Magdalena Ball Ball has an English Literature honors degree from the City University of New York, studied at Oxford, and has business and marketing degrees. Her editorials, short stories, poetry, articles, and reviews, have appeared in many journals and anthologies, winning several awards. Her poetry books include Unmaking Atoms, Repulsion Thrust, and Quark Soup; her novels include Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening. (The Art of Assessment is nonfiction.) She collaborated with Carolyn Howard-Johnson in several poetry books and has a radio show and a review site. Finally, Magdalena is a research support lead for a multinational company.
Tell us about your highly successful review site, Compulsive Reader:
I started Compulsive Reader nearly 20 years ago (!), after a website I’d been writing reviews for folded. …
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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of the multi award-winning series of HowToDoItFrugally books for writers, such as USA Book News’ winner, The Frugal Book Promoter. An instructor for UCLA Extension’s Writers Program for nearly a decade, her awards include Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment (given by members of the California Legislature), and Women Who Make Life Happen (given by the Pasadena Weekly newspaper). She is also an award-winning poet and novelist.
What was your first writing job?
My real first job was at The Salt Lake Tribune as a staff writer (and later, a columnist) when I was only eighteen. That was when we still used teletypes and they set the plates for a newspaper by pouring hot lead into forms! Journalism has never been more exciting than it was then!…
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Since 1997, B. Lynn Goodwin‘s Writer Advice has grown from a newsletter for writers into an e-zine that invites reader participation through quality fiction, memoirs, interviews, reviews, and articles reaching readers around the globe. She has also written You Want Me to Do WHAT? Journaling for Caregivers (Tate Publishing), Talent (Eternal Press), and Never Too Late: From Wannabe to Wife at 62 (Koehler Books). She’s won The Literary Lightbox Award, the Bronze Medal in the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards, and was short-listed for a Sarton Women’s Book Award. Goodwin has appeared in Small Press Review; Dramatics Magazine; The Sun; Caregiver Village; Good Housekeeping.com; and elsewhere. She’s a reviewer and teacher at Story Circle Network, as well as manuscript coach at Writer Advice.
Susan Wittig Albert, Ph.D.,…
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For over fifteen years, Corbin has worked as a developmental editor and writing consultant helping emerging writers. She holds a Master’s Degree in Education and teaches memoir, personal essay, and craft classes at the Richard Hugo House, universities, and at writing conferences. Her memoir Creating a Life (Catalyst Book Press) was nominated for Pacific Northwest Book Association and Washington State Book Awards; her other titles include Divorce as Opportunity (Booktrope) and her recent memoir God’s Cadillac (out for submission). Her essays have been widely published in journals and in parenting and writing anthologies. She lives in Seattle with her two children. Find her here.
How do you help emerging writers with their goals?
There comes a time when it would be helpful for every writer to have one-on-one feedback from someone with experience.…
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A leading American poet and a multiple Pushcart nominee (with awards from Midwest Poetry Review, Peninsula Pulse, Poetswest, Womanspace, and others), Midwest writer Christine Swanberg just had her ninth poetry collection, Wild Fruition: Sonnets, Spells, and Other Incantations, published. A college and high school teacher, she is a featured national reader and workshop leader; her work has appeared in hundreds of anthologies and journals.
Your collection of 75 poems is grouped into five parts, each preceded with a color or b/w photo. How long did it take to complete? Was it more challenging than your previous collection, The Alleluia Tree?
It has been five years since my last collection. I experimented with sonnets and shaping free verse. Part of my process is placing the poems in journals before publishing them as a collection because I want them to have wide a readership; it makes the collection more professional and more publishable.…
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Alex Andy Phuong earned his Bachelor of Arts in English from California State University—Los Angeles in 2015 while also serving as an editor for Statement Magazine.
What were your duties as editor for Statement Magazine?
Statement Magazine is the literary magazine that has been part of California State University—Los Angeles since 1950. As an editor, my job was to read over a hundred creative pieces that consisted of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid forms. We did not exactly categorize the writing, though, because the staff wanted to celebrate the creative writing talents of the entire university. The editors also had the judge each written piece to assess whether or not the writing is of a professional and literary quality. Other staff members also judged artwork based on photographs that artists submitted, and then the entire staff celebrates the production of the magazine at an elaborate launch party during the spring academic term.…
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One of the many awards that noted American poet Judith Skillman has received is from the Academy of American Poets (for Storm), while Red Town and Prisoner of the Swifts were Washington State Book Award finalists. Her poems have been included in such journals as Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and FIELD; also, her collaborative translations in various journals. She’s in Best Indie Verse of New England as well. Her latest full poetry collection is Kafka’s Shadow and you can visit her here.
How did you decide on Franz Kafka for your new poetry collection?
I read “Metamorphosis” again and was very taken with it. After a span of thirty years since the last reading, the story took on new dimensions. Then I read “The Stoker,” “The Judgment,” and “Letter to His Father,” as these have been reissued in a new edition titled The Sons (Schocken Books, Inc.,…
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