eASTERN iOWA rEVIEW
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Chila Woychik, Founding Editor, Nonfiction Editor - Chila (pronounced "Sheila") is the owner and managing editor of Port Yonder Press, est. 2009. She especially enjoys chiseled lines that bring musicality to a piece. Chila won the 2017 Loren Eiseley Creative Nonfiction Award (Red Savina Review) and the 2016 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award from the Emrys Foundation. She was also named a finalist in the 2017 Proximity Personal Essay Contest and received an Honorable Mention in the 44th New Millennium Writing Awards. Her most recent publishing credits appear in Cimarron Review, Portland Review, Stonecoast, Tahoma Literary, and a few more. A poem, "Getting Religion," will appear in the upcoming anthology, Waves: A Confluence of Women's Voices (AROHO Foundation). Her poems have appeared in JuxtaProse, Panoply, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband of thirty-five-plus years on a small homestead in eastern Iowa. You will alternately find her hiking the trails near home, biking, visiting a local bookstore or coffee shop, or herding sheep and chickens into not-so-straight lines toward the barn. German-born, Chila wants to publish a serious book one day & continue to discover her roots. You can find her on Facebook where she posts, edits, deletes, then posts again. And occasionally she even deactivates. Her most beloved role thus far has been as Grandma. (2014-2018)
Sarah Broussard Weaver, Associate Editor, General, lives in a very loud house in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Nick, four children, three dogs, a cat, a hedgehog, and some fish. She is working on her MFA in creative nonfiction at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her essays have been published in Lunch Ticket, Hippocampus, The Nervous Breakdown, Full Grown People, and the second issue of Eastern Iowa Review. She enjoys reading, writing, and relaxing. She has determined she will own a hammock one day in which to do all three of those at once. (2016-2018)
Richie Johnson, Reader, General, is curious, uncertain and a bit wild, and everything else a twenty-four year old often is, thereabouts, having nothing to do and everywhere to be. He currently sleeps in an off-grid screen shack in Maine with his partner (and their cat roommate Pisces), where together they grow human-powered organic veggies. He likes that and he likes writing and he thinks both are good for him. Richie has had work appear in: Vilas Avenue, Sandy River Review and Eastern Iowa Review. (2016-2018)
Rachel Schlager, Assistant Editor - Rachel is impossible to explain because she is consistently evolving. She is an artist who believes in the written word enough to have gotten a degree in Literature from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Ia. Her passions include animal rescue, volunteering in the community, and throwing amazing, actor-themed, movie marathon parties. Rachel keeps a bubble gun in her car, just in case of a traffic jam, and is always excited to read a new story. (2017-2018)
Lianne Simon, Cover Design, Right-hand Help & Counsel - Lianne’s first novel, Confessions of a Teenage Hermaphrodite, was published by MuseItUp Publishing in 2012. Eastern Iowa Review published her personal essay "Changeling" in their 2015 Spring/Summer edition. She wrote about intersex from a Christian perspective for the Fall 2015 issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics by Johns Hopkins University Press. As a public speaker, she advocates on behalf of those with differences of sex development. Lianne and her husband live in the suburbs outside of Atlanta, where she writes both English prose and computer software. (2014-2018)
Craig Woychik, Assistant Editor, Fan, Dark, & Speculative Fiction, believes that Assassin's Creed: Origins just might be the best video game yet developed. His educational pursuits include stints at Kirkwood Community College (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) and Moody Bible Institute - Spokane campus. He's working on his first collection of short stories, and is especially proud of his beautiful year-old daughter. (2017-2018)
SHORT TERM READERS
Kelly Garriott Waite writes from Ohio where she's researching the second owner of her 1908 house. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Wild Culture, the Fourth River: Tributaries, and is forthcoming in the Hopper. She's currently working on a compilation of essays about people forgotten to history. (Jan-Mar 2018)
Kelly said this about her time with us: "Being a reader for Eastern Iowa Review forced me from the vague and comfortable 'this doesn't work' to a precise articulation of what I didn't like about a piece. Did the piece, despite lush writing, contain distracting tense shifts? Were there too many points of view? Was the piece implausible? Or was it disqualified because of the author's failure to follow the guidelines? Such careful reading not only benefits a literary magazine, it also benefits the reader, whose own writing cannot help but be improved. I appreciated my stint as a reader for Eastern Iowa Review and look forward to filling in again in the future."
Lou J Berger is a professional author and editor and an active member of SFWA. His stories have appeared in a handful of anthologies, and one recently earned Finalist status in the Writers of the Future contest. He lives in Denver with his high-school crush, three dogs, and a kink-tailed cat. (Jan-Mar 2018)
Lou said this about these months: As a professionally published author, I have always had a bit of a ken for what the purse-lipped editors that abound in the publishing industry call "purple prose." They usually say this with disdain. For the uninitiated, purple prose is overly descriptive, flowery language that chokes a narrative thread with unneeded garlands of adjectives and adverbs, sprawling across the written page like kudzu through a parking lot in North Georgia. continue reading
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Colleen Clausen, Associate Editor, General - Colleen earned a Bachelor’s in Mathematical Sciences (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Illinois-Springfield in 2009. She is married, has six children, and has lived in mainland Japan and various American states from Atlantic to Pacific, while traveling with her military husband. Some of her favorite authors include Charles Dickens, Frank Herbert, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, and Marcus Aurelius. She is an avid book collector, hiker and homeschooling mom. After the children are in bed, she does research for a novel on the 18th Dynasty of Egypt that she hopes to begin writing in the near future. (2014-2017) Colleen is taking a short break to refresh.
Laura Sweeney, Associate Editor, Poetry, facilitates Writers for Life in central Iowa. She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist's Conference in Oslo, Norway. She holds master's degrees in interdisciplinary social science and public administration, with minors in creative writing, women's studies, and social justice. Her recent and forthcoming poems have appeared in Negative Capability Press, Main Street Rag, East Jasmine Review, Folia, Balloons Lit. Journal, Yellow Chair Review, Wordrunner eChapbook, Canadian Woman Studies, Red Savina Review, Right Hand Pointing, and Nuclear Impact Anthology. Her essays have appeared in The Good Men Project and the anthology Farmscape: The changing rural environment. (2015-2017) Laura has temporarily stepped back to pursue her MFA, and will rejoin us soon.
Sonja Johanson, Associate Editor, Poetry, has recent work appearing in Still: The Journal, Outlook Springs, and The Writer’s Almanac. She is a contributing editor at the Found Poetry Review, and the author of Impossible Dovetail (IDES, Silver Birch Press), all those ragged scars (Choose the Sword Press), and Trees in Our Dooryards (Redbird Chapbooks). Sonja divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine. (2016-2017) Sonja has stepped back, at least temporarily, to begin work on her MFA & we wish her the best of luck!
Kyrell Newell, Reader, Essays, Emeritus, a senior at Drake University (Des Moines, Iowa), studies accounting and finance, and spends much of his free time writing poetry. He's a member of Drake's Spoken Word team, has been published in the university journal, The Periphery, is a member of the Drake football team, and has recently been a participant in the Big Brother Big Sister Program. Kyrell is also a Community Service leader for the Iowa Homeless Shelter (via the football team) & helped coach the children’s soccer team through his church league. He is adamant that rap music should be composed of thoughtful and clever rhymes and lyrics that display the creativity and intelligence of a rapper. (2016-2017) Kyrell has graduated and moved on to whatever the future holds for him. Good luck, Kyrell!
Beverly Nault, Associate Editor, Emeritus - Bev has a B.A. in Political Science from Texas A&M University and has completed graduate level work in Business Writing from Wright State University. Her nonfiction work Lessons from the Mountain, What I Learned from Erin Walton (Kensington 2009), co-written with Mary McDonough, won the Ella Dickey Literacy Award in 2010. She also has a six-book series, The Seasons of Cherryvale (Lamp Post Press), and reviews live theatrical productions for local newspapers. Bev is a former pre-Olympic rider in hunter and dressage, having ridden in the United States and England where she studied to earn a certificate from the British Horse Society. She was a 2017 finalist for the San Diego Book Awards (Suspense category). She and her husband have two grown children. You can find her at www.beverlynault.com, and on Twitter and Facebook. (2015-2017) Bev has taken the job of Grandma.
www.beverlynault.com, https://www.facebook.com/Beverly-Nault-363697507748/
Angela Doll Carlson, Reader, Emeritus, is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist whose work has appeared most recently in publications both online and offline, such as Burnside Writer's Collective, St. Katherine Review, Rock & Sling, Image Journal's "Good Letters" blog, Ruminate Magazine (online) and Art House America. Her first book, Nearly Orthodox: On Being a Modern Woman in an Ancient Tradition (Ancient Faith Publishers) was released July 2014. Her latest book, Garden in the East: The Spiritual Life of the Body, is due out from Ancient Faith Publishers in 2016. Angela currently lives in Chicago, IL with her husband, David and her 4 outrageously spirited yet remarkably likable children. (2016-2017) Angela has taken the job of Nonfiction Editor at St. Katherine Review.
Grace Bridges, Assistant Editor, Fiction, Emeritus - Grace is in love with immersive, descriptive writing that carries a strong sense of place, and the character of places. She has a penchant for stories that stretch and mingle the bounds of reality and imagination with a dose of wild joy, like riding on Aslan's back in Narnia or swimming with dolphins at home in New Zealand. Some of her favourite writings come from people like Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Anne McCaffrey, Orson Scott Card, and Alexander McCall Smith. Her stories have appeared in Space Battles: Full-Throttle Space Tales #6 (2012) from Flying Pen Press, and Regeneration: New Zealand Speculative Fiction II (2013) from Random Static. She has also had literary work published in The Milo Review, Decades Review, & Island Review. Grace is a translator by trade, with a degree in German & French from Auckland University, and post-graduate work in German translation. (2014-2015)