Meet our Students

First Year Students - Poetry

Christopher Caruso
Christopher Caruso (poetry) is returning to New Jersey after a six year hiatus.  He received his B.A. in English with a Creative Writing focus from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he graduated with honors and completed a Senior Creative Thesis.  While living in Denver, CO he was involved in several community charities; most notably an art auction/poetry reading he organized that raised money for Denver’s homeless. He is currently working on creating a more challenging and abstract poetic style and updating his blog http://chrisinkspot.blogspot.com/).  Post MFA, he plans to teach in Europe and Japan before pursuing a PhD concentrating on Modernist Literature with a focus on DADA.   His poetry has appeared in Matter, Rio Grande Review, Lilliput, and several anthologies.        

Sara Grossman
Sara Grossman (poetry) was raised on a flower farm in Chesterfield, New Jersey.  She received her B.A. in English and Music from Rutgers College in New Brunswick, NJ.  After studying at Rutgers, she worked in the financial sector and later returned to farming.  Her poetry explores the practice of everyday life as a series of complex processes bound to social, cultural, and historical experience.  She teaches English Composition in the Rutgers-Newark Writing Program.

Paula Neves 
Paula Neves (poetry) was born and raised in and around Newark’s Ironbound section, has worked in various wordsmithing capacities, and, true to her Portuguese heritage, has experienced near transcendence in the presence of fado and futebol. She has a BA in English and Portuguese from Rutgers New Brunswick, is finishing an MA in English from Rutgers Newark, and decided that her fascination with internal and slant rhymes, coupled with her inability to escape her roots predestined her to join the RN MFA program. Her poetry has appeared in The Poetry of Sex, The Newark Metro and is forthcoming in the New Laurel Review. This past spring she happily arose at 4:00 a.m. to read her own and others’ daybreak/renewal poems at the Newark Museum’s Centennial Celebration.

Jenna Risano
Jenna Risano (poetry) was born in Brooklyn and raised in Hamilton, New Jersey. After a five year stint in Tampa she is ready to add a new turnpike exit to her repertoire. She received a BA in English-Writing from the University of Tampa in 2008. At UT she was Poetry Editor of the literary magazine, won the Tim O’Connor Award for Writing, and was awarded Best English Graduate and Best Writing Portfolio. When she’s not writing or reading, or writing about reading, her loves include hockey, listening to her records, and watching old movies.

Valerie Smith
Valerie Smith (poetry) was raised in Kingston, Jamaica and Long Island, New York, by conservative, albeit liberal-minded Jamaican parents. After taking several years off for travel, she finally, and to her parents' relief, completed her B.A in English at CUNY Hunter College, and her MA in English at Rutgers University. In the past five years, she has lived in Brazil and Jamaica. She currently resides in Newark, and is more than thrilled to engage with the Rutgers Newark MFA Program's dynamic group of writers.

Armin Tolentino
Armin Tolentino (poetry) is returning to his native New Jersey, ending a six year, self imposed exile.  In 2003, he graduated with a BS in chemistry from the College of New Jersey, but had no interest in pursuing the field professionally.  Instead, he spent time in Baltimore, Boston, and Portland, OR, experimenting with a grab bag of jobs including AmeriCorps volunteer, care taker, special education teacher, Japanese cook, and airline employee.  He spent his off hours writing fiction and poetry and is excited to study creative writing at Rutgers-Newark.  He is also excited to return to the Garden State where it is never difficult to find a gyro at three in the morning.   

Rimas Uzgiris
Rimas Uzgiris (poetry) grew up in upstate NY and received a BA in anthropology at UC-San Diego. In search of cultures old and new, he lived in Lithuania for a year before going to graduate school in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Unwilling to simply assume a theoretical stance in his field, he completed a PhD in philosophy. All too often, though, he poured out verses when he sat down to write. This Brooklyn habitant looks forward to studying at Rutgers-Newark this fall.

Second Year Students - Poetry

diego báez
diego báez (poetry) graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University in 2007 with a BA in English.  He enjoys punctuation in general, and guillemets, specifically.  He abhors television and adores Nam June Paik.  Much of his writing is informed by his experiences as an American in Paraguay -- a role to which he cannot wait to return. Until then, he very much enjoys working with the writers at Rutgers-Newark.

Moriah Cohen
Moriah Cohen (poetry) is a single mother who graduated Magna Cum Laude from Ramapo College with a BA in Literature. She was published in the 2006 and 2008 editions of Ramapo’s literary magazine, which she recently helped edit. Moriah is the 2007 recipient of the Helen Burchell Award and the 2008 recipient of the Lee Sennish Award. Her poetic influences include James Hoch, Sharon Olds, and Patrick Phillips. Moriah is happily anticipating working with the faculty at Rutgers-Newark.

Zahra Marie Darby  
Zahra Marie Darby (poetry) was born and raised in Miami, FL. She received her B.A. from Spelman College (2004) where she was a student contributor and editor for Aunt Chole (formerly Focus) and L-i-n-k-e-d. Zahra has lived and worked in Atlanta, reporting for a bi-weekly newspaper whose mission is to inform and connect members of the African Diaspora. Most recently, her interview with poet Sean Singer was published in Country Dog Review. She has become a patron of many spaces in Newark, and loves the local spoken word and jazz scenes. 

Saeed Jones  
Saeed Jones (poetry) was born in Memphis, TN and raised in Texas. He received a BA in English from Western Kentucky University. While at Western, he competed for the speech/debate team and won several national and international titles. Along the way, he met poet and professor Tom Hunley, who introduced him to poetry as a discipline and to the broader literary community. His work has appeared in StorySouth, OCHO, Barnwood, Splinter Generation, and other publications. He blogs regularly at saeedjones.wordpress.com. 

Jean YeoJin Sung
Jean YeoJin Sung (poetry) was born in South Korea and raised in Cherry Hill, NJ. She received her BA in 2004 from NYU's Gallatin School where she was awarded the Herbert J. Rubin Award for Poetry. She received her Master's in Public Administration in 2008 from NYU's Wagner School of Public Service. She is passionate about her volunteer work with Day One New York, where she coordinates the Youth Voices Network, which supports survivors of teen dating violence in speaking out and raising awareness about the issue. She currently works at Project Reach Youth at Brooklyn's Secondary Schools for Law, Journalism, and Research as an after-school teacher and mentor. Currently residing in Brooklyn, she is excited to return for her final year in Rutgers-Newark MFA Program.

Eleonora Luongo
Eleonora Luongo (poetry) was born and raised in Elizabeth, NJ. Nora's writing journey began with a blue diary that one of her grandparents brought to her from Italy. She studied architecture for two years at NJIT, became fascinated with the shiny-new and exciting "world wide web", and defected to earn her degree in computer science. Her NJIT English professor suggested she get a minor in literature, and it was in her poetry class that she was first called a poet.  She spent many summers visiting family in southern Italy, and recently got married in Amalfi. She currently works at Rutgers-Newark, is excited about the MFA Program, and hopes to choose Literature/Book Arts as her concentration.

Third Year Students - Poetry

Daniel Flynn
Daniel Flynn (poetry) grew up on the Jersey Shore and still lives in the shore town of Brick.  His interest in literature and writing was as an alternative to the steady grind of undergraduate pre-med studies at The College of New Jersey (1997), where he abandoned Biology and majored in English.  The works of writers Henry James and Robert Frost influenced his understanding and appreciation of language.  After minor publishing success in feature writing, Daniel received an alternate license to teach in the State of New Jersey in 2000 and became a successful teacher of English at Freehold High School.  He is a second year MFA student at Rutgers Newark.  Life, for Daniel, is about using and questioning language – “the rest is silence.”

Gaganpreet Kaur
Gaganpreet Kaur (poetry) was born in North India and raised in Queens, NY. She received her BA in English and Philosophy from Queens College of The City University of New York. She has worked as a high school English teacher in NYC for the past four years and currently resides in Howard Beach, NY. She has obsessively read the works of Agha Shahid Ali and Alan Dugan. Her book review has appeared in LUNA, an online journal of poetry and translation. She is thrilled to be completing her MFA at Rutgers-Newark this year.

Kevin Kilroy
Kevin Kilroy (poetry) was born and raised in Little Egg Harbor, NJ.  He attended Hofstra University, where he received his BA in English Literature and Creative Writing. He moved to Queens in 2006, where he worked as a waiter, bartender, and canvasser for the Working Families Party in Brooklyn. He currently lives in the Heights in Jersey City and works as a waiter in midtown Manhattan.  A musician, he plays piano and guitar, considers himself a drummer first and foremost, and has recently developed an appreciation for jazz.  He enjoys traveling, plans a trip to Ireland, and loves mixology (the histories and finer points of - as well as indulging in - various liquors and beers).  His literary influences include Hemingway, Salinger, Bukowski, Creeley, Hayes, Camus, and Faulkner.  He looks forward to his second year in the inaugural MFA class of Rutgers Newark.

Jacob T. McCall
Jacob T. McCall (poetry) was born in Deerfield Beach, FL, the youngest of four sons of a paperboy from the streets of New York City and a South Florida preschool teacher. The elder McCall told his son endless stories about his urban homeland, instilling in young Jacob a wish to see and experience the city for himself.  He earned a football scholarship to Fordham University in 2000 and graduated with a BA in English (2004).  He earned a living as a substitute teacher while attending Joshua Springs Bible College, where he prepared a paper for the 2005 Media Ecology Association Conference about Racial Caricatures in Video Games. He left Joshua Springs in the summer of 2005 due to theological differences, returned home, worked as a Recreation Minister, and became a public school teacher.  He worked at becoming a well-rounded individual while planning his return to graduate school and the pursuit of his new dream: becoming Poet Laureate of the U.S.  Jacob has enjoyed the challenges of Rutgers Newark, where he is a second year MFA student.

First Year Students - Fiction

Leslie Ann Murray Alvaradous
Leslie Ann Murray Alvaradous (fiction) - "My prize positions are my laptop, the thirty-something diaries I have documenting the minutia and beauty of my life, and my unedited journeys, some real, some imagined. The theme of transition and journey takes precedent in most of my stories; I am interested in these two elements because it’s the world I have perpetually lived in since migrating to America from Trinidad fourteen years ago. My writing has had several journeys its self it has moved from the spoken word stage to freelance journalism and now fiction. My writing has been published by the Amsterdam News, The Museum of the African Diaspora and The African Magazine. Besides my personal journeys, I have been teaching creative writing to youths in New York City and South Africa to create their own journeys through the power of writing I help them build wings and see the world without borders"

Kevin Catalano
Kevin Catalano (fiction) was born and raised in Chittenango, NY, home of Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum, meaning he grew up surrounded by Oz-themed cafes and stores, yellow-bricked sidewalks, and perfectly normal residents who, every year, dressed as Oz characters for the town's annual Oz Festival.  He is convinced that this environment has messed with his head in strange, irreversible ways.  He received his B.A. in English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, studied reindeer husbandry in Finland, and now lives in New Jersey with his wife, where he teaches composition full-time at Rutgers-Newark. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Prick of the Spindle, Cause & Effect Magazine, PANK, Denver Syntax, the Absent Willow Review Anthology, and other places nobody's ever heard of.  A short story of his was also nominated for StorySouth's 2008 Million Writers Award. 

Mark Di Ionno
Mark Di Ionno (fiction) is a news columnist at The Star-Ledger and the author of three non-fiction books about New Jersey culture and history, including one about the American Revolution. Prior to working at The Star-Ledger, Di Ionno was a sports columnist at The New York Post, an experience which shaped his view of America's slide down the less bread and more circuses path. His fiction writing themes will center on lost American ideals and purpose, and how the entertainment-deadened citizenry, led by media, no longer holds government or industry accountable to those ideals. Di Ionno is the father of six children, and lives in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. He is a graduate of Rutgers-Newark ('85) and will be teaching a course in Fall '09 called "Urban Journalism."

Ephen Glenn
Ephen Glenn (fiction) was born in Ohio. In 2002-03 he was a Writing Fellow at the The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. His fiction has appeared in Shankpainter. His nonfiction -- Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism (Boston: South End Press, 1996), in which he was a co-editor and contributing writer -- won the 1997 Meyer Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Ephen holds a M.A. in American Studies from New York University and a B.A. from Bard College, where he studied Literature and Gender to write his senior thesis, "‘The Choice Word or the Chosen Silence’: Male Homoeroticism in Harlem Renaissance Literature, 1925 - 1932". These days he hustles in New York City as a certified Hatha Yoga teacher, freelance editor, and creative writer. He knows the Rutgers MFA Program by reputation and is delighted by an invitation to join their literary community for graduate work. He looks forward to learning from his peers, the serious students and seasoned teachers enthusiastic as he is about the art of the novel.

Tom Johns 
Tom Johns was raised in Chicago and spent a chunk of his formative years in the back of a storefront on the city’s Southside where his sister turned him on to Mike Royko. Raised in a traditional Gypsy household, Johns was pulled from grade school at age seven as his family hit the road in a traveling carnival. After selling cars, fried dough, and vacation packages, Johns would next enter a classroom at age 25 when he enrolled at Lake Forest College where he recently graduated summa cum laude with honors in his major, English, and distinction on his thesis (a collection of creative writing); he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa and won his school’s Gail DeHerder Memorial Prize in Creative Writing. His fiction has appeared in Word Riot, Denver Syntax, The Litchfield Literary Review, Front&Centre, and others.

Dickson Lam
Dickson Lam (fiction) was born in Hong Kong and raised in San Francisco.  He received his BA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and his MA in Education at Teachers College of Columbia University.  He has worked in various capacities to reform education including serving as an AmeriCorps member at Coleman Advocates to address educational equity, teaching high school English and Social Studies for seven years, including being a founding teacher at June Jordan School for Equity, a small high school in San Francisco.  Most recently, he has worked at the Public Service Center at UC Berkeley coordinating AmeriCorps programs focused on serving underserved youth.  He is looking forward to working with the Rutgers-Newark faculty and students in his pursuit of completing a memoir.   

Kiira Mancasola
Kiira Mancasola (fiction) was raised in the naturally beautiful but culturally challenged city of Redding in northern California. Growing up she was a competitive fiddler—a three-time State Champion and the National Small Fry Champion in 1991. She received her BA in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 2007.  Other adventures from her collegiate period include a program in Shakespeare and Classical Acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and volunteering at a street children’s shelter in Quito. She spent the past two years living in San Francisco, where she worked as Managing Editor for left-coast arts and culture magazine, SOMA, and writer for JustinTimberlake.com. She is grateful to the Rutgers Newark MFA program for the opportunity to get back to writing what she loves, and looks forward to exploring the five wards of Renaissance City. 

Priscilla Mainardi 
Priscilla Mainardi (fiction), born and raised in Connecticut, has an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania.  She moved to New Jersey in 1983, raised her family, and then went back to college for a nursing degree.  While working as a nurse at Chilton Memorial Hospital, she has taken numerous writing workshops in New York City and Provincetown, and loves everything about writing, from buying the perfect pen, to the requisite solitude, to the way a story takes shape on the page.  She once wrote a 175 page novel called The Box of Money in one month, and hopes to publish it someday.  She is thrilled to be part of the very exciting program at Rutgers-Newark.

Justin Mayer
Justin Mayer (fiction) is a graphic designer, illustrator, and aspiring writer. In 2004, he earned a BA in New Media Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY, where he minored in Professional Writing and was editor-in-chief of Reporter, the school magazine. Since college, he has worked in advertising in New York City and Hoboken, NJ, as a web designer. He lives in an apartment in Montclair, NJ, a few blocks away from his nursery school, where his first teacher, Mrs. Grady, once described him as a man of few but important words. Attending the Rutgers Newark MFA Program is exactly what he wants to be doing with his life.

John McIntyre   
 John McIntyre (fiction) grew up in Tennessee, listening to stories told by everyone around him. By the time he'd finished high school, he had decided to become a writer, despite having almost no idea what that would entail. He attended The University of Memphis, studying with the writer Randall Kenan and receiving a BA in Literature in 2001. He received his M.A. in Literature from U. of M. in 2005, working closely with the poet Gordon Osing. Osing's influence in part influenced McIntyre's decision to live and work in South Korea after graduation, where McIntyre has taught as a TOEFL teacher since 2005. He has traveled widely in Northeast Asia and  Australia.
     He continues work on  a volume of stories in the vein of Sherwood Anderson's great Winesburg, Ohio, though McIntyre's stories are relocated to the American South, and  mostly set in the present day. He is also at work on a book of letters between the writer James Salter and the late critic Robert Phelps. Selections from this book appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of the American Scholar as “Dawn of a Literary Friendship.”  He is honored to receive the Truman Capote Fellowship and looks forward to working with the very talented faculty and students at the Rutgers Newark MFA  Program.

Claudio Mir
Claudio Mir (fiction) is a filmmaker and actor as well as a skilled musician and visual artist. Claudio is truly a community artist writing and directing touring pieces for prostate and breast cancer survivors to perform for the public. Additionally, he has created pieces to bring awareness of HIV/AIDS prevention and the social cost of domestic violence and child abuse and neglect. For the past 12 years he has worked as the artist director and head faculty for the Artists Mentoring against Racism, Drugs, and Violence summer camp, which serves over fifty New Brunswick students (ages ten to fifteen) along with twenty college mentors. He adapted and directed “Dominicanish,” a one-woman show written and performed by Josefina Baez. His photography and performances have been exhibited throughout the New York Metropolitan area. For the past eight years, Claudio has been increasingly in demand as an artist in schools, as a professional development facilitator, and as a workshop leader. In 2003, he was selected to serve as a New Jersey State Arts Council Artist in the Schools. Claudio earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He received a Professional Actor Degree from the School of Scenic Arts, National Fine Arts Palace, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He has also studied theater direction at the International School of Latin American and Caribbean Theater in Bologna, Italy, and earned his Associates Degree in Professional and Commercial Photography from Middlesex County College in New Jersey. At the present time he works at the Office of the Associate Vice President of Academic & Public Partnerships in the Arts & Humanities in Rutgers New Brunswick.

Christa Parravani
Christa holds (fiction) a BA from Bard College in creative writing and earned her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. She has completed two major bodies of photographic work, Kindred and Whatever I was in Life Spoon River. She has exhibited work at Photo New York, The AAF Contemporary Art fair in New York, Photo San Francisco, Sixtyseven Gallery, Julia Friedman Gallery, Gallery 400 in Chicago, The Woodstock Center for Photography, Midway Contemporary Art Galley in St. Paul, and the Kassel Academy of Art in Kassel, Germany. She was awarded the first Mortimer Frank Travel fellowship for her series, Other in 2003, and is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships. Her work has been published in PEN America, Crowd, Advocasey, the Columbia University SOA Bulletin, Small Spiral Notebook and as the cover art for Danielle Pafunda's Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press), and is forthcoming in When Darkness Falls: A Survey of Contemporary Gothic Art. She was an assistant Professor at Keene state College and a lecturer in the MFA program in Visual Art at UMass Amherst and Dartmouth College. Christa has previously taught at the Purchase College of Art and Design, Columbia University and The San Francisco Art Institute. She looks forward to coming to Rutgers to work on her memoir.

Nick Ripatrazone
Nick Ripatrazone (fiction) lives in rural New Jersey with his wife.  He is no stranger to Newark: his mother is from the Ironbound, he played soccer at dusty Independence Park, and he earned an MA in English Literature at Rutgers Newark, where he was awarded Highest Distinction in Literary Studies.  He was third prizewinner in the 2008 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest.  His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Sou’wester, The Los Angeles Review, and The New York Quarterly.  He is a public-school English teacher and is also completing graduate work in Catholic theology. 

Joann Samaan
Joann Samaan (fiction) was first generation born in New Jersey.  I was raised in a very traditional household with my parents who where born and raised in Egypt. I graduated from Rutgers University with a BA in English in 2008.  Currently, I am working in Educational Marketing, but am eager to expand my knowledge and gain experience in Fiction Writing.  Hopefully, I will one day be able to teach and have others feel the same joy as I do when I am writing. 

Mary Jang-ye Schultz
Mary Jang-ye Schultz (fiction) was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in Virginia. She attended Virginia Commonwealth University where she received a BA in English with a focus on Creative Writing and minored in Religious Studies. She has been working as a bartender after moving to Brooklyn, New York in 2002, with the exception of two years when she was a publicity assistant for a small publishing house. She has taken workshops with the 92 Y Unterberg Poetry Center, Sarah Lawrence Summer Writing Workshop, and the Sackett Street Writer’s workshop and now looks forward to the nurturing and inspiring community of Rutgers Newark MFA program.

Hirsh Sawhney
Hirsh Sawhney (fiction) was born in New Haven, Connecticut but spent the past few years living in Delhi, India, the city his parents abandoned in the 1960s.
He edited and contributed a short story to Delhi Noir (2009), an anthology of brand-new fiction published by Akashic Books. As a journalist, he's navigated the red light districts and communist party offices of Calcutta, but his career highlight remains the afternoon he spent drinking with beer Hanif Kureishi, whose work had inspired him to start writing in the first place. Hirsh looks forward to what the next two years at Rutgers-Newark will bring. 

 Nancy Toomey
Nancy Toomey’s family roots are in Newark, NJ, where her great-grandfather arrived after his birth on the boat from Ireland in the 1870’s. Emerging intact from her huge Irish family, she earned her degree in Anthropology in 1977 at Montclair State University and spent the next twelve years in marketing communications. She traded in her business suits to raise three daughters and pursue, despite incessant interruptions, her secret dream, writing fiction, publishing a first novel in 2005. Nancy has taught art, culture and history at the Newark Museum and taken groups of children to space as a mission commander at a Challenger learning center. She celebrates passing decades by running NYC marathons. She defines her life as a series of deep immersions out of which spring endless permutations of evolving truth. The surface of things powers her momentum forward while her recognition and appreciation for all those things ‘below stairs’ nourish her passion for the written word. Pursuing her MFA at Rutgers is the culmination of her secret dream, where she hopes all that came before will converge in her work.

Mariann J. VanDevere
Mariann J. VanDevere (fiction) was born and raised in New Jersey.  She gradutated magna cum laude from Temple University in Philadelphia with a BA in Communications and a minor in Spanish.  At first she was enrolled as journalism major but quickly switched when she learned that she would have to take extra math classes.  Mariann looks forward to developing herself as a writer and educator through the MFA program at Rutgers.  She enjoys all kinds of writing including academic, playwriting, fiction, etc; and she will read anything good.  Keep your eyes open because she will one day be on Oprah's book list and eventually her comfy couch.

Amanda Whiting
Amanda Whiting (fiction) grew up in New Jersey, leaving after high school to pursue her BA in Philosophy (cum laude, 2006) from Williams College in western Massachusetts. Since then Amanda's professional life has taken her from Washington, D.C. to London and from the cubicles of Corporate Litigation to the sales floor of an Abercrombie & Fitch. Inspired by a year spent studying at Oxford University, Amanda has spent the past 18 months living in the UK. She is very excited to be quitting her day job and returning to America in favour of pursuing the MFA at Rutgers University.

Steve Wright
Steve Wright (fiction) was born in 1979 and is from New Jersey. He earned his AA from Bergen Community College in 2007 and received a BA in English from Montclair State University in 2008. For the past decade he has worked in retail. He publishes as S.F. Wright, and his fiction has appeared in Thieves Jargon. A first year student, Steve is very excited about becoming a part of the MFA program at Rutgers Newark.

Amy Kiger-Williams
Amy Kiger-Williams (fiction) lives in West Caldwell, NJ, with her husband and three children (ages 9, 7, and 5).  She was born in Warsaw, Indiana, and has lived in Lancaster, PA and New York City.  She earned a BA in Comparative Literature/Creative Writing from NYU in 1990.  She has worked on a Wall Street trading floor, at an internet startup, for a consulting firm, and also has had a small business selling fabric online.  In addition to writing and reading, she enjoys making quilts, mixed media art, and jewelry. Her favorite writers include Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Mary Gaitskill, Amy Hempel and Alice Munro, to name a few.  She has published in Vestal Review, Pindeldyboz and Juked, and is currently at work on a novel. 

Michael Liska
Michael Liska (fiction) has spent his entire life in New Jersey.  He was born in Edison, lives in Highland Park, and currently works in Newark at the New Jersey Institute of Technology as a grant administrator.  He spends most of his time playing the accordion, writing, keeping records of his dreams, and backpacking.  He studied philosophy at Rutgers, where he received his BA in 2000.  He has spent the past several years writing, playing in bands, traveling when he could afford it, and working at odd jobs. 

MaryRose Merkel
MaryRose Merkel (fiction) graduated from Johns Hopkins and migrated to Kyiv, Ukraine, where she monitored elections and watched the Orange Revolution rapidly deflate.  She then moved to West Virginia, where she spent quality time in another tent city, not far from Harpers Ferry.  Due to her fascination with Slavic studies, she reads much too much Socialist Realism, and greatly admires Vladimir Nabokov for breaking out of that mold.  Her current favorite read is "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami.

Lisa Toniolo
Lisa Toniolo (fiction) was born in Newark, NJ, where she lived until her move to Belleville at the age of 25.  She graduated from Rutgers University – Newark with an English major and Music minor.  Currently employed by the Rutgers University – Newark English Department, she spends most of her free time reading, writing, listening to music, playing the bass, and hanging out with her young nieces and nephew.  Her favorite authors include Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Chuck Palahniuk, William Shakespeare, Hunter S. Thompson and Toni Morrison.  She writes with the illusion of one day getting paid to scribble nonsense on paper by day while playing shows with her unknown rock band by night.  She is excited to have a chance to acquire a graduate degree from Rutgers, as everyone in her immediate family has graduated from the university.