About Our Contributors

Editor and author Philip Athans has been the driving force behind varied media including Alternative fiction & poetry magazine and Wizards of the Coast. He lives and works in the Pacific Northwest.

Burt Beckmann was born in 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1985, after graduating with a MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University, he moved to Spain, where he spent the next thirty-four years as an otiologist. In 2019 a medical condition brought him to Salt Lake City. Most recently his poetry has been accepted by or pub­lished in The Main Street Rag, Blue Unicorn, and The Lyric; among other credits, his work has appeared in mag­azines as diverse as Rattle and The American Dissident. Besides writing poetry, he plays bass guitar and shoots pool.

Seth Benton lives in Williamsburg, Virginia. His poems have appeared recently in Pinyon, New Plains Review, saltfront, Slipstream, and Lullwater Review.

Julia Chiapella's poetry has appeared in Avatar Review, Edison Literary Review, Euphony Journal, I-70 Review, The MacGuffin, Midwest Quarterly, OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, The Opiate Magazine, Pirene's Fountain, The Round, The Wax Paper and West Branch among others. She co-founded Santa Cruz Writes and is the retired director of the Young Writers Program, which she established in 2012. She received the Gail Rich Award in 2017 for creative contributions to Santa Cruz County and is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective.

Rob Cook was a founding employee at Pixar and received an Oscar in 2000 for his pioneering work on the tech­nology behind computer animation and special effects. He has attended the Dodge Poetry Festival and also studied at the Writer's Studio. Rob received his BS in physics from Duke University and MS in computer graph­ics from Cornell. He is an instrument-rated pilot and enjoys scuba diving, kayaking, and classical piano.

Jordan Dilley is a writer living in the Pacific Northwest. Her fiction has appeared in The Woven Tale, Saturday Evening Post, and Blue Lake Review, as well as other publications.

Stephanie French-Mischo’s stories have appeared in Apeiron Review, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and Midwest­ern Gothic. She lives and writes in Indianapolis.

Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of three poetry collections—most recently, At The Narrows, from Word Poetry. She is a former Rose O’Neill Writer-in-Residence at Washington College where she taught ecopoetry and served as chief marketing officer.

Lynn Hoggard has published eight books and more than 100 individual poems. For her, poetry is a way for­ward, into the spirit's vision.

Ruth Holzer is the author of eight chapbooks, most recently, Living in Laconia (Gyroscope Press) and Among the Missing (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, Faultline, Slant, Poet Lore, Connecticut River Review and Plainsongs, among other journals and anthologies. She has received several Pushcart Prize nominations.

Elizabeth Hurst was born in Los Angeles and currently live in the Outer Sunset District of San Francisco. She likes alchemy, poetry, horror and politics.

DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico, and was educated at the Universities of California, Padova, Princ­eton and Yale. After a career in business and the sciences, he has returned to an early avocation in poems. His work has appeared in Neologism, Consilience Journal, Poetica Magazine and The Jewish Literary Journal, and is forthcoming in Tar River and The Deronda Review.

Michel Steven Krug is a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, and former print journalist from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He's Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News (PRTN) literary magazine and he litigates.

Yvonne Higgins Leach is the author of a collection of poems called Another Autumn. Her latest passion is working with shelter dogs in Spokane, WA. For more information, visit www.yvonnehigginsleach.com

William Miller's eighth collection of poetry, Lee Circle, was published by Shanti Arts Press in 2019. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner and West Branch. He lives and writes in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

JBMulligan has published more than 1100 poems and stories in various magazines over the past 45 years, and has had two chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as 2 e-books: The City of Now and Then, and A Book of Psalms (a loose translation). He has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, and was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize anthology.

Cyndy Muscatel has written for several publications including The Seattle Times and The Desert Sun. Her fic­tion, non-fiction, and poetry have been published in many journals including The MacGuffin, Main Street Rag, North Atlantic Review, and Quercus Review. Her collection of published short stories, Radio Days, is available on Amazon. She is writing a memoir of her time teaching in the inner city of Seattle during the Sixties, and teach­ing memoir writing in Kona, Hawaii.

Judy Myers' flash piece "Is Girl Here" (published in Quiddity) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Other publi­cation credits include The Round and the Brushfire Literary Arts Journal. In addition, the story appearing in this issue of Whistling Shade has also appeared in Flights. Her novel, That Certain Wealth of Love, about runaways, babies, and searching for mothers, is in pursuit of an agent.

Ana Pugatch taught English in Asia for several years before recently returning to the States. Her work has been featured in publications such as Literary Shanghai and The Los Angeles Review, among others.

Tony Rauch has four books of short stories published—I’m right here (spout press), Laredo (Eraserhead Press), Eyeballs growing all over me ... again (Eraserhead Press), and What if I got down on my knees? (Whis­tling Shade Press). He can be found at: http://trauch.wordpress.com.

Mark Rhoads recently retired from Bethel University, St. Paul, MN, where he taught in the music department for 35 years. He began writing poetry at age 50. His poems have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Deronda Review, Contemporary Rhyme, Ballard Street Poetry Journal, Plainsongs and Whistling Shade. In 2015 he published a collection of poems titled No Gathering In of this Incense.

A.E. Schulz has been published in Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Poet Lore, Glass, apt, Malpaís Review, Lullwater Review, and Global Graffiti. She attended the Ayurvedic Living School in Arcata, California, and became certified in Ayurvedic cooking and Ayurvedic aromatherapy.

Lanette Sweeney's debut collection, What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir about Losing A Child to Addic­tion, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. Her work has appeared in many online and print publica­tions, and she hopes her book helps end the stigma around medication-assisted treatment, which saves addicts’ lives.

Justin Teerlinck is an occupational therapist in the Tacoma, Washington area, where he is learning how to place his writing skills and sense of the absurd in service to people with disabilities. His response to most stan­dardized test questions is, “Meow don't know this theoretical construct. Meow try again please?”

Joel Van Valin is the publisher of Whistling Shade. His first poetry chapbook, The White Forest, was published in 2018 by Prolific Press. He lives with his wife and twin sons in St. Paul, and can frequently be found with them at a playground.

Jeffrey Wald’s stories and essays have appeared in journals such as Whistling Shade, Dappled Things, The Windhover, The Short Humour Site, Shotgun Honey, Genealogies of Modernity, Aethlon, Collidescope, and elsewhere.