Born, raised and a resident in Illinois for most of her life, Valerie Connelly now lives with her husband, Michael, in Wisconsin north of Milwaukee. She divides her time between publishing, writing, speaking, painting, composing music and traveling to visit family. Ms. Connelly’s years as an advertising copywriter, graphic designer and print shop owner served her well as she founded Nightengale Press in July of 2003.
Ricardo Cortez Cruz is the author of Straight Outta Compton and Five Days of Bleeding, novel composition short and funky and with grooves as their only guide. For the record, he is hooked on theorizing in narrative forms, cut and mix style, the rhetoric of sound, writing with corazón, black noise, frictions (fiction and nonfiction scratched into each other), mad flows, and art as “dope” or a weapon. 2nd verse: Cruz’s creative work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas / Nueva escritura de las Américas, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Postmodern Culture, Fiction International’s Abject/Outcast issue, Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review, African American Review, Jabari Asim’s anthology Not Guilty: Twelve Black Men Speak Out On Law, Justice, and Life, Becky Bradway-Hesse’s anthology In The Middle of the Middle West, and Kevin Powell’s anthology Step Into A World, among other hotspots. He recently stitched together a third def(t) body of (s)language, Premature Autopsies: Tales of Darkest America, remixing and reconstituting himself as if his very lively ‘hood—drugged/dragged out—depended upon it. Cruz teaches English at Illinois State University, where he stresses the kleeer intimate connection between today’s rap and old school.
Joanne Diaz teaches in the English Department at Illinois Wesleyan. She got her MFA in creative writing from New York University and her PhD in Literature from Northwestern University. Before graduate school, Joanne worked as an intern, editorial assistant, and associate editor at Bedford/St. Martins. Joanne's also worked as a freelance editor for The Princeton Review, Houghton Mifflin, and several independent authors.
Cathy Gilbert, faculty member at Heartland Community College, teaches many levels of English composition and will soon add humanities and creative writing to her teaching repertoire. She received her BA from Illinois Wesleyan University and her MA at the University of Chicago. Her poems has been published in the Madison Review, Pank, and Main Channel Voices, and she has work forthcoming this spring in an online journal called r.kv.r.y. When she's not reading, writing, or grading papers, Cathy spends her time playing trains with her nephew and going to as many jazz concerts as her sleep schedule allows.
ISU Professor Hilary K. Justice, a leading Hemingway scholar, teaches courses on the creative process, performativity, and book history; writing as Ariadne, she has won several awards for fan-fiction, including the coveted Quill-to-Parchment Best Author for the <i>Harry Potter</i> fandom. She is also a senior editor for fiction and scholarly non-fiction on the OWL and CAT internet archives.
Charles Reynard is a Circuit Court Judge of the 11th Judicial District in Bloomington, IL and is the former State's Attorney of McLean County, IL. His poems have won numerous citations and have appeared in several literary journals. He writes frequently about his experiences in the justice system. Judge Reynard co-leads a popular seminar for Illinois judges called "Literature and the Law," which uses poems, plays and short stories that raise complex moral and ethical issues. Valente and Reynard have been married to each other for four years and live in Normal, IL.
Amy Riddle is a Master's Candidate in English with an emphasis in Creative Wrting at Illinois State University. Her current writing involves the development of microfiction and microfiction cycles, with some dabbling in poetry when microfiction is out running errands.
Amy E. Robillard is Assistant Professor of English at Illinois State University, specializing in rhetoric and composition. She teaches courses in rhetorical theory, composition theory, the personal essay, and life writing.
Karen Schmidt is University Librarian and University Copyright Officer at Illinois Wesleyan University. She joined the faculty in August 2007. Prior to coming to IWU, Karen worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, where she was the Associate University Librarian for Collections. She has a BS and MLS from Indiana University and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.
Todd Stocke is vice president and editorial director of Sourcebooks, a leading independent book publisher based in Naperville, Illinois. As editorial director, he oversees every Sourcebooks imprint and the company's efforts in every category, including most areas of nonfiction, commercial and literary fiction, romance novels, mixed-media, calendars, and children's books. A native of Minnesota, Todd got his start in publishing at renowned fiction and poetry house Coffee House Press and was a bookseller before he began at Sourcebooks in 1994. Todd was editor of We Interrupt This Broadcast, the format-breaking mixed-media book that was Sourcebooks' first New York Times bestseller, and its follow-up, And The Crowd Goes Wild, one of the bestselling sports anthologies ever. During his time at Sourcebooks, he has overseen the growth of its list from 10 new titles a year to its current annual output of 300.
Judith Valente covers religion for PBS-TV and Chicago Public Radio and also interviews poets and authors for NPR. She worked previously for The Washington Post,The Wall Street Journal and People magazine. She was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She is author of the award-winning poetry collection, Inventing An Alphabet. Her newest collection, Discovering Moons, is forthcoming from Virtual Artists Collective, Chicago. She is writing a book on contemporary monastic life.
Euphemism Campus Box 5555 Illinois State University Normal, IL 61790