Contributors
Rick Barnett is from Thomasville, Georgia. A graduate of The Florida Writing Program, he lives, writes, and teaches in Atlanta. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Touchstone, Notre Dame Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the editor of The Christendom Review.
Olivia Bustion is a Ph.D. candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. She was a John N. Wall scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has also appeared in AGNI and Ninth Letter.
Paul J. Cella III, is a writer living in Atlanta. His essays have appeared in The New Atlantis, The American Conservative, Touchstone, The Dallas Morning News and other publications. He is currently an editor at Red State and chief editor of the website What's Wrong with the World. Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, he graduated from Wake Forest University.
Arthur Dasher is a former priest of the Episcopal Church. Born in Macon, Georgia in 1937, he received his B.A. in philosophy and French from Stetson University in 1959. In the early sixties, he attended the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale where, while doing field work in a small suburban parish, he met and worked with Cleanth Brooks. He was ordained a priest in December, 1962 on the Feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury. He brought two missions to parish status, nourished both Haitian and Hispanic congregations to maturity, and has taken in Sudanese families fleeing persecution. He has also served as Director of Development and Community Relations for Edgewood Children’s Ranch, and in Orlando as Assistant to the President of Campus Crusade for Christ for Church and Community Relations in Florida. He has two children from his first marriage, and three step children from his second marriage to Frances Mary Demetree of Orlando.
Thomas DeFreitas was born in 1969 in Boston. He was educated at the Boston Latin School and at the University of Massachusetts. He now lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Merrill Joan Gerber is a prize-winning novelist and short-story writer who has published seven novels--among them The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for "the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme"--as well as six volumes of short stories and three books of nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, Redbook, Commentary, The Sewanee Review and elsewhere. Her newest novel is titled The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn. Ms. Gerber teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology. She was a Wallace Stegner fiction fellow at Stanford and the winner of an O.Henry Prize. She studied under Andrew Lytle in The Florida Writing Program.
Ashley Mace Havird's poems have appeared in many journals including The Southern Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Poetry Review, and Southern Humanities Review. Her short stories have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. In 2000 and in 2007, she received a Shreveport Regional Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. In 2002 she was awarded a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and her poems that year were nominated for inclusion in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has taught Creative Writing at Centenary College of Louisiana and in the University of Virginia's Division of Continuing Education. She lives in Shreveport, Louisiana with her husband, daughter, and dog.
Lawrence Hetrick grew up in Gainesville, Florida, where he attended the University. From 1966 to 1986 he taught poetry writing and English there. He has published reviews, interviews, essays, poetry, and fiction in journals such as Art Papers, New Art Examiner, Mississippi Quarterly, New Virginia Review, Sewanee Review, Terrain, and many others. He is a former editor, from 1997 to 2004, of The Chattahoochee Review. He currently teaches English and humanities at Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta.
The late Darius Lecesne (1959-2006), defender of Christendom, husband and father, poet, bibliophile, and graphic artist, was born in Kingston, Jamaica. His father was an RAF airman who flew night missions over Germany as a gunner in a Lancaster bomber during WWII. This subject,along with his emerging faith, informs much of his poetry and his artwork. Lecesne entered the Roman Catholic Church as an adult after coming to the spiritual dead-end of Marxism. In the communion of saints, he prays, as he lived, for others.
William Luse is the associate editor of The Christendom Review. He has published articles in Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, poetry in The New Oxford Review, and other articles at websites like The New Pantagruel and Orson Scott Card’s Ornery.org. He has written one novel which remains unpublished. He was once a good golfer (even financing, back in the 90’s, the down payment on his wife’s new car through skin game profits), but can still drink European lager to admirable excess. He studied the craft of fiction under Smith Kirkpatrick beginning in 1968, and knows that the day will never come when he does not consider himself that man’s student. He is currently an adjunct professor of English at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Florida. But more importantly he’s been married to the same woman for over 30 years, which union has issued in two daughters, now in their twenties, who still like him.
Lydia McGrew is a housewife and home schooling mother living in Michigan. She took a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University (1995) and has published a number of works in philosophy. She is the co-author (with Timothy McGrew) of Internalism and Epistemology: The Architecture of Reason (Routledge, 2007), and her articles have appeared in journals such as Erkenntnis, Journal of Philosophical Research, and Philosophia Christi. She is a contributor to the group weblog What’s Wrong with the World.
William Mickelberry graduated from the University of Florida’s writing program under Smith Kirkpatrick. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The Literary Review, Quarterly West, The Denver Quarterly, The Black Warrior Review and the Southern Poetry Review among others. After teaching at the University of Florida and University of North Carolina--Greensboro, he currently works as a screenwriter and lives in Los Angeles. More of his artwork and poetry can be seen at http://www.wcmickelberry.com.
Marion Montgomery lives and writes in Crawford, Georgia. His most recent book is With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party, in Company with T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Others.
After getting his MA under Smith Kirkpatrick, John Morefield taught at Miami-Dade Junior College then returned to Gainesville and UF as an English instructor for seven years. Later he did technical writing, sold wine, played fiddle in a bluegrass band, bought and tended an orchard. He wrote very little for most of his thirties, then in his forties began to buckle down. During the next decade and a half he wrote four novels, two of which were accepted for representation by the New York agent Robert Lescher, who had guided the careers of Isaac B. Singer, Edna O'Brien, Calvin Trillin, and Leonard Gardner. Lescher was unable to place these books. John continues to write and occasionally publish short stories, some of which have appeared, or will soon appear, in Columbia, Aethlon, The Chattahoochee Review, and Louisiana Literature. He is Associate Professor of English at East Tennessee State University.
Marie Speed received her M.A. in English with emphasis in Creative Writing from the University of Florida where she studied under Smith Kirkpatrick and Harry Crews. She was also editor of the university literary magazine, the Florida Quarterly. Her career has largely focused on magazine publishing; she is currently group editor at JES Publishing based in Boca Raton, which publishes Boca Raton magazine and Florida Table, among others. Ms. Speed is a member of Leadership Florida, class XVII, and a board member of the Caridad Center, a medical clinic serving the working poor. She lives in Ocean Ridge, Florida.
Jeff Trippe is an educator and freelance writer who lives in Yarmouth, Maine, with his wife Laura and daughter Alex.
Sterling Watson is the author of five novels: Weep No More My Brother; The Calling; Blind Tongues; Deadly Sweet; and Sweet Dream Baby. Weep No More My Brother was nominated for the Rosenthal Award given annually by the National Academy Institute of Arts and Letters. Watson is the recipient of three Florida Fine Arts Council Awards for fiction writing. His short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Southern Review. He is Director of the Creative Writing Program at Eckerd College and holder of the Peter Meinke Chair in Creative Writing.