OUR CONTRIBUTORS
Issue 6, Volume I
Issue 6, Volume I
Pocket Anthology:
Allen Learst won the 2011 Leapfrog Fiction Contest for his short story collection, Dancing at the Gold Monkey. His work has appeared in War, Literature and the Arts, Alaska Quarterly Review, Chattahoochee Review, Hawaii
Review, Passages North, Ascent, The Literary Review, Pisgah, and Water~Stone. The first chapter of his novel in
progress, Bonefish, was published in Crossborder Journal. His essay “The Blood of Children” was nominated
for a Pushcart Prize, received a "Special Mention" in the 2008 Pushcart Prize XXXII Best of the Small Presses,
and a “Notable” in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. Read more at http://www.allearst.com/
John Feffer has revitalized the lost art of the serialized novel with his latest, The Third Return -- available on his
Patreon page. John is the author of the Splinterlands series, the thriller Foamers, and numerous works of non-
fiction. Mike Davis dubs Feffer “the 21st-century Jack London.” In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls his
novel Splinterlands “a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning. The Third Return is a new thriller that
involves two spies, the two Koreas, and the DC intern that puts it all together.
Thomas Carney has written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles magazine,
American Letters and Commentary, Tupelo Quarterly and Frontline (PBS) among other publications. He lives
in New York City.
Portfolios and InSight:
Bill Gubbins’ photographs have appeared in Rolling Stone and the New York Times, been the subject of solo
exhibits in Detroit, Nashville and soon Los Angeles and Germany, and are part of the permanent collection of
the Butler Art Institute in Youngstown, Ohio. Gubbins is also an accomplished national magazine editor
(Creem, Moviegoer and Country Weekly, among others), television creator and executive producer (the
Channel One in-school TV network and daily newscast) and design writer (essay in David Carson’s seminal
and best-selling book, The End of Print, as well as pieces in Émigré and CommunicationArts, among others).
More at @BillGubbinsPhotos
Allen Learst (see above), fiction writer, grew up in Detroit, and his InSight photos of Detroit showing a city
somewhere between recuperation and despair, document the precarious limbo of that city.
Fiction and Poetry:
Rozann Kraus has been for many years a leading light in the dance world in Boston, She founded Dance
Complex, a center for innovative dance and movement, she has choreographed innumberable dance pieces
and, of course, danced herself; and now she has turned to poetry. We publish "Meditation on Yom Kippur"
with permission of the author.
Mark David Wyers completed his BA in literature at the University of Tampa and his MA in Turkish studies at the
University of Arizona. From 2008 to 2013 he was the director of the Academic Writing Center at Kadir Has
University in Istanbul, during which time he drew upon his master’s thesis to write a historical book-length
study titled “Wicked Istanbul”: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Early Turkish Republic. He has since
dedicated himself to working on translations of Turkish novels, published examples of which include
Boundless Solitude by Selim İleri, The King of Taksim Square by Emrah Serbes, The Pasha of Cuisine
by Saygın Ersin, and The Peace Machine by Özgür Mumcu, and in 2019 his translations of The Girl in the Tree
by Şebnem İşigüzel and Stepmother Earth by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu will be released. His translations
of Turkish short stories have been published in a number of anthologies and journals.
Marta Aponte Alsina writes novels, stories and essays. In 1994 she published the novel Angélica furiosa (Sopa
de Letras). Then followed El cuarto rey mago (novel, Sopa de Letras, 1996); La casa de la loca (short stories,
Alfaguara, 2001); Vampiresas (short novel, Alfaguara, 2004); Fúgate (short stories, Sopa de Letras, 2005); Sexto
sueño (novel, Veintisiete Letras, 2007); El fantasma de las cosas (novel, Terranova Editores, 2009); Sobre mi
cadáver (short novel, La Secta de los Perros, 2012); Mr. Green (short novel, Random House Mondadori, Flash
series of digital books, 2013); La muerte feliz de William Carlos Williams (novel, Sopa de Letras, 2015; a
Mexican edition was published by Editorial Calygramma in 2016) and Somos islas (essays, Editora Educación
Emergente, 2015). Sexto sueño received the National Novel Prize awarded by the Pen Club of Puerto Rico. In
2014 she was awarded the Nilita Vientós Gastón chair, conferred by the Women and Gender Studies Program
of the University of Puerto Rico. Editorial Dragomanni published in 2015 the Italian version of Sobre mi
cadáver. Aponte Alsina’s most recent book is PR 3 Aguirre (Sopa de Letras, 2018). She has edited several
books, including Narraciones puertorriqueñas, an anthology of Puerto Rican short fiction published by
Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho.
Essay:
Joseph Dimow was on the Editorial board of the progressive Jewish Currents magazine, lived most of his life in
New Haven, CT. He died May 2, 2013, at the age of 93. Like a number of people in his generation he was a
member of the Communist Party and had the distinction of being among the first arrested in 954 under the
notorious Smith Act, who were freed then when the Supreme Court declared the Act's provisions
unconstitutional. Dimow quit the party upon discovering Stalin's brutal excesses, but throughout his life
continued to advocate for civil rights, for other social causes, for nuclear freeze, and for building bridges
between Arabs and his fellow Jews. He had a wonderful quiet sense of humor and, for those of us who
counted him as family, he is still sorely missed.
¡Viva!
Jan Schmidt recently retired as the Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at The New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts. Her fiction has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Long Story and New
York Stories. In Downtown she published a series of oral history interviews with hard-core, risky individuals
and their brushes with salvation. Her essays have appeared in New York Stories, American Letters and
Commentary, and Issue 2 of The Wall. With J.D. Rage, she co-edited Venom Press and its quarterly poetry
and fiction magazine, Curare, for eight years. Her short story collection Collateral Regeneration was a semi-
finalist for the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts, 2015.
Editors:
Bronwyn Mills holds an MFA from UMass, Amherst, and a Ph.D. from NYU where she was an Anais Nin Fellow. Later a Fulbright Fellow (La République du Bénin, West Africa) she travels widely, and has lived in New York City, Istanbul, Turkey; Latin America; and Paris, France. For many years a dance and theatre writer for regional arts publications in New England, she is also a Senior prose editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Books include Night of the Luna Moths (poetry,) Beastly's Tale (a fabulist novel); and she is currently working on Canary Club, a novel set in medieval Spain. Her work has appeared in IKON, Frigate, Talisman: a Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Tupelo Quarterly, and most recently in Agni Online. She guest-edited the Turkish issue of Absinthe; New European Writing (#19). Bronwyn has taught at Stevens Institute of Technology; Kadir Has University in Istanbul; and Abomey-Calavi in Bénin. From time to time she publishes work on African vodou. Bronwyn lives and writes in a tiny mountain village far, far away. Read more at https://bronwynmills.org/
Eric Darton has published a number of books, including the New York Times bestseller Divided We Stand: A
Biography of The World Trade Center (Basic Books, 1999, 2011), and Free City, a novel, (WW Norton, 1996). He is also the author of an ongoing work of free scholarship, Book of the World Courant, available at www.bookoftheworldcourant.net. Recently his essays have been published in Tupelo Quarterly www.tupeloquarterly.com. More of his work may be found at www.ericdarton.net and here at The Wall. Darton leads Writing at the Crossroads, a workshop for prose writers, a sampling of whose work appears in issue 2.
Hardy Griffin has published writing in New Flash Fiction, Alimentum, Assisi, The Washington Post, American Letters & Commentary, and the chapter "Voice: The Sound of a Story" in Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2003), as well
as translations in the Istanbul Biennial, Words Without Borders, and for the award-winning photographic study, Armenians, documenting the lives of Armenians living in contemporary Turkey. He is currently at work on a novel, Our Girl, and has a Ph.D. from Boğaziçi (Bosporus) University, Istanbul, Turkey.
Allen Learst won the 2011 Leapfrog Fiction Contest for his short story collection, Dancing at the Gold Monkey. His work has appeared in War, Literature and the Arts, Alaska Quarterly Review, Chattahoochee Review, Hawaii
Review, Passages North, Ascent, The Literary Review, Pisgah, and Water~Stone. The first chapter of his novel in
progress, Bonefish, was published in Crossborder Journal. His essay “The Blood of Children” was nominated
for a Pushcart Prize, received a "Special Mention" in the 2008 Pushcart Prize XXXII Best of the Small Presses,
and a “Notable” in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. Read more at http://www.allearst.com/
John Feffer has revitalized the lost art of the serialized novel with his latest, The Third Return -- available on his
Patreon page. John is the author of the Splinterlands series, the thriller Foamers, and numerous works of non-
fiction. Mike Davis dubs Feffer “the 21st-century Jack London.” In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls his
novel Splinterlands “a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning. The Third Return is a new thriller that
involves two spies, the two Koreas, and the DC intern that puts it all together.
Thomas Carney has written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles magazine,
American Letters and Commentary, Tupelo Quarterly and Frontline (PBS) among other publications. He lives
in New York City.
Portfolios and InSight:
Bill Gubbins’ photographs have appeared in Rolling Stone and the New York Times, been the subject of solo
exhibits in Detroit, Nashville and soon Los Angeles and Germany, and are part of the permanent collection of
the Butler Art Institute in Youngstown, Ohio. Gubbins is also an accomplished national magazine editor
(Creem, Moviegoer and Country Weekly, among others), television creator and executive producer (the
Channel One in-school TV network and daily newscast) and design writer (essay in David Carson’s seminal
and best-selling book, The End of Print, as well as pieces in Émigré and CommunicationArts, among others).
More at @BillGubbinsPhotos
Allen Learst (see above), fiction writer, grew up in Detroit, and his InSight photos of Detroit showing a city
somewhere between recuperation and despair, document the precarious limbo of that city.
Fiction and Poetry:
Rozann Kraus has been for many years a leading light in the dance world in Boston, She founded Dance
Complex, a center for innovative dance and movement, she has choreographed innumberable dance pieces
and, of course, danced herself; and now she has turned to poetry. We publish "Meditation on Yom Kippur"
with permission of the author.
Mark David Wyers completed his BA in literature at the University of Tampa and his MA in Turkish studies at the
University of Arizona. From 2008 to 2013 he was the director of the Academic Writing Center at Kadir Has
University in Istanbul, during which time he drew upon his master’s thesis to write a historical book-length
study titled “Wicked Istanbul”: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Early Turkish Republic. He has since
dedicated himself to working on translations of Turkish novels, published examples of which include
Boundless Solitude by Selim İleri, The King of Taksim Square by Emrah Serbes, The Pasha of Cuisine
by Saygın Ersin, and The Peace Machine by Özgür Mumcu, and in 2019 his translations of The Girl in the Tree
by Şebnem İşigüzel and Stepmother Earth by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu will be released. His translations
of Turkish short stories have been published in a number of anthologies and journals.
Marta Aponte Alsina writes novels, stories and essays. In 1994 she published the novel Angélica furiosa (Sopa
de Letras). Then followed El cuarto rey mago (novel, Sopa de Letras, 1996); La casa de la loca (short stories,
Alfaguara, 2001); Vampiresas (short novel, Alfaguara, 2004); Fúgate (short stories, Sopa de Letras, 2005); Sexto
sueño (novel, Veintisiete Letras, 2007); El fantasma de las cosas (novel, Terranova Editores, 2009); Sobre mi
cadáver (short novel, La Secta de los Perros, 2012); Mr. Green (short novel, Random House Mondadori, Flash
series of digital books, 2013); La muerte feliz de William Carlos Williams (novel, Sopa de Letras, 2015; a
Mexican edition was published by Editorial Calygramma in 2016) and Somos islas (essays, Editora Educación
Emergente, 2015). Sexto sueño received the National Novel Prize awarded by the Pen Club of Puerto Rico. In
2014 she was awarded the Nilita Vientós Gastón chair, conferred by the Women and Gender Studies Program
of the University of Puerto Rico. Editorial Dragomanni published in 2015 the Italian version of Sobre mi
cadáver. Aponte Alsina’s most recent book is PR 3 Aguirre (Sopa de Letras, 2018). She has edited several
books, including Narraciones puertorriqueñas, an anthology of Puerto Rican short fiction published by
Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho.
Essay:
Joseph Dimow was on the Editorial board of the progressive Jewish Currents magazine, lived most of his life in
New Haven, CT. He died May 2, 2013, at the age of 93. Like a number of people in his generation he was a
member of the Communist Party and had the distinction of being among the first arrested in 954 under the
notorious Smith Act, who were freed then when the Supreme Court declared the Act's provisions
unconstitutional. Dimow quit the party upon discovering Stalin's brutal excesses, but throughout his life
continued to advocate for civil rights, for other social causes, for nuclear freeze, and for building bridges
between Arabs and his fellow Jews. He had a wonderful quiet sense of humor and, for those of us who
counted him as family, he is still sorely missed.
¡Viva!
Jan Schmidt recently retired as the Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at The New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts. Her fiction has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Long Story and New
York Stories. In Downtown she published a series of oral history interviews with hard-core, risky individuals
and their brushes with salvation. Her essays have appeared in New York Stories, American Letters and
Commentary, and Issue 2 of The Wall. With J.D. Rage, she co-edited Venom Press and its quarterly poetry
and fiction magazine, Curare, for eight years. Her short story collection Collateral Regeneration was a semi-
finalist for the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts, 2015.
Editors:
Bronwyn Mills holds an MFA from UMass, Amherst, and a Ph.D. from NYU where she was an Anais Nin Fellow. Later a Fulbright Fellow (La République du Bénin, West Africa) she travels widely, and has lived in New York City, Istanbul, Turkey; Latin America; and Paris, France. For many years a dance and theatre writer for regional arts publications in New England, she is also a Senior prose editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Books include Night of the Luna Moths (poetry,) Beastly's Tale (a fabulist novel); and she is currently working on Canary Club, a novel set in medieval Spain. Her work has appeared in IKON, Frigate, Talisman: a Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Tupelo Quarterly, and most recently in Agni Online. She guest-edited the Turkish issue of Absinthe; New European Writing (#19). Bronwyn has taught at Stevens Institute of Technology; Kadir Has University in Istanbul; and Abomey-Calavi in Bénin. From time to time she publishes work on African vodou. Bronwyn lives and writes in a tiny mountain village far, far away. Read more at https://bronwynmills.org/
Eric Darton has published a number of books, including the New York Times bestseller Divided We Stand: A
Biography of The World Trade Center (Basic Books, 1999, 2011), and Free City, a novel, (WW Norton, 1996). He is also the author of an ongoing work of free scholarship, Book of the World Courant, available at www.bookoftheworldcourant.net. Recently his essays have been published in Tupelo Quarterly www.tupeloquarterly.com. More of his work may be found at www.ericdarton.net and here at The Wall. Darton leads Writing at the Crossroads, a workshop for prose writers, a sampling of whose work appears in issue 2.
Hardy Griffin has published writing in New Flash Fiction, Alimentum, Assisi, The Washington Post, American Letters & Commentary, and the chapter "Voice: The Sound of a Story" in Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2003), as well
as translations in the Istanbul Biennial, Words Without Borders, and for the award-winning photographic study, Armenians, documenting the lives of Armenians living in contemporary Turkey. He is currently at work on a novel, Our Girl, and has a Ph.D. from Boğaziçi (Bosporus) University, Istanbul, Turkey.
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