Contributors
Thomas DeFreitas was born in 1969 in Boston. He started writing rhymes in seventh grade, and began serious attempts at writing poetry in 1985, upon his near-simultaneous discovery of Seamus Heaney and Dylan Thomas. He graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1987. He attended the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) for three semesters in 1989 and 1990. In 1991, under the influence of Thomas Merton and others, he returned to the Catholicism of his youth after a long truancy. During the late 1990s he was a volunteer with his archdiocese, assisting the secretary of a trilingual inner-city parish. In 2010, after a tumultuous decade, he fulfilled a longtime dream by moving out of the city to the leafier suburbs.
Elena Lee Johnson studied English literature and writing at Bryan College, where she marveled at the Tennessee hills. Although she enjoys the diversity and vigor surrounding her current residence in Chicago’s south suburbs, she considers the rural landscape and culture of western Illinois to be home. Her poetry has appeared in the magazine Time of Singing.
William Luse is the associate editor of The Christendom Review.
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. She is a contributing editor to The Christendom Review.
Todd McKimmey is a Cedar Park, Texas-based fine art, portrait and product photographer and owner of Todd McKimmey Studios. To support his photography habit and provide for his family, he works as a Group Head (Software Test) at a company which specializes in precision geolocational systems while moonlighting as a web-master for both The Christendom Review and What’s Wrong with the World.
Jim Tynen has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a master’s in journalism, both from Northwestern University. He is editorial page editor of the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah. He and his wife, Marnie, have two grown children: Ruth, who lives in Spain, and Sarah, who is studying in China. He can be reached at jim.tynen@gmail.com and @jimtynen.
John Young is a career Spanish and English teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools and currently works at an alternative program. He studied Creative Writing under novelist Sterling Watson at Eckerd College until 2004. After having taken education classes towards an advance degree, he happened upon certain writers who stressed learning outside of the classroom (John Holt, Ivan Illich) and discontinued the pursuit of what he considered to be empty abstractions. Always interested in real learning, he is a member of the Downtown Sailing Center in Baltimore’s Harbor.