Contributors
Authors
Ann Voorhees Baker started writing again just a few years ago, after a 40-year hiatus from her early efforts in her college years. Her short stories have been published in the Chicago Quarterly Review and elsewhere, and she’s received, among other awards, two writer residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. She hosts an annual women’s writing retreat in the Catskills called Women At Woodstock and has completed her first novel, for which she’s seeking an agent. She lives with her husband in Southern California near the ocean.
Mark Brazaitis is the author of eight books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Guernica, Under the Sun, Beloit Fiction Journal, Poetry East, USA Today, and elsewhere. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.
Elizabeth Carls is a poet and essayist writing across genres from her home in St. Paul, MN. Her work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Split Rock Review, River Teeth , and Under the Sun. She is currently an MFA student in the Creative Writing Program at Hamline University and serves as the Assistant Editor of Creative Nonfiction for Water~Stone Review. She occasionally teaches in the English Department of a local community college.
Kurt Caswell is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently Iceland Summer: Travels Along the Ring Road, with 35 full-color illustrations by artist Julia Oldham. His other books are: Laika’s Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog; Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents; In the Sun’s House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation; and An Inside Passage, which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. His essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in American Literary Review, High Country News, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ninth Letter, Orion, River Teeth, and other publications. Kurt teaches writing, literature, and outdoor leadership in the Honors College at Texas Tech University.
Telaina Morse Eriksen is the author of Unconditional: A Guide to Loving and Supporting Your LGBTQ Child (Mango Publishing, 2017, 2022), winner of the 2017 Bisexual Book Award for Nonfiction, and the short fiction piece The City of God (Archer Central Publishing, 2023). Please visit telaina.com for more information or follow Telaina on Instagram @telainae.
Judith Fetterley lives, writes, and gardens in upstate New York. She is passionate about plants and place and about the gift of being free to be passionate about her partner, Sara. An Emerita Teaching Professor of American Literature, Women’s Studies, and Writing Studies at the University at Albany,State University of New York, she is the author of The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction and Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture. Since leaving her academic appointment, she has owned and managed a small garden design business, Perennial Wisdom, and become a Master Gardener for the Albany County Cornell Co-operative Extension. Recent work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Hypertext, Women’s Studies Journal, and NYT Modern Love column. She writes a bi-monthly newsletter, “Out in the Garden,” which starts and ends in the garden but travels widely in between. It can be read and subscribed to on her website, www.perennialwisdom.net.
Gary Fincke‘s latest essay collection, The Mayan Syndrome, was published by MadHat Press in 2023. Its lead essay “After the Three-Moon Era” was reprinted in The Best American Essays 2020. His previous collection, The Darkness Call, won the Robert C. Jones Prize (Pleiades press, 2018).
Hye-Kyung Stella Kang, PhD, is Professor of Social Work at Seattle University. Her most recent co-authored book, Racism in the United States: Implications for the Helping Professions (3rd Ed), was published by Springer Publishing in 2022. She lives near the Salish Sea and is currently working on a memoir essay collection about love as an act of resistance and liberation.
Anu Kumar lives in New Jersey with her family. She has lived in various places in India before moving to Singapore and then to the US. She has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and other degrees in history and management.
Anu’s essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in the The Missouri Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, The Common, On the Seawall, Litro Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, Blood Orange Review, River Styx Journal, and elsewhere. One of her essays received ‘notable mention’ in The Best American Essays, 2023, edited by Vivian Gornick.
Her first novel, Letters for Paul, appeared in 2006 and was published by Mapinlit, India. She has since then written ten novels, including three works of historical fiction, under the pseudonym of Adity Kay and published by Hachette India. Her most recent novel, The Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mystery, is a historical mystery set in nineteenth century Bombay and was published by Speaking Tiger Books earlier this year. Anu has also written for younger readers. Her most recent books are Kings and Queens of India and Her Name was Freedom: 35 Fearless Women who Fought for India’s Independence (both published by Hachette India). She also writes regularly for Scroll.in.
Dave Larsen graduated from the University of Washington with degrees in English literature and business administration. After serving two years in the Marine Corps, he began a 28-year career in the finance department of The Boeing Company. David’s writing has been published in Able Muse, Alternate Route, Hooghly Review, 21st Century Text, and Glacial Hill Review. He continues to run Soos Creek Wine Cellars, the winery that he founded 34 years ago, and is married with three children.
Jennifer Lauren is a former litigation attorney and award-winning journalist. She was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest but moved to Austin, Texas, in 2020, in search of sunshine and tacos. She lives with her husband, two kids, two cats, and her personal assistant, Izzy, a toy Australian Shepherd. Her work has been featured in Manifest-Station and Women on Writing. Her latest novel, Play Me Backwards, was a third-place winner of the Gutsy Great Novelist Page One Prize in 2022. Find her at jenniferlauren.net.
William Luvaas has published four novels and two collections of short fiction. The first, Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle, was The Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year. His new collection, The Three Devils, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in early 2025. Luvaas’s honors include an NEA fellowship and first place in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest. Dozens of his short stories, essays, and articles have appeared in many publications, including The Village Voice, American Literary Review, The Antioch Review, North American Review, Short Story, The Sun, and The American Fiction Anthology.
Angela Miyuki Mackintosh is a writer and illustrator living on a ranch in the Sequoia National Forest, California, that she’s renovating into an artist retreat. Her writing has been published in Writer’s Digest, Under the Sun, Exposition Review, Harpur Palate, Eastern Iowa Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Review, Red Fez, iō Literary Journal, Permafrost, and elsewhere. Most recently, her essay about sex trafficking, “The Recruit,” was nominated for Best of Net and The Best American Essays. Angela is an editor at WOW! Women on Writing. When she’s not writing or editing, she enjoys oil painting, trail running, off-roading, watching horror flicks, visiting old cemeteries, and snuggling with her three rescue cats.
Since retiring from a career in the nonprofit sector, Margaret Morth is immersed in a life-long passion for catching and writing stories. Writer’s Digest awarded a 2022 Honorable Mention for her story, “To Beat the Band.” Her work has also appeared in The RavensPerch, TulipTree Review, and North Dakota Horizons. She has an M.A. in English literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Brooklyn, her adopted home of many years.
Born and raised in upstate New York, essayist and poet John Nizalowski moved to Santa Fe in the mid-1980s and has ever after lived west of the 100th meridian. He has published six books, most recently Chronicles of the Forbidden, which was a finalist for the 2020 Colorado Book Award in Creative Non-Fiction, and The Emergence of Frank Waters, a volume of scholarly essays he co-edited with Alexander Blackburn. In addition, his work has appeared in a wide range of literary, scholarly, and journalistic venues. Before retiring in 2022, he taught mythology, creative writing, and cultural studies at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction.
Maureen Pendras is a writer and psychoanalyst living in Seattle. She is a Faculty member of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and has a private practice. This is her first publication in Under the Sun. She is currently at work on a collection of essays on girlhood and other heartbreaks. Her friends own a restaurant in which they describe their fare as Earth Food for Humans, and this is one possible description of her writing.
John Picard is a native of Washington, D.C., currently living in Greensboro, North Carolina. He has published fiction and nonfiction in New England Review, Narrative Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. A collection of his stories, Little Lives, was published by Main Street Rag. More can be found at johnmpicard.com
Erica “ERN” Rivera (she/they) is a trans Latinx/e performance writer of color. She’s currently writing a collection of essays tentatively titled The Trans Girl’s Guide to Grey’s Anatomy, from which this essay comes. Her work appears in en*gendered, manywor(l)ds, and JAKE, and is forthcoming in beestung, Sophon Lit, The Emerson Review, Osmosis Press, and Broken Antler Magazine Quarterly. For fun, she likes to watch TV and pretend all the characters are trans.
Jacob Simmons is a high school teacher in California’s Central Valley and an MFA candidate for Creative Nonfiction at Fresno State University. He writes about love and atrocity, and he’s trying to become less of a scoundrel every day.
Cate Touryan writes under her pen name–derived from her middle name and mother’s maiden name–to distinguish herself from a well-known NY Times bestselling author (another Ann Neumann) whose emails regularly appear in her inbox. Sadly, Cate had to decline the Pulitzer Center’s request to republish her Harper’s Magazine article on the small matter of the article not being hers. Cate has recently returned to writing fiction and creative nonfiction after a rewarding career as a university writing instructor, copy editor, and professional writing consultant. Her debut YA novel, Turning Toward Eden, is slated for release in spring 2025. Although mostly retired, under her better known name, she continues to teach technical writing for forensic scientists and criminalists, her work taking her to California crime labs across the state. She developed and taught the technical writing course for UC Davis’s Master’s in Forensic Science and helped develop and teach the foundational Grammar, Mechanics, and Usage course for UC Berkeley Extension’s Editing Certificate program. Cate lives on California’s foggy but beautiful central coast with her husband, her Yorkie, and a rafter of turkeys—as in both a whole bunch of them and in the rafters.
Beth Walker is a professional writing consultant at the University of Tennessee at Martin. Her short story, based on the Southern folklore of haints, appears in the current issue of Gramarye: The Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction. She also has fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in recent issues of Hemingway Shorts, Tiferet Journal, and Mom/Egg Review, among others, and a poem about breast cancer appears in the anthology BARED. Her scholarship, which ranges from Nancy Drew to writing studies, has appeared in several edited collections. In the accompanying picture taken not long after finishing treatment, Beth is presenting at a conference on Hemingway’s style.
Terry Yanulavich has been writing for as long as she can remember. She’s a recent graduate of GrubStreet’s year-long Memoir Incubator. The Deep End, her current unpublished memoir, is a portrait of what happens to an American family in a post-war industrial working-class immigrant town with no hope of resurrection. Her work has appeared in The Sun and other publications, and she has written and performed political satire and sketch comedy in Boston. She’s a mother of two twenty-something daughters and lives with her husband, Peter, outside Boston.
Artists
Chad Carter is a central California visual artist with a background in traditional sign writing, custom paint/design, and learning things the hard way.
He enjoys painting nostalgia, and is inspired by American history, folk music, derelict redwood structures, carbureted vehicles, and old objects that have a story to tell.
He spends his free time cruising his Jeep down country roads or up to the mountains, and enjoying a newly built studio and workshop where he paints and works on other creative projects.
You can find his work on instagram @chadcarterart or www.carterartstudio.com
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