CHIRPS FROM THE SPARROW
POETRY
OUR NATIONAL TREASURE
Memoir, Pulitzer Prize Poet Vijay Seshadri
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Skylark, Julia Harm
Winter Fog, John P. Kristofco
Tonight, Stars Usher Evening, Before Dawn, Brandon Marlon
Red Chimera, Caitlin Jackson
To a Golden Maiden, Poem and Photograph, Carrie Albert
Samantha, Brad Kavo
Ella Fitzgerald Opens…, Gary Charles Wilkens
Untitled, Simon Perchik
Parang La, Rajasthan, The Story of an Apple Pie in Bombay, Corinne Elysse Adams
Family Hymn, Always Somewhere One Finds Goodbyes, Mary, Mary, Mitchell Untch
The Temperature of Memory, A.M. Gwynn
Porcupine Balls with Mushroom Sauce, Mike McGeehon
FLASH FICTION
Inheriting from Hattie, Diana Crane
The War After, Michael McGehee
Just the Sky, Scott Szpisjak
SHORT STORIES
Take Me Into Your Dreams, Maria! Seyyed Ali Shojaee
Tuba Dreams, Timothy Reilly
Twenty-four Years Later, Michelle Meyers
CONTRIBUTORS
Vijay Seshadri is Grey Sparrow’s national treasure for our winter issue of 2015. Vijay won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, for 3 Sections, published by Graywolf Press in Minnesota.
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Corinne Elysse Adams’s work has appeared in journals such as Confrontation and Alimentum in the past, and was a recipient of a 2009 Dorothy Sargent-Rosenberg poetry prize. Adams is a story collector, writer, songstress, and high school teacher. She grows lots of veggies in Austin, Texas. Over the past 15 years, she has lived all over the world, collecting stories and studying folk writing and musical traditions in India, Ladakh, Japan, Ireland, Scotland, and all around the States.
Carrie Albert is both poet and visual artist. Her poetry has appeared in diverse journals including Fowl Feathered Review, HEArt online, Naugatuck River Review, Tattoo Highway, Randomly Accessed Poetics, Wicked Alice, among others. Her collage and photography often inspires words and visa versa. Collage and poem pairings have been featured in a number of online publications, including Monarch Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Soundzine, qarrtsiluni, Triggerfish Review, among others. She is Artist in Residence at ink sweat and tears online.
Diana Crane grew up in Canada, taught sociology in the U.S. and has published several books on fashion, the media and the arts. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Fulbright awards. Her books have been translated into ten languages. She now lives in Paris where she writes fiction and articles about fashion and the arts and co-edits a fashion studies journal. Two of her stories are forthcoming in Still Point Arts Quarterly and Chicago Quarterly Review. She is completing a speculative novel about climate change.
A.M. Gwynn writes poetry and short fiction. Her work will be featured in a forthcoming issue of War, Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities. Her work also appears in Boston Literary Magazine and Muddy River Poetry Review. She resides in Germany.
Caitlin Jackson is a graduate of Oberlin College, where she received a BA in Creative Writing and German Studies. Currently she works as a technical writer in Orlando, FL and has recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida. She has had poems published in 2river View, River Poets Journal, Scissors and Spackle, Natural Bridge, OVS and The Jabberwock Review.
Julia Harm is a San Francisco Native who moved to Los Angeles at the tender age of 10. She has been published in Slake Magazine as well as Narrative and The Statement.
Brad Kavo is a graduate of Penn State University, where he focused on British and American literature. He is currently a high school English teacher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he has taught literary analysis and writing for the past six years. His poetry has also been published in Grey Sparrow Journal, Lines + Stars, and War, Literature, and the Arts (WLA).
John P. Kristofco, from Highland Heights, Ohio, is professor of English and the former dean of Wayne College in Orrville. His poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared in over a hundred different publications, including: Folio, Rattle, The Bryant Literary Review, The Cimarron Review, Poem, Avocet, Iodine, Small Pond, The Aurorean, Ibbetson Street, Blue Unicorn, and Blueline. He has published two collections of poetry, A Box of Stones and Apparitions and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times.
Mike McGeehon lives in Newberg, Oregon. He has worked as a social worker, a janitor, a nursing home attendant and, for the last 8 years, as a teacher for an online charter school. His work is featured in the anthology Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets, and in a number of journals.
Michael McGehee lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “The War After” is his first published work of fiction.
Brandon Marlon is a creative writer from Ottawa, Canada. He received his B.A. (Hon.) in Drama and English from the University of Toronto and his M.A. in English from the University of Victoria. http://www.brandonmarlon.com
Michelle Meyers is a fiction writer and playwright living in Los Angeles. Her fiction has appeared in DOGZPLOT and jmww and her flash fiction piece “Primal Beauty” was selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions of 2014. She is also a finalist for PEN Center’s Emerging Voices Fellowship. Her plays have been developed and/or produced in Los Angeles; New York City; Providence, RI; Chicago; Great Barrington, MA; and Nova Scotia, Canada.
Diana Y. Paul is a former Stanford professor of Buddhist philosophy and cultures. She is a printmaker influenced by the Zen Buddhist aesthetic. She combines a mixed media approach to organic, minimalist images, with an element of surprise or the unexpected thrown in. Food and other organic themes are her favorites. “Magical realism” and abstraction suggest the original source.
Her art has been exhibited widely in California, Hawaii, and Japan. She also writes a blog on art, fiction, food, wine, and movies called: “Unhealed Wound: Heroic Art—lights the shadows of life’s unfinished business” unhealeldwound.com for lovers of beauty with an edge. Diana has recently finished her debut novel, Unhealed Wound (SheWrites Press), to be released September 2015.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Poetry, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at http://www.simonperchik.com
Timothy Reilly, during the 70’s, was a professional tuba player in both the United States and Europe (in the latter, he was a member of the orchestra of the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy). He is currently a substitute elementary teacher, living in Southern California with his wife, Jo-Anne Cappeluti: a published poet and scholar. His short stories have been published in Relief, The Seattle Review, The Waterhouse Review, Flash Fiction Magazine (UK), Blue Lake Review, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Amarillo Bay, Foliate Oak Literary Review, Passager, and several other print and online journals.
Seyyed Ali Shojaee was born in 1983 in Tehran, Iran. He has a B. E. in Industrial Engineering; Systems’ Analyses. He has written several short stories in Persian and has also won national awards. Shojaee is the recipient of several Excellence Awards for books: The Season Book Festival honored The Stars Which Are Not Very Far, the Quranic Stories Festival Award honored Falling In Love At The Time Of Inscriptions, and The Children and Adolescents Festival for the book honored What if the Snowman won’t melt? Shojaee also garnered a national award from The Iranian Young Festival for the Season of Laylas’ Loves.”
He has also performed an Individual expo with 25 artworks in conceptual art style [Iran 2005.] He has also held 10 workshops on western and Iranian art and story writing methods for young writers and college students in Iran from 2008 through 2012.
Scott Szpisjak is an avid reader, writer, and traveler. He works out of Virginia where he lives with his cocker spaniel.
Mitchell Untch was a finalist for the C.P. Cavafy Award; semi-finalist for the Janet McCabe Poetry Contest; finalist for the Atlanta Review Poetry Contest; semi-finalist for the Paumonack Review; and Pushcart Nominee. Recent publications include Confrontation; Nimrod Intl; Natural Bridge; Beloit Poetry Journal; Poet Lore; North American Review; Owen Wister; Solo Novo; Glassworks; Knockout and others.
Gary Charles Wilkens, Assistant Professor of English at Norfolk State University, was the winner of the 2006 Texas Review Breakthrough Poetry Prize for his first book, The Red Light Was My Mind. His poems have appeared in more than 50 online and print venues, among them The Texas Review, The Cortland Review, the Adirondack Review, The Prague Revue, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume II: Mississippi.
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