Wordgathering

ISSN 2690-7089

Editor-in-Chief: Diane R. Wiener
Flash Memoir Editor: Daniel Simpson
Gatherer’s Blog Editor: Ona Gritz
Poetry Editor: Emily K. Michael
Prose Editor: Sean J. Mahoney
Special Guest Editor, 2020-2023: Kenny Fries
Assistant Editor: Rachael A. Zubal-Ruggieri
Assistant Book Reviews Editor: Kate Champlin

Founding Emeritus Editors: Stuart Sanderson, Dana Hirsch, Yvette Green, and Denise March

Very Special Thanks to Michael Northen, Editor-in-Chief, 2007-2019

Editorial Bios:

Diane R. Wiener

Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.

Daniel Simpson

Daniel Simpson’s School for the Blind was published in 2014 by Poets Wear Prada. He and his wife, Ona Gritz, co-authored Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and collaborated as poetry editors for Referential Magazine. The New York Times and numerous poetry magazines have printed his work. The recipient of a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts fellowship, he tends a blog at https://insidetheinvisible.wordpress.com/.

Ona Gritz

Ona Gritz’s new memoir, Everywhere I Look, won the Readers’ Choice Gold Award for Best Adult Book, the Independent Author Award in New Nonfiction, the Independent Author Award in True Crime, and is an Independent Book Review 2024 Must-Read. Her nonfiction has appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The Guardian, Brevity, Parents, and River Teeth. Among her recent honors are two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays and a Best Life Story in Salon. The Space You Left Behind, Ona’s first young adult novel, written in verse, has just been released from West 44 Books and is featured in The Children’s Book Council’s Hot Off the Press roundup of anticipated best sellers.

Emily K. Michael

Emily K. Michael is a blind poet, musician, and writing teacher from Jacksonville, FL. Since 2016, she has edited poetry for Wordgathering. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Wordgathering, The Hopper, Artemis Journal, The South Carolina Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog, Barriers and Belonging, Welcome to the Resistance, and AWP Writer’s Notebook. Her first book, Neoteny: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2019), includes a finalist for The Atlantis Award as well as a nominee for The Pushcart Prize. Emily’s work centers on ecology, disability, and music. Emily is passionate about grammar, singing, birding, and guide dogs. Find more of her work at http://emilykmichael.com.

Sean J. Mahoney

Sean J. Mahoney believes that Judas was a way better singer than Jesus. He trusts in salsa (the 7th food group), dark chocolate, and CBD. Sean has had work published at Poets Reading the News, The Good Men Project, Nine Mile Literary Magazine, Amsterdam Quarterly, and Wordgathering, and a score of other public walls. Sean has worked as a prose editor at Wordgathering for almost four years, now. He live in Santa Ana, California with Dianne, her mother, three dogs, and four renters. There is a large garden and two trees with big bitter oranges that look more lemon-like. Sean helped create the Disability Literature Consortium, roots for Tardigrades, and syncs to Little Shop of Horrors at least twice a year.

Kenny Fries

Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods (Creative Capital Literature Award), The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights); and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia. Twice a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), he was a Rockefeller Foundation Arts and Literary Arts Fellow, a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan/US Friendship Commission and National Endowment for the Arts, and a Cultural Vistas/Heinrich Böll Foundation DAICOR Fellow in diverse and inclusive transatlantic public remembrance. His current work-in-progress is Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust, excerpts of which have appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, and Craft, as well as form the basis for his video series What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940? He is a 2022 Ford Foundation/Mellon Foundation Disability Futures Fellow.

Rachael A. Zubal-Ruggieri

Rachael A. Zubal-Ruggieri (she/her/hers, they/them/theirs) is a long-time employee at Syracuse University. She co-created (with Diane R. Wiener) “Cripping” the Comic Con, the first of its kind interdisciplinary and international symposium on disability and popular culture, previously held at SU. At conferences and as a guest lecturer for many years, Rachael has presented on the X-Men comic books, popular culture, and disability rights and identities from her perspective as a Neurodivergent person and as a Mad Queer Crip. Entries in their “Micro Mutant Postcard Project” have been published in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature and Stone of Madness. Their most recent publications include two articles (co-authored with Diane R. Wiener) in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies‘ Special Issue, “Cripping Graphic Medicine I: Negotiating Empathy and the Lived Experiences of Disability in and through Comics” (Volume 17, Issue 3).

Kate Champlin

Kate Champlin (she/her) is a late-deafened adult and a graduate of Ball State University (Indiana). She currently works as a writing tutor and as a contract worker for BK International Education Consultancy, a company whose aim is to normalize the success of underserved students.