WORDS @ WORK:
Building Imaginations
WORDS @ WORK:
Building Imaginations
**FIRST PLACE**
Trisha Rickey lives in Durango, Colorado. She loves hanging out with her dogs, traveling with her partner, and wandering anywhere there are woods and mountains. She works as a community mental health counselor and teaches psychology at a local community college. Trisha enjoys writing short stories and poetry, and is currently working on her debut novel. As a recent empty-nester, she has just begun to seek a home for some of her writing and was recently published in the Big Wing Review.
**SECOND PLACE**
Ella St. John’s narratives blend the textures of rural life and offer an exploration of love, inevitable loss, and renewal. She holds a BS in Mathematics and a love for story drawn from ordinary life. Her work has been recognized in the Bright Flash Literary Review. She lives with her wife and their dog Fred, splitting time between Los Angeles and the mountains of North Idaho.
**THIRD PLACE**
Vanessa Orlando is a two-time recipient of the Maryland Writers Association Short Fiction Prize and a Georgia Associated Press Feature writing award. She was one of five writers selected for the Manitoba Writer's Guild's Emerging Writers Program . Her short story "When Sara Looks Up" was made into a short film by Columbia College Chicago. Her most recent work has been published in Enhanced Gravity: More Fiction by Washington Area Women (Paycock Press, Arlington) and News Lines from the Old Line State (Maryland Writers Association).
Michael Gigandet is a retired lawyer living on a farm in Tennessee. His stories have
appeared in Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Bending Genres, Quarencia Press, Panoplyzine and Transfigured Lit and in anthologies by Great Weather for Media, Palm Sized Press, Pure Slush and Down In The Dirt.
Scribes Valley Publishing has included Steve Putnam’s short fiction in a number of its anthologies. His work has also appeared in Main Street Rag and Whiskey Island, Magazine. Novel manuscripts, Academy of Reality and Loose Horse Lost, were both finalists in Faulkner-Wisdom Competitions in New Orleans. Madville Publishing recently accepted Academy of Reality. It will be available in October 2024. Facebook page—Steve Putnam Author—will provide updates
Brenda Galloway Conway is a life-long Midwesterner. She currently lives in the Ozarks with her husband and the flying squirrels that visit most nights. She writes poetry, short stories and children’s books. Brenda loves small towns, nonprofits and nature.
Her first poetry collection, Spirit Animal Lessons is in the publication process. Brenda was a recent semifinalist for her humorous short story "Call Your Mama" in Tulip Tree Publishing’s Humor Story Contest. Brenda’s poetry was chosen for the 2023 Detroit Lakes Flowerpot Poetry Festival which melds literary art and public art into an accessible, temporary art walk.
Richard Risemberg was born into a Jewish-Italian household in Argentina, and brought to Los Angeles to escape the fascist regime. He has lived there since, except for a digression to Paris in the turbulent Eighties. He attended Pepperdine University on a scholarship won in a writing competition, but left in his last year to work in jobs from gritty to glitzy, starting at a motorcycle shop and progressing through offices, retail, an independent design and manufacturing business, and most recently a stint managing an adult literacy program at a library branch in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city. All has become source material for his writing.
He has pursued journalism, photography, and editorial writing, which, combined with his years in motorcycle culture, introduced him to the darker side of the dream. His fiction concentrates on working-class life, homelessness, and cultures of violence, and the indifference of the Dominant Paradigm to it all.
Mr. Risemberg has published stories, poems, essays, editorials, and articles in numerous edited publications; you may view the current list at https://crowtreebooks.com/richard-risemberg-publications/
Brian Sluga is a customer experience consultant, author, and avid bicyclist. Brian has a Bachelor’s degree in communications from Bradley University and in December 2023 received an MFA in creative writing at Lindenwood University.
When Brian is not daydreaming about his next book or article, you can find him cooking gourmet Italian cuisine, laughing at Progressive Insurance commercials and listening to 80’s music.
Brian has self-published two Amazon books. My first book Not Just My Poetry It's Your Life, Too was published in 2019. His new Amazon published book, From Now to The End of Time is his 2nd book.
Brian is currently working on a non-fiction cancer memoir manuscript called The Shriek I Do Remember. It is his real-life story of surviving testicular cancer at age twenty.
Naples, Florida
Jay Goldin works in academia and journalism. He has published poetry, fiction, film essays, book reviews, and photographs.
Fred Thornburg has been observing people and situations and twisting them into short stories for over forty years. He has been published in various anthologies and released a volume of his favorites in a collection titled “A Book Full Of Breaths”. He lives a simple life in central Michigan where he is no doubt eager to get his current story from the frontal lobes to the finger tips.
Richard Vetere co-wrote the movie The Third Miracle, which is a screenplay adaptation of his own novel, published by Simon & Schuster. It was produced by Francis Ford Coppola, directed by Agnieszka Holand, and stars Ed Harris and Anne Heche and released by Sony Picture Classics. It is now streaming on Tubi TV. Richard Vetere’s teleplay adaptation of his published stage play The Marriage Fool, starring Walter Matthau, Carol Burnet and John Stamos, is now streaming on Amazon. It was the highest rated CBS TV movie ever viewed when it first aired in 1998. He wrote the cult classic film Vigilante starring Robert Forester and he wrote the screenplay adaptation of his own play How to Go Out on a Date in Queens starring Jason Alexander and Ron Perlman. He also wrote the teleplay adaptation of his own stage play Hale the Hero! for the General Motors Playwrights Theater on A&E starring Elisabeth Shue. His screenplay Caravaggio, an adaptation of his own published stage play, won the Golden Palm Award for Best Screenplay at the Beverly Hills International Film Festival in 2021. He has twenty-four published plays and seven published novels including Champagne & Cocaine; The White Envelope; I, Human and most recently She’s Not There. His novel The Writers Afterlife, published in 2014, was called “a unique caper of magic realism” by Publishers Weekly. His new play Zaglada, was published by Dramatic Publishing in 2019 His Live Fast, Die Young & Leave a Good-Looking Corpse: a memoir of the 1970s was published in 2021. He has a master's degree in Comparative English Literature from Columbia University and has lectured on screenwriting and playwrighting in the master’s program at NYU and lectures now at Queens College. In 2005, the Frank Melville Library at Stony Brook University created the Richard Vetere Collection, an archive of his work.
richardvetereauthor.com
As the daughter of an antiquarian book dealer, Taria grew up surrounded by far more books than is healthy for one person. After a Literature degree, a journalism course and some gratuitous vocabulary overuse, her stories have appeared in a Hagrid-sized handful of anthologies and have won enough literary prizes to fill his other hand. Despite this, she has no need as yet for larger millinery.
After dropping out of high school, Leslie Muzingo worked as a waitress, bartender, census taker, high-school teacher, shelter-aid in a battered woman's shelter, and an attorney. She made it through law school by sheer grit, her boyfriend's '56 red Ford pickup, and with one pair of blue jeans. No longer an attorney, most of her published stories can be found through Goodreads or Amazon Authors. She can also be followed on Twitter@Sootfoot5. Stories not so easily found were published by Literary Mama, Fudoki Magazine, and Pink Panther Magazine. She lives in Mobile, Alabama in winter and Prince Edward Island, Canada in the summer with her husband, John, and her dog, Esther.
The Law of Unintended Consequences is a theme in all of Marlene’s work. To date she and her geneticist brother Dr. Hank Fabian have co-authored “Moon Life,” a science fiction adventure searching for extraterrestrial life on Jupiter’s moon Europa. She has also published a first person POV novella “Elderchild” detailing an Alzheimer’s patient’s descent into the rabbit hole of past melting into the present, as well as a poetry collection, “Survival Poems to Help You through the Day.” Marlene and her longtime writing partner Alice Hill have written two regionally produced plays and are currently editing a novel based on the interaction of humans and wildlife. As president of the nonprofit The I Will Projects, Marlene also promotes environmental sustainability through education.
Rebecca Evans writes the difficult, the heart-full, the guidebooks for survivors. Her debut memoir in verse, Tangled by Blood, bridges motherhood and betrayal, untangling wounds and restorying what it means to be a mother. She’s a memoirist, essayist, and poet, infusing her love of empowerment with craft. She teaches high school teens in the Juvie system through journaling and art projects. Rebecca is also disabled, a military veteran, and shares space with four Newfoundlands and her sons. She co-hosts Radio Boise’s Writer to Writer show on Stray theater and does her best writing in a hidden cove beneath her stairway.
Her poems and essays have appeared in Narratively, The Rumpus, Hypertext Magazine, War, Literature & the Arts, The Limberlost Review, and more, along with a handful of anthologies.
She's earned two MFAs, one in creative nonfiction, the other in poetry, University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. She’s co-edited an anthology of poems, When There Are Nine, a tribute to the life and achievements of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Moon Tide Press, 2022). Along with her full-length poetry collection, Tangled by Blood (Moon Tide Press. 2023), Rebecca has authored Safe-Handling, forthcoming in 2024 (Moon Tide Press).
For more information on her work and workshops, visit: https://rebeccaevanswriter.com/
Joseph Salerno works as a part-time office manager for a small accounting firm. He has a BA in Psychology from SUNY - Empire State College and he is a proud member of the Long Island Writers' Guild.
His stories have been published on numerous occasions: Guilders '84 - The Literary Magazine of Hostra University (1984), Open Minds Quarterly (2014), and Scribes Valley Publishing anthologies 2019-2023.
Joseph is an enthusiastic board game player (quite ruthless at backgammon), and he lives with about a dozen large houseplants three blocks from the New York City limits.
**Please note: Ava's story will not appear in the anthology**
Ava Ming’s short stories have been featured in several print and online anthologies; Midnight&Indigo, Birmingham Nouveau, Original Skin, Whispers in the Walls, Chemistry, The Bangalore Review, Twist and Twain, Junoberry Books and The London Independent Short Story Prize 2024.
Her short story, "The Hijab" was broadcast on BBC Radio where she was later BBC Radio Drama Writer in Residence. She’s had three plays produced for the stage, one of which features in the online archive; Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) at the University of Hull and, was a runner-up for the Alfred Fagon award. She was also writer and coach for the English Heritage project; Interwoven Freedom, Abolitionist Women in Birmingham.
Ava lives in Birmingham in the UK and is currently working on two writing projects; a short story anthology and a novella with the hopeful but ambitious goal of publishing both in 2024.
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