Contributors, G-I
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, Multi-Culti Mami columnist (Wanting, Waiting), is a Spanish-American poet, writer, and teacher. Her work has appeared in a variety of literary venues, including Literary Mama, Mamazine, Tattoo Highway, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Cicada, Soleado, and the anthology The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change (Seal Press, 2008). Her website is www.TurnPeoplePurple.com and her blog is http://multicultimami.wordpress.com. Violeta lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, their son and two daughters, all adopted as infants from Guatemala, and their two incorrigible dogs. She is currently at work on her first novel.
Jeanne Lyet Gassman ("Healing Arts") is married to Larry and is the mother of two teenagers, Genevieve and Greg. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Her non-fiction and fiction have been published in Sonoran Mirage: An Anthology from the Writers Round Table Phoenix, The Arizona Republic, Bereavement magazine, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Encouragement Award from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. In addition to work on her own writing, she teaches creative writing classes at libraries and community centers in the Phoenix metro area and plays violin in the Phoenix College Symphony. To learn more about Jeanne, please visit her website.
Lisa Gates ("Essential Functions") is raising a son as well as a writing and coaching career, tandem inspirations for her blog Design Your Writing Life. After a 12-year respite from freelance journalism, this story marks her first literary publication anywhere!
Gail Gauthier ("Mom Memory") is the author of seven books for children and young adults. The most recent, A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat was published in June, 2007 and will be followed by A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers in the summer of 2008. Her earlier books for middle grade students drew heavily on the lives of her two sons, one of whom is still a college student and the other a recent graduate. An earlier essay about her experiences as a martial arts student appeared at VerbSap. She maintains the blog Original Content and lives in Connecticut with her husband and younger son.
Wendy H. Gill ("Alterations") is an educational consultant and freelance writer. She is the mother of a 20-year-old daughter, Morgan, and a 17-year-old son, Taylor. Her poems have appeared in Iodine Poetry Journal and Main Street Rag. She has published essays in Writer’s Digest and Skirt! Magazine as well as in the following anthologies: Tis the Season (Novello Press), Hungry for Home (Novello Press), and On Air: Essays from Charlotte’s NPR Station, WFAE 90.7.
Edvige Giunta ("The Quickening") is associate professor of English at New Jersey City University. She is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors (2002) and co-editor of The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (2002) and Italian American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 2003). Her essays, memoir, and poetry have been published in many journals and anthologies. She is poetry editor of The Women’s Studies Quarterly and co-editor of Transformations. She is the mother of Emily, fifteen, and Matteo, four and a half. They are sources of love and poetry in her life.
Brenda Glasure ("Zen Broccoli"), like most Moms, wears many hats. She and her husband are raising two humans -- a girl and a boy. Brenda spends many hours volunteering her time and talents to the public schools in her town. She has recently been employed as a ghost writer for a children's book project. She has been published in The Better Homes and Gardens New Baby Book and writes poetry, short fiction, and essays for adults and middle-grade readers.
Cora Goss-Grubbs ("The Free Range Bionicle") lives across the street from a blueberry farm in Woodinville, Washington with her spouse and two sons. Her essays, poems and interviews have been published in Calyx, StringTown, hipMama, Synapse, Victory Review, Between the Lines, and aired on public radio. Before motherhood, Cora founded RASP, a literary non-profit organization, and wrote two young adult novels (for which she is seeking a publisher).
Carol Graser ("The Calor Lawrence School of Dance") is a writer and performer of poetry living in the Adirondacks of upstate New York. She's spent over 19 years intensively and overwhelmingly raising and homeshcooling her three children. She and her husband homeschool two now, ages 13 and 7, her oldest homeschooler having just successfully completed his first year as a film major in college. She's currently the host of a poetry reading series at historic Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs. Her work has appeared in The Lullwater Review, So to Speak, Southern Poetry Review and The Worcester Review, among others.
Louise Graves ("The Contents of His Pocket") lives in the North of England and is a mother of two boys and stepmother to a teenage girl. She has travelled over 500 miles to get where she is now and some may say she still has far to go. She has been writing for a while now and has a couple of online as well as paper publications to her name. Louise has been writing with Alex Keegan's Bootcampers on and off for three years, she writes because she wants to, because she enjoys it and because no matter how hard she has tried she just can't stop.
Stacey Greenberg("Participant Observation") is the creator of the zine Fertile Ground: For People Who Dig Parenting). She lives in Memphis with her husband and two sons. Her writing has appeared in Hip Mama, Clamor, and Mothering.com. She writes a monthly column for Philosophical Mother and a daily blog for Rescue Magazine.
Ona Gritz ("Mothering by Scent", "Boy Child, "Testing the Seams" and "family Bed") is the author of two children's books, Starfish Summer (HarperCollins, 1998) and Tangerines and Tea (Harry N. Abrams, forthcoming 2004). Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including Ekphrasis, Moment, Poetry East, Heresies, and online in Literary Mama and The Plum Ruby Review. Her work is also forthcoming in Poetica. Ona lives in Hoboken, New Jersey with her son, Ethan.
Jennifer Graf Groneberg ("Break") lives and writes in the mountains of northwest Montana with her husband and their three boys, a seven-year-old and twin three-year-olds. Currently, she is working on a book called Roadmap to Holland (New American Library, 2008), about mothering Avery, a fraternal twin born with Down syndrome. You can read more about her and her family at her website.
Libby Gruner ("How She Writes It," A Review of I Don't Know How She Does It; "Masks, Chains, and Myths: Analyzing Motherhood," "The Wonder Years: Three writers talk about the time that leaves most of us speechless") writes the column Children's Lit Book Group and teaches English and Women's Studies at the University of Richmond in Richmond, VA, where she lives with her family. Her academic writing has appeared in SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Children's Literature, and other journals. Her personal writing has been featured in Brain,Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers and the Seal Press anthology Toddler: Real-Life Stories of those Fickle, Urgent, Irrational, Tiny People We Love, and Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life. Find out more on her blog.
Jessica Smartt Gullion, PhD ("A Vinyl Batgirl Notebook") and her husband parent two amazing children in a tiny town in north Texas. Her writings on motherhood have appeared in Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life ,The Mother's Movement Online , and the Journal for the Association for Research on Mothering . She is currently finishing her first novel.
Teresa Burns Gunther ("Let Down") holds an MFA in Creative Writing from St. Mary’s College of California. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Lynx Eye, the Berkeley Fiction Review, Mary Online Journal, and the Apprentice Guild's The Mag, where she was a featured writer in the Summer 2004 issue. Her story "Magic Fingers" was a finalist in the 2004 Phoebe Journal Winter Fiction Contest. She is currently completing her first novel, Shadow Lake. Teresa lives with her husband and two amazing, loving sons, Aaron (12) and Sam (15), in Oakland, California, where she leads creative writing workshops through Lakeshore Writers (Contact her at lakeshore49@sbcglobal.net for more information).
Kim Haas ("You Are Here") lives in Brighton, Michigan with her husband and their two amazing daughters, Katie (12) and Emily (9). Before relocating to the Midwest, Kim served as co-director of the Writer’s Voice in Phoenix and as an instructor for their MothersWrite program. Her work has appeared in “Swallow the Moon,” “Raising Arizona Kids,” and “Welcome Home.” In addition to being a writer, she is also a graphic designer and collage artist. Her current writing projects include a novel-in-stories, a short story collection and a recent draft of a novel completed in thirty days. Visit her blog, “Creative Fallout” at
http://kimhaasdesign.blogspot.com.
Alle C. Hall's ("Not Quite Haiku: A Review of Haiku Mama" and "A Conversation with Linda Blachman") nonfiction appears in Creative Nonfiction, BUST, Literary Café Radio, The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, and The Stranger, for which she interviewed Leonard Nimoy. Her structurally accurate comic haiku appear in Swivel: The Nexus of Women and Wit and The Moment of Truth.
Pamela Hamilton, ("Overheard at Playgroup") an American now living in Canada, is passionate about her writing, her husband and two daughters, and her work in marketing communications and gymnastics training. Her writing has appeared online in All Things Girl and adultgymnastics.com, and in print in The Word Weaver. She was recently awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2004 Non-fiction Travel Writing Contest held by The Preservation Society, Inc. You may read more of her work at: http://phwrites.blogspot.com.
Lisa Hardman ("Wonder Mold Mother") is a stay-at-home mother of five children ranging in age from 18 months to 17 years. Last year, at the age of 38, she decided to take her writing more seriously and return to college. She is currently finishing a degree in English instead of completing the degree she started 19 years ago in Music Performance. She has written 18 resource articles as a nontraditional student columnist for FastWeb, the Internet's leading scholarship search service, detailing her challenges of juggling school and motherhood. Lisa lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, with her husband, Bryan, and their children. Her website is www.brainymama.wordpress.com/.
Lisa Harper ("Flying Home") received her M.A. in Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis. She lives with her husband, daughter and son in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is an adjunct professor of writing in the M.F.A. program at the University of San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Switchback, the Irish Times, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Literary Couplings, and Gastronomica. This work is the final chapter of Inside Out (seeking a publisher), which fuses research with personal narrative in order to understand the transformations of motherhood.
Leah Harris ("If the Buddha Gave Birth: A Review of Momma Zen") is the mother of a one-year-old little boy Buddha. Her poetry and prose have been published in Off Our Backs: A Feminist Newsjournal, Beltway Poetry, and Mizna. Her memoir-in-progress explores her experiences as an institutionalized adolescent. She works in the field of mental health advocacy and lives in Washington, D.C. You can read her blog Mama Dharma and reach her at leah_ida@hotmail.com.
Cindi Harrison ("Grounding"), a writer from San Francisco, is a lesbian co-parent to two really fab teenagers, Alex and Lee. Three of her poems are forthcoming in Gertrude. Recent publications include pieces published in This Day: Diaries from American Women and Annie Finch's and Katherine Varnes'sAn Exaltation of Forms. She's currently working on her first novel.
Kim Harrison ("Mother-Sister") is a social work professor and clinical social work consultant from Lawrence, Kansas. She has a patient husband, six great kids, and family who visits on a daily basis.
Cheryl Hart ("Behind the Pretty Pictures") is a dedicated reader and writer, active in a local writer's circle and two book clubs. She graduated from Emory Law School and after a few years of practice, embarked on a new career as a stay-at-home mom. Her poetry has appeared in Subtle Tea and is forthcoming in Café del Soul. She lives in Georgia with her husband and their six-year-old son and four-year-old daughter.
Amy Hassinger ("Getting Books") is the author of two novels, The Priest's Madonna and Nina: Adolescence. She teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program through the University of Nebraska, and lives in Illinois with her husband and two children. You can find her online at www(dot)amyhassinger(dot)com.
Tova Hassler ("Eleven") is the mother of two children and writes widely about family life. She is not using her real name because she would like her daughter, who is very Internet savvy, to continue to give her hugs.
Aeron Haynie ("Books and Dust") is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. She lives in Green Bay with her husband, Mark Anderson, and their cherubic 14-month old daughter, Sophie Lyda.
Esther Altshul Helfgott ("Mouth") is a poet, writing teacher, and mother of three adult children and of four grandchildren. Her writing has appeared in The Dakota House Journal, Spindrift, Switched-on-Gutenberg, Moondance, The American Psychoanalyst, The Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Review, Mentress Moon, historylink, and other periodicals. She has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington (which took her 16 years to complete) and is the author of The Homeless One: A Poem in Many Voices (Kota Press, 2000). Esther edits the on-line literary journal: The Psychoanalytic Experience: Analysands Speak and she is the founding coordinator of Seattle's "It's About Time" Writers' Reading Series, now in its 15th year.
Anne Helmstadter ("The Boys and Baby") is a former film industry executive who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two young daughters, and two ageing Siamese cats. She completed an MFA in creative writing at St. Mary’s College in 2004 and is currently writing her first novel. This is her first published piece.
Shu-Huei Henrickson ("China Boy") is a writer from Taiwan who lives and teaches in Rockford, Illinois. Her work has appeared in Fiction International; Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love; Susie Bright's The Best American Erotica 2005; and elsewhere. Prone to frequent attacks of wanderlust, she has traveled to Morocco, Russia, Japan, Malaysia, Turkey, Norway, England, and dozens of other countries.
Liz Henry ("Dream of the Night Key" and Diary of a Young Mother) lives in Redwood City, California with her partner and 3 year old child. Her poems, fiction, and translations from Spanish have been published most recently in Two Lines, Transfer, Strange Horizons, and Fantastic Metropolis. She is currently working on translating the poems of Juana de Ibarbourou, and is looking for feminist science fiction stories written in Spanish to translate into English.
Michelle Herman ("Hope Against Hope") writes both fiction and nonfiction, and teaches in the MFA program at the Ohio State University. She is the author of the collection A New and Glorious Life; the novel Missing (which was awarded the Harold U. Ribalow Prize for "best Jewish fiction" and selected as one of the 25 Best Books of the Year by VLS, the literary supplement of The Village Voice); the novella Dog (due out in 2005 from MacAdam/Cage); and the forthcoming memoir, The Middle of Everything (also due in March 2005, from the University of Nebraska Press), from which this piece has been excerpted. Her stories, novellas, and essays have appeared in such journals as the North American Review, Story Quarterly, and American Scholar, and have been anthologized in such collections as Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers and Jewish-American Fiction: A Century of Stories.
Cindy Hill ("Daughter") is, first and foremost, mother to Evelyn Mae Hill, an 11-year-old soccer-playing, horse-riding, chicken-raising embodiment of joy; and stepmother to two witty, warm, and wonderful young teens. Cindy, her husband Chris, and the girls live in Middlebury, Vermont. A recovering criminal defense attorney, Cindy now works as a freelance writer, zoning administrator, and fiddle and lace-knitting instructor, because life's too short to do one thing at a time. Her poetry has been published in PanGaia Magazine, Maps and Voyages (anthology of the Otter Creek Poets), and Vermont Life. Her narrative poem Land For Sale won the 2002 Ralph Nading Hill, Jr. award. She can be reached at wordwomanvt@yahoo.com.
Ann Hite ("White Clouds on Blue Sky") spent her formative years in Atlanta, Georgia during the sixties with her extended family, who believed the south was a country of its own. From this lethal combination was born a writer, who to this day finds the characters from her family's past creeping into her prose. Ann is the mother of four daughters, ranging from 30 to 5 years old, and has the privilege to be stepmother to her seventeen-year-old stepson. Ann has completed her first novel, Sleeping Above Chaos, writes short stories and poems. Ann has published short stories and essays both online and in print with publications including Skyline Magazine, Wild Violet, Long Story, The Dead Mule, and Fiction Warehouse. To read more, visit her website, The Painted Door.
Hannah Holborn's ("We Danced Without Strings") teenage sons have fun while she writes. "We Danced Without Strings" placed first in Surrey Writer's Festival Writing Contest. Her fiction has or will appear in Room of One’s Own, edifice WRECKED, The Quarterly Staple, The Avatar Review, Front & Centre, Words literary journal and Sights Unseen: New Writing From British Columbia. Her fiction can be read online at The Danforth Review, Identity Theory, Girls with Insurance, and Cautionary Tales.
Peggy Hong ("Woman Fables" and "Sanctuary") was born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in Hawaii and New York. She is the author of a poetry collection, Three Truths and a Lie(Water Press and Media), poetry chapbooks Lies and Fables and The Sister Who Swallows the Ocean (CrowLadies Press), and a fine art letterpress book, Hoofbeats (Gokiburi Press). She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her husband and their three children, ages 20, 18, and 16. She teaches at Alverno College, Woodland Pattern Book Center, and Riverwest Yogashala. She is a certified Iyengar yoga instructor and helps direct Riverwest Yogashala, a nonprofit yoga center. She serves as Milwaukee’s Poet Laureate for 2006 and 2007.
Janis Hubschman ("Family Vacation" and "Lost Again") is the mother of two daughters, ages 16 and 18. She lives and writes in New Jersey. Her works have appeared in The New York Times, New York Runner, MSS, US Industry Today, and several local newspapers. She is currently completing an M.A. in English at Montclair State University. "Family Vacation" is her first published fiction. With the help of her agent, she is looking for a home for her completed novel about mothers and daughters. She may be reached at Janishub@aol.com.
Lockie Hunter("Your Toddler: Socrates in Training Pants") is pursuing her MFA in creative writing at Emerson College in Boston where she lives with her toddler Pascale and infant Graham. Her fiction and essays have been published or are forthcoming in the Emerson Review, The Morning News, Southern Hum, Seattle Writergrrls, Muscadine Lines, ken* again, and Wild Violet. Lockie's also writes a humor column for The Mad Hatter Review titled "Lockie Confidential" and is working on a Southern novel that she hopes will help to preserve some of the eccentricities and joy of her family and hometown. You may find more of her work at Lockie Hunter.
Debbie Ann Ice ("A Brief Visit") is the mother of two boys and one female English Bulldog (her daughter). She and her husband manage all of them in Connecticut. Her work has appeared in various online and small print publications such as Salome Magazine, 3AM magazine, Pindeldyboz, , Word Riot, Barbaric Yawp, and others. She is thrilled to be a part of Literary Mama.
Cammy Iverson ("Children Dancing") is a mother of two daughters and grandmother of four. Recently, Cammy realized her lifelong dream of earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Spirituality and Holistic Studies from Vermont College, where she focused on women's spirituality at midlife as well as the theory of generativity and the leaving of a lasting legacy to future generations. Cammy's work includes conducting seminars to encourage women in their life journeys at and after midlife and writing children's stories about the relationship between grandchildren and grandparents. Cammy lives with her husband in Wisconsin.
Rachel Iverson ( "An Interview with Kate Moses" ) is the Poetry Editor of Literary Mama. She lives in Malibu with her husband, son and daughter. She earned a BA in English literature and journalism from Valparaiso University and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota. She writes a column, Mother and Other, for Literary Mama. Her poems and prose have appeared in publications including, Illume, a Journal of Universal Ideas, The MFC Forum Magazine, edifice WRECKED, Books and Babies, Onthebus, and The Philosophical Mother. She is also the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Glimpse Over the Edge (2002) and Mother & Other (2003), and is a member of the Los Angeles Poets and Writers Collective. She is currently at work on a novel and a collection of essays. You can read some of her previously published work at www.racheliverson.com.