Archives: Authors

Dana Wildsmith is the author of a  novel, Jumping, and an environmental memoir , Back to Abnormal: Surviving With An Old Farm in the New South, which was Finalist for Georgia Author of the Year. She is also the author of five collections of poetry. Wildsmith has served as Artist-in-Residence for Grand Canyon National Park and will serve as Artist-in-Residence for Everglades National Park in October of this year  She lives with her family on an old farm in north Georgia, and works as an English Literacy Instructor at Lanier Technical College.  Her widely followed blog, http://www.danawildsmith.com/blog, focuses on the life of a working writer.

Raised in North Carolina and Cincinnati, Janice Moore Fuller is Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina. She has published a poetry book Archeology Is a Destructive Science (Scots Plaid Press, 1998) and poems and essays in numerous American and European journals and anthologies, including New Welsh Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Sow’s Ear, Pembroke Magazine, and Mississippi Quarterly. Her plays have been produced at Catawba’s Florence Busby Corriher Theater, Charlotte’s BareBones Theater, and the Minneapolis Fringe Festival. Her libretto for German composer Knut Mueller’s Destructive Science premiered at the Rendez-Vous Musique Nouvelle in France in November 2003.

Educated at Duke University (B.A.) and UNC-Greensboro (M.A., Ph.D.), she has studied Yeats in Ireland and post-colonial literature at the University of London through National Endowment for the Humanities seminars. She has read her poetry and taught workshops at universities and other venues throughout the United States, Wales, Ireland, Italy, and Russia.

A Fellow at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Fundación Valparaiso in Spain, Hawthornden International Center in Edinburgh, and the Vermont Studio Center, she has been honored for her work by the North Carolina Arts Council, the Arts and Science Council, North Carolina State University, the Southern Women Writers Conference, and the Blumenthal Writers and Readers series.

Keith Flynn (www.keithflynn.net) is the award-winning author of seven books, including five collections of poetry: The Talking Drum (1991), The Book of Monsters (1994), The Lost Sea (2000), The Golden Ratio (Iris Press, 2007), Colony Collapse Disorder (Wings Press, 2013), and a collection of essays, entitled The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How To Make Your Poetry Swing (Writer’s Digest Books, 2007). His latest book is a collaboration with photographer Charter Weeks, entitled Prosperity Gospel: Portraits of the Great Recession. From 1984-1999, he was lyricist and lead singer for the nationally acclaimed rock band, The Crystal Zoo, which produced three albums: Swimming Through Lake Eerie (1992), Pouch (1996), and the spoken-word and music compilation, Nervous Splendor (2003). He is currently touring with a supporting combo, The Holy Men, whose album, LIVE at Diana Wortham Theatre, was released in 2011. His award-winning poetry and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies around the world, including The American Literary Review, The Colorado Review, Poetry Wales, The Cuirt Journal (Ireland), Takahe (New Zealand), Poetry East, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Margie, The Cimarron Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, Word and Witness: 100 Years of NC Poetry, Crazyhorse, and many others. He has been awarded the Sandburg Prize for poetry, a 2013 NC Literary Fellowship, the ASCAP Emerging Songwriter Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award and was twice named the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for NC. Flynn is founder and managing editor of The Asheville Poetry Review, which began publishing in 1994. For more information, please visit: www.ashevillepoetryreview.com.

Joseph Enzweiler was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1950. He received a degree in Physics from Xavier University, and moved to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1975. He received a ms in Physics from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and in 1981 built a log house in Goldstream Valley north of town where he has lived ever since. He works as a carpenter, stone mason and photographer during the summer and fall months, and spends his winters writing. Every few years he returns to rural northern Kentucky for several months where he lives with his brother and his family, and is building a rock fence around his brother’s 3 acres of land. Enzweiler has published 3 previous books of poetry: Home Country (Fireweed Press, 1986), Stonework of the Sky (Graywolf Press, 1995) and A Curb in Eden, first version (Salmon Publishing, Ltd, 1999). A Curb in Eden, new version was published by Iris Press in 2003.

Charlotte Matthews was born in Washington D. C., and her childhood memories are a prominent feature in a number of her poems. She has always felt a great affinity for the land. Right after college, she lived in a tomato greenhouse and farmed in Vermont.
She is the author of two published chapbooks, A Kind of Devotion (Palanquin Press, 2004) and Biding Time (Half Moon Bay Press, 2005). Her poems have recently appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Tar River Poetry, Meridian, and other journals. She is the recipient of numerous awards for both teaching and writing including a fellowship from Brown University and a grant from the Klingenstein Foundation. She teaches at Piedmont Virginia Community College and Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.
She lives with her two children, Emma and Garland, in Crozet, Virginia.

Thorpe Moeckel has guided trips on rivers and trails throughout the Appalachians. His first book of poems, Odd Botany, won the Gerald Cable Award and was published in 2002. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hollins University and lives with his family on a small farm near the James River in Western Virginia.

Jon Manchip White was a distinguished Welsh-American writer who published over 35 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry over a long writing career. His works of fiction include both novels, collections of short stories and many scripts for film and television. His non-fiction books include history, biography, archaeology, anthropology, travel and personal essays.

 

After graduating from Cambridge in 1950, Manchip White moved to London and became story editor for the newly established BBC Television Service. During his time at the BBC, he read scripts, made adaptations, and wrote original dramas. From 1952 to 1956, Manchip White served Britain as a Senior Executive officer in the British Foreign Service. He continued to write poetry and novels during his time in public service, and he resigned his job to concentrate full time on his writing as an independent author. From 1956 to 1967 he worked as a screenwriter for movies, including a period employed by Samuel Bronston Productions in Paris, Rome and Madrid, where he spent five years. During this time, he traveled widely around Europe and other parts of the world like South Africa. His travels helped to increase his knowledge and provided him the opportunity to research subjects and places for travel and non-fiction books.

 

In the mid-sixties, Jon Manchip White felt the time had arrived to change his circumstances, to shake up his routine. Ever the wanderer, he decided to go to the United States, a place he had admired since college when he wrote a dissertation on the Pueblo Indians. Around this time, he had met the critic and biographer, Cleanth Brooks, who had been in London as the Cultural Attaché at the American Embassy. Brooks suggested that Manchip White look for a position at an American university, and he wrote him a recommendation. In 1967 Jon accepted a job as the writer-in-residence at the University of Texas at El Paso where he started the creative writing program. He enjoyed and excelled at teaching, and eventually he received a full professorship. Teaching also allowed him more time to focus of his main ambition of being a writer of books. The position at El Paso gave him the opportunity to explore the American Southwest and Mexico. As much as he loved Texas, in 1977, he was offered a position at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville as the Lindsay Young Professor of English, an offer too good to refuse. He was the founder of the creative writing program at the University of Tennessee, and soon grew to love East Tennessee with its beautiful forests and mountains.

 

Jon Manchip White has became an American citizen. He continued to live and write in Knoxville, Tennessee. In 1997, Iris Audio Publications released two audio tapes of the author reading from his book of short stories, Whistling Past the Churchyard: Strange Tales From a Superstitious Welshman. In 1999 Iris Press republished his memoir, The Journeying Boy: Scenes From a Welsh Childhood originally published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1992. Iris, in 2007, published his new historical novel, Solo Goya: Goya and the Duchess of Alba at Sanlúcar based on episodes in the life of the great Spanish painter, Francisco Goya. This novel, along with his earlier biographies of Diego Velázques and Hernán Cortés, concluded what Jon has called his Spanish Trilogy. In July of 2012 Iris Press published Manchip White’s final book, The Bird With Silver Wings, a collection of stories with musical themes.

 

Jon Manchip White died in Knoxville, Tennessee in July of 1913 at the age of 89.

Meira Rosenberg began Indiana Bamboo while completing her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College, where it grew from her memories and imaginings of the small town where she was raised in Indiana and her early childhood in Ohio. Prior to publication, Indiana Bamboo was the winner of the Tennessee Mountain Writers Excalibur Award, a one-time award for a first-time novelist. The novel was also selected as the New Voices in Children’s Literature: Tassy Walden Awards Middle Grade Honor Book.

She and her husband have three children who are now young adults, but while growing up, they had almost as many pets as Indiana Bamboo does, from dogs, cats, guinea pigs, hamsters, goldfish, and hermit crabs, to the occasional garter snakes who were banished to a terrarium on the front porch. While she spends most of her time writing and as a writing instructor, she is a lawyer and a former Literary Trustee of the Lorraine Hansberry Properties Trust.

When her fourteen-year-old Cockapoo, Oreo, isn’t being too mischievous, Meira writes in the kitchen at home in Connecticut. But when Oreo acts up, she flees to bookstores, libraries, and coffee shops to continue writing while drinking lots of tea and too much hot chocolate.

To learn more about Meira and Indiana Bamboo, visit www.MeiraRosenberg.com.

Wendy Drexler is the author of Western Motel (Turning Point, 2012) and the chapbook Drive-Ins, Gas Stations, the Bright Motels (Pudding House, 2007). Her first children’s book, Buzz, Ruby, and Their City Chicks, coauthored with Joan Fleiss Kaplan, was published by Ziggy Owl Press in 2016. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Blood Orange Review, Ibbetson Street, Nimrod, Off the Coast, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Worcester Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals; featured on Verse Daily and WBUR’s Cognoscenti; and in the anthologies Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and Burning Bright: Passager Celebrates 21 Years. She has been both a poetry editor and a cavity-nest monitor for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is a native of Denver, Colorado, and lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, with her husband.

www.wendydrexlerpoetry.com

Al Maginnes was born in Massachusetts and grew up in a number of states, mostly in the southeast. A former recipient of an Artist’s Grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, he has degrees in English and writing from East Carolina University and the University of Arkansas. He is the author of six full length collections, most recently Music From Small Towns (Jacar Press, 2014), winner of the Jacar Press poetry competition, and Inventing Constellations (Cherry Grove Collections, 2012), as well as four chapbooks. He lives with his family in Raleigh, North Carolina and teaches at Wake Technical Community College.