drunk Monkeys, and more. He spends his days learning and practicing skills of all Adobe programs. For more of his artwork visit him @afairosgallery and @afairoworld on Instagram.

        

        

Rebecca Pyle is an artist whose work appears in New England Review, The William and Mary Review, and Permafrost. She owns two easels, and a house with a deeply pitched roof on a foothill in mountainous northern Utah. Rebecca Pyle is also a writer. See rebeccapyleartist.com.