Fred J. Abrahams
memoir
Fleeing Germany just before the Holocaust, Fred spent his childhood on the upper west side of Manhattan. He graduated the University of Pennsylvania before serving a tour of duty with the US Army in Germany. A career in marketing grew into a stint as a writer/producer of TV Infomercials. A quad bypass started him writing about his experiences, which include travels in post-war Europe; partying with the abstract expressionist painters of the Chelsea school; 270 minutes of fame as a champion on a TV Quiz show; visits to the original Studio 54; and co-founding The Improv comedy club.
Arlene Ang
poetry
Arlene is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent being a collaborative work with Valerie Fox, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008). She lives in Spinea, Italy where she serves as staff editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. More of her work may be viewed at www.leafscape.org.
Jennifer Berman
memoir
Jennifer’s mother once told her, “You remember everything; even things that never happened.” Jennifer is currently working on her memoir, “What Is The Day For?” based on her memories, real and imagined. She has written and performed a one woman show called “Stuck,” and works as a sign language interpreter in New York City.
Mary Biddinger
poetry
Mary is the author of Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and the chapbook Saint Monica (forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press). Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, The Collagist, Copper Nickel, diode, Gulf Coast, North American Review, Passages North, Third Coast, and many other journals. She is the editor of the Akron Series in Poetry, co-editor-in-chief of Barn Owl Review, and director of the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She teaches at The University of Akron. Her newest poetry collection is called O Holy Insurgency.
Aaron M. Brown
art gallery
Aaron was born and razed in Wichita, KS. Despite this setback, he has managed to remain active as a painter, graduating with honors from Syracuse University, exhibiting nationwide and receiving a few accolades here and there, including a Pollock-Krasner grant in 2005 and a grant from the Franz and Virginia Bader fund in 2009. He currently lives and works in Selinsgrove, PA, where his wife Ann teaches art at Susquehanna University.
Steve Capo
memoir
Steve has been working as a songwriter in the music industry for nearly a decade. His songs have appeared on national television programs, such as the WB’s Dawson’s Creek, Bravo’s Strong Medicine, and NBC’s Passions. He has sold over 25,000 downloads through the Internet sites of such programs. He was a writer for Bloomberg News, where his articles appeared in several publications, including The New York Post and The Los Angeles Times. He is currently working on a full-length memoir.
Scott Carpenter
fiction
Scott is a professor of literature at Carleton College (MN who has published extensively in areas of non-fiction, including a volume about literary mystifications (currently in press). His fiction has appeared in such venues as Lit.com and Ducts (he admits to being a “repeat offender at Ducts”!) and he has recently completed his first novel, An Empire of Dust.
Guillermo Castro
poetry
Guillermo’s work is forthcoming or appears in Quarterly West, Court Green, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, LaFovea, EOAGH, Nthposition, Barrow St, La Petite Zine, among others, and the anthologies My Diva, This Full Green Hour, Saints of Hysteria, and more. His translations of Olga Orozco, in collaboration with Ron Drummond, appear in Guernica, U.S. Latino Review and Visions. He lives in New York City and is a native of Argentina.
Therese Doucet
essays
Therese lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., with her husband and toddler-age daughter. Prior to becoming possibly the world’s worst housewife, she worked in a number of government jobs and earned degrees in philosophy, cultural history, and public policy. She recently completed her first novel.
Jerry Farrell
essays and fiction
Jerry has been a frequent Ducts contributor since 2004. His essays, humor, and opinions have also appeared in The New York Daily News, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Newsday, Vignette, The Knight, GadgetWorld, People Today and Predictions. He resides in Farmingdale, New York with his wife and two young sons.
Holly Faurot and Sarah H. Paulson
art gallery
Holly and Sarah live and work in Brooklyn, NY and have worked collaboratively on performance artworks since 2002. Their work has been presented in public spaces, as well as in galleries/venues including Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY; NYCAMS (New York Center for Art & Media Studies), NY; The Chocolate Factory Theater, Brooklyn, NY; English Kills Art Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, NY; NurtureArt, Brooklyn, NY; and Open Art Gallery, Beijing, China, among others. More information about their work can be found at www.faurotpaulson.com or www.englishkillsartgallery.com.
Becki Fuller
art gallery
Becki is a Brooklyn based documentary photographer. Her passion for street art and graffiti takes her all around the five boroughs of New York searching for beauty and inspiration in the urban landscape. She is a strong advocate for people taking back public space from corporate America and making it their own once again.
E.B. Gallardo
best of
E. B. Gallardo is a graduate student, working toward a double PhD in Anthropology and Folklore. Her dissertation work focuses on baseball culture in the Dominican Republic and the Dominican community in NYC.
Alex Girotti
fiction
Alessio (Alex) Girotti was born in Rome in 1951. He is the son of the late Italian actor Massimo Girotti. Alex studied the Classics, Music and Architecture, and played semiprofessional Rugby on several Roman teams. In 1979 he moved to Los Angeles, where he tried his luck as a screenwriter. None of his original plays were ever produced, but he was able to find steady work and eventually became a member of the Writers Guild of America. In 1985 he quit the movie industry to start Antika Marble & Tile Company, an outfit specialized in the installation of dimensional stone and ceramic tile. He became an American citizen in 1994. In the late Nineties he moved with his wife Jacquelyn to the little island of Grand Turk, in the Caribbean, where he has worked as a scuba diving instructor and a soccer coach. Now retired, he keeps busy writing, sculpting limestone faces and playing percussion. His current reggae band can be heard every Saturday night in one of the local bars. His short stories have appeared in some of the following: The Kit-Cat Review, Words of Wisdom, Oracle Story & Letters, Timber Creek Review. “Rodent Rhapsody” was a finalist in the 2007 Fall Edition of Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers.
Ona Gritz
essays
Ona writes a monthly column about motherhood and disability for the online journal, Literary Mama. She is also a prize winning poet and the author of two children’s books. Her essays have been published in numerous anthologies and journals, most recently, The Utne Reader, More Magazine and The Bellingham Review where she placed second for the 2008 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for her work.
Arun Irizarry
memoir
Arun Irizarry is a writer living in Sydney, Australia.
Tyke Johnson
essays
Tyke is a writer living in Los Angeles, California where the dry Santa Ana winds cease to blow even when he’s told they’re not, and no matter his frequency of sweeping the floors, the desert dust follows him to bed. He’s had the privilege of being published by Wrtiers Bloc, Opium, Unlikely Stories, Rose & Thorn, and The Los Angeles Review among others. He can be reached at tykejohnson@gmail.com.
Steven Karl
poetry
Steven is the author of a collaborative chapbook, State(s) of Flux, with the artist, Joseph Lappie (Peptic Robot Press) and forthcoming chapbooks, (Ir)Rational Animals (Flying Guillotine Press) and Saturdays (Scantily Clad Press). His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Vantias, Coconut, Eleven Eleven, Barrow Street and others. He is a frequent contributor to Coldfront Magazine online and Galatea Resurrects. He blogs at stevenkarl.blogspot.com.
Bruce Meissner
memoir
Bruce is a frustrated writer. Much as he would like to write full time, he is chained to a more sober, albeit less relevant, occupation as an Operations Manager for a metropolitan daily newspaper on the west coast. Nearing a half century of life, he’s lived half of that time in Sacramento, California, accompanied by his wife, various cats, and two dogs- a cocker spaniel named Bongo, and a Basset hound mix who answers to Norman, if to anyone.He sees his reflection every year.
Julie L. Moore
poetry
Julie L. Moore is the author of Slipping Out of Bloom, forthcoming from WordTech Editions, and the chapbook, Election Day (Finishing Line Press). Moore is a Pushcart Prize nominee and recent recipient of the Rosine Offen Memorial Award from the Free Lunch Arts Alliance in Illinois, the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate: Faith in Literature and Art, and the Judson Jerome Poetry Scholarship from the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. Moore has contributed poetry to Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, CALYX, Chautauqua Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Dogwood, The MacGuffin, Sou’Wester, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and others. Her website is www.julielmoore.com.
Patrick Okell
essays
After failing as a corporate lawyer, Patrick is currently working at failing as a stay-at-home dad to three-year-old twins. The hours and work environment are surprisingly similar. Patrick loves living in Seattle because it allows him to consider going hiking, skiing, sailing, sea kayaking or mountain biking all in the same day, but he still gets all the same TV channels as the rest of the country. This is his first piece to be published anywhere. More of his writing can be found at slokell.com.
Hoang Pham
art gallery
Hoang was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the United States in 1982. Her work takes on forms of drawing, print media, and installation, and deals with phenomena surrounding nature, travel, memory, and its temporal representations. Concurrently her work explores the imperfect, and contradictory nature of what is perceived as natural and balanced, with reference to plant and body. She currently lives and works in Richmond, VA.
Erin Robinson
memoir
Erin had a wonderfully exotic early childhood filled with Catholic schoolgirl mischief. She is a court reporter in Oakland, California, is married to a sweet, saintly man, and has two dogs and a cat. With an Argentinian father and American mother, she has never quite felt like she fits into any one culture.
Gabrielle Selz
essays
Gabrielle is an award winning nonfiction writer. This is her second publication in ducts. Her work has previously appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, Literary Mama, Killing the Buddha, More Magazine, The Sag Harbor Express and The East Hampton Star, among others. She is a 2009 recipient of the New York Foundations for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction. Gabrielle is finishing a memoir and she is a regular participant at The Moth story slams in New York.
Garrett Socol
fiction
Garrett created and produced Talk Soup, The Gossip Show, and other popular series for the E! Network. His short stories have appeared in The Barcelona Review, Hobart, Pequin, Pank, Perigee, Paradigm, nth position, Ascent Aspirations and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His plays were produced at the Berkshire Theatre Festival and the Pasadena Playhouse.
Melodie Starkey
fiction
Melodie’s young adult novel, View from the Closet Doorway, won the 2008 SouthWest Writers Conference award in its genre. Another novel, Sunflowers, was a quarterfinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award in 2009. Her short fiction has appeared in several literary magazines, including South Carolina Review, The Pikestaff Forum, Skylark, Porcupine Literary Review, The Charleston Post & Courier, New Works Review, and an anthology of Southern writers titled Inheritance. She was a recipient of the 1993 South Carolina Fiction Writer’s Project award, and received a 1999 writing grant from the Illinois Arts Council for a novel in progress. Currently she is an IT training specialist at a preeminent Chicago law firm, with three fledgling children and too many cats.
Sunsh Stein
memoir
Sunsh lives in New York City, but has one foot out the door. She’s a freelance writer with a master’s degree in journalism and a day job as a patient advocate. She was recently called an “advanced hippie.”
Kathrine Varnes
poetry
Kathrine is the author of a book of poems, The Paragon, and co-editor of the poetics handbook, An Exaltation of Forms. Other works include a screenplay, two stage plays, a pile of literary essays and the first thirty pages of a novel-in-progress with the working title of Joint and Several. An instigator of collaborative poetry, Varnes lives with her family in Larchmont, New York.
Megan Williams
poetry
Megan Williams once promised her voice teacher that she would never deny she’s from Pottstown, Pennsylvania, no matter how strong the urge. Over a year deep into her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, Megan is the poetry co-editor of LUMINA. Bunnies, (railroad) maps, & opera are her other great loves.
Rachel Wineberg
fiction
Rachel is a graduate from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she earned an M.F.A. in theater directing. Her story, When the Thaw Comes, was recently published in the Westchester Review Literary Magazine.
Virginia Winters
fiction
Virginia is a pediatrician and writer, living in Lindsay, Ontario, Canada. Her short story, The End of the Day, won second prize in the Wynterblue Publishing February contest and was published in May in Confabulation2. She was featured writer, with online publication of the story in April in the publisher’s e-zine, WinLit. A second story, Fire of Love, which won first prize in the April contest, was published online in May, and will be in Confabulation3(2010)
STAFF
Jonathan Kravetz
editor-in-chief
Jonathan is best known for his ability to scratch his forehead and squint his eyes simultaneously . He is a writer, editor and some time trumpet player who spends too much time reading long feature stories on the world wide web. He is a co-founder of ducts and founder of the New York based reading series, Trumpet Fiction, held each month at KGB Bar in the east village. He has studied writing with a number of teachers in New York, including Alice Eliot Dark (fiction), the late Fred Hudson (screenwriting) and Alison Estes (children’s fiction) and has held a number of odd jobs, including news reporter, taxi cab driver, projectionist and ducts installer (hmmmm). He currently works as a computer consultant. He has recently taken up improv comedy classes with the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theater of NYC as a way to discover finer and more glorious ways of embarrassing himself on a weekly basis.
Gail Eisenberg
humor editor
Gail is a delightful combination of comedy and tragedy. A former writer/producer in Comedy Central’s on-air promotions department, she’s a freelance copywriter, journalist, and co-author of A Mother Loss Workbook (HarperCollins). Her work has appeared in Time Out New York, The Daily News, and Newsday, as well as on-air on Comedy Central and HBO. She has also written copy for theatrical entertainment companies. For the last decade, she has contributed concept and copy to ad agency SJI, for clients like HBO, A&E, IFC, PBS, and CBS. She is co-writer and co-star of Cat Eisenberg, Dog Eisenberg, launching Winter ‘08 on LOGO.
Sharon Gurwitz
treasurer
Sharon’s careers as psychology professor, banker, and management consultant all come in handy for managing the business side of ducts. When she’s not working on a consulting project or writing her novel, she enjoys going to the theater, ballet, and classical music concerts.
Amy Lemmon
poetry editor
Amy is the author of the poetry collections Fine Motor (Sow’s Ear Poetry Press, 2008) and Saint Nobody (Red Hen Press, 2009). Her poems and essays have appeared in Rolling Stone, Verse, Prairie Schooner, New letters, Barrow Street, Cincinnati Review and other magazines. Selections from ABBA: The Poems, a sequence written in collaboration with Denise Duhamel, appear in several literary magazines, and online at Lafovea.org. Amy is poetry editor Ducts.org and an Associate Professor in the English and Speech Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Anne Mironchik
assistant
Anne, although a fine treasurer, is much more renowned for her songwriting, which reaches back to capture the classic brilliance of favorite hits by Carole King and Laura Nyro. She blurs the lines between jazz, country, rock and R&B, weaving melody and rhythm together in masterful ways. Her rich alto voice leads listeners from one genre to another as she explores the struggles, loves, fears and joys of everyday heroes. When she’s not writing great music, Anne is busy crunching numbers for ducts! Anne’s new CD “Find Me” is now available and can be found at www.annemironchik.com. 4newsongs@earthlink.net
Cindy Stockton Moore
art gallery editor
Cindy Stockton Moore is a Philadelphia-based painter. Outside of the studio, she works as adjunct professor of art and theory. Her essays have appeared in New York Arts Magazine, NY Sun, in addition to on-line and university publications. A listing of her current exhibitions and projects can be found at: www.cindystocktonmoore.com.
Kat Rodies
editor
Kat Rodies is a nurse practitioner, medical writer, and short fiction enthusiast who has been called the ideal person to have with you in a POW camp.
Elizabeth Rosen
essays and memoirs editor
Elizabeth is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. In previous incarnations, she has also been a writer for Nickelodeon, an associate producer for the news, and the editor of two academic journals. She has published her nonfiction and fiction in various publications.
Tim Tomlinson
fiction editor
Tim’s fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, North American Review, Libido, and elsewhere. He’s published haiku in Modern Haiku, Time Haiku, and Black Bough. He’s an occasional journalist, and a full time teacher, working at both NYU and the New York Writers Workshop.
Illustrators
Steve Tarantino
Steve attended FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology ) in New York for Illustration. He graduated in 1991 with a BFA in Illustration. www.stevetarantino.com.
Jenah Pelley
Jenah is currently pursuing a career in film. Through Ducts, her love of paint and pencil is still thriving.
Interns
Colleen J Veldt
Colleen became affiliated with the New York Writers Workshop when studying in Florence last year under Tim Tomlinson. She is a sophomore at New York University, studying the history and politics behind religion and religious violence in hopes of some day becoming a well-traveled reporter for a news organization. Colleen has been writing for various NYU publications, as well as interning with NYWR and Ducts.org. She is currently exploring and residing in New York City.