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Michael Andreoni
personal essays
After several decades of being referred to as a sarcastic nit, Michael decided to revel in it. Dogs bitten, children frightened. He’s available for parties if you’re not particular about keeping your friends. His work has appeared in Iconoclast, The Rambler, Allegory, Fogged Clarity, The Legendary, and other publications.
Ashly Barrett
personal essays
Ashly was born and educated in Sumter, South Carolina. She studied music in high school, competing in a traveling concert and show choir group. She taught choreography for Show Choir students and also practiced as a dental assistant for twelve years. “Lockdown” is her first publication.
Lola Belle
humor
Lola is a globetrotting bartender with a penchant for megaphones and microphones. She was working on her memoirs, entitled “Flapping My Gums Made My Teeth Crooked,” but writing Facebook status updates takes up most of her day.
Devyani Borade
personal essays
Devyani writes light-hearted articles on topics – ranging from the most mundane to the extremely eccentric – drawn from everyday life. She likes chocolate cookies, Calvin & Hobbes comics and trying her husband’s patience.
Laynie Browne
poetry
Laynie is the author of eight collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent books are The Desires of Letters (Counterpath, 2010), The Scented Fox (Wave Books, 2007, National Poetry Selection), and Daily Sonnets (Counterpath, 2007). She is currently developing a poetry in the schools program for the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Jacquelin Cangro
personal essays
Jacquelin is the editor of a collection of essays titled The Subway Chronicles: Scenes from Life in New York (Penguin/Plume). She recently completed her first novel and her short fiction has been published in The Macguffin and Pangolin Papers. Now she is working on her next non-fiction endeavor about fifteen of America’s most iconic places, titled Finding America. More information can be found at jacquelincangro.com
Brendan Constantine
poetry
Brendan is a poet based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in numerous journals, notably Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, The Cortland Review & RUNES. He is currently poet in residence at The Windward School & Loyola Marymount University extension. His collection, Letters to Guns, was released in 2009 from Red Hen Press.
Leah Darrow
fiction
Leah is a full-time blog writer and website content writer. She graduated in Humanities with an emphasis in Creative Writing from the University of Athabasca in Canada.
Peter Dobill
art gallery
Born in New Zealand, Peter Dobill is a Brooklyn, NY based actionist. He received his BFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2004 in addition to the 2008-2009 Franklin Furnace Fund For Performance Art Grant. Dobill co-founded and has curated the Maximum Perception Performance Festival in Brooklyn, NY since 2008. He has performed and exhibited internationally in galleries/venues including Exit Art, NY, NY; English Kills Art Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Nurture Art, Brooklyn, NY; Open Realization Contemporary Art Gallery, Beijing, China; and Rockefeller University, NY, NY as well as being artist in residence at Ox Bow, Saugatuck, MI in 2007. www.peterdobillactionist.com
Holly Faurot and Sarah H. Paulson
art gallery
Holly Faurot and Sarah H. Paulson live and work in Brooklyn, NY and have been collaborating for the past 8 years on durational multi-media performance artworks. Their work has been presented in galleries/venues including Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY; NYCAMS (New York Center for Art & Media Studies), NY; The Chocolate Factory Theater, Long Island City, NY; The Harold Clurman Center for New Work in Movement and Dance Theater, NY; English Kills Art Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, NY; P.I.T. (Projects In Transit), Brooklyn, NY; NurtureArt, Brooklyn, NY; Starr Space, Brooklyn, NY; Chez Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY; Alice Chilton Gallery for Performance Art Documentation, Brooklyn, NY; Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, NY; Open Realization Contemporary Art Gallery, Beijing, China; and Landhaus Feuerlöscher, Prenning, Austria, among others. More information about their work can be found at www.faurotpaulson.com and www.englishkillsartgallery.com
Kipp Friedman
memoir
A native New Yorker, Kipp holds B.A.s in History and Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He began his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida before moving to Wisconsin, where he worked in public relations for GE Medical Systems and then as a marketing and public relations specialist for several organizations. He is also a professional photographer. Kipp currently resides in Milwaukee with his wife and they have a son in college. For the past three years he has been writing essays capturing memories from his childhood as the youngest son of the accomplished novelist and playwright Bruce Jay Friedman. Several of his stories have appeared on the www.smithmag.net site. This is his first story for www.ducts.org . Kipp hopes to publish these stories in a collection entitled, The Barracuda in the Attic & Other Memories.
Laura Zinn Fromm
personal essays
Laura teaches journalism at Montclair State University, and fiction and creative non-fiction at the JCC Manhattan. She has written for Business Week and The New York Times.
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.
Mindy Greenstein
memoir
Mindy first started writing as a child, but didn’t pursue it as a career because she thought, “from this you could make a living?” She became a Clinical Psychologist and Psycho-oncologist instead, but realized through her experiences with her patients how much she wanted to write again. She has previously been published in Ducts.org, and she lives with her husband and two sons in New York City.
Neil Grimmett
fiction
Neil has had over seventy short stories published. In the UK by among others: London Magazine, Stand, Panurge, Iron, Ambit, Postscripts Magazine, etc. Australia, Quadrant, South Africa, New Contrast. Plus stories in the leading journals of Singapore, India, France, Canada, and the USA, where he has appeared in Fiction, The Yale Review, DoubleTake, The Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Descant, The Southern Review and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. He has appeared online in Blackbird, Tatlin’s Tower, Web Del Sol, In Posse Review, m.a.g., Word Riot, Blue Moon Review, 3AM, Gangway, Eclectica, The Cortland Review, Segue, The Dublin Quarterly, Mysterical E, Thuglit and over twenty others. He has made the storySouth Million Writers Notable Short Story list for the last three years. In addition, he has won the Write On poetry award, the Oppenheim John Downes Award five times, three major British Arts Council bursaries and a Royal Society of Authors award. He is a member of the US branch of PEN. He is represented Josh Getzler at Russell and Voleking in New York.
Mary Diane Hausman
fiction
Mary Diane was born and raised in the Texas Hill Country, and that experience provides a strong voice for her work. Her work appears with Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and RitaDove in the anthology, Unsilenced: The Spirit of Women (Commune-a-Key Press), in my own poetry collection, A Born-Again Wife’s First Lesbian Kiss and other poems(Relief Press), as well as in numerous other anthologies and literary journals, including: Hawaii Review, Spillway, Webster Review, Not Child’s Play (Lunchbox Press, Inc.), Primavera, Inkwell, New Texas, My Lover Is A Woman and Pillow Talk (Ballantine Books and Alyson Books), The MacGuffin, The Texas Review, Out of the Dark (Queen of Swords Press), and Westview. She’s worked with Kate Millet at Muse Magic, Women Writers Reading in Manhattan, beena featured poet/author at the Westchester Music Conservatory and Bank Street Radio, New York, NY. Her essay, The Feeding (a comparison of vampirism and alcoholism), won first place in the Pennwriters’ In Other Words Contest. She teaches writing workshops at the University of Texas extension program, as well aspoetry and writing in public workshops.
Jacob Kalish
humor
Jacob is a freelance journalist and humorist whose work has appeared in Details, Maxim, Stuff, New York Press, Spin, Blender, Men’s Fitness, Poets and Writers, and Playboy, and in Ducts among other publications. His humor book Santa vs. Satan: The Official Compendium Of Imaginary Fights was published by Three Rivers Press. He was an editorial Assistant at Details Magazine from 1999-2000 and hasn’t had a regular job since then, except for sporadic soul-crushing work as a high school substitute teacher. He hopes he can avoid offices until he dies, which, considering his high blood pressure and triglyceride levels, he might be able to accomplish fairly easily.
Bill Kimzey
poetry
Bill Kimzey is a virgin poet. A hobbyist. Dilettante. Bill grew up in Nassau Bay, Texas, among the Astronauts and engineers that worked at Johnson Space Center. He now calls New Jersey home, but has lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Jakarta and Hong Kong, and traveled extensively for work and pleasure. Bill’s fiction has previously appeared in Cha; a recent nonfiction piece of his appeared in Verbsap.
Kim Winter Mako
personal essays
Kim grew up in New Jersey, graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in theatre, and then lived in New York City for many years. She was a founding member of the now defunct theatre company, aTheatreCo. She and her husband now live in the south, which they like, but often feels like living in a foreign country. Images of real pizza and bagels pervade her dreams. She has been published at Humor Press.
Mia Mather
memoir
Mia was born in Texas and reared in New Canaan, Connecticut when it was farmland. She went to college in Oregon, and married foolishly. She took her BA in English from the University of Oregon, left her husband, and returned to New York. She had a long and successful career in what was then called Data Processing, then called MIS, then called IT. She married again, wisely, and still lives in New York. She has been writing for as long as she can remember.
Kathryn Merry
poetry
Kathryn Merry is an actress by trade. She owes her love of words to her mother, who put William Carlos Williams in her hand as a child the minute Kathryn recognized that a note on the kitchen counter, about the plums in the icebox, was a poem. She lives in New York’s East Village, drives a scooter, sells her soul being in commercials and writes poetry and prose.
Laura Moriarty
art gallery
Laura Moriarty was born in Beacon, New York in 1960. A self-taught artist, her work has been the subject of twelve solo exhibitions since 1992, including most recently, ‘Upheaval’, a site-specific painting at Artspace, New Haven (2009). Moriarty’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions throughout the US, Canada and Europe. Laura has been artist-in-residence at the NOCCA Institute in New Orleans, Women’s Studio Workshop, Collaborative Concepts in Beacon, the Frans Masereel Center in Belgium, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Germany, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. In 2007, Laura was awarded her second grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (previously awarded in 1997.)
Marlene Nadle
memoirs
Marlene spent more than ten years as a political and arts reporter, including extensive reporting from Latin America and Eastern Europe for the Christian Science Monitor Radio and World Monitor Magazine. She’s been a political writer for the Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and others and covered elections for the BBC. She wrote on social and cultural issues for the Village Voice, Connoisseur, and others, and is now an Associate in the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at the New School for Social Research. She also functioned as Associate Producer in the Public Affairs Unit of the Independent Network. She created documentary pieces on the UN for PBS and worked on the films “Far From Poland,” “The Killing Floor,” and “When the Mountains Tremble.”
Margaret Özemet
personal essays
Margaret has recently returned to the United States after living and working in Turkey for the past three years. She draws from her childhood on a farm in Iowa for much of her work. Her work has also appeared in Drunken Boat, Gargoyle Magazine, Stone’s Throw Magazine and New Letters where her essay “Divine Bovine Dreams” won the honor of Readers Choice Best Essay Award, as well as a Pushcart nomination. She currently lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Gökhan, and son, Teoman.
Jericho Parms
memoirs
Jericho was born and raised in New York City. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts where she is working on a memoir Dispatch from Wonderland, a story of art, memory, and madness.
Carl Schinasi
personal essays
Carl teaches at Miles College in Birmingham, AL. Recent works have appeared in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Ducts, and in the book, Baseball/Literature/Culture: Essays 2008-2009. His essay “I See Black” appears in this summer’s issue of Black Magnolias Literary Journal. He’s a big fan of the historic Birmingham Barons and the quirkily named Montgomery Biscuits.
Lauren Goodwin Slaughter
poetry
Lauren’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review Online, Verse Daily, Drunken Boat, Dossier, Fugue, 42opus, Blue Mesa Review, Salt Hill, Hayden’s Ferry, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an editor for DIAGRAM and poemmemoirstory.
Coree Spencer
memoir
Coree has lived in New York City for almost twenty years and has taken time off from her great acting career to write. At least you don’t need current head shots or movement class in order to write short stories.
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.”
Sarah Stern
poetry
Sarah won the 2009, 2005, and 2002 Bronx Council on the Arts’ BRIO Awards for Excellence in Poetry. Her first manuscript, Sweet Water, was a finalist for the 2009 ABZ First Book contest. She was also awarded an Honorable Mention from the 2006 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards, as well as a second Honorable Mention from Lilith Magazine’s 2004 Charlotte Newberger Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications. She is a press officer at The New School.
Thomas Sullivan
humor
Thomas’s writing has appeared in 3AM Magazine and Bad Idea Magazine, among others. He is the author of Life In The Slow Lane, a comic memoir about teaching drivers education (available from Uncial Press at http://www.uncialpress.com/books/lifeinth/lifeinth.html). To view more of Thomas’ writing please visit his author website at http://thomassullivanhumor.com
Marc Vincenz
poetry
Marc is of Swiss-British descent, was born in Hong Kong, and worked in China for many years. Recently based out of Iceland, he writes a column for The Reykjavik Grapevine, Iceland’s English language newspaper. He is a Contributing Editor for Boston’s Open Letters Monthly. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming in various journals, including: MiPo: Poets & Artists, nthposition, FRiGG, Prick of the Spindle, and Danse Macabre.
Joshua Willey
fiction
After growing up in Oakland and studying literature in Portland, Joshua moved to China and began working an endless series of day jobs including firefighting and commercial fishing. He has published in Verlag, 365 Tomorrows, Wilderness House, the Cascade Reader, Rain Taxi, Chengdoo Magazine, and the Deschutes Source.
Dylan Willoughby
poetry
Dylan has recently received fellowships from Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony. Chester Creek Press has recently published two chapbooks of his poetry. Other poems have appeared in magazines such as Green Mountains Review, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, Denver Quarterly, Spinning Jenny, Vert, Agenda (UK), and Stand (UK). Willoughby received an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University.
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.
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 “Cookin’ in The Kitchen” is now available and can be found at www.annemironchik.com.
Cindy Stockton Moore
art gallery editor and illustrator
Cindy Stockton Moore is a Philadelphia-based painter. Her collaborative project, TreeFort, created with Abby Goodman can be visited mid-June through October 2010 on Governors Island Sculpture Park. 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
humor editor
Kat Rodies is a Nurse Practitioner and oncology writer who, thankfully, has a lot of funny firiends. She lives in Williamsburg with her border collie mix, Cassie.
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
Chris Frost
Chris is a handbag designer and illustrator. His work has appeared in Santa vs. Satan: The Official Compendium Of Imaginary Fights, published by Three Rivers Press and in Ducts. He lives in Bushwick, though he was once voted best-dressed man in Williamsburg.
Natalie Lerario
Natalie has been working as a graphic artist since 2005 and has recently completed a web design certificate program in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Along with graphic design, Natalie also enjoys creating digital illustrations. www.NatalieLerario.com
Philip Shane
Philip is the Co-Founder and original Designer of Ducts, and an award-winning documentary film producer and editor in New York.
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.
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