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 collection of essays, Present Imperfect, is now out from Poets Wear Prada. She is also the author of Geode, a Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award Finalist, and On the Whole: A Story of Mothering and Disability. A longtime columnist at Literary Mama, Ona’s poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The New York Times, River Teeth, The Bellevue Literary Review, Brevity, and elsewhere. Recent honors include two Notable Mentions in Best American Essays, a Best Life Story in Salon, and a winning entry in The Poetry Archive Now: Worldview 2020 project.
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 is the Administrative Assistant of the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach located in the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University (SU). In 2021, she graduated cum laude from the Human Development & Family Science program at Falk College, with a Disability Studies Minor. Her current research interests include Self-Advocacy, Representations of Disability in Popular Culture, and Interdisciplinary Disability Studies. Throughout 35-plus years working at SU, Rachael has dedicated her career to improving the lives of people with disabilities, including broad-based support to multiple disability rights initiatives on campus, in the CNY area, and nationally, through many grant-funded projects and opportunities and via long-term relationships with community agencies and programs. Rachael is currently Co-Advisor of the Self-Advocacy Network (formerly Self-Advocates of CNY), and previously served as a Board Member of Disabled in Action of Greater Syracuse, Inc. Rachael is also co-creator (with Diane R. Wiener) of “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, she has for many years presented on the X-Men comic books, popular culture, and disability rights and identities. As a Neurodivergent parent to an Autistic son, Rachael writes and presents about neurodiversity and autism parenting, seeking to debunk and disrupt traditional representations of “the autism mom.” Her poetry has been published in Wordgathering and Stone of Madness Magazine.
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.