Patrice Fulcher is an Associate Professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School. Prior to teaching, Patrice served as a criminal defense attorney specializing in indigent defense and has always been a staunch advocate for the poor and disenfranchised. She worked as a Senior Staff Attorney for the Georgia Capital Defender, successfully litigating death penalty cases; a Senior Staff Attorney for the Fulton County Public Defender Office, handling all major felony cases; was the CEO of her own firm, The Fulcher Law Group, Inc., representing clients with misdemeanor, serious felonies, and civil cases; and a Senior Staff and Supervising Attorney for the Fulton County Conflict Defender, representing adults and juveniles charged as adults. She has also worked for The Southern Center for Human Rights, conducted training programs for the Fulton County Public Defender Office, and is an instructor for the Southern Public Defender Training Center. She earned her B.A. from Howard University and her J.D. from Emory University School of Law.
Besides being a poet, Kathleen L. Housley is an independent writer and researcher with strong interdisciplinary knowledge spanning American history, art, music, science, medicine and theology. She doesn't try to keep her interests separate because she finds cross-fertilization to be essential to creativity. For example, in her book of poetry Firmament (Higganum Hill Books, 2007), she explores the borderlands between science and religion. A poem titled "Driving the Ambulance with Robert Frost" published in the Winter 2009 issue of the journal Ars Medica combines her experience as a volunteer emergency medical technician with her knowledge of Robert Frost's poetry. An essay in The Global Spiral, the online journal of the Metanexus Institute (Dec. 2009) is titled "Seeing the Thunder: Insight and Intuition in Science, Mathematics and Religion." It is always in the borderlands between disciplines that Housley finds her most intriguing ideas. She is also the author of three biographies of uniquely creative women: the Smith sisters, abolitionists, suffragists and Bible translators; Emily Hall Tremaine, a well-known collector of 20th century art; and Perle Fine, a brilliant but underappreciated abstract expressionist painter. Her book of essays Keys to the Kingdom: Reflections on Music and the Mind was published by the Wising Up Press Writers Collective in 2010 and her book of poetry, Epiphanies, in 2013.
Kerry Langan, the Chair of the Collective Editorial Board, is a fiction writer who loves reading and writing short stories. She notes, "I read Guy de Maussapant's 'The Necklace' in seventh grade and was hooked.'" Her most pleasurable hobby is reading award-winning short fiction anthologies and collections authored by her favorite writers (of which there are many!) Her own short fiction has appeared in more than 40 literary journals published in the United States, Canada, and Asia. She is grateful to have been published in Other Voices, StoryQuarterly, American Literary Review, The Antigonish Review, Rosebud, Thema, The Seattle Review, The Cimarron Review, Fireweed, Yuan Yang, and the many other small presses working tirelessly to promote literature as an essential element of contemporary life. Kerry is also delighted with the accessibility of online journals and their power to encourage both writing and reading. She has been published in several, including Literary Mama and JMWW. Kerry's non-fiction has appeared in Working Mother. Her book, Only Beautiful & Other Stories, was the first book published by the Wising Up Writers Collective and she published her second short story collection, Live Your Life & Other Stories with the Collective in 2012. She is a co-editor of the recent Wising Up Anthology, SHIFTING BALANCE SHEETS:Women's Stories of Naturalized Citizenship & Cultural Attachment. (www.oberlin.net/~langan)
MICHELE MARKARIAN
Michele Markarian is a writer and actor based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her short plays have been presented by the Boston Theatre Marathon, the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport, YAT in South-West London, the Fine Arts Association of Ohio, American Globe Theatre in Manhattan, Brooklyn College, and the Minnesota Shorts Festival of Plays, among others. Her ten-minute play Old Friends was a finalist for a 2006 Heideman Award from Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, and her play Parents of Typical Children was shortlisted at the Gold Dust Competition for Playwrights and shown at the London Theatre, New Cross in July of 2012. Her plays have been published by Dramatic Publishing, Heuer Publishing, and the Book of Estrogenius. Her play Whose Bag Is It Anyway? will be published by Smith and Kraus in the anthology The Best Ten Minute Plays of 2014. Her short fiction can be found in the Wising Up anthologies Families: the Frontline of Pluralism, View From the Bed; View from the Bedside, and Daring to Repair. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild.
KAT MEADS
Kat Meads has published numerous books of poetry and prose, including Little Pockets of Alarm, Not Waving, The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan, Born Southern and Restless, and For You, Madam Lenin. Her most recent book 2:12 a.m.: Essays was published by the Stephen F. Austin University Press. She has received writing awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Silicon Valley Arts Council and writing residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, Millay Colony, and the Montalvo Center for the Arts. Her short story “The End of Something (Maybe Love)” won Chelsea magazine’s national fiction competition, and her short plays have been produced in Los Angeles and New York. She teaches in Oklahoma City University’s low-residency Red Earth MFA program. (www.katmeads.com)
SHAHIDAH H.
MUHAMMAD
Shahidah Muhammad lives in
Atlanta. A Muslim, she is a thoughtful and tireless advocate for positive
interfaith relations and is active in numerous interfaith groups.She is the mother of seven accomplished
adults, the grandmother of eight. Over the past few years, she accompanied her
husband Sherif as he struggled with the many serious complications of diabetes
- kidney failure, open heart surgery, and amputations - a faith journey that
has expanded her interest in energy healing and spiritual companioning through
illness for caretakers as well as people with fatal disease.
Poet Maria Nazos was
raised by a sea captain and speech pathologist in Athens, Greece and Joliet,
Illinois. She received her MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her
chapbook, Trailer Park Heart, was
selected by Marge Piercy as runner-up for the 2010 Providence Athenaeum
Philbrick Poetry Project Award. She has received scholarships from The
Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, The Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and
a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. Her work won the Fall 2009 Poetry
Competition held by The Alabama State Poetry Society. She attended the Iowa
Writers' Workshop. Her work is published or forthcoming in Inkwell, The
Saranac Review, The anthology Wait
a Minute, I Have to Take off My Bra,The Neuropsychiatry of Poetry,The
Boxcar Poetry Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, The New York
Quarterly, Harpur Palate, The New Plains Review, The Sycamore Review, Main
Street Rag, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Tar River Poetry, and the anthology Double Lives, Reinvention & Those We Leave Behind. She lives
and writes in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her first poetry book, A Hymn that Meanders, has just been published through the Wising Up Writers Collective.www.marianazos.com.
LILIA TRÁPAGA TENNEY
Lilia is the founder and director of the theater group El Caldero (The Cauldron) whose goal is to make poetry and literature accesible for younger Mexicans. Born in Mexico City, she has been a resident of San Miguel de Allende for 25 years. She has a degree in Political Science from Universidad Iberoamericana, and a post graduate specialization in Rural Development from the Public Administration Institute in Paris, France. She also studied drama at the University Centre of Theater, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Her main interest is the Spanish language. As well as being a playwright, she is a translator, and a Spanish teacher, and has given a number of talks about literature for the Cervantes Everywhere Festival. El Caldero, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, has received two grants from the Culture Institute of Guanajuato State.
Phyllis Langton, Professor Emerita, George Washington University, is the author of more than 25 books and articles. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA and is an active registered nurse, licensed from California for over 50 years. She enjoys volunteer work as a nurse with ALS patients. Her interest in creative non-fiction began in 2000 when her husband was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) and given six months to live. She kept a journal of their three-year journey until his death in 2003, which she has used to write the memoir, Last Flight Out: Living, Loving & Leaving. Three chapters of this memoir have been published in two anthologies: Illness & Grace, Terror & Transformation, and Love After 70. She is working on a second memoir, Sweet Abandon, the story of her childhood born in a Salvation Army Home and life in an orphanage. One chapter has been published in FAMILIES: The Front Line of Pluralism. She is a co-editor on the recent Wising Up Anthology, View from the Bed: View from the Bedside.Her memoir LAST FLIGHT OUT: LIVING, LOVING & LEAVING was published through the Collective in 2011.
