Devyani Borade
art gallery (graphic narrative)
Devyani writes on the humour and pathos of everyday life. Her fiction, nonfiction and art have appeared in numerous international magazines, including previous issues of Ducts. To enjoy more of Debora’s adventures, visit her website Verbolatry and sign up for her kickass free newsletter at devyaniborade.blogspot.com.
Maggie Carino-Ganias
fiction
Maggie lives in Manhattan and devotes her time to writing fiction according to the level of independence her kids have obtained. Once they are both able to ride the NYC subway alone, she anticipates completing a lot more.
Ruth Carmel
essays
Ruth is a lawyer and writer who lives in New York with her husband and children. Her essays have been published in Talking Writing, aish.com, and Alimentum, among other publications.
Sam Cha
poetry
Sam is a non-pseudonymous human with an MFA from UMass Boston & various other traits & appendages, chronicled in Google. His poem “i am michael derrick hudson” was featured in Rattle’s Poets Respond project. He lives & writes in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Bernice Chauly
fiction
Bernice is a Malaysian writer, poet and educator. She is the author of five books of poetry and prose, including: going there and coming back (1997); The Book of Sins (2008); Lost in KL (2008); the acclaimed literary memoir, Growing Up With Ghosts (2011), which won the Reader’s Choice Awards 2012 in the Non-Fiction Category; and her third collection of poems, Onkalo (2013). For 20 years she worked as a multi-disciplinary artist and is recognized as one of the most significant voices of her generation. She is Festival Director for the George Town Literary Festival and an Honorary Fellow in Writing from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus.
Nina d’Alessandro
fiction
Nina holds an MA in Poetics from New York University, where she has taught writing, photography, 19th- and 20th- century art and literature, and a long-running series of seminars in jazz. Her award-winning photographs of musicians have been exhibited in the US, United Kingdom, and Europe, and have appeared in a wide variety of media, including Village Voice, Jazz Times, Penguin Books, Ken Burns’ 19-hour documentary Jazz, and CDs for Sony and Enja Records. She has published poems and essays, and has made recordings as a singer and Juno-nominated lyricist.
Meredith Davies Hadaway
poetry
Meredith’s work has recently appeared in Mantis, Passages North, New Ohio Review, poemmemoirstory, and Salamander. Her third poetry collection, At The Narrows, came out from WordTech Communications in March of 2015. She has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. Meredith served as the 2013-2014 Rose O’Neill Writer-In-Residence at Washington College.
Anna M. Evans
poetry
Anna’s poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Artists’ Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Her new sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans, is available from White Violet Press.
Alex M. Frankel
memoir
Alex is a poet, critic, blogger, and fiction writer currently living in Los Angeles after spending much of his life in Spain. He received his BA in philosophy from Columbia University and his MA in teaching from the School for International Training. He earned his MFA in poetry at New England College under the guidance of Alicia Ostriker.
Juliana Gray
poetry
Juliana’s second poetry collection, Roleplay, won the 2010 Orphic Prize and was published in 2012 by Dream Horse Press. Anne Boleyn’s Sleeve won the 2013 Winged City Chapbook Prize and was published last year. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Yellow Chair Review, ONE, The Journal, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
art gallery (graphic narrative)
Rowan is a Japanese-British-Chinese-American writer. She has a BA from Columbia University, a MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is working on a PhD at the University of East Anglia. Her work has appeared in, among other places, NPR’s Selected Shorts, TriQuarterly, the Tin House Open Bar, and The Indiana Review. She is a 2015 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop.
Lisa Lanser Rose
memoir
Lisa is the author of the memoir, For the Love of a Dog (Harmony Books), and the novel, Body Sharers (Rutgers University Press), which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for Best First Novel. Recent essays and stories have appeared in The Florida Review, Superstition Review, The Tampa Review Online, Sugar Mule Literary Magazine, Ascent Literary Magazine, Saw Palm, and Word Riot. The essay, “Turnpike Psycho,” won the 2013 Florida Review Editor’s Award.
Luis Joaquin M. Katigbak
fiction
Luis is the Associate Editor of Esquire Magazine (Philippine edition). He has won numerous honors for his writing, including four Palanca Awards, a Philippine Graphic prize, and a Young Artists’ Grant from the Republic of the Philippines National Commission for Culture and the Arts. He is the author of The King of Nothing to Do (Milflores Publishing, 2006), a collection of essays; and Happy Endings (University of the Philippines Press, 2000), a collection of short stories – both National Book Awards nominees of the Manila Critics Circle. “Planetarium” is from his latest collection, Dear Distance (Anvil Publishing).
Ilana Masad
essays
Ilana is an Israeli-American writer living in NYC. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Printer’s Row, The Rumpus, The Toast, The Butter, Hypertext Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, and more. She is also the founder of The Other Stories at theotherstories.org, a podcast that makes it just a little bit easier for writers to get heard. She tweets a lot @ilanaslightly and writes sometimes at slightlyignorant.com.
Stephen Massimilla
poetry
Stephen’s co-authored book, Cooking with the Muse: A Sumptuous Gathering of Seasonal Recipes, Culinary Poetry, and Literary Fare, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Acclaim for his other books includes an SFASU Press Prize for The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat; the Bordighera Poetry Prize for Forty Floors from Yesterday; the Grolier Poetry Prize for Later on Aiaia; and a Van Rensselaer award, selected by Kenneth Koch. Massimilla’s work has most recently appeared in AGNI, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Harpur Palate, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, RHINO, and Verse Daily. He holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and The New School.
Ricki Miller
essays
Ricki was an elementary school teacher in the suburbs of Boston and on Long Island for 37 years. Somehow she is still able to stand up. She has an M.Ed. from Boston University and in May 2015 she earned her MFA in creative writing from Stony Brook. Her creative, nonfiction and humor pieces have appeared in various publications, including The Southampton Review, Barnes and Nobles.com, and Ducts. Her piece in this issue is an excerpt from her recently completed memoir.
Jim Murphy
poetry
Jim teaches creative writing at the University of Montevallo, just south of Birmingham, Alabama. His chapbook, The Memphis Sun (Kent State UP), won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Award. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Heaven Overland (Kennesaw State UP) and The Uniform House (Negative Capability Press). His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Brooklyn Review, Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Puerto del Sol, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly and other journals. He has also translated a chapbook of poems from Spanish, Amazonia, by Colombian American poet Juan Carlos Galeano.
Voichita Nachescu
essays
Originally from Romania, Voichita came to the United States as an international graduate student. She completed her doctorate in Women’s Studies, but still finds herself drawn to creative writing (her first love). She lives in New Jersey, teaches writing and women’s studies at Rutgers University, and occasionally works as a personal chef. Her first short story, “The Last Thing You Wanted to Hear,” was published this summer in the Mulberry Fork Review.
Amare Selfu Worku
art gallery
Amare has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. After graduating in 2004 from Addis Ababa University School of Fine Arts and Design (SFAD) with SFAD’s highest honor (known as the “Gold Medal”), he began teaching Painting and Drawing at SFAD. In 2010, he was appointed Chair of the Painting Department and Curator of SFAD’s Art Gallery. He also co-founded Point Fine Arts and Design Studio P.L.C. During this time, as general manager, he oversaw and worked on several high-profile design and fine art projects, including a large-scale mosaic work located at the main building entrance of the National Museum of Ethiopia. In March 2012, he moved to Maryland to pursue an MFA in Studio Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and graduated in August 2015. He is an adjunct faculty member and teaches Drawing at MICA.
Jason M. Stewart
art gallery
Jason is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, and installation. Stewart received his BFA from Rowan University and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Stewart’s work addresses the idea of “place” through multiple voices – each voice being a re-experience or re-arrival to the idea of place. His handling of an idea through different modalities strives to address the formal concerns of materials, while also alluding to the mutability of the human mind. In addition to his art practice, Stewart is an educator, songwriter, and scenic designer. Stewart has displayed work throughout the East Coast – including the Newark Museum in Newark, NJ. Additional works can be seen at www.jasonMstewart.net.
STAFF
Mary Cool
Editor-in-Chief
Mary is a writer, editor and artist who lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Frida Kahlo is her artistic and inspirational muse, and she hopes someday to grow an equally decadent unibrow. Mary’s short fiction has appeared in the online magazines Hogglepot and Storychord, and she has performed her work in the Kick Assonance literary series at the KGB Bar in the East Village. She studied documentary filmmaking at The New School and blogs about learning to write through reading at captivatedaudience.blogspot.com.
Jacqueline Bishop
art gallery editor
Jacqueline is an award-winning photographer-painter-writer born and raised in Jamaica, who now lives and works in New York City (“Jamaica’s 15th Parish”). She has twice been awarded Fulbright Fellowships, including a year-long grant to Morocco; her work exhibits widely in North America, Europe and North Africa. She also teaches Liberal Studies at New York University, and is the author of The River’s Song, a novel about growing up in Jamaica. She writes a monthly visual arts article for the Huffington Post, and a new book, The Gymnast and Other Positions, is forthcoming in December 2015. Visit Jacqueline Bishop at her website, http://www.jacqueline-bishop.com.
Lisa Kirchner
memoir editor
Lisa is the producer and host of New York’s only reading and improv series, The Next Chapter. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Salon.com, BUST Magazine, The New York Post, Budget Travel, Kirkus Reviews and Huffington Post, among numerous others. Before moving to the Persian Gulf, she was the religion editor for Pittsburgh’s gay and lesbian newspaper, the bridal editor for its society rag, and an alt newsweekly dating columnist. Her flash essay, “My Husband: My Moto,” appeared in the compilation Learning to Love You More (Prestel Publishing, 2007). Her solo show, CRANKY WHITE GIRL IN QATAR, is the basis for her memoir, Hello American Lady Creature. She currently lives in New York City.
Amy Lemmon
poetry editor
Amy is the author of two poetry collections, Fine Motor (Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Press, 2008) and Saint Nobody (Red Hen Press, 2009); and co-author, with Denise Duhamel, of ABBA: The Poems (Coconut Books, 2010) and Enjoy Hot or Iced: Poems in Conversation and a Conversation (Slapering Hol Press, 2011). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Rolling Stone, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Verse, Court Green, The Journal, Barrow Street, and many other magazines and anthologies. Amy is Professor and Acting Chairperson of English & Communication Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology and lives with her two children in Astoria, Queens.
Tim Tomlinson
fiction editor
Tim Tomlinson is co-founder of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. His chapbook, Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (2015). His fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in China (United Verses), the Philippines (Esquire, Tomas, Silliman Journal, and Fast Food Fiction on Anvil Press), and in numerous venues in the US, including The Blue Lyra Review, Barnstorm Literary Journal, Caribbean Vistas, Soundings Review, Theory in Action, and in the anthology Long Island Noir (Akashic Books). He’s been an invited speaker and workshop leader in China, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, and the US. He teaches in New York University’s Global Liberal Studies program. He’s been Fiction Editor with Ducts since 2005, where he’s been proud to showcase work from established US writers such as Kim Addonizio and Sheila Kohler, and to bring in writing from around the globe, from authors such as Damyanti Biswas, Sarge Lacuesta, and M.G. Stephens.
Illustrators
Daniella Batsheva
Daniella is an illustrator and designer born and raised in Philadelphia, working in Los Angeles. Brought up in a clash of cultures from various countries, her work subtly reflects the frenzy of her home and family. She graduated from The University of the Arts with a BFA in Illustration in May 2011. Inspired by bad horror films, eastern culture, and candy, Daniella concocts edgy pieces with color palettes brighter than your mom’s 80’s jumpsuit.
Albert Collado
Albert is an aspiring artist studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Born in the Dominican Republic, he moved to the United States when he was three years old. He currently works for the author of Little Book, Big Dreams, a 12-book series.
Yuliya Kashapova
Yuliya is a graphic artist and illustrator. In 2005, she received a BA in Design and Studio Art from the University of Virginia, and has worked in the TV, film, and music industries in NYC, San Francisco, LA, and New Jersey. Her illustration works have been published in The New Yorker, and various literary magazines. www.kashapova.com
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.
Cindy Stockton Moore
Cindy Stockton Moore is a Philadelphia-based artist: find out about current projects at cindystocktonmoore.com.