Epiphany | A Literary Journal

Contributors Fall 2004

Isabelle Assante
Isabelle Assante is a French-born writer who has been a resident of New York City since 2001. Her debut as a playwright came after one of her full-length plays Article 5, an account of a year-long correspondence with a death row inmate incarcerated in Jackson, Georgia, was taken to the French stage in 2000. Some excerpts of the play are now part of a collection published by Editions Berenice.

She has studied playwriting at NYU under Christopher Shinn and Michael Zam and was selected to participate in the Flea Theater workshop with Mac Wellman in the spring of 2004.

One of her one acts, Potluck, was part of the Samuel French Theater Festival in 2003. This coming winter, Ms. Assante's 2001 comedy On Se Calme! (Art et Comedie Editions) will receive an exclusive fifteen-performance production by the renowned Divadlo Theatre. Established in Marseilles in 1982, Divadlo was named after the famous Czech puppet theatre.

She is currently at work on a solo piece inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet that she will present at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory this December. For more information, please contact: isabelle_assante@hotmail.com.

Brendan Costello Jr.
Brendan Costello Jr. is a writer living in New York City. He is a recent recipient of the Irwin and Alice Stark Award for Short Fiction from the City College of New York, where he is completing a master's degree in creative writing. His work has appeared in Salon.com and smokebox.net, and he is currently at work on a memoir, as well as a novel set in the surreal world of riverboat gambling. Brendan is also an arts producer for WBAI radio in New York. He can be reached at btc@gis.net.

John Michael Cummings
John Michael Cummings's nonfiction has appeared in ACM (Another Chicago Magazine) and Utne Reader. His short stories have appeared in North American Review and Alaska Quarterly Review. He is a native of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia and today lives in New York City. He can be reached at johnmcummings@aol.com.

Theodor Damian
Theodor Damian is a theologian, writer and editor. He is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at the Metropolitan College of New York. He has also published poetry in Faultline, Poetry East, and Rockhurst Review and is also the author of books in the field of theology and literary criticism. His poems, written in Romanian, have been widely published in his home country. He is founder and director of Lumina Lina/ Gracious Light, A Review of Romanian Sprituality and Culture, and Symposium, a theological review, in New York.

Leah Fortson
Leah Fortson's work has appeared in the Oxford American, the Mountain Laurel, and several history publications. Her first novel, Take Two, a humorous look at two women confronting their mid-thirties, is about to go out to publishers. She is working on her second book, in which a dangerously charming sister-in-law makes a Harlem household examine the value and cost of family, and the lies and truths required to keep it going. Lisa can be contacted at arroyo@gilderlehrman.org.

Henry Guzman
Henry Guzman received an MFA in dramatic writing from NYU in 1993 and has had plays produced by various theaters including Tisch School of the Arts (NYU), the Public Theater, INTAR, Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, the Ohio Theatre, and Aaron Davis Hall. His plays include Inkarri's Return, Caliban, Flyin' High, Black Box, Pilgrim's Passion, Kid Mondongo, and Confessions of a PK. He is a member of New York Theatre Workshop's Usual Suspects, The Writers Room, and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre's Professional Playwrights unit. He can be reached at hguzman@nyc.rr.com.

Daniel John
Daniel John was raised in Saskatchewan, Canada. He is a garden and landscape designer by trade and teaches a class in Intuitive Gardening for Brookline Adult Education. He has ten children.

Enid Harlow
Enid Harlow is the author of two novels, Crashing (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1980) and A Better Man (Van Neste Books, Midlothian, Virginia, 2000). Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals of national distinction including the Southern Review, Ontario Review, TriQuarterly, Xavier Review, the American Voice, Quarterly West, and Bennington Review. Ms. Harlow has received two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards and a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also the author of five stage plays.

A native New Yorker, she graduated from New York University, College of Arts and Sciences and NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She continues to live and write in the city of her birth.

William Luvaas
William Luvaas is the author of six novels. The Seductions of Natalie Bach (Little, Brown) was nominated for the National Book Award, and Going Under (Putnam) for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His stories and essays have appeared in many publications including: American Fiction-No. 9, Antioch Review, Blackbird, Cosmopolitan, Confrontation, Glimmer Train, Open Spaces, Short Story, the Sun, Village Voice, and the Washington Post Book World. His story The Firewood Wars was cowinner of Fiction Network Magazine's second national Fiction Competition, and a collection won honorable mention in the Capricorn Fiction Award. He teaches creative writing at San Diego State University.

Jim Reese
Jim Reese is a writer, photographer and editor who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he teaches in the English department and works on the editorial staff of the Prairie Schooner. He is cofounder of and Imagining Editor for Logan House Press. Reese's poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies: South Dakota Review, Nebraska Life, Nebraska Territory, Morpo Review, Touchstone, Plains Song Review (University of Nebraska Press), Platte Valley Review, as well as Poetry Motel in his first book, As Worthless As Tits On A Boar (Cacthouse Publishing, 1995), Wedding Cake and Funeral Ham (Grizzly Press, 2002) and his most recent collection, The Jive (Morpo Press, 2004).

Courtney Reimer
Courtney Reimer moved to New York from her hometown of Seattle in March of 2001. Since then, she's fallen in and out of love with the city more times than she's bothered to count. She spends her days writing pithy news about the has-beens, never-weres and always-will-bes of classic rock for VH1. Her work has appeared in the Stranger, CMJ, and Black Book magazine. Though the maxim is that most rock journalists are failed musicians, she can often be found preparing for her music career by attempting to stay in key while belting out bad pop songs at sundry Manhattan karaoke bars. She can be reached at Courtney.Reimer@vh1staff.com.

Aaron Sanders
Aaron Sanders is a writer who pays the bills by staying home with his two boys by day and working as a Ph.D candidate in English at the University of Connecticut by night. Aaron's most recent work has appeared in Quarterly West, Beloit Fiction Journal, the Jabberwock Review, Hawaii Review, and Aura Literary Arts Review and has been aired on WAMC's The Roundtable (Northeast Public Radio). Aaron can be reached at sandersaaron@yahoo.com.

Bob Rossi
Bob Rossi is a union organizer in the Pacific Northwest and co-editor of the Northwest Ethnic Voice.

Marilyn Stern
Marilyn Stern is a New York City-based photographer working in fine art and editorial photography. Her work has been widely exhibited and published in the U.S. and in Europe. She has published two books: Kval! Die Walfanger der Lofoten (The Whale Hunters of Lofoten) and Masked Culture: The Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, a long-term group project. She is represented in the permanent collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and numerous private collections.

Since the mid-1990s, Marilyn has worked almost exclusively in photo-assemblage. She developed and taught the class "Beyond the Single Image" at the International Center of Photography in 2001, and is currently on the faculty of New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

Marilyn Stern was photo editor of Across the Board, a national business magazine. She is also a writer. She has authored one book (Kval!) and numerous articles on photography, travel, culture, science and business for Photo District News, The World & I, Travel Agent, MD and other magazines.

Marilyn is currently compiling an anthology on composite photography.

She holds a B.A. in Fine Art from Brown University, 1976, with photography classes at Rhode Island School of Design. Her training also included assisting over 20 commercial photographers in New York City.

Susan Thomas
Susan Thomas has published stories, poems and translations in many journals and anthologies. Her collection, State of Blessed Gluttony, (Red Hen Press, 2004), was winner of the Benjamin Saltman Prize. A chapbook, The Hand Waves Goodbye, was published by Main Street Rag in 2002. She is the winner of the 2003 Iowa Poetry Award from the Iowa Review and the 2003 Ann Stanford Prize from University of Southern California. She is currently working on translating the poems of Giovanni Pascoli from the Italian with Richard Jackson and Deborah Brown. She lives in Marshfield, VT.

Jodi Weiss
Jodi Weiss is an associate literary agent at the Peter Rubie Literary Agency in New York City. When she's not agenting, she teaches literature and creative writing courses at New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Studies and at Hunter College. Jodi has an MA in English and an MFA in creative writing, both from Brooklyn College. Her short stories have appeared in a variety of literary journals, and her book for teenagers (written with Russell Kahn), 145 Things to Be When You Grow Up, was published by The Princeton Review/Random House in 2004. She can be reached at JodiW5@aol.com.

Jill Wright
Jill grew up in a small town in Oklahoma and now lives in Los Angeles where she has worked as a writer-producer of new media for Warner Brothers, Digital Pictures, IVS and others. Her work with children and media has been the subject of a BBC Documentary, Equinox. She is an award-winning author of children's books — The Old Woman and the Willy Nilly Man (G.P. Putnam's Sons), winner of The Helen Laemme Award, The Old Woman and the Jar of Uums (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), and Minnie's Tea Party (Starry Puddle Publishing). She has been the recipient of a grant from the Los Angeles Council of Cultural Affairs. Her poetry chapbooks are — A Child's Christmas in Oklahoma, (Sacred Bundle Publishing,) and Wild Stars, an Anthology from Art of the Wild, SVWC, (Starry Puddle Publishing) which she also edited. She has completed a novel, Hand Me Down the Wind, and is at work on her second novel, Petals. Her work has recently been published or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Phatasmagoria, The Distillery, PMS poem/memoir/story), Hawaii Review, Homestead Review, Eclipse, Eureka Literary Magazine, Spillway, Mindprints, and The Texas Review. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, 2003. She can be reached at jill@starrypuddle.com.