ONLY CONNECT
The 2007 Charlotte Writers' Club Anthology
ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-087-9
282 pages. $15
Fiction, Poetry, Creative Non-fiction.
Edited by Lisa Williams KlineAvailable September 1.
Introduction / Contents / Author Bios /
It’s a pleasure to present the third volume of the Charlotte Writers’ Club Anthology. Included are all winners and honorable mentions for contests over the past two years who wished to participate. Contests whose winners are featured in this anthology include the Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Story Contest, generously supported by Ed Simpson in his wife’s honor; the Katherine Osborne Nonfiction Contest, sponsored by Main Street Rag Publishing Company; the Anne Dowd Gillylen Quarles Fiction Contest, sponsored by Perrin Henderson; The Deane Ritch Lomax Poetry Contest, sponsored by John and Henry Lomax, the Children’s Story Contest, and the anonymously-funded Anthony Abbott Undergraduate Poetry Competition. This relatively new contest honors long-time member Dr. Anthony Abbott, poet and novelist who taught for many years at Davidson College, and who has given so much to the North Carolina writing community. The contest is open to full-time college students in North Carolina.
Each year the Charlotte Writers’ Club is proud to sponsor readers for the Central Piedmont Community College Literary Festival created by Irene Honeycutt. In this volume we’ve included poems by the fine poets who have represented us in that regard.
This year for the first time we opened submissions to the club at large and included a number of the stories, essays and poems that we received from the membership. Some of these pieces are reprints of favorites, while many are brand new. This volume represents the work of nearly half of our membership. The editorial committee deeply appreciates the support we’ve received from the membership on this anthology, from long-time members to new ones. The same way that some anthology editors “invite” respected authors to send pieces to their book, we did invite the members of the club’s Advisory Board to send their work, and we’re honored that all of them responded generously.
Heartfelt thanks go to all of those club members who served on the editorial committee and gave of their time to help shape this book—Ann Campanella, L.B. Green, Jerri McCloud, Danna Ray, Louise Rockwell, and Richard Allen Taylor. I’d also like to thank my colleague Betsy Thorpe, who offered the perspective of an experienced and objective outside editor. Thanks to M. Scott Douglass of Main Street Rag Publishing Company for working with us on this project once again. Finally, I’d like to thank my friend (and boss) Amy Rogers, publisher of Novello Festival Press, who has compiled several fine anthologies and offered me priceless practical advice as well as crucial moral support.
We chose the theme “Only connect…” for this anthology. I personally can’t “not write,” and the Charlotte Writers’ Club has given me a place to meet others who seem to have this same affliction! In this anthology, as in the club, writers who have been honing their craft for many decades can connect with those who have just discovered writing’s joys. All of us, whether we write for ourselves, or for publication, write in an attempt to connect with our own inner selves, and with this world we live in. I hope that this anthology helps us in that quest.
Lisa Williams Kline, Editor
I Fiction
Susan Woodring: “Radio Vision”
Kay McSpadden: “Communion”
Shelley W. Stout: “The Coachella Inn”
Elizabeth S. Hatley: “Lace-Curtained Windows”
Elaine St. Anne: “Cleaning Up”
Louisa Jones: “What’s Bad for You”
Maureen A. Sherbondy: “Head Above Water”
Nichole Gause: “Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone”
Betty Wilson Beamguard: “Connie Sue Confesses”
Lisa Williams Kline: “Take Me”
Betty Burgin Snow: “The Great Commission”
Judith Wright Aplin: “Rochester Proves Himself”
Nancy Thompson McGill: “Annie’s Christmas, 1939”
Annie Maier: “Final Gift”
Helen M. Copeland: “Lizard’s Leap”
Elaine Neil Orr: “The Hair Cut”
Carolyn Steele Agosta : “Water’s Edge”
II Poetry
Gilda Morina Syverson: “Juggling”
Blynn Field: “When Love Barely Lights the Way”
Richard Allen Taylor: “3”
Genie Cotner: “Heaven”
Barbara Conrad: “Paperwhites,” “Bodegones”
M. Scott Douglass: “America’s Crew Cut,” “A Seagull in Wyoming”
Ann Campanella: “Sunday Mornings,” “Motion”
Clarence Eden: “Blackberry Winter,” “Fall is Grand in New York,” “Rites of Passage”
Dede Wilson: “Day Moon,” “Noon-Wine Illusions”
Terri Wolfe: “A Month into Marriage”
Dannye Romine Powell: “Why I Miss Visiting My Mother-in-Law in Helena, Arkansas”
Diana Pinckney: “This is How I See Them”
Ione O’Hara: “Fifteenth Night of the Moon”
Anthony S. Abbott: “Poem in Two Voices”
Gail Peck: “At Rehab”
Irene Honeycutt: “Vintage Friends”
Louise Rockwell: “From Your Travels Abroad”
Joseph Spencer: “Reunion”
Sandy Hill: “Trophy”
John Clark: “You Ache”
Eleanor Riggins Brawley: “Swimming With My Daughter After Terrorists Attack London”
Rebecca Schenck: “My Last Aunt”
Bee Jay Gwennap: “Cleaning Under the Extra Bed”
Genie Cotner: “Daffodils”
Elizabeth Willoughby Swann: “Leash”
Alice Waugh Kallmerten: “To My Wife’s Mother”
Beth Cagle Burt: “Father’s Waning”
Mary Kratt: “Foolish Umbrella”
Sue Friday: “Big Al Taplet”
Dorothy J. Waterfill: “East”
Kristine Mossinghoff: “Cold Laundry Mountain”
Mary Ann Thomas: “Out, Out Damn Fat”
Mary Lou Hindley: “Feather Against Leaf”
Judy Goldman: “Last Night”Anthony Abbott Undergraduate Competition Winners
Jacob Joseph Bathanti: “The First Run After”
Kathrine M. Cays: “A Clement Touch”
Heather Collings: “Alcoholism Poster Child”
Sarah Cadence Hamm: “Into 89”
Kathryn Linn: “October”
Jon Robertson: “You Can’t Touch This: A True Hollywood Story”
Lauren Alston Smith: “Outside the Corriher-Linn-Black Library, a Frog”III NonFiction
Maureen Ryan Griffin: “Natalie Goldberg, Walt Whitman, and Me”
Caroline Castle Hicks: “Okra and the Meaning of Life”
Margaret G. Bigger: “Connections by Choice”
Danna Ray: “A Bowl of Beets”
Marisa Rosenfeld: “Miguel”
Lynn Gorski : “Winged Victory”
Andrew Kalnik: “Barefoot to the Shining Hill”
L.B. Green: “The Bed of My Mother’s Grief”
IV photographs
Gordon Schenck: “Wicker”
L.B. Green: “Morning Glory: Garden and Universe Series, 2004”
L.B. Green: “Canna: Garden and Universe Series, 2004”
M. Scott Douglass: “Almost Arrested”
Anthony S. Abbott is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Man Who (2005) and a novel, Leaving Maggie Hope (2003).
Carolyn Steele Agosta‘s short stories and essays have appeared online and in print in the U.S., U.K., Europe, and South America. One of her stories was aired on BBC Radio 4 and others have been on public radio for the deaf and made into short films.
Judith Wright Aplin is the mother of five sons (including identical twins), a grandmother to twelve, and a veteran of twenty-one years in the classroom. Judith writes poetry and children’s stories. She is a graduate of Pomona College, Claremont, California, with a BA in English and has a MS degree in Family and Child Development from Winthrop University. She is a native of Illinois and has lived in Rock Hill, South Carolina for 42 years.
Jacob Joseph Bathanti was born in Anson County on June 19, 1987, to Joseph and Joan Bathanti. He is currently a History major at Wake Forest University. When he’s not there, he lives just outside Boone, NC, with his parents and brother, Beckett.Betty Wilson Beamguard grew up in Tennessee, but makes her home near Clover, South Carolina. Her features, short stories, poems, and humorous essays have appeared in anthologies, literary journals, and such magazines as The Writer, Sasee, and Women in the Outdoors. She’s currently writing the biography of Heather Brooks, a woman who drives her horse-drawn carriage with her feet.
Margaret G. Bigger, although best known for wedding glitch collections, has published 24 books in 2 genres, TRUE humor and history from life experience, the latter as joint projects with UNC-Charlotte and the Levine Museum of the New South.
Eleanor Riggins Brawley is an author, photographer and an award-winning video producer. Her poetry chapbook, A Short History of Music, was published by John Knox Press. She produced the public television series POETRY LIVE for UNC-TV, for which she won the Adelia Kimball Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Charlotte Writers’ Club. She is the curator and project director for a photography narrative exhibit, Families of Abraham, which consists of over 200 photographs of the faith traditions of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim families in the Charlotte area.
Beth Cagle Burt, co-editor of Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets and associate editor of moonShine review, authored award-winning poetry chapbook The Fearless Tattoo. She has taught writing and literature at Rowan-Cabarrus and Cape Fear Community Colleges. Her poetry and photography have appeared in numerous journals including Slipstream, Tulane Review, Blue Collar Review, GSU Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, and Main Street Rag.
Ann Campanella is a long-time member of the Charlotte Writers’ Club, although since her daughter’s birth she rarely makes it to meetings. Her poetry collection, What Flies Away, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Co. in 2006. She lives on a small farm in Huntersville with her husband and daughter.
Kathrine M. Cays has two children and lives in the Piedmont area of North Carolina with her husband. Along with writing poetry, she gardens and makes various kinds of art. She will receive her Associate Degree from Wake Technical Community College and plans to attend a nearby university to obtain a degree in Creative Writing and Studio Art.
John Clark, a native North Carolinian with A.B. and M.A. degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill, enjoyed a 23-year career in public broadcasting, including 18 years as general manager of WDAV at Davidson College. He has served on a number of non-profit boards, and since 2002 has been the executive director of Chamber Music at St. Peter’s. With creative outlets in piano, musical composition and poetry, John lives with two cats in Charlotte, keeps up with his three children and tags along with his three grandchildren.
Heather Collings recently graduated from Queens University of Charlotte and then went right back for the MFA program in Creative Writing. She enjoys theatre, knitting, and dogs.
Barbara Conrad’s chapbook, The Gravity of Color, was published by Main Street Rag in 2007. Her poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Iodine, Icarus, Kakalak, and other journals. She is editor of Writing for Soup, an anthology of writings and art from her workshop with our homeless “neighbors” at Charlotte’s Urban Ministry Center.
Helen M. Copeland was born in Rochester, Minnesota, where she was influenced by science as practiced in the Mayo Clinic where her dad was a pioneer in surgery. Raising her four children was fun for her. Then she began writing to become a good writer.
Genie Cotner, a Charlotte native, lives with her husband and daughter just a few blocks from where she grew up. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Iodine Poetry Journal, Main Street Rag, THRIFT Poetic Arts Journal and Kakalak 2007.
M. Scott Douglass is the recipient of an Arts & Science Council Grant with which his first book, Auditioning for Heaven (2001) was published. He has three other poetry collections, Balancing on Two Wheels (2003), STEEL WOMB Revisited (2005) and Dip Says Hi (2005). He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the publisher and managing editor for Main Street Rag Publishing Company.
Clarence Eden is a Charlotte resident, husband of Janet, father of two, grandfather of four who has written poetry for more than a dozen years. In addition to Seasonings, he is published in a number of journals and anthologies. He credits the Charlotte Writers’ Club for friendships, contacts, and inspiration.
Blynn Field, in her past life, was a high school French teacher, dancer, and choreographer. Her poems have appeared in Iodine, Bay Leaves, Tall Grass Writers Anthology, and Kakalak (2006 and 2007). In 2006, one of her poems won second place in the Poetry Council of North Carolina’s James Larkin Pearson Free Verse contest.
Sue Friday, a fiction writer, is delighted to be publishing a poem. She lives on a farm in southwest Mecklenburg with her retired husband, dog, and cranky old cat.
Nichole Gause lives in Charlotte with her husband and baby girl. Her novel, Café Bless, will be published in 2008.
Judy Goldman is the author of two books of poetry, Wanting to Know the End and Holding Back Winter, and two novels, Early Leaving and The Slow Way Back. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Ohio Review, Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her prizes include the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, Mary Ruffin Poole Award for First Fiction, Roanoke Chowan Poetry Award, Zoe Kincaid Brockman Poetry Award, Gerald Cable Poetry Award, and the Oscar Arnold Young Poetry Award.
Lynn Gorski was born in San Francisco in 1947. Because her dad was in the Air Force she experienced the adventure of also living in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Massachusetts, Maine, Florida, North Carolina, and Okinawa before her 18th birthday. She and her husband of 40 years retired from the Washington area to Charlotte, N.C. in 2002.
L.B. Green is a freelance writer, essayist, painter, photographer and teacher. She lives in Davidson, N.C. Her poetry book Judas Trees North of the House was published in 2003. She was awarded recently a Fellowship in Literature by the North Carolina Arts Council and also a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her visual work has been exhibited in North Carolina museums and galleries. Her drawings, paintings and photographs are in private collections across the United States.
Maureen Ryan Griffin, an award-winning poet and nonfiction writer, is the author of two collections of poetry, This Scatter of Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water, and a hands-on writing guidebook entitled Spinning Words into Gold. Her work has appeared in many literary magazines, including Calyx, Chelsea, The Cincinnati Review, The Texas Review, and in a number of anthologies, including Marlo Thomas’s The Right Words at the Right Time, Volume 2 and James Howe’s Thirteen. She offers writing workshops and classes, as well as individual coaching and critiquing, through her business, WordPlay.
Beejay Gwennap moved to Charlotte more than 25 years ago after living a substantial number of years in Pittsburgh. Her first poem was written two years ago at a Wildacres painting retreat. Since then she’s been exploring poetry and wondering why she waited so long.
Sarah Cadence Hamm is an English Literature and Writing major at Catawba College. When not in school, Sarah likes to read, go to the beach, and work at her local tea shop. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is Neapolitan
Elizabeth S. Hatley credits several former careers as springboards for her writing inspiration, including florist, cosmetologist, and flight attendant. She has a Master’s Degree in English and is currently working on an MFA in Creative Writing. She lives in Charlotte with her husband.
Caroline Castle Hicks, a former high school English and Humanities teacher, is now an award-winning writer and poet as well as a regular public radio commentator on Charlotte, North Carolina’s NPR affiliate, WFAE 90.7 FM. Her work has appeared in numerous national and regional publications and she is the author of a collection of essays and poems entitled Such Stuff as Stars Are Made Of: Thoughts on Savoring the Wonders in Everyday Life. She lives in Huntersville, North Carolina, with her husband Dana and their two children, Mariclaire and Ian.
Sandy Hill is a long-time Charlottean transplanted from Pennsylvania and a semi-retired Charlotte Observer editor. She’s a novel writer married to another novel writer.
Mary Lou Hindley attended Denison University where she majored in piano and advanced English. She is a piano teacher, fairy tale reader, and a storyteller at Sharon Elementary. She’s both an avid reader and an adoring grandmother.
Irene Blair Honeycutt retired from CPCC where she received the Excellence in Teaching Award. She founded the college’s first Spring Literary Festival and for over 14 years directed it to national acclaim. A former CWC president, she was awarded the first Adelia Kimball Founders Award for her advocacy for writers.
Louisa Jones lives in Burlington with her boyfriend and Jack Russell terrier. She has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from N.C. State University and has been published in Bishop House Review, Alamance Magazine, Our State, and N.C. Signature. She is originally from Scotland and loves to travel back there when she has the time.
Alice Waugh Kallmerten’s poems have received awards and been published in Fields of Earth, Anson Pathways, and N.C. Poetry Council’s Bay Leaves anthologies Mt. Time and Looking Back. Raised in West Virginia, a graduate of West Virginia University, much of her work reflects those strong roots of family and place. She has authored Grandma’s House and edited her 100 year old uncle’s Rhymes of Old Nature Man. Charlotte has been home for twenty years. Now 80, she recently moved to Gilford, New Hampshire, near family.
Andrew Kalnik began writing poetry seriously at 74 years of age. His poems have won awards at the state level, and have appeared in numerous publications. He and his wife live in Charlotte.
Lisa Williams Kline (Editor) has published two novels for young people, Eleanor Hill, (N.C. Juvenile Literature Award) and The Princesses of Atlantis, and a third, Flying Under the Radar, is forthcoming from Delacorte Press. Her stories for adults have appeared in Peregrine, Women’s Words, The Belletrist Review, and several anthologies, including An Intricate Weave, In My Life, On Air, and Tis the Season. She is an associate editor with Novello Festival Press and a past president of CWC.
Mary Kratt’s poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Tar River Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, New Mexico Humanities Review, Poet Lore, Nimrod, and many other literary magazines. She is a MacDowell fellow and author of books on poetry, biography, and history. Her poetry collections are On the Steep Side (Briarpatch Press, 1993), The Only Thing I Fear is a Cow and a Drunken Man (Carolina Wren Press, 1991), and Small Potatoes (St. Andrews Press, 1999), which won the Brockman-Campbell Poetry Book Award.
Kathryn Linn attends Queens University in Charlotte and is majoring in French and English. She plans to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing. She would like to thank the entire English Department at Queens and especially Professor Funderburk.
Annie Maier is a freelance editor and writer living in South Carolina with her husband and daughter. Having helped numerous writers realize their dream of publication, she is currently hard at work on Stroke of Genius, a memoir about her father.
Nancy Thompson McGill grew up in Charlotte and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UNC-Charlotte. She began writing children’s fiction in 1992, shortly after retiring from teaching fourth grade for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Nancy and her husband, William, live in Matthews, NC.
Kay McSpadden teaches high school English in York, South Carolina. Her op-ed columns appear every other Saturday in The Charlotte Observer on the Viewpoint page. She is married to Randy, a Presbyterian minister, and has two sons: Jamie, a junior at Yale, and Will, a freshman at Emory.
Kristine Mossinghoff is a native Texan and a graduate of Texas A & M. She enjoys writing poetry, essays and short stories. She teaches at a preschool in Davidson where she lives with her husband and two young daughters.
Ione O’Hara has taught at UNC-Charlotte and CPCC and has been awarded an Arts and Science Council Grant and a writer’s residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications and her chapbook, A Passing Certainty, was published in 2004.
Elaine Neil Orr lives in Raleigh with her husband, and teaches literature and creative writing at N.C. State University. She was born and spent her girlhood in Nigeria and much of her fiction and creative nonfiction is drawn from her early life. She is the author of a memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life (University of Virginia Press, 2003 and 2005) and has recently published or has work forthcoming in Image, The Missouri Review, The Louisville Review, Kalliope, Cold Mountain, and Southern Cultures. She is at work on Calling: A Novel, based on the diary of a nineteenth-century female missionary to West Africa.
Gail Peck is the author of four collections of poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Rattle, Southern Review, Kestrel, Brevity, and elsewhere. Her work is forthcoming in Kakalak 2007.
Diana Pinckney’s poems and prose have appeared in such magazines and journals as Atlanta Review, Cream City Review, Iodine, Calyx, Tar River Poetry and many others. She has three poetry collections: Fishing with Tall Women (Persephone Press, 1996), White Linen (Nightshade Press, 1998) and Alchemy (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2004). She teaches poetry writing in the Center for Lifelong Learning, at Queens University in Charlotte, N.C.
Dannye Romine Powell has two collections from the University of Arkansas Press and has been the recipient of fellowships in poetry from the NEA and the N.C. Arts Council.
Danna Ray is a clinical nurse specialist in Psychiatry and a Family Nurse Practitioner. Writing is a therapeutic tool she uses for herself and also for her clients. She is the mother of three sons and nine grandchildren.
Jon Robertson is a reporter for the Daily Journal and Daily Messenger newspapers in Seneca, S.C. He is also a columnist for “Bootleg: Essential Culture.” Raised in Charlotte, Jon is a 2006 graduate of Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C. with a degree in communication arts.
Louise Rockwell lives in Davidson with her husband Russell, and basset hound, Stella. She has been with the Charlotte Writers’ Club since 1999 and believes in its mission and potential for serving regional writers. She is also interested in drama and gardening.
Marisa Rosenfeld is a chemist and Real Estate Broker. She was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and lives in Charlotte with daughter Lisa. She writes essays and poetry. Her credits include The Charlotte Observer, Hungry for Home, The Charlotte Writers’ Club 2004-2005 Anthology, co-editor of On Air, Essays from Charlotte’s NPR Station WFAE 90.7, Celebrating Life Anthology, Iodine Poetry Journal, Main Street Rag and The Pedestal Magazine.
Elaine St. Anne writes articles, essays and short fiction. Her work has appeared in Today’s Charlotte Woman, The Charlotte Observer, and Writer’s Advice. She lives in Charlotte, N.C. with her little dog Maggie.
Gordon Schenck is an architectural photographer whose work has been widely published. Personal photographs, such as “Wicker,” have been shown in art exhibits. A longtime CWC member, Gordon’s science fiction story won a prize in a club contest, and he claims 50% success in publishing Haikus.
Rebecca Schenck, a Charlotte native and a past president of the Charlotte Writers’ Club, has published poetry and nonfiction. With degrees from Queens and UNCC, she taught at both schools. She was secretary to more people than she can name, but traveled with only one, her architectural photographer husband, Gordon.
Maureen A. Sherbondy’s fiction is forthcoming in the North Carolina Literary Review, Sierra Nevada College Review and Reflections Literary Journal. A short story was a finalist in the 2006 William Faulkner –William Wisdom Creative Writing Contest. Her poetry chapbook, After the Fairy Tale, has just been published by Main Street Rag. She lives in Raleigh.
Lauren Alson Smith is an English major at Catawba College and hails from Greensboro, North Carolina. Her poetic accomplishments include winning the Oak Grove Freedman’s Cemetery Competition, the Gilbert-Chappell Poetry Contest, and the Calvin Koonts Poetry Prize. Her hobbies include writing, reading, painting, drawing, playing violin and playing string bass.
Joseph Spencer, after a 30+ career in engineering, continues to enjoy writing poetry and essays, as well as occasional attempts at watercolor painting. A native Charlottean, his other interests include photography, tennis, sailing, volunteer work and reading. In payment for any real or imagined sins, he sometimes plays golf.
Betty Burgin Snow returned to Spartanburg, S.C., her hometown, after thirty-one years living and teaching in Pennsylvania. She and her husband have joined the ranks of the retired, seeking warmer climes. She enjoys being near her family and having the time to read, quilt, knit, and, of course, write.
Shelley W. Stout fiction has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies. She is the owner of Creative Prose and conducts writing workshops around the Charlotte area. Her first novel, Halos in the Dark, will be released in August 2008 by BeachSide Press.
Gilda Morina Syverson is a poet, artist, writer and teacher whose award winning poetry and prose has been published in various literary journals, magazines and anthologies in the United States and Canada. Her chapbook In This Dream Everything Remains Inside was part of Main Street Rag’s 2004 Editor’s Choice Series. In her work, Syverson seeks to form a bridge between the literary world and the larger community in which she lives.
Elizabeth Willoughby Swann (Beth) is a former high school English and journalism teacher, and she is currently a homemaker and volunteer. A graduate of the University of Kentucky, she began writing poetry in 2006. “Leash” is her first published poem.Richard Allen Taylor is an editor, poet, and poetry critic living in Charlotte, N.C. His poetry chapbook, Something to Read on the Plane, was a runner up in Main Street Rag’s 2004 Chapbook Contest. He is a co-editor of Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets.
Mary Ann Thomas has published poems and six short stories in over 25 publications, and is currently working on her second novel. For 30 years she was a psychotherapist at Gaston Mental Health and at Saluda Psychological Services for Rock Hill, South Carolina. She is married and has three grown sons, two daughters-in-law and three grandchildren.
Betsy Thorpe (Consultant) has been in the publishing business since 1990. She has worked as an acquiring and developmental editor with many of New York’s top publishing firms: HarperCollins, Broadway Books, Macmillan, and John Wiley & Sons. Since leaving New York, she has helped numerous clients as an editor, co-writer, and literary agent.
Dorothy J. Waterfill’s first published poem appeared in the Cotswold Comet (her elementary school newspaper) when she was in fifth grade. She has contributed articles to numerous local publications, and her 10-minute play, The Elevator, was presented in Theatre Charlotte’s 9x9x9 series in 1999. A longtime public relations consultant, Dorothy received the Public Relations Society of America/Charlotte Chapter’s Infinity Award for lifetime achievement in 2002.
Dede Wilson has three books of poetry: Glass, Sea of Small Fears, and One Nightstand. Her work has been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Iodine, and Asheville Poetry Review. She is a past president of the Charlotte Writers’ Club, and a winner of the club’s highest honor, the Adelia Kimball Founder’s Award.
Terri Wolfe lives in Charlotte and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (B.A.) and Queens University of Charlotte (M.F.A.). Winner of the Charlotte Writers’ Club Poetry Contest in 2003 and 2001, her poems have appeared in such journals as Iodine, The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, and Independence Boulevard. She currently teaches Creative Writing in the Center for Lifelong Learning at Queens University.
Susan Woodring is a graduate of the Master in Fine Arts program at Queens University in Charlotte. Her fiction has appeared in a number of journals, including Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Passages North, and Ballyhoo Stories. Her first novel, The Traveling Disease, will be published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in the fall of 2007.