Contributors
Shrien Alshabasy graduated from the New Paltz MA program in May 2020.
Joann K. Deiudicibus (MA, English 2003) is a writing instructor and Staff Assistant for the Composition Program at SUNY New Paltz. Her poems appear in Typishly, Lightwood, Chronogram, The Shawangunk Review, Awosting Alchemy, as well as A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill Press), the Calling All Poets Twentieth Anniversary Anthology and Ekphrasis 2020 (CAPS Press). She is the poetry co-editor of WaterWrites (Codhill Press). Her essays appear in Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process (Codhill Press) and Affective Disorder and the Writing Life (Palgrave Macmillan). She’s recently been a featured reading for Calling All Poets, Greenkill Gallery, and Next Years Words. Her interests include cats, composition, true crime, and confessionalism.
Bri Castagnozzi will graduate from SUNY New Paltzs 4+1 program in the fall of 2021 with an MA in English. Her interests include ethnic writing, animal theory, pedagogy of composition, and visual storytelling. As a falconer, her ornithological passions often cross paths with her scholarly pursuits.
Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born, American-Haitian Queer independent writer and author. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays that are centered on existentialism in the context of Blackness.
Dennis Doherty teaches creative writing and literature and SUNY New Paltz. He has also enjoyed teaching, lecturing, and reading for many other public and private schools in the region, from elementary to high school to prison. He is author of four volumes of poetry: The Bad Man (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press, 2004), Fugitive (Codhill Press, 2007), Crush Test (Codhill Press 2010), and Black Irish (Codhill Press, 2016) as well as a book-length study of Huckleberry Finn: Why Read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New Street Communications, 2014). Essays, poems, and stories appear throughout the literary press. He has a new novel in the works.
Thomas Festa, Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of a book and over two dozen articles, mainly focused on Milton, Donne, and other early modern English writers, and has co-edited four anthologies. Current projects include a study of W.S. Merwin, as well as new poems and translations. His poetry has appeared in the Shawangunk Review, Chronogram, Lightwood, and Haiku Journal.
Abigail Gallagher is a Hudson Valley poet and writer. Her work has been published in Breakwater Review, Chronogram, and Green Kill Broadsheet, among others. She is the author of the self-published chapbook, How to Grieve which documents the grieving process through both poetry and prose. Abbey is the Childrens Literacy Coordinator at the Millbrook Library, an English tutor, and Mid-Hudson Youth Writers workshop leader. You can find her book reviews, writing workshop ideas, and general life musings at https://nonewideasblog.wordpress.com.
Brian Garritano is an High School English teacher who fancies himself a poet, and lives in Beacon, NY. An alumni of SUNY New Paltz, he can often be spotted going for long runs at five in the morning or picking up an indulgent amount of take-out food to enjoy on a cozy night in.
Christopher Heffernan was born and raised in upstate New York, and has had poetry and fiction placed in magazines and journals around the country such as The Believer, The Writers Journal, Pacific Coast Journal, Cottonwood, Talking River, The South Dakota Review, Louisiana Literature, the Sierra Nevada Review, the Tampa Review, Whisky Island, Big Muddy, The Madison Review, Cape Cod Poetry Review, 34th Parallel and he has a story coming out this fall in the Potomac Review. He has a book of poetry and flash fiction titled Rag Water, and spends much of his time working and walking in the sun.
Mary K. Holland is Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, where she teaches contemporary literature and theory. Her most recent work is #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture (co-edited with Heather Hewett, Bloomsbury 2021). She is also the author of The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism (Bloomsbury 2020) and Succeeding Postmodernism (Bloomsbury 2013), and co-editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace (MLA 2019). Shes looking forward to expanding the footprint of last years garden, and seeing what comes to the surface.
Mike Jurkovic’s poems and musical criticism have appeared worldwide with little reportable income. Recent full-length collections are: AmericanMental, (Luchador Press 2020) and Blue Fan Whirring (Nirala Press, 2018); he was a 2016 Pushcart nominee. Mike is the President of Calling All Poets ( www.callingallpoets.net ), a long-time Hudson Valley reading series (New Paltz, NY). His reviews appear online at All About Jazz and Lightwood. He hopes to return to his Tuesday Night Jazz Sanctuary program on WOOC 103.5 in Troy, NY.
He loves Emily most of all.
James Kwapisz (English MA, TA 2017-2019) is a writer and musician based out of Kingston, New York. His stories, songs, poems, and essays share a common theme in that they explore various communication breakdowns and offer perspectives that could help us connect more clearly and genuinely.
Teresa Kurtz graduated from SUNY New Paltzs English MA Program in August 2020. They are interested in feminist theory, affect theory, American post-modernism, and Frankenstein scholarship. In their Masters Thesis, Teresa explores the contextuality of physical touch as well as touchs potential to be seen as a literary lens.
Sabrina E. Lopez graduated from SUNY New Paltzs English MA Program in May of 2020. Her interests include twenty-first century manifestations of the mixed body and Afro-Cuban spiritual folklore. She continues her studies through independent research and creative projects merging short stories and poetry.
Edward Maietta tells tall and short tales and writes poetry in the Hudson Valley.
Cyrus Mulready is Associate Professor of English and the Director of Graduate Studies at SUNY New Paltz. He has served as Editor of the Shawangunk Review since 2016.
Julia Ponder is a teacher and a writer living in the Hudson Valley. She graduated with an MA in English from SUNY New Paltz in May of 2020. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in The Chronogram, The Susquehanna Review, 805Lit, That Magazine, The Sonder Review, The Stonesthrow Review, The Shawangunk Review, and The Dillydoun Review.
Erin Quinn Journalist/Swim Coach/Mom
erinmaryquinn@gmail.com
Alana Sawchuk is a writer and SUNY New Paltz alum dwelling in the Hudson Valley. When shes not entrenched in local government weirdness shes placing gentle kisses on her dogs snoot and struggling to write her first novel.
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of English Emerita at SUNY New Paltz in the Department of English where she taught autobiography, creative writing, American and contemporary literature, womens Literature, and Holocaust literature courses. Her work has been published in many journals including The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Broadkill Review, The Cream City Review, Home Planet News, Kansas Quarterly, Memoir, the Westchester Review, and Wind. Her work also has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series. She has had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000) and two collections of autobiographical essays, Women/Writing/Teaching (SUNY Press, 1998) and Wise Women: Reflections of Teachers at Mid-Life, co-authored with Dr. Phyllis R. Freeman (Routledge, 2000). In addition, she co-authored with Laurence Carr an anthology of womens writing from the Hudson Valley: A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill, 2013), which won the USA Best Book Award for Anthology. One chapbook, The Earth Was Still, was recently published by Finishing Line Press and another Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time by Word Temple Press. Legacies: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, a composition and literature textbook and anthology, co-authored with Lynne Crockett, published by Cengage is now in its fifth edition. Her full-length volume, Foraging for Light was published in September 2019 by Finishing Line Press.
Rhonda Shary was a Lecturer in the English department at SUNY New Paltz from 2008 to 2014, teaching Honors Composition, Composition I and II, Contemporary Issues and Literature, 20th Century American Women Writers, and other courses. With the support of Pauline Uchmanowicz and Larry Carr, Rhondas poetry has been published in the Codhill Presss Water Writes: A Hudson River Anthology and A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, and in the Shawangunk Review.
James Sherwood (MA English, 2009, MAT Secondary Ed, 2011) is a Litigation Paralegal at a Kingston, NY law firm and serves as Associate Editor at Codhill Press. As an independent editor, he has edited, proofed, and indexed books for publication through the SUNY Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Pearson, Cengage, and various other small presses. He lives in Highland with his wife, Malorie, and cat, Lily.
Robert Singleton received both his BA Degree and MA Degrees from SUNY New Paltz. His mother, Natalie Tompkins Singleton was also a New Paltz graduate (Class of 1940). He taught in the Composition Program as a TA and later as an Adjunct Instructor for the English Department until his retirement from the department after being diagnosed with Parkinsons Disease in 2014. He also taught in the College Writing program at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. His poems have appeared in Xanadu, The Long Island Poetry Collective, Maelstrom, Foxtail, The Image of War (the publican of The Center for the Preservation of Civil War Photography), as well as previous issues of The Shawangunk Review. He currently lives in Schenectady, New York.
Timothy Smajda will earn his MA in English from SUNY New Paltz in May 2021 after five semesters of studying and teaching First-year Composition in the English departments TA program. After graduating, he will be teaching English classes at the college level. His scholarly interests include the craft of fiction and poetry, Biblical literature, mythology, the life and writings of C.S. Lewis, Jungian Analytical Psychology, and music composition.
H. R. Stoneback (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, SUNY New Paltz) is the founding editor of the Shawangunk Review and the author of several monographs, essays, and poetry collections, including Reading Hemingways The Sun Also Rises (Kent State UP, 2007), Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact, & Influence (UNO Press 2013), Affirming the Gold Thread (Florida English Press, 2014), and Songs & Poems for Hemingway & Paris. Despite (or because of) his retirement, his itinerary of keynote addresses and poetry readings over the past year has taken him to Philadelphia, Nashville, the Caribbean, and beyond.
Lanette Sweeney’s debut collection, What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir About Losing A Child to Addiction, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press and is currently in presales at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/. Sweeney is grateful the book is allowing her to share two messages: medication-assisted treatment saves addicts lives, and a life rich with meaning, purpose and joy is (eventually) possible after even the most brutal loss. Sweeney, a former fundraiser and college teacher, is now a full-time writer thanks to her wifes support. She and her family live in South Hadley, MA.
Nicholas Wright earned his MA (English) from New Paltz in 2008 where he was a TA and an adjunct for several years. He earned his MAT from Bard College in 2017. Currently, he teaches literature and writing courses at Marist and grammar courses for the Bard Prison Initiative. This is his first published poem.
