Derek Alger
essays
Derek is a graduate of the Columbia University MFA writing program, and serves as Editor-at-Large to PIF Magazine. His fiction has appeared in Confrontation, Del Sol Review, The Literary Journal, and Night Train, to name a few. He has worked as an editor and reporter for newspapers in the Bronx for over 20 years.
Roberta Allen
fiction
Roberta is the author of eight books, including the novel, The Dreaming Girl, republished in 2011. Her latest story appeared in The Literarian. She is also an artist/photographer with work in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum. She recently finished a novel called In This Room. She teaches private writing workshops. robertaallen.com
Johan Björck
art gallery
Johan is an artist and musician living and working in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has a BA from at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in Umeå Sweden. Recent exhibitions include: Miracle & Connelly Presents with Laura Piasta (Vancouver, CA), The Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada), The Dust Gallery (Umeå, Sweden), Sasquatch Research Center GBG Convention NO:1 at Vita Rosen Gallery (Gothenburg, Sweden), Carlsson Svensson Contemporary (Budapest, Hungary), Forte Prenestino (Rome, Italy). More about his work can be found at: http://jbjorck.blogspot.com/
Phoebe Bright
fiction
Phoebe decided to pursue fiction writing after she graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a B.A. in Behavioral Biology and a plan to move to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Phoebe currently works along the Atlantic coast during the warmer months and in a Rocky Mountain ski town when there’s snow. This is her first fiction publication.
David Crabb
memoir
David is an actor, writer, Moth Slam host, and co-producer of the live storytelling series, Ask Me Stories. He has been a member of the acclaimed Off-Broadway Axis Theatre Company since 2001, starring in productions in NYC and abroad in Paris & Edinburgh. His solo show “Bad Kid” was a 2012 New York Times Critics’ Pick. A memoir based on the show comes out in 2013.
Jim Daniels
poetry
Jims’ recent books include Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry (Carnegie Mellon University Press), All of the Above (Adastra Press), and Trigger Man, short fiction (Michigan State University Press), all published in 2011. Birth Marks will be published by BOA Editions in 2013.
Vicky Deger
essays
Vicky is originally from Australia, and has moved around the world, living in New York, Brazil, and London, until settling in Los Angeles, where she has raised two sons. Her work has appeared in The Coachella Review, The Grove Review, and Gulf Stream Magazine. Currently, she works in the entertainment industry as a costume designer, while planning her next adventure.
Ron Drummond
poetry
Ron’s Why I Kick at Night was a Portlandia Press Chapbook Competition winner. His poetry also appears in the Penguin textbook Literature as Meaning, in the anthologies Poetry Nation, Poetry After 9/11, This New Breed, and Saints of Hysteria, and in the literary journals Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Borderlands, Columbia Review, Court Green, Global City Review, The Journal, Northwest Review,Ocean State Review, among others. His translations, in collaboration with Guillermo Filice Castro, have appeared in U.S. Latino Review, Terra Incognita and Guernica. He has been awarded fellowships from Ragdale, VCCA, and Blue Mountain Center, and is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.
Stephanie Eckenrode
memoir
Australian-born New Yorker Stephanie Eckenrode currently works as an advertising copywriter in Manhattan.
Ophira Eisenberg
memoir
Ophira is a comedian, writer, and host of NPR’s new weekly trivia comedy show, Ask Me Another. Selected as one of New York Magazine’s Top 10 Comics that Funny People Find Funny, and featured in the New York Times as a skilled comedian and storyteller with a “bleakly stylish” sense of humor, Ophira has also appeared on Comedy Central, VH-1, E! Channel, the Oxygen Network, and the Discovery Channel. Her writing has been published in five anthologies including I Killed: True Stories of the Road from America’s Top Comics and Heeb Magazine’s collection Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish. Her debut memoir, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy will be coming out in Spring 2014. She is a regular host and teller with The Moth.
Ida Fogles
essays
Ida lives in Missouri and maintains a belief that the Kansas City Royals will some day rise Her writing has appeared in publications here and there, including Well Versed and The First Line.
Miriam Foley
fiction
Miriam Foley is a graduate of English Literature from the University of Leeds. She lives in Madrid and works as Lifestyle Editor at hellomagazine.com. She is at work on her first novel.
Becki Fuller
art gallery
Becki Fuller is a Brooklyn based photographer and co-founder of the street art & graffiti blog The Street Spot. Her interest in the urban arts has taken her all around the five boroughs of New York and beyond, searching for beauty and inspiration in city landscapes. Her photography has been featured in numerous books and exhibited in shows at Pandemic Gallery, Mighty Tanaka, Fresthetic, Mishka, Phantom Audio, and most recently as part of the Billboard Art Project in Atlanta, GA. She is a strong advocate for people taking back public space from corporate America and making it their own once again.
Richard Holinger
essays
Richard has lived in the Fox Valley west of Chicago for 30 years, where he writes a column for a local newspaper. His poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and book reviews have appeared in The Iowa Review, Boulevard, and The Southern Review, and his work has reviewed three Pushcart Prize nominations.
Jessi Klein
humor
Jessi is a New York comedian who appeared on The Showbiz Show with David Spade. She was previously a panelist on VH1’s Best Week Ever, and had her own special on Comedy Central’s Premium Blend. Klein served as Director of Development for Comedy Central and helped shepherd the network’s hit series Chappelle’s Show. She has also worked on staff for the ABC series, Samantha Who? Starring Christina Applegate in Los Angeles.
Mary Koral
essays
Mary teaches at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, MI. She writes about the experience of multicultural, multiracial living since that defines much of her life. She is happy to be published in Ducts, one of the best online journals out there.
Sean Lause
poetry
Sean teaches courses in Shakespeare, Literature and the Holocaust and Medical Ethics at Rhodes State College. His poems have appeared in The Minnesota Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Alaska Quarterly, The Beloit Poetry Journal and Poetry International.
Monique Antonette Lewis
fiction
Monique grew up in Aurora and Denver, Colorado and is a board member of the New York Writers Workshop. In 2011, she created a beginner’s fiction workshop called The Writer’s Corner, based in Brooklyn. She is working on her first novel, Shady Hills. Monique received both her MFA and MA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University, preceded by a B.A. in Technical-Journalism from Colorado State University. She lives in Brooklyn and is the assistant editor of mergermarket, an online news service of the Financial Times Group.
Valerie Z Lewis
humor
Valerie is a college professor in New York. A comprehensive list of her poetry and fiction can be found online at valerielewis.net.
Lee Martin
essays
Lee is the Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of The Bright Forever, and three other novels, as well as the memoirs, Such a Life, From Our House, and Turning Bones, and the story collection, The Least You Need to Know. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University, where he was the winner of the 2006 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Amalia Melis
essays
Amalia is a New Yorker living in Athens, Greece, where she is the creator/organizer of the Aegean Arts Circle Creative Writing Workshop. She is a freelance writer whose published work includes 2nd place short story award for new writers and an essay in Glimmer Train, and she also makes assemblage sculptures out of found objects.
Joddy Murray
poetry
Joddy earned his MFA in Poetry at Texas State University, San Marcos, and a Ph.D. in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Portland Review, American Literary Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Carquinez Poetry Review, and Texas Review. He currently teaches writing and rhetoric at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.
Jennifer Noel
memoir
Jennifer Noel is a mother, psychotherapist and writer living in Maine. Though she has been writing fiction and memoir since she was a child, she has only recently begun to publish.
Laura Piasta
art gallery
Laura is a Canadian-born artist who works in Sweden and Canada. She is currently completing a several-month residency in Copenhagen at the Factory of Art and Design. She finished her MFA at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå Sweden in 2012 and her BA from Emily Carr University, Vancouver, Canada in 2006. Recent exhibitions include: Miracle & Connelly Presents with Johan Björck (Vancouver, CA), Gallery 60 (Umeå, Sweden), The Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada), Konsthall C (Stockholm, Sweden), The Museum of Longing and Failure (Copenhagen, Denmark), Atelierhof Kreuzberg (Berlin, Germany), The Power Plant (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), and The Grimm Museum (Berlin, Germany), among others. More about her work can be found at: http://laurapiasta.com
Stephen Policoff
fiction
Stephen’s 1st novel, Beautiful Somewhere Else, won the James Jones Award and was published by Carroll & Graf in 2004. His essay, “Music Today?” won the Fish Short Memoir Award and was published in the Fish Anthology (West Cork University, Ireland) in July 2012. His fiction and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Provincetown Arts, Family Fun, Opium, Otis Nebula, and many other publications. He teaches writing in Global Liberal Studies at NYU. This piece is excerpted from his 2nd novel, The Buddha Train.
Karla Siegel
art gallery
Karla Siegel is a Philadelphia painter, trained at Tyler School of Art, obtaining her BFA in 2004. Her work has been widely exhibited in the Philadelphia region as well as New York. In addition to her career as a painter, Karla Siegel has worked with a number of Philadelphia art institutions including the Mural Arts Program, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Main Line Art Center. She currently lives in the Fairmount neighborhood of Philadelphia, where she maintains a working studio practice at the The Church Studios artist co-op.
M.G. Stephens
fiction
M. G. Stephens (Michael Gregory Stephens) is the author of eighteen books, including the novels Season at Coole and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, as well as such nonfiction works as Lost in Seoul and Green Dreams, which won the AWP award in creative nonfiction and subsequently was picked by Joyce Carol Oates as one of the notable nonfiction books of the 20th century in Best American Essays of the Century. He recently completed a new novel, a book of stories, and a nonfiction cultural history and memoir about downtown New York in the 1960s.
Emily Weiner
art gallery
Emily is a New York based painter and writer. Recent and upcoming exhibitions of her work include: Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia PA), The Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada), Visual Arts Gallery (New York,) Fleisher/Ollman Gallery(Philadelphia PA) Camac Centre d’Art (France), and Concrete Utopia (New York.) She teaches painting at The School of Visual Arts in New York and at Pratt Institute. Her writing on art has appeared in Art Forum, Domus, and Time Out New York. She is a member of the Art Book Club. More about her work can be found at: www.emilyweiner.com
Cindy Stockton-Moore
art gallery
Cindy is a Philadelphia based artist whose recent shows include ‘Toward Futility’ a solo project at Artspace Liberti (Philadelphia) and ‘An Island Now Peopled,’ a two-person exhibition at Chashama Chelsea Project Space (New York.) She has shown throughout the US and abroad at venues such as Heskin Contemporary (New York, NY,) PS122 (New York NY,) The Painting Center (New York, NY,) Sandy Carson Gallery (Denver, CO,) Public Fiction (Los Angeles, CA,) and The Museum of Science and Industry (Tampa, FL.) Her writing on art has appeared in ArtNews, NYArts Magazine, The New York Sun, in addition to university and gallery publications. Cindy is currently a member of the curatorial team at Grizzly Grizzly. You can find out more about her work at www.cindystocktonmoore.com
Liara Tamani
fiction
Liara ‘s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Apalachee Review, Blackbird, Fourteen Hills, Mythium Literary Journal, and Storyscape Journal. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College and a BA from Duke University. In addition to writing, she has a passion for teaching the healing movement forms of Nia and yoga. She is currently working on her first novel and lives in Houston.
Louis Wittig
humor
There’s really not too much to know about Louis Wittig. He’s slightly overweight, his haircuts don’t always make perfect sense, and he thinks he’s a much better judge of character and investments than he actually is. He does try to write, though. His blog is www.mrbutterworth.com.
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 playwright, 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. His plays have been produced in New York, Dallas and Brighton, England. He teaches creative writing in New York.
Derek Alger
essays editor
Derek Alger is a graduate of the Columbia University MFA writing program, and serves as Editor-at-Large to PIF Magazine. His fiction has appeared in Confrontation, Del Sol Review, The Literary Journal, and Night Train, to name a few. He has worked as an editor and reporter for newspapers in the Bronx for over 20 years.
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 TheHuffingtonPost.com, 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. 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 ofABBA: 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 Rolling Stone, New Letters,Prairie Schooner, Verse, Court Green, The Journal, Barrow Street, and many other magazines and anthologies. Amy is professor of English at the Fashion Institute of Technology and lives with her two children in Astoria, Queens.
Anne Mironchik
assistant
Anne 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/illustrator
Cindy is a Philadelphia based artist whose recent shows include ‘Toward Futility’ a solo project at Artspace Liberti (Philadelphia) and ‘An Island Now Peopled,’ a two-person exhibition at Chashama Chelsea Project Space (New York.) She has shown throughout the US and abroad at venues such as Heskin Contemporary (New York, NY,) PS122 (New York NY,) The Painting Center (New York, NY,) Sandy Carson Gallery (Denver, CO,) Public Fiction (Los Angeles, CA,) and The Museum of Science and Industry (Tampa, FL.) Her writing on art has appeared in ArtNews, NYArts Magazine, The New York Sun, in addition to university and gallery publications. Cindy is currently a member of the curatorial team at Grizzly Grizzly. You can find out more about her work at www.cindystocktonmoore.com
Kat Rodies
humor 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.
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
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 different 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.
Chris Frost (humor section)
When not reminiscing about life in the old New York, Chris Frost designs and crafts handbags. His illustrations have appeared in Ducts and Santa vs. Satan: The Official Compendium Of Imaginary Fights. He currently resides in Bushwick, but dreams of a move to Puerto Varas.
Yuliya Kashapova
Yuliya has been working in the design field for past 6 years as a graphic artist and illustrator. In 2005 she received BA in Design and Studio Art from UVA, and went on working on various projects in 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
She teaches private writing workshops.