Fred Dale
Fred Dale is a husband to his wife, Valerie, and a father to his occasional jerk of a dog, Earl. The three of them live in Avondale, where Fred works tirelessly to keep things running smoothly. He is a Senior Instructor in the English Department at the University of North Florida, and an avid cyclist, but mostly, he just grades papers. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Crack the Spine, Chiron Review, Wild Violet Magazine, The Critical Pass Review, Raleigh Review and others.
Monica DePaul
Monica DePaul teaches rhetoric and writing skills at the University of North Florida, and by that she means that she teaches BS-detection skills. She excels in knowing when students are ignoring her and in making just the right dirty joke to catch their attention. She also startles easily and is distrustful of anyone she has not carried on a conversation with face-to-face for at least ten solid minutes. Monica is currently helping with the efforts to get Jacksonville to pass an LGBT-inclusive non-discrimination ordinance and to get livable pay for adjunct college professors. In her free time, she can be found playing video games, lifting weights, and maintaining her natural curls.
Monica has independently published her first book, Blood on Fire, a satire of the vampire genre chronicling the exploits of snarky teenage vampire Amy Able as she fends off undead super soldiers from her Florida town. Monica is working on a sequel, Blood on the Rocks, as well as Little Annoyances, a short story compilation featuring young people overcoming ridiculous obstacles from the mundane to the supernatural. She loves semi-colons, dashes, action scenes, and long strings of dialog.
Frances Driscoll
Frances Driscoll is the author of three collections of poems: Talk To Me (Gillian Conoley's Black River Press), The Rape Poems and Seaglass Picnic (Jack Estes' Pleasure Boat Studio). William Slaughter's Mudlark published a chapbook of The Rape Poems. You can hear Driscoll read some of The Rape Poems and Seaglass Picnic at Mark Ari's EAT Magazine.
Driscoll's work is used by trauma therapists and sexual assault awareness training for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. National Guard. Her work is taught in a number of schools in a variety of disciplines and adapted for many stage productions.
Tangela Floyd
Tangela Floyd is the author and editor of the commemorative comic book Introducing the Black Superheroes. The book commemorates 10 black superheroes derived from American ex-slaves. She is also author of Can I Speak, Eve of a New Nation, and the children's book, Jump Manya. Tangela is a poet, storyteller, and lecturer. She has performed across North America, Europe, and Africa. Tangela is formerly a pricing manager for Chase Home Finance, the mortgage subsidiary of JPMorganChase. She is currently the executive director for Young Minds Building Success Charities, Inc.
Tangela has a Bachelors degree in Business Administration with a major in Banking and Finance from the University of North Florida. She also has a Masters in Business Administration.
Sohrab Fracis
Sohrab Homi Fracis <www.fracis.com> is the first Asian author to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award, for Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America. It was published by University of Iowa Press, and republished in India and, in translation, in Germany. His stories have appeared in Fifth Wednesday , Crossborder Journal, Bridge Eight, Slice Magazine, Other Voices, The Antigonish Review, Weber Studies, The Toronto Review, India Currents, State Street Review, Writecorner Press, Ort der Augen, Wild Application, and South Asian Review. He taught creative writing at University of North Florida, after earning his M.A. there. He was fiction and poetry editor at State Street Review, final judge of the Page Edwards Short Fiction Award, and Visiting Writer in Residence at Augsburg College. He's on the critique faculty for the annual Florida Heritage Book Festival at Flagler College. He was a Florida Individual Artist Fellow in Fiction, a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Fiction at Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and an artist in residence at Escape To Create and, twice, at Yaddo.
Liz Gibson
“Deformance” artist Liz Gibson works in painting, sculpture, video, installation, performance and storytelling. Her art has been presented and exhibited in galleries, colleges and museums including MOCA Jax, the Telfair Museum in Savannah and the Ringling Museum of Art. Liz received a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in 2014. She was a recipient of a Spark Grant funded by Florida Blue Insurance to bring art experiences to Jacksonville in 2014-2015. She also received a grant from the Community Foundation of Northeast Florida for 2013-14. Liz has an MFA in Performance Art from Florida State University and she teaches at the University of North Florida.
Tim Gilmore
Tim Gilmore is the author of 10 books including The Mad Atlas of Virginia King, with Hurley Winkler and Kiley Secrest, In Search of Eartha White, The Ocean Highway at Night, and Stalking Ottis Toole: A Southern Gothic. He teaches Composition and Literature at Florida State College of Jacksonville. He's a big fan of his border collie, John Coltrane, monkey puzzle trees, and wandering around strange old places.
Tim is the creator of www.jaxpsychogeo.com and writes the “Let There Be Lit” column for Folio Weekly.
Lisa Vick Grubba
Lisa Vick Grubba is a freelance writer focusing on nature and environmental issues. She grew up in Central Florida, riding horseback for hours through open countryside, water skiing in alligator-infested lakes, and playing hide-and-seek in the orange groves with a pack of neighborhood kids. The massive changes development brought to the area spurred her to write about the changing Florida landscape. She is the founder and editor of Florida Field Notes, Northeast Florida’s Outdoor Journal (www.floridafieldnotes.com).
Grubba has covered real estate for The Florida Real Estate Journal, written community news and features for Forum, an Orlando Sentinel publication, and reviewed books for Women’s Digest. She is working on a master’s degree in journalism from Harvard University Extension School.
She is a Florida Master Naturalist, a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the National Book Critics Circle, and the National Writers Union.
You can find her on Twitter at @lisagrubba or reach her by email: editor@floridafieldnotes.com.
Matt Lany
Matthew Lany won’t quit unless it’s hopeless. He’s hardcore. He once saved a drowning baby with a pair of tongs, and it doesn’t matter that the baby was a red potato. Sure, the media says it matters, but they’re biased. Also, Matt has a stapler. His lone wish: Matt vs. Pitbull, hoagie-eating contest. Show your support by visiting mattvspitbullhoagiewar.com. Jax by Jax will serve as a book launch for Matt. He’ll read from The Tree (a novel) and Heartcockvaginamind (poems). He'll also share the opening of Transplant, a novel-in-progress regarding a young man whose spine is ripped out and replaced with a water moccasin.
Jordan Logue
Jordan Logue was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, the setting for his first three novels. In his varied career, Logue has been a police officer, a land use planner, a real estate consultant, a lobbyist and business development consultant. He graduated from Bishop Kenny High School, and went on to what was then known as Florida Junior College. He earned a B.S. from Florida State University and a Master's in Public Administration from the University of North Florida. An amateur musician, he focuses primarily in the bluegrass genre, but can occasionally be coaxed with some traditional country.
Jordan grew up in the Riverside neighborhood, lived for a few years in North Shore, and now resides in Avondale. He has been active in RAP, having served as President of the Board for three years. His novels are set in earlier periods of Jacksonville.
Johnny Masiulewicz is author of the poetry collections Keywords: a dada experiment (Happy Tapir Press) and Professional Cemetery (Puddin’head Press). His work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, sites and anthologies including Curbside Review, The Main Street Rag, Third Wednesday, Nerve Cowboy and The Alembic. A native Chicagoan, he now lives and works in St Johns, Florida.
Johnny Masiulewicz
Tiffany Melanson
Tiffany Melanson is a poet, performer and graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in Bridge Eight, the online journal deadpaper, and on Swamp Radio, a live radio and podcast experience celebrating the culture, art and history of Northeast Florida, where she is both occasional co-host, interviewer and frequent contributor. Her work is forthcoming in Coda Magazine, EAT poems, and was recently featured in The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens' exhibit, Reflections: Artful Perspectives on the St. Johns River.
Tiffany teaches poetry workshops, magazine production and oral interpretation at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts.
Emily K. Michael
Emily K. Michael is a blind poet, musician, and writing instructor, living in Jacksonville, FL. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature; Artemis Journal; Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing; Breath & Shadow: A Journal of Disability Culture and Literature; Bridge Eight; Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics; and I Am Subject Stories: Women Awakening. She writes for Classical Minnesota Public Radio and develops grammar workshops for multilingual learners.
Carol O'Dell
Carol O'Dell was born a block from the Daytona boardwalk, then adopted, taken to Atlanta and raised by a fundamentalist preacher-woman and her elder-in-the church husband. They grew on her and became her mama and daddy. She tries hard for it not to, but most of Carol's stories come from this experience.
Author of Mothering Mother: A Daughter's Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir, Carol wound up on CNN, which would have made her daddy proud. It seemed like a big deal at the time.
Stories. And coffee. And sunflowers. That's what Carol loves. You can find her words in The Florida Review, Glossolalia, Margin, The International Short Story Collection, The Pisgah Review, Deep South and so on.
Carol's back in Florida. Her daddy told her that Fer-nan-din-a (insert Southern drawl) would be a good place to live one day. Turns out he was right. Carol writes and paints, is the founder of Chats Noir Circles, and is a contributing editor for Caring.com. She speaks, performs, and teaches at conferences and workshops around the country. She'll read for coffee.
Marcus Pactor
Marcus Pactor won the Subito Press Prize for Fiction for his collection of short stories, Vs. Death Noises. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Menacing Hedge, TheEEEL, and Heavy Feather Review. He teaches fiction writing at the University of North Florida.
G.M. Palmer
Author of the poetry collection With Rough Gods, critic of Mad Men and Thug Notes, creator of poems mixing myth with a side of wry humor and tears (1), G.M. Palmer collects his work at www.gmpalmer.com and tweets @gm_palmer and teaches all over town, but mostly he lives with his wife and daughters on a poodle farm near the Trout River (2).
(1) Tears can be pronounced to rhyme with ears or cares here. Also, footnotes have been grossly underutilized since the senseless suicide of David Foster Wallace.
(2) Palmer would also like you to know that he feels especially blessed if he can find more than five hours of sleep in a day.
Heather Peters
Heather M. Peters is an inherently awful dancer. She can't sing well either. Actually, she has very few talents, but people seem to like her anyway.
Having read at Jax by Jax last year, Heather is thrilled and shocked to find herself returning. She will be reading from her upcoming book Sinking in the Stillness until the first tomato is thrown.
Heather's day-job is as middle-school English teacher, molding young minds to do her grammatical bidding. After school hours, she is president of the Offically Unofficial Unauthorized Sylvester Stallone Fan Club. And Batman. Twice.
H.K. Rainey
H.K. Rainey is the author of Memory House and Sotto Voce. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Mills College in Oakland, California, where she was a two-time poetry editor of the literary journal 580 Split. Her work has appeared in Jacket Magazine, the Sand Canyon Review, deadpaper, The Walrus, Bang Out SF, Corium Magazine, Full of Crow, Rusty Truck Magazine, New College Review (Tuscaloosa), Cider Press Review, Mad Rush, sPARKLE and bLINK, and Bird's Thumb; and the anthologies Word Trips: Poems from the First Coast (Hidden Owl Books, 2007), So Speak Up! (Oakland, 2010), and Conversations at the Wartime Café: A Decade of War 2001-2011 (Ed. Sean Labrador Y Manzano). She has appeared in several San Francisco Bay Area reading series including Acker's Dangerous Daughters, the Bang Out Reading Series, Contingency, Quiet Lightning, Bitchez Brew, Lyrics & Dirges, Lip Service West, San Francisco's Litcrawl, Oakland's BeastCrawl, and Works in Progress. For several years, she produced and co-curated the Anger Management Reading Series in San Francisco and Oakland. She teaches English at Florida State College in Jacksonville where she lives and writes. She is currently working on a fantasy series called the Arqiyyon, the first volume of which, These Hours of Bones and Ash, has already been completed.
Raleigh Rand is a volunteer at Beaches Community Kitchen, mother of four, contributing editor with the University of North Florida’s literary magazine, Fiction Fix, and author of one novel, Brightleaf. She is currently working on another novel, Ash Wednesday, set in and around Mayport, Florida and the Jacksonville Beaches. It remains a mystery when this second novel will be ready for publication.
Raleigh Rand
Andres Rojas
Andres Rojas was born in Cuba and came to the United States at age 13. He attended FCCJ where he was the recipient of the Douglas M. Freels Poetry Award and the Jacksonville-State Street Review Poetry Award. After earning an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Florida, he taught creative writing and composition before earning a J.D. also from the University of Florida, and currently works for the United States Department of the Treasury. He is the poetry editor for Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, and his poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in 2River View, Barrow Street, Cossack Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, and riverSedge.
Michaela Tashjian
Michaela Tashjian’s work has appeared in Tiger’s Eye Poetry, The Penwood Review, The Storyteller, Inkspill, 396 Hours, and other publications. Her favorite region of Jacksonville is Riverside, where she has settled down for the time being. Despite the fact that she has an English degree, a typewriter, a published book, and a rapidly diminishing supply of friends, she wonders every day if she will grow up to be “a real writer."
Jeff Whipple
Jeff Whipple creates art about the weirdness and beauty of our brief appearance in the infinity of time. His 82 solo exhibitions include shows at the Tampa Museum of Art, the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, the Museum of Art DeLand, and the Boca Raton Museum of Art. His art has shown in dozens of group exhibitions across the USA and has received 48 top awards in competitions.
Jeff’s play “Spokesperson” was produced in Chicago in 2008 and his comedy, “Couch Potatoes of the 22nd Century,” was produced in 2009 in Orlando. He’s had 17 other play productions since the mid-1980s. He’s won several playwriting awards including five Florida statewide playwriting competitions.
Jeff has won six state arts council individual artist fellowships: two from Illinois and four from Florida. One of the Florida fellowships was for playwriting and the others were for visual art.
His paintings for a New Orleans library were selected as one of the 50 best public art projects in 2012 by the Public Art Network. He’s had dozens of public art commissions with work in murals, sculpture, and video installation.
Jeff has taught at several colleges including Arizona State University, Florida State University, and Northern Illinois University. He currently teaches at the University of North Florida.
April Gray Wilder
April Gray Wilder is a writer and editor. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of Fiction Fix, a literary journal, since 2008. Her fiction, lyric essays, and poetry have appeared in a few dozen online and/or print journals including Prick of the Spindle, Eat Flash, the Unboxed Voices Anthology, and Potluck. She received a Glimmer Train Honorable Mention and has attended the Skidmore NY Summer Writer’s conference on scholarship. She holds a B.A. from the University of North Florida, an M.A. from New York University, and an M.F.A. from Hollins University.
Hurley Winkler
Hurley Winkler is a native + lover of Jacksonville. She's the Managing Editor of the internationally-distributed print publication Perversion Magazine, and Associate Producer for the regional podcast Swamp Radio. She's an MFA in Creative Writing candidate at Lesley University's interdisciplinary program, concentrating in Fiction. Her most recent published work appears in the book The Mad Atlas of Virginia King, alongside the local brilliance of writer Tim Gilmore and illustrator Kiley Secrest. In the past, Hurley has contributed fiction and nonfiction work to publications like The Legendary, 396 Hours, EAT Flash, and Wild Application. She lives in Jacksonville Beach. Follow her everywhere: @hurleywinkler
