Gertrude Press

Mary Bess Dunn "Under A Different Sun"

Mary Bess Dunn is a resident of Nashville Tennessee. As an education professor at Tennessee State University she worked with teachers at all levels to promote writing in the classroom. Recently she has scaled back her teaching to write full-time. Her work has been featured in Quiddity International Literary Journal, The Best of Pif Magazine:Off-Line, Sanskrit Literary Journal, and online in The Smoking Poet, Folly, Stone’s Throw Magazine, and Verdad. She enjoys traveling, biking, paddling, and hugging the grandkids.

TRIVIA: Our nomination of her story encouraged Mary to join Facebook. Hey, we do our best to encourage people to spend countless hours viral stalking.

Seth Fisher "The Shiny Lady"

Seth Fischer's writing has appeared in Guernica, Monkeybicycle, Swink, and Pank. He is Sunday Editor at The Rumpus, and he’s the founding editor of The Splinter Generation and Webscribbler. Seth lives in San Francisco and has a day job where he sits in a cubicle not too far from an albino alligator.

TRIVIA: Seth and I shared the same Antioch University MFA mentor (though I as few years earlier) – the always intriguing, brilliant Susan Taylor-Chehak.

Caroline Harvey "Poem for The First Naked Girl I Touched"

Caroline Harvey's writing has been featured in print, film and television, including the anthology High Desert Voices, Numinous Magazine, The Legendary, Lowestoft Chronicle, The Charles River Review, and on Season 5 of HBO’s Def Poetry. Caroline is an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music and has performed and taught at schools and organizations nationwide such as YouthSpeaks, The Esalen Institute, Lesley University, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. She’s honored to have shared stages and classrooms with such artists as Alicia Keys, Melissa Ferrick, Susie Bright, Dave Chapelle, Donna De Lory, and many others. A past member and coach of winning poetry slam teams, Caroline also works to facilitate writing projects for at-risk youth and survivors of trauma.   

TRIVIA: Our poetry editor, Liz Simson, so loved this poem that she read it – despite slightly more pressing business – at one of our Board Meetings... then read again the sentences she particularly liked.

Mercedes Lawry"What Else is Waiting" and "Lost Prayers"

Mercedes Lawry was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA and has lived in Seattle almost thirty years. She’s published in Poetry, Rhino, Nimrod, Poetry East, Seattle Review, and others. Her chapbook, There Are Crows in My Blood, was published by Pudding House Press. She’s also published fiction and poems for children. Among the honors she’s received are awards from the Seattle Arts Commission, Hugo House, and Artist Trust. Mercedes has also been a Jack Straw Writer and held a residency at Hedgebrook. Currently she is the Director of Communications at the Museum of History & Industry.

TRIVIA: When asked to nominate his choices, our former poetry editor Steven Rydman, who chose the poetry for one of our issues this year, nominated Mercedes – twice.

Katie Jean Shinkle  "Emergence" 

Katie Jean Shinkle is the Assistant Poetry Editor for DIAGRAM. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, South Loop Review, Sugar House Review and >killauthor, among others. 

TRIVIA: Katie also writes some damn good fiction. Read this, in Pank. See what we mean?