Contributors
Issue 1: The First Time
Elizabeth Bernstein (Laundry Day) is fiction editor of The Big Ugly Review. Her short story, “Alice,” won first prize in the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s 2003 Fiction Contest, and was optioned by Sneaky Little Sister Films. Her stories have appeared in the North Atlantic Review and elsewhere. Her plays have been produced in various venues, including the Exit Theatre, the PlayGround, Impact Theatre and Fringe of Marin. “Laundry Day” originally appeared in Pudding magazine.
Blame Sally (Birds Fly South, words and music Monica Pasqual) is Pam Delgado, Renee Harcourt, Jeri Jones, and Monica Pasqual. They can be heard regularly on KFOG’s Acoustic Morning show, as well as on the program's Ten Year Anniversary CD alongside songs by Paul Simon, Louden Wainright lll, Bruce Cockburn, Dar Williams, The Waifs and more. The band’s new album, “Blame Sally,” was released in April 2004. Visit them at www.blamesally.com.
James Cihlar's (The Last House in Minneapolis) poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The James White Review, and Briar Cliff Review; his reviews and essays have appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Literary Magazine Review, and the Lincoln Journal-Star. He has worked in editing, art, and marketing at Redleaf Press, Coffee House Press, and New Rivers Press. In 2000 he won a Minnesota Arts Board Fellowship in Poetry.
Dan Coshnear (Recovery, Correspondence) lives in Guerneville and teaches fiction through UC Berkeley Extension. He also works nights in a group home for men and women with mental illness. He is author of a collection of short stories, Jobs and Other Preoccupations (Helicon Nine 2000).
Kim Curtis (Execution Girl) is an award-winning journalist for The Associated Press in San Francisco.
Debra Di Blasi (Seed) received the 2003 James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. She is the author of Prayers of an Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press) and Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions), which won the Thorpe Menn Book Award and was made into an internationally award-winning film. Her fiction most recently appeared in The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Midwest, and is forthcoming in Chelsea, First Intensity, Rhapsodia, and elsewhere. www.debradiblasi.com
Tom Erikson (First Images) is an independent photographer who has worked out of San Francisco for over twenty years. He has photographed a lot of things, but makes his living making portraits. Musicians and families are his specialty.
essence (Sleeping with the Driver) San Francisco-based singer-songerwriter essence first gained national attention in 1998 when she won the Lilith Fair National Talent Search. Several of her songs have since been featured on television soundtracks, including one on "Nash Bridges" and four on "The Division." She is currently touring in support of her nationally released and critically acclaimed record, Mariposa. You can look for a new essence record by the end of 2004. For more information, visit www.essencemusic.com.
Nigel French (Arrivals) is the nonfiction editor of The Big Ugly Review.
Judy GeBauer (Dredging) is a playwright whose work has been performed around the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Among her awards are the HBO Writer Award, the Beverly Hills Theatre Guild-Julie Harris Award, and the Colorado Arts Innovation Award. She is trying her hand at fiction.
Jack Goodstein’s (Mandelbaum in the Movies) fiction has appeared on the web in such ezines as Eclectica, Ken*again, and The Asylum. He reviews books regularly for The Compulsive Reader. “Mandelbaum in the Movies” previously appeared in Rites of Passage.
Kitsune Hime (case) casts a dark shadow in her sunny North Bay habitat. Her motivations are: pain, rejection, and organic shade grown fair trade coffee. When not haunting artists or eating hydrogenated snacks, she likes to write and make music.
David Hopkins (I Can‘t Speak Your Name) is from Dublin, Ireland. He is what he is and he writes songs. Some people will love those songs; it's all about fractions. See if you like him.
Polly Kimberly (Night Swim) is a graduate of the Bread Loaf School of English. She is currently taking time off from teaching English at the Emma Willard School to be at home with her children.
Rachel Koppelman (First, Second, First) has been dividing her time between Boston, MA, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, since receiving her undergradute degree in psychology in June, 2001 from Tufts University. She plays accordion for the Ghorar Deem Express, a nine-piece multi-grooved ensemble that oscillates between funky and freaky, and has co-founded Floating Opera Records in connection with the release of the band's debut album in February of 2004. She spends most of her days making up for lost time.
Ericka Lutz’s (The Phoenix) fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Scrivener Creative Review, Green Mountains Review, Kaleidoscope, and Sideshow (Somersault Press). Her creative nonfiction appears in the themed anthologies Child of Mine (Hyperion), Toddler (Seal Press), and France: A Love Story (Seal Press), as well as extensively online. She is the author of seven commercial non-fiction books and the fiction editor at Literary Mama. Visit her at her personal website at www.erickalutz.com.
Heather McDonald (My Flaming) grew up in North Carolina and studied at UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Edinburgh. She works at the University of San Francisco where she earned her MFA in Writing. She has previously published poetry in Creative Urges and is currently working on a novel. She also loves trees.
Evelyn Manangan (Running Away in San Francisco) was born in Greenwich Village and shares her birthday with Franz Kafka. When not temping, she works in video to pay rent in San Francisco where she takes great pleasure and comfort in organic stone-fruit, micro-greens and the "highest concentration of Filipinos outside of Manila."
Lisa McMann (A Valuable Girl) is an editor at insolent rudder. Her most recent works have been published in print at Sexy Stranger and Gator Springs Gazette, and on-line at The Glut, Mitochondria, Pindeldyboz and MonkeyBicycle. She has pieces forthcoming at Saucyvox and Snow Monkey.
Lisa Polito (Breath-taking) is currently taking leave of her senses. Having given up the security of salary, health insurance, and her cozy Kodiak Island home, she’s living marginally and writing scared, wandering the western U.S. and trying to figure out what the hell's gone wrong with this country.
Susan Richardson (Disabused) is a writer and tutor of writing from Wales. Her work has appeared in a wide range of journals, both on and offline, in the UK, USA and Canada, including Flashquake, Stirring, Iota, Fail Better and Other Poetry. Her poetic drama, Two Of Me Now, is published by Cecil Woolf in The Bloomsbury Heritage Series and she was a 2003 Pushcart Prize nominee. For further information about her work, please visit her website: www.susanrichardsonwriter.co.uk
Ken Samuels (Raider of the Lost Ark) lives in San Francisco. He works in a bookstore. He is the self-publisher of an autobiographical 'zine called Uncorrected Proof.
Julia Serano (Vice Versa) is a trans-activist, a poetry slam champion, guitarist/vocalist for the noisy-pop band Bitesize, and the host of the music and spoken word show GenderEnders. To find out more about her various creative endeavors, check out her website at www.juliaserano.com.
Emily Spreng Lowery (Walking Through Walls) writes for Sauce Magazine in St. Louis and has recently had creative work published in Cave Hollow Anthology I, Cenotaph Pocket Editions and Opium Magazine. Work is forthcoming in Red Wheelbarrow. She is currently working toward an MFA at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Emily is also a member of Itinerant Tales, a roving group of local writers, and a contributing editor for River Styx.
Rebecca Stoddard (excerpt from aporia: :porchlight) is a poet living in San Francisco where she runs the Geary St. Reading Series. Her poems have appeared in journals such as LitVert, can we have our ball back? and Tinfish. home?, a chapbook, was published by Noemi Press in 2004.
Stephen Yerkey (We Don’t Get to Watch the Trains) has no fixed address, is a proud member of Consumer Credit Counseling, the American Automobile Association, and a lifelong subscriber to the Victoria’s Secret Catalog.