Our contributors are drawn from the four corners of the Earth. They include artists, poets, authors and songwriters.
Adnan Mahmutović is a Bosnian Swede, who teaches English literature and Creative Writing at Stockholm University. His first novel Thinner than a Hair came out in 2010 with Cinnamon Press, and his collection How to Fare Well and Stay Fair will come out in Autumn 2012 with Salt Publishing.
Alon Adika lived in Japan for a number of years during which he began learning calligraphy under Nakayama Taigan of Kobe. In addition to calligraphy, he is also interested in photography and writing. He currently resides in New York City.
Annie Evett is a prolific scribbler of characters, weaver of stories, wields a balanced editing razor and a mean 6 HB pencil. She is a self proclaimed champion for the return of the short story in its own right. Annie infuses her eclectic writing and artwork with years of teaching, traversing the corporate landscape and motherhood. The creative energy behind the collaborative writing project CYOA , she has a string of short stories published, is a contributing editor in a variety of anthologies and has a number of brushpainting and sketches published.
Annie Gustin is Brazilian and has lived in the U.S. since childhood. She has received awards for her work and has published over sixty poems in literary journals, newspapers, and anthologies in the U.S., Japan, and Brazil. She taught Portuguese at Yale University, as well as ESL in the New Haven area, for many years, and, at present, is dedicating her time to creative writing and research. Annie misses her Japanese friends, and is thrilled to be a part of this international, artistic project.
Bard T. Fox Dunham resides outside of Philadelphia PA—author and historian. He’s published in over seventy international journals and anthologies and was a finalist in the Copper Nickel Annual Short Story Contest for his story, "The Lady Comes in the Night". He’s a cancer survivor. His friends call him fox, being his totem animal, and his motto is: Wrecking civilization one story at a time.
Berit Ellingsen is a Norwegian writer whose stories have appeared in many places, including Bluestem, Asian Cha, SmokeLong, Metazen and decomP.
She was a runner-up in Beate Sigriddaughter’s Ghost Story Competition
and a semi-finalist in the 2011 Rose Metal Press chapbook competition.
Berit’s novel, The Empty City, is about silence.
Billy O'Callaghan is the author of two collections, In Exile and In Too Deep, both published by Mercier Press. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, Confrontation, the Fiddlehead, Hayden's Ferry Review, the Los Angeles Review, Narrative Magazine, the Southeast Review and numerous other magazines and journals around the world.
Bradley Wind is a writer and artist.
Brigita Orel has had her stories and poems published in Rose & Thorn Journal, Cantaraville, Autumn Sky Poetry, Islet, The Storm at Galesburg anthology, and other print and online magazines. In 2010, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She studied writing at Swinburne, Australia, and she lives and creates in Slovenia.
Prolific writer and artist Catherine Edmunds has more than 250 published works to her name. Solo works include the
poetry collection, wormwood, earth and
honey and the novel Small Poisons,
(Circaidy Gregory Press). Her latest novel, Serpentine
(BeWrite Books), explores what happens when art doesn’t only reflect life...
but is life itself.
Claire Beynon is a writer and artist.
Damien C. Edwards currently lives in Sydney, Australia. He travels under numerous guises with the hope of eventually becoming one with himself. He writes in a wide gamut of creative disciplines with, among others, a notable exception of play-writing, due to his extreme and obvious level of unsophisticated, unrefined and undeveloped skills in his playwright persona. He desires to work through the problem with his hopes set on miraculously discovering some level of vestigial, atavistic like talent for the art of play, because the irregular periods of attempts don’t seem to be paying off much.
Follow on
Twitter: @damiencedwards
Dan Holloway
runs the literary project eight cuts gallery, is a performance poet, and
is the author of the novels Songs from the Other Side of the Wall and
The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes.
Daniel Werneck is an artist and professor in Brazil. He takes
care of his wife and two kids, teaches animation at an university, makes
comics and is currently writing a book about French comics artist
Moebius. "When does he sleep?", you might ask. That is actually a pretty
good question, to which no one knows the answer.
Daniel Christian is a singer-songwriter from the central United States (Nebraska), blending pop, rock, folk, and country music into a style that “sounds like cinnamon rolls taste!” He has won two National Country Music Festival awards, and has released albums of pop and folk music. Often compared to The Beatles and James Taylor, Daniel was selected to perform at “Born to Play,” an event spanning North America which set the record for largest simultaneous acoustic music concert of all time. He is currently in production on his third album of original music in Nashville, Tennessee.
Dave Bonta lives in Plummer's Hollow, Pennsylvania and online at Via Negativa. In college, he spent a formative year in the Kansai region of Japan, where he learned how to eat natto and lose staring contests with wooden bodhisattvas. His latest book is a collection of "inaction comics" called Words on the Street.
David Church Rodríguez , AKA Rabbitz, started writing to avoid having to talk. He currently lives near Paris and has a day job making people happy. He writes ocasionally in Spanish and on twitter as @Rabbitz
Diane Stephenson lives in South Western Ontario, Canada. She has been a born again Christian for over 40 years. She worked in graphic arts for 15 years, has done many types of art throughout her life, but now pours her creativity into writing.
Donald Jacob Uitvlugt lives somewhere in the middle of the United States, but mostly in a haunted memory palace. He writes what he calls "haiku fiction" -- small stories with big impact. His work has most recently appeared in Cover of Darkness and the Journal of Unlikely Entomology, as well as the anthologies Sparks and 100 Horrors.
Elissa Gordon's poetry mines a childhood spent between New
York City and New England and a passion for travel and foreign language.
She has been anthologized in River Poets Journal, South Mountain Poets,
Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow Poets, The Stillwater Review, Short, Fast
& Deadly: Best of 2010, and Last Words (2011), appeared in print
issues of Windmills (Australia) and New York Underscore, a new magazine
about New York City life, and online in The Word Place, Shot Glass
Journal and Short, Fast and Deadly.
Having retired from the University of Kansas in 2001, Elizabeth Schultz now balances scholarship on Herman Melville and on the environment with writing essays and poems about the people and places she loves. She has published two critical works on Melville, two collections of poetry, one book of short stories, and published her scholarship and poetry widely. She has also co-organized an international conference on ecocriticism in Beijing and regularly participates in international ecocriticism conferences.
Fritz Bogott writes sincere lies about magic and technology. He lives with his wife and daughters on a hill in southeastern Minnesota.
Heidi Mannan lives in the mountains of North Idaho with her husband and son. When she's not busy recording the bizarre encounters of her imagination, she enjoys gluten-free cooking and nature walks.
Iain Maloney lives in Aichi, Japan. He has a masters in Creative
Writing from the University of Glasgow and is a widely published writer
of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. His piece in this book is an extract
from the novel Dog Mountain, which is available to a good home.
Ida Černe is a Serbian immigrant, US ex-pat living in Vienna. A professional translator of poetry, fiction, screenplays (from German, Serbian or Russian into English), her published stories/poems span from The European to the New Southerner. A ghost writer, tour guide, chauffeur, and drama addict, she likes to take naps.
James Lloyd Davis, a veteran of the war in Vietnam and former electrician, ship builder, ironworker and engineer currently lives in Ohio. He has returned to writing after a long absence, is working on two novels, and experiments with short fiction in various forms.
Jan D. Hodge has hosted several Japanese students during his teaching career. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals and several textbooks and anthologies.
Jane Elizabeth Helen Roberts is a freelance writer living in Shropshire (UK) with a really long name. She has a degree in Classics (Cambridge), yet looks nothing like Socrates. Fact and fiction included in various gent’s and women’s magazines, ezines and anthologies. Likes pseudonyms and green tea.
Jen Campbell is from the north-east of England and now lives in London. She's a published poet and short story writer, and also author of Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops (Constable and Robinson, 2012).
Jennifer Domingo is new to the pleasures of haiku. She hopes to continue to learn to master this very intricate and delicate form of poetry. She also enjoys people watching, fiction writing, day dreaming and blogging.
JL Merrow is that rare beast, an English person who refuses to drink tea. She writes across genres, with a preference for contemporary gay romance and the paranormal, and is frequently accused of humour.
Twice-nominated for a Pushcart, Jonathan Greenhause is the author of a chapbook, Sebastian’s Relativity (published by Anobium Books), and has recently appeared in The Believer, Fjords, Going Down Swinging, Water~Stone Review, and others. He was a runner-up in the 2012 Georgetown Review Prize and a semi-finalist for the 2011 Paumanok Poetry Award.
Kruti Kothari is a
techie who prefers to program her life through different strokes and
shades. Sketching and illustrating stories is not only a passion but an
escape route from boring codes.
Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in decomP, TenPagePress, Wigleaf, Metazen, and elsewhere. He is the author of the eBooks, Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction and You Never Die in Wholes.
Lily Mulholland
is an Australian short story writer who lives and works in Canberra,
Australia, although her soul resides just outside of Hobart, Tasmania,
the most beautiful place in the universe. Lily hopes to reunite body and
spirit within the next three years. Until then, she calls Canberra
home.
Lisa Scullard, from the UK, wrote her first novel, Living Hell, at the age of 18. She studied martial arts for 22 years, including competing in regional and British competitions.
Having worked in various jobs including as a ceramic artist, nanny, bartender, motorcycle mechanic, nursing assistant and nightclub bouncer, Lisa now writes and edits full-time. Follow Lisa on Twitter and visit her blog.
Liz Haigh lives in the north west of England with her husband, two children, one horse and two guinea pigs. She works at a university library, which is her dream job, because she loves books. She taught English for two years in Japan after graduating from university. She remembers the time very fondly and is still in contact with good friends there. Liz has had had several short stories and poems published and is currently working on a novel for young adults.
Marcus Speh is a German writer who lives in Berlin. His short fiction has been published in elimae, Mad Hatter’s Review, kill author, PANK and elsewhere.
He’s been nominated for a Micro Award, two Pushcart Prizes, two Best of the Net awards and two Million Writers Awards, and was longlisted for the Paris Literary Prize. He's never been to Japan, but would like to go there one day.
When Marianne Betterly isn’t hip hop dancing, baking
quiches or traveling the world in search of the best cappuccino, she’s
writing poetry. She has been published in “Hot Flashes,” “Hot Flashes 2:
More Sexy Little Stories and Poems,” “The Legendary (Slam issue),” “The
Green Silk Journal,” “Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An
Anthology of Women’s Poetry” and “The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal.”
She has received poetry awards from the Dancing Poetry Festival and
Writers Digest. She lives in Kensington, CA.
Mark Kerstetter is restoring an old house in Florida. His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Jerry Jazz Musician, Unlikely 2.0, Evergreen Review and other journals. Mark is the former poetry editor of Escape into Life.
Martin Elster author of There’s a Dog in the Heavens!, is also a composer and serves as percussionist for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poems have appeared in journals including The Chimaera, The Flea, Lucid Rhythms, Scarlet Literary Magazine, Soundzine, Thema, Victorian Violet Press, and in the anthology Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Poetry Award.
Marylee MacDonald is the winner of the Barry Hannah Prize, the Matt Clark Prize, the ALR Fiction Award, and Rash Award. Her stories have appeared in The Yalobusha Review, American Literary Review, The Broad River Review, StoryQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, and Ruminate. “Ambassador” first appeared in The Briar Cliff Review.
Michelle Goode is a writer, script reader, editor and proofreader from Bedfordshire in the UK. Despite having gained a degree in French and Fine Art, a love of writing and editing has won her heart. It was during a year-long trip to Australia in 2008 that Michelle first dabbled with writing and found her calling.
During the past four years she’s had a comedy radio sketch and four comedy web show episodes produced, two short stories published by Ether Books and has been a finalist for the prestigious Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award. She is a script reader for The London Screenwriter's Festival, Hollywood-based Screenplayreaders, New Writing South and for private clients via her Writesofluid script reading and editing service.
Moxie Mezcal is the author of the postmodern pulp novel CONCRETE UNDERGROUND, available as a free download. Moxie’s works are bawdy pulp frivolities masquerading as high art and should under no circumstances be taken seriously. Moxie lives under an assumed name in San Jose, California.
Naomi Houser is a writer, a student, an actress, a singer, a violinist and a
mother as well as a photographer for fun. She pursues the beauty in life where
she can find it and takes each day as they come. She sends out her deepest
sympathies to those who lost loved ones in this horrific tragedy.
Nina Adel – writer, singer-songwriter, educator and teaching artist - was educated at the Berklee College of Music (vocal performance, composition), University of New Mexico (Spanish, English, TESOL) and Belmont University (MA in English/Creative Writing). She received training in aesthetic education from the Leonard Bernstein Center and The Wolf Trap Foundation She has worked as a Spanish-English-Portuguese translator, released three studio-length recordings of original music and founded and directed an arts-based nonprofit community organization. Amongsther recent published works are fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, music, translations and academic articles in the Louisiana Folklife Journal 100 Stories For Haiti, the Tennessean, Belmont Literary Journal, Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies and Poets for Living Water. She has personal ties to Japan, where she lived, recorded and taught in the past. Amongst her areas of interest are identity, neurodiversity and communication, community-based arts development and the environment. She lives, teaches and writes in Nashville, Tennessee., where she lives with her two children.
Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer from the island of Cyprus. She is the author of three collections of poetry and two books of short stories, Ledra Street and Girl, Wolf, Bones. Her work has been published in Israel, the UK, the USA, Australia and elsewhere.
Oonah Joslin was born in Ballymena Northern Ireland and lives in Northumberland, England. She is editor of e-zine Every Day Poets, three times winner of MicroHorror and twice honoree in Binnacle Ultra Shorts Competition. Her novella, A Genie in a Jam, is serialised at Bewildering Stories where it won a place in the Mariner’s Review 2010. You can find out more about Oonah along with updates to her work at Parallel Oonahverse
Pushpi Bagchi is a Communication Designer and is particularly interested in integrating design and education. Her undergrad thesis The Garrulous Gastronaut attempted to introduce children to sustainability and was featured in several national publications. This reinforced her desire to explore whimsical methods of introducing children and adults to current issues that affect our lives.
Raven Dane is the UK-based author of the Legacy of the Dark Kind series, fantasy spoof, The Unwise Woman of Fuggis Mire, and steampunk novel, Cyrus Darian and the Technomicron. She has many short stories published, including one in a celebration of forty years of the British Fantasy Society.
Robert J. McCarter lives in the mountains of Arizona with his wife and dog. Although he currently makes his living as a computer programmer, his heart has always been that of an artist. Whether acting, taking pictures, producing fractal art, or writing he finds his greatest joy in creativity.
Robert’s first novel, Shuffled Off: A Ghost’s Memoir is available now. “The wry humor and raw emotional truth of JJ’s journey will have readers rooting for him from death to eternity.” -- Kirkus Review
Sessha Batto is a sword-carrying Buddhist writer of angsty homoerotic fiction. She turned to writing full time after a twenty year stint in video production editing, scripting and creating motion graphics. Originally from Belfast, she lives in the States with her husband, son, very old cat and too many swords.
Sharon Ratheiser took “O” level art in England and has lived
in Vienna, Austria, since 1968 where she has had solo and group
exhibitions. She has done correspondence courses in drawing and
calligraphy and has attended art classes experimenting with a variety of
media (aquarelle, acrylics, oil, chalk pastel, ink) and painting a wide
range of themes (including natural history, still life, landscapes,
portraits, nudes, and some abstract).
Shkna 9 began painting in the summer of
2003, with a strong background in drawing. She has a fondness for
animals, astrology, consciousness, and espresso. She currently lives
north of Detroit with her fiancé and three cats.
silent lotus is a spiritual advisor, whose poetry has been published in Europe, England, America and Canada. He has resided for a significant portion of his life in the Caribbean and The Netherlands, and for the past eleven years has been living as well in Providence, RI, with the artist Nermin Kura.
Simon Paul Wilson
was born in England but decided to travel around Asia and forgot to go
back.
Currently living in Guangzhou, China, his writing has been deeply
influenced by Asian culture and authors such as Banana Yoshimoto, Haruki
Murakami, Xiaolu Guo and Yoko Ogawa.
His first book, ‘Yuko Zen Is Somewhere Else’, can be found on the
Authonomy website and has received high praise and gold medal status. He
is now working on a number of projects which go by the names of ‘See
You When the World Ends’, ‘We Are Blood’ and ‘GhostCityGirl’.
When not writing, Simon usually spends his time listening to very loud
music while playing air-guitar and other instruments.
American Suzanne Kamata has lived in Japan since 1988. She is the author of the novel, Losing Kei (Leapfrog Press, 2008) and the short story collection, The Beautiful One Has Come (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2011).
Sylvia Petter is an Australian writer based in Vienna. Her stories appear in her collections, The Past Present and Back Burning, as well as in the charity anthologies, 100 Stories for Haiti, 50 Stories for Pakistan and 100 Stories for Queensland. She has fond memories of her time in Kyoto in October 1994 when a postcard from Yomimono slipped under the door of her ryokan to say that a story of hers had been accepted. It was her first print publication.
Ted Taylor, a graduate of University of Arizona's esteemed Creative Writing Program, has work appearing frequently in Kyoto Journal, Kansai Time Out, The Icebox Haiku Journal and Deep Kyoto, as well as in various print and online publications. A Contributing Editor at Kyoto Journal, he won the top prize in the Kyoto International Cultural Association Essay Contest. Currently residing in Japan, he is currently at work on a book about his walking the Shikoku 88 Temple Pilgrimage.
Tyson Bley walks dogs for a living. It is also his hobby, about which he likes to write. Writing is also his hobby. It is his hobby to write about his hobby. He is the author of Normal Service Will Resume Shortly, an entertaining book about dog walking. Several other books on this topic have also been published by him. He likes to write less formally, and more hobbyistically, about walking dogs at his blog.
Uche Ogbuji was born in Calabar, Nigeria. He lived, among other places, in Egypt and England before settling near Boulder, Colorado where he lives with his wife and four children. Uche is a computer engineer (trained in Nigeria and the USA) and entrepreneur whose abiding passion is poetry. His poems, fusing his native Igbo culture, European Classicism, Western American setting, and Hip-Hop style, have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum, Corium Magazine, Soundzine, Lucid Rhythms, The Flea, IthacaLit, Unsplendid, String Poet, Mountain Gazette, The Raintown Review, Verse Wisconsin, YB Poetry and Scree. Keep up with him on twitter (@uogbuji).
Vaishali Shroff has been accused of having a long standing affair with her pen. From having poetry published in newspapers as a teenager to writing movie scripts for animation studios, over a dozen stories for Chicken Soup anthologies by Westland Ltd., articles in various parenting magazines, children's stories filmed on www.smories.com, stories and poetry for the English Literature curriculum of the CBSE Education Board, India's Central Board for Secondary Education, she is waiting with twiddling thumbs for the release of her first illustrated book for children with Pratham Books.She also runs a reading and story-telling club for children and uses her toddler as an inspiration to see the world from a whole new perspective.
Vesna McMaster grew up “abroad”, and took English Literature at Cambridge. She brought out a collection of short stories in 2003, and has had numerous competition successes and publications ( www.vesnamcmaster.com.) She spent 10 years in Sendai, the tsunami epicentre, and is particularly glad to be part of this Anthology.
W.F. Lantry, a native of San Diego, holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He taught for many years in Europe, and still reminisces about the gorgeous view of the Mediterranean from his classroom window. His publication credits encompass print and online journals and anthologies in more than twenty countries on four continents. Recent honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Editors' Poetry Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (in Israel), and Atlanta Review International Publication Prize. The Language of Birds (Finishing Line Press 2011), is his lyric retelling of Attar’s Conference of the Birds. He currently works in Washington, DC, and is a contributing editor of Umbrella: A Journal of Poetry and Kindred Prose.
Alon Adika lived in Japan for a number of years during which he began learning calligraphy under Nakayama Taigan of Kobe. In addition to calligraphy, he is also interested in photography and writing. He currently resides in New York City.
Andrew Stancek's recent writing has appeared in The Linnet's Wings,
Istanbul Literary Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Prime Number Magazine, River Poets Journal, Camroc Press Review, Orion Headless, Connotation Press, Long Story Short and Thunderclap Magazine, among others. THIS Literary Magazine has nominated him for a Pushcart Prize.
Istanbul Literary Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Prime Number Magazine, River Poets Journal, Camroc Press Review, Orion Headless, Connotation Press, Long Story Short and Thunderclap Magazine, among others. THIS Literary Magazine has nominated him for a Pushcart Prize.
Annie Evett is a prolific scribbler of characters, weaver of stories, wields a balanced editing razor and a mean 6 HB pencil. She is a self proclaimed champion for the return of the short story in its own right. Annie infuses her eclectic writing and artwork with years of teaching, traversing the corporate landscape and motherhood. The creative energy behind the collaborative writing project CYOA , she has a string of short stories published, is a contributing editor in a variety of anthologies and has a number of brushpainting and sketches published.
Annie Gustin is Brazilian and has lived in the U.S. since childhood. She has received awards for her work and has published over sixty poems in literary journals, newspapers, and anthologies in the U.S., Japan, and Brazil. She taught Portuguese at Yale University, as well as ESL in the New Haven area, for many years, and, at present, is dedicating her time to creative writing and research. Annie misses her Japanese friends, and is thrilled to be a part of this international, artistic project.
Bard T. Fox Dunham resides outside of Philadelphia PA—author and historian. He’s published in over seventy international journals and anthologies and was a finalist in the Copper Nickel Annual Short Story Contest for his story, "The Lady Comes in the Night". He’s a cancer survivor. His friends call him fox, being his totem animal, and his motto is: Wrecking civilization one story at a time.
Berit Ellingsen is a Norwegian writer whose stories have appeared in many places, including Bluestem, Asian Cha, SmokeLong, Metazen and decomP.
She was a runner-up in Beate Sigriddaughter’s Ghost Story Competition
and a semi-finalist in the 2011 Rose Metal Press chapbook competition.
Berit’s novel, The Empty City, is about silence.
Billy O'Callaghan is the author of two collections, In Exile and In Too Deep, both published by Mercier Press. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, Confrontation, the Fiddlehead, Hayden's Ferry Review, the Los Angeles Review, Narrative Magazine, the Southeast Review and numerous other magazines and journals around the world. Bradley Wind is a writer and artist.
Prolific writer and artist Catherine Edmunds has more than 250 published works to her name. Solo works include the
poetry collection, wormwood, earth and
honey and the novel Small Poisons,
(Circaidy Gregory Press). Her latest novel, Serpentine
(BeWrite Books), explores what happens when art doesn’t only reflect life...
but is life itself.
Claire Beynon is a writer and artist.
Dan Holloway
runs the literary project eight cuts gallery, is a performance poet, and
is the author of the novels Songs from the Other Side of the Wall and
The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes.
Daniel Werneck is an artist and professor in Brazil. He takes
care of his wife and two kids, teaches animation at an university, makes
comics and is currently writing a book about French comics artist
Moebius. "When does he sleep?", you might ask. That is actually a pretty
good question, to which no one knows the answer.
Dave Bonta lives in Plummer's Hollow, Pennsylvania and online at Via Negativa. In college, he spent a formative year in the Kansai region of Japan, where he learned how to eat natto and lose staring contests with wooden bodhisattvas. His latest book is a collection of "inaction comics" called Words on the Street. David Church Rodríguez , AKA Rabbitz, started writing to avoid having to talk. He currently lives near Paris and has a day job making people happy. He writes ocasionally in Spanish and on twitter as @Rabbitz
Diane Stephenson lives in South Western Ontario, Canada. She has been a born again Christian for over 40 years. She worked in graphic arts for 15 years, has done many types of art throughout her life, but now pours her creativity into writing.
Donald Jacob Uitvlugt lives somewhere in the middle of the United States, but mostly in a haunted memory palace. He writes what he calls "haiku fiction" -- small stories with big impact. His work has most recently appeared in Cover of Darkness and the Journal of Unlikely Entomology, as well as the anthologies Sparks and 100 Horrors.
Historian, philosopher and humorist, Professor Dr. Art Bupkis,
is a published children’s story writer, novelist, playwright, and poet.
He, along with his unnatural twin sister, Sephone Zorro, is a literary
ward of L. R. Baxter, a professor at the University of Florida.
D.R.D. Bruton is both a graduate of Aberdeen University
and of Edinburgh College of Art. He won the HISSAC short story competition in
2008 with ‘Barken, Mad Sometimes’ and has had competition success with Fish Publishing
and in the Bridport Prize. He has also had short fiction published in a wide range of magazines including The Eildon Tree,
Vestal Review, Transmission, Cadenza, Storyglossia,
Ranfurly Review, The Smoking Poet, Flash Magazine, and Blood
Orange Review.
Elissa Gordon's poetry mines a childhood spent between New
York City and New England and a passion for travel and foreign language.
She has been anthologized in River Poets Journal, South Mountain Poets,
Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow Poets, The Stillwater Review, Short, Fast
& Deadly: Best of 2010, and Last Words (2011), appeared in print
issues of Windmills (Australia) and New York Underscore, a new magazine
about New York City life, and online in The Word Place, Shot Glass
Journal and Short, Fast and Deadly.
Having retired from the University of Kansas in 2001, Elizabeth Schultz now balances scholarship on Herman Melville and on the environment with writing essays and poems about the people and places she loves. She has published two critical works on Melville, two collections of poetry, one book of short stories, and published her scholarship and poetry widely. She has also co-organized an international conference on ecocriticism in Beijing and regularly participates in international ecocriticism conferences.
Esther Madden lives in Sandhurst, England and has had several short stories published nationally and won prizes for her writing. She is currently trying to save the world by promoting the value of supporting Reading FC through the Supporter’s Trust: STAR whilst also working as a Data Administrator for a company that aids agriculture around the globe.
Friederike Mayröcker, born 1924 in Vienna
where she lives, was since 1954 a close friend of Ernst Jandl. She has
published around 100 books and has received numerous prizes and awards,
including the Georg Büchner Prize in 2001. Her prose and poetry has been
translated into several languages. The following works appear in English: Night
Train (1992); Heiligenanstalt (1994); with each clouded peak (1998);
peck me up, my wing (2000); Raving Language: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (2007);
brütt, or The Sighing
Gardens (2008).
Fritz Bogott writes sincere lies about magic and technology. He lives with his wife and daughters on a hill in southeastern Minnesota.
Heidi Mannan lives in the mountains of North Idaho with her husband and son. When she's not busy recording the bizarre encounters of her imagination, she enjoys gluten-free cooking and nature walks. Iain Maloney lives in Aichi, Japan. He has a masters in Creative
Writing from the University of Glasgow and is a widely published writer
of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. His piece in this book is an extract
from the novel Dog Mountain, which is available to a good home.
Ida Černe is a Serbian immigrant, US ex-pat living in Vienna. A professional translator of poetry, fiction, screenplays (from German, Serbian or Russian into English), her published stories/poems span from The European to the New Southerner. A ghost writer, tour guide, chauffeur, and drama addict, she likes to take naps.
James Lloyd Davis, a veteran of the war in Vietnam and former electrician, ship builder, ironworker and engineer currently lives in Ohio. He has returned to writing after a long absence, is working on two novels, and experiments with short fiction in various forms.
Jan D. Hodge has hosted several Japanese students during his teaching career. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals and several textbooks and anthologies.
Jane Elizabeth Helen Roberts is a freelance writer living in Shropshire (UK) with a really long name. She has a degree in Classics (Cambridge), yet looks nothing like Socrates. Fact and fiction included in various gent’s and women’s magazines, ezines and anthologies. Likes pseudonyms and green tea.
Jen Campbell is from the north-east of England and now lives in London. She's a published poet and short story writer, and also author of Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops (Constable and Robinson, 2012).
Jennifer Domingo is new to the pleasures of haiku. She hopes to continue to learn to master this very intricate and delicate form of poetry. She also enjoys people watching, fiction writing, day dreaming and blogging.
JL Merrow is that rare beast, an English person who refuses to drink tea. She writes across genres, with a preference for contemporary gay romance and the paranormal, and is frequently accused of humour.
Kruti Kothari is a
techie who prefers to program her life through different strokes and
shades. Sketching and illustrating stories is not only a passion but an
escape route from boring codes. 
Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in decomP, TenPagePress, Wigleaf, Metazen, and elsewhere. He is the author of the eBooks, Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction and You Never Die in Wholes.
Lily Mulholland
is an Australian short story writer who lives and works in Canberra,
Australia, although her soul resides just outside of Hobart, Tasmania,
the most beautiful place in the universe. Lily hopes to reunite body and
spirit within the next three years. Until then, she calls Canberra
home.Lisa Scullard, from the UK, wrote her first novel, Living Hell, at the age of 18. She studied martial arts for 22 years, including competing in regional and British competitions.
Having worked in various jobs including as a ceramic artist, nanny, bartender, motorcycle mechanic, nursing assistant and nightclub bouncer, Lisa now writes and edits full-time. Follow Lisa on Twitter and visit her blog.
Liselotte Pope-Hoffmann
is a part-time lecturer in the English Department at Vienna University;
she did a PhD on Doris Lessing; and has a wide
range of teaching experience in Austria,
UK, Ireland and Kenya. Fields of interest: modern
literature, gender studies, ESL. A translator and ESL-materials writer, she
lives in the Vienna Woods with her husband and two daughters.
Marcus Speh is a German writer who lives in Berlin. His short fiction has been published in elimae, Mad Hatter’s Review, kill author, PANK and elsewhere.
He’s been nominated for a Micro Award, two Pushcart Prizes, two Best of the Net awards and two Million Writers Awards, and was longlisted for the Paris Literary Prize. He's never been to Japan, but would like to go there one day.
When Marianne Betterly isn’t hip hop dancing, baking
quiches or traveling the world in search of the best cappuccino, she’s
writing poetry. She has been published in “Hot Flashes,” “Hot Flashes 2:
More Sexy Little Stories and Poems,” “The Legendary (Slam issue),” “The
Green Silk Journal,” “Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An
Anthology of Women’s Poetry” and “The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal.”
She has received poetry awards from the Dancing Poetry Festival and
Writers Digest. She lives in Kensington, CA.
Mark Kerstetter is restoring an old house in Florida. His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Jerry Jazz Musician, Unlikely 2.0, Evergreen Review and other journals. Mark is the former poetry editor of Escape into Life.
Martin Elster author of There’s a Dog in the Heavens!, is also a composer and serves as percussionist for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poems have appeared in journals including The Chimaera, The Flea, Lucid Rhythms, Scarlet Literary Magazine, Soundzine, Thema, Victorian Violet Press, and in the anthology Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Poetry Award. 
Michelle Goode is a writer, script reader, editor and proofreader from Bedfordshire in the UK. Despite having gained a degree in French and Fine Art, a love of writing and editing has won her heart. It was during a year-long trip to Australia in 2008 that Michelle first dabbled with writing and found her calling.During the past four years she’s had a comedy radio sketch and four comedy web show episodes produced, two short stories published by Ether Books and has been a finalist for the prestigious Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award. She is a script reader for The London Screenwriter's Festival, Hollywood-based Screenplayreaders, New Writing South and for private clients via her Writesofluid script reading and editing service.
Moxie Mezcal is the author of the postmodern pulp novel CONCRETE UNDERGROUND, available as a free download. Moxie’s works are bawdy pulp frivolities masquerading as high art and should under no circumstances be taken seriously. Moxie lives under an assumed name in San Jose, California.
Nina Adel – writer, singer-songwriter, educator and teaching artist - was educated at the Berklee College of Music (vocal performance, composition), University of New Mexico (Spanish, English, TESOL) and Belmont University (MA in English/Creative Writing). She received training in aesthetic education from the Leonard Bernstein Center and The Wolf Trap Foundation She has worked as a Spanish-English-Portuguese translator, released three studio-length recordings of original music and founded and directed an arts-based nonprofit community organization. Amongsther recent published works are fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, music, translations and academic articles in the Louisiana Folklife Journal 100 Stories For Haiti, the Tennessean, Belmont Literary Journal, Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies and Poets for Living Water. She has personal ties to Japan, where she lived, recorded and taught in the past. Amongst her areas of interest are identity, neurodiversity and communication, community-based arts development and the environment. She lives, teaches and writes in Nashville, Tennessee., where she lives with her two children.
Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer from the island of Cyprus. She is the author of three collections of poetry and two books of short stories, Ledra Street and Girl, Wolf, Bones. Her work has been published in Israel, the UK, the USA, Australia and elsewhere.
Pushpi Bagchi is a Communication Designer and is particularly interested in integrating design and education. Her undergrad thesis The Garrulous Gastronaut attempted to introduce children to sustainability and was featured in several national publications. This reinforced her desire to explore whimsical methods of introducing children and adults to current issues that affect our lives. 
Raven Dane is the UK-based author of the Legacy of the Dark Kind series, fantasy spoof, The Unwise Woman of Fuggis Mire, and steampunk novel, Cyrus Darian and the Technomicron. She has many short stories published, including one in a celebration of forty years of the British Fantasy Society. 
Robert J. McCarter lives in the mountains of Arizona with his wife and dog. Although he currently makes his living as a computer programmer, his heart has always been that of an artist. Whether acting, taking pictures, producing fractal art, or writing he finds his greatest joy in creativity.Robert’s first novel, Shuffled Off: A Ghost’s Memoir is available now. “The wry humor and raw emotional truth of JJ’s journey will have readers rooting for him from death to eternity.” -- Kirkus Review
Sessha Batto is a sword-carrying Buddhist writer of angsty homoerotic fiction. She turned to writing full time after a twenty year stint in video production editing, scripting and creating motion graphics. Originally from Belfast, she lives in the States with her husband, son, very old cat and too many swords. 
Sharon Ratheiser took “O” level art in England and has lived
in Vienna, Austria, since 1968 where she has had solo and group
exhibitions. She has done correspondence courses in drawing and
calligraphy and has attended art classes experimenting with a variety of
media (aquarelle, acrylics, oil, chalk pastel, ink) and painting a wide
range of themes (including natural history, still life, landscapes,
portraits, nudes, and some abstract).
Shkna 9 began painting in the summer of
2003, with a strong background in drawing. She has a fondness for
animals, astrology, consciousness, and espresso. She currently lives
north of Detroit with her fiancé and three cats.
silent lotus is a spiritual advisor, whose poetry has been published in Europe, England, America and Canada. He has resided for a significant portion of his life in the Caribbean and The Netherlands, and for the past eleven years has been living as well in Providence, RI, with the artist Nermin Kura.
Simon Paul Wilson
was born in England but decided to travel around Asia and forgot to go
back.
Currently living in Guangzhou, China, his writing has been deeply
influenced by Asian culture and authors such as Banana Yoshimoto, Haruki
Murakami, Xiaolu Guo and Yoko Ogawa.
His first book, ‘Yuko Zen Is Somewhere Else’, can be found on the
Authonomy website and has received high praise and gold medal status. He
is now working on a number of projects which go by the names of ‘See
You When the World Ends’, ‘We Are Blood’ and ‘GhostCityGirl’.
When not writing, Simon usually spends his time listening to very loud
music while playing air-guitar and other instruments.
American Suzanne Kamata has lived in Japan since 1988. She is the author of the novel, Losing Kei (Leapfrog Press, 2008) and the short story collection, The Beautiful One Has Come (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2011).
Sylvia Petter is an Australian writer based in Vienna. Her stories appear in her collections, The Past Present and Back Burning, as well as in the charity anthologies, 100 Stories for Haiti, 50 Stories for Pakistan and 100 Stories for Queensland. She has fond memories of her time in Kyoto in October 1994 when a postcard from Yomimono slipped under the door of her ryokan to say that a story of hers had been accepted. It was her first print publication.
Ted Taylor, a graduate of University of Arizona's esteemed Creative Writing Program, has work appearing frequently in Kyoto Journal, Kansai Time Out, The Icebox Haiku Journal and Deep Kyoto, as well as in various print and online publications. A Contributing Editor at Kyoto Journal, he won the top prize in the Kyoto International Cultural Association Essay Contest. Currently residing in Japan, he is currently at work on a book about his walking the Shikoku 88 Temple Pilgrimage.Tyson Bley walks dogs for a living. It is also his hobby, about which he likes to write. Writing is also his hobby. It is his hobby to write about his hobby. He is the author of Normal Service Will Resume Shortly, an entertaining book about dog walking. Several other books on this topic have also been published by him. He likes to write less formally, and more hobbyistically, about walking dogs at his blog.Uche Ogbuji was born in Calabar, Nigeria. He lived, among other places, in Egypt and England before settling near Boulder, Colorado where he lives with his wife and four children. Uche is a computer engineer (trained in Nigeria and the USA) and entrepreneur whose abiding passion is poetry. His poems, fusing his native Igbo culture, European Classicism, Western American setting, and Hip-Hop style, have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum, Corium Magazine, Soundzine, Lucid Rhythms, The Flea, IthacaLit, Unsplendid, String Poet, Mountain Gazette, The Raintown Review, Verse Wisconsin, YB Poetry and Scree. Keep up with him on twitter (@uogbuji).Vaishali Shroff has been accused of having a long standing affair with her pen. From having poetry published in newspapers as a teenager to writing movie scripts for animation studios, over a dozen stories for Chicken Soup anthologies by Westland Ltd., articles in various parenting magazines, children's stories filmed on www.smories.com, stories and poetry for the English Literature curriculum of the CBSE Education Board, India's Central Board for Secondary Education, she is waiting with twiddling thumbs for the release of her first illustrated book for children with Pratham Books.She also runs a reading and story-telling club for children and uses her toddler as an inspiration to see the world from a whole new perspective.
Vesna McMaster grew up “abroad”, and took English Literature at Cambridge. She brought out a collection of short stories in 2003, and has had numerous competition successes and publications ( www.vesnamcmaster.com.) She spent 10 years in Sendai, the tsunami epicentre, and is particularly glad to be part of this Anthology.
