Contributors will include:
Marjorie Skelly, whose 2015 book of essays, stories and poems, The Unpublished Poet, was endorsed by former Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf. Winner of first place wards from Poets and Patrons, the Jo-Anne Hirshfield Poetry Memorial Contest and the Palatine Public Library, she has three times reached finalist status in the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mike Poetry Contest in Chicago. She has taught poetry writing at Harold Washington Library and poetry and fiction writing at Eisenhower Library.
John Milas is an MFA student in Purdue University’s creative writing program. He grew up in central Illinois before serving in the United States Marine Corps on active duty. His writing can be found in Superstition Review,Hypertext Magazine, Chicago Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Learn more at johnmilas.com.
Natalia Nebel is a writer and translator (Italian to English) whose fiction, book reviews, interviews and translations have been published in a variety of literary journals, including Fifth Wednesday Review, Burnside Review, Great Lakes Review, Free Verse, Prague Review, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, New City and Chicago Quarterly Review. She’s also a Pushcart Prize nominee and most recently was nominated for the AWP First Journal award in both the essay and short story categories. In her free time she’s a co-curator for the reading series Sunday Salon Chicago.
Michael Blades is the Division Chair for English and the Arts at Zion Benton Township High School, following a stint of 15 years teaching high school English in both Evanston and Chicago. A native Evanstonian, Mr. Blades cut his literary teeth in the second floor children’s section of Evanston’s former library. He is excited to read his only published work in his hometown, before retiring back to his house in Skokie to assist Jennifer in laundering the piles created by his children: Owen, Leta, and Louise.
Richard Huffman completed undergrad work at Eastern Washington University. His graduate studies in Sociology and Creative Writing were completed at San Jose State University. His short stories and articles have been published in Catamaran, The Reed, phren-Z, The Chicago Quarterly Review, the newspaper Good Times and elsewhere. He has written a gritty Western Historical novel and is working on a novel about race relations and love’s vagaries in the aftermath of the Viet Nam war. He is a Viet Nam Vet., was an active participant in The Black Panthers movement in the ’60s and ’70s and was kicked out of his high school’s creative writing class for an “unsavory” story. He now lives in Santa Cruz with a dachshund of questionable character.
R. Craig Sautter is author, co-author and editor of 10 books including three histories of U.S. presidential conventions and elections. For the past three decades, he’s taught classes in philosophy, politics, history, literature and creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago and philosophy at Miami Dade College during the winters. For several years he was a poet-in-residence for the public schools of three counties of Upstate New York, and for the Illinois Arts Council he conducted creative writing classes with over 20,000 K-12 students. He was the 47th president of the Society of Midland Authors and served two terms on the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Advisory Board.
Steven Carrelli is a visual artist and writer living in Chicago. He earned an MFA in Painting from Northwestern University, and he teaches in the Department of Art, Media and Design at DePaul University. Carrelli’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited nationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions and have appeared in regional and national publications. His work is included in the collections of the Illinois State Museum, Elmhurst College, the City of Chicago, Northwestern University, and DePaul University, among others. His writing has also appeared in Crab Creek Review.
