Author Profile: Julie E. Bloemeke, contributor to THE GREAT GATSBY ANTHOLOGY

PHOTO: Built in 1930 and housed in the former Buice’s General Store, Wilbur and Rudy’s Farmtable is a bit late for the Gatsby era. But its recent popularity in the Milton, Georgia, community has generated all the buzz of a Gatsby party. Poet Julie E. Bloemeke chose Wilbur and Rudy’s as the location for this Gatsby photo shoot because of its up-and-coming energy and dedication to promoting local artists, poets, and musicians. Also, it is one of the perfect places to write — organic coffee shop by day, wine bar by evening. Julie is grateful to fellow poet and photographer, William Walsh, for his 20s-era eye, and to her late grandmother, Geraldine Iglehart, whose vintage flapper gown and ostrich-feather fan helped recreate the roar. Her poem “Telephone” appears in The Great Gatsby Anthology.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I am fascinated by Fitzgerald’s use of the telephone as a presence in conversation. The mystery of who is on the other end of the wire lends resonance to Gatsby’s intrigue; the insistence of Fitzgerald’s shrill metallic urgency is often used to punctuate, disrupt, pause, or hijack. My current poetry manuscript—largely influenced by our deepening connection to the cell phone—offers a grateful hat tip to Fitzgerald’s adroit observations of the telephone’s importance in social dynamics.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Julie E. Bloemeke’s poetry manuscript Slide to Unlock, recently placed as a semifinalist in three book prizes: the 2015 Hudson Prize through Black Lawrence Press, the 2015 Washington Prize through the Word Works, and the 2014 Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book Award. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and a 2015 fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications including Gulf Coast, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Drunken Boat, Poet Lore, and The Great Gatsby Anthology. In May, she won the 2015 ekphrastic poetry competition at the Toledo Museum of Art, where her work will be on view with the Claude Monet collection until September.

Author Profile: Linda Kraus, contributor to THE GREAT GATSBY ANTHOLOGY

PHOTO: Poet Linda Kraus with her copy of The Great Gatsby Anthology at the end of a pier in Mount Dora, Florida — to commemorate her poem “The End of the Pier” featured in the collection.

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON HER POEM: Gatsby’s tortuous quest for love became a kind of totem for me over the years; I wished to honor its significance in my own life as well as in the lives of many generations of readers by writing “The End of the Pier.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Linda Kraus has taught English and Film Studies at the college and university levels. She has written film criticism, short fiction, and poetry since adolescence and has published both poetry and film criticism. Her poems appear in a variety of anthologies, and she is currently editing her first collection of poetry.

Author Profile: Kathryn Kulpa, contributor to THE GREAT GATSBY ANTHOLOGY

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” – Yogi Berra

PHOTOGRAPH: Author Kathryn Kulpa brought her copy of The Great Gatsby Anthology to visit an obscure Rhode Island landmark as inscrutable in its own way as the gaze of Dr.T. J. Eckleburg — the “fork in the road” where rural Adamsville, Rhode Island, meets equally rural Acoaxet Village in Westport, Massachusetts. She contributed her poem “What Daisy Knew” to the collection.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR ABOUT HER POEM: One of the most haunting moments of The Great Gatsby for me was always Daisy’s description of the birth of her daughter, how she hopes her child will be “a beautiful little fool.” There’s such a sad finality to that moment, as if she’s accepting that she will never be seen for anything but a beautiful fool in her own life. That took me back to imagining what if Daisy had chosen love instead of security? How much did she second-guess, and how much did that decision cost her? My piece “What Daisy Knew” grew out of that question.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kathryn Kulpa is the author of  Pleasant Drugs (Mid-List Press)  and Who’s the Skirt? (Origami Poems Project). She has published flash fiction and prose poetry in Smokelong Quarterly, KYSO Flash, Literary Orphans, and The Flexible Persona and has work forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press. She is teaching a summer writing workshop for teens at the Tiverton Public Library and will teach a fiction class for adults this fall at the Rogers Free Library in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Author Profile: Christina Murphy, contributor to THE GREAT GATSBY ANTHOLOGY

PHOTO: Christina Murphy stands with her copy of The Great Gatsby Anthology by the statue of John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1801-1835), on the campus of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. The statue is the center point of the main entrance to the University, and it is a beloved symbol of the University itself and of the community it has served since 1837. Huntington is a “land, water, and air” city, as it is open to travel and commerce via all three means. Huntington also has the distinction of being the largest inland port in America by tonnage. Christina contributed the poem “Ascend into Dreams” to the anthology.

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON HER POEM: My creative process in writing “Ascend into Dreams” was an effort to imagine what a vision of the highest freedom of ascending into dreams would be like for a man of Jay Gatsby’s intense imagination and romantic sensibilities. I have always been mesmerized by the intensity of Gatsby’s imagination and ability to envision his own created and idealized world. And so I sought for this poem the types of images and conceptual frameworks that would best exemplify what the passion and the intensity of Gatsby’s vision of love would be like. That concept guided me through the drafts of this poem until I felt it captured the idea and ideal of Gatsby as the consummate dreamer for whom creating and sustaining his romantic vision became his life’s passion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Christina Murphy is a poet and fiction writer originally from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She has lived parts of her life in states whose names—Tennessee, Mississippi, and Connecticut—are variants of Native American words for “big river.” Now she lives in a 100-year-old house along the Ohio River, and “Ohio” is also a Native American word for “big river.” She senses a pattern here and attributes the stream of consciousness that runs through a number of her poems to her affiliation / connection with rivers. Her poetry appears in a range of journals and anthologies, including, PANK, Dali’s Lovechild, and Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, and the anthologies Let the Sea Find its Edges, From the Roaring Deep: A Devotional in Honor of Poseidon and the Spirits of the Sea, and Remaking Moby-Dick. Her work has been nominated multiple times for a Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Net anthology. Christina invites and appreciates readers’ comments on her work, and she can be reached @ChristinaMurph1 on Twitter.

Author Profile: Gary Glauber, contributor to THE GREAT GATSBY ANTHOLOGY

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON THE PHOTOGRAPH: 
Here I am reading The Great Gatsby Anthology in front of the majestic and venerable Bedford Oak. This emblem of our village (Bedford, New York) is estimated to be more than 500 years old. This incredible white oak stands with a girth of more than 23 feet, with a spread of branches that goes out to some 130 feet. Unfortunately, the photo doesn’t capture the whole of it. This tree was growing when Native Americans populated the area, it stood strong through local events in the Revolutionary War, and most certainly was thriving when Fitzgerald was penning The Great Gatsby in the early 1920s.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gary Glauber is a poet, fiction writer, and teacher. In April 2015, he took part in Found Poetry Review’s PoMoSco project. Recent poems are published or forthcoming in Blue Heron Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, West Trade Review, Calliope Magazine, The Bookends Review, Deep Water Literary Journal, Typoetic.us, The Legendary, Xanadu, and Think Journal. His first collection, Small Consolations, was published in July 2015 by The Aldrich Press. A chapbook entitled Memory Marries Desire will be available from Finishing Line Press in fall 2015. He contributed his poem about Nick Carraway, “I am not even faintly like a rose,” to The Great Gatsby Anthology.

Aug. 14, 2015: Books on the Square (Providence, RI) hosts GREAT GATSBY Gala!

On Friday, August 14, 2015, starting at 7 p.m., Books on the Square in Providence, Rhode Island, will host a special event — An Evening with Scott and Zelda: Celebrating The Great Gatsby Anthology.  The evening is free and open to the public — attendees are encouraged to dress in Roaring Twenties attire!

Four East Coast contributors to The Great Gatsby Anthology — a collection of poetry & prose from 80 authors inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel — will read selections from the anthology published by Silver Birch Press in June 2015.  Our thanks to Sam Cha, Jean L. Kreiling, Kathryn Kulpa, and Marybeth Rua-Larsen for joining in this celebration — with a special thank you to Kathryn for organizing the event!

WHAT: An Evening with Scott and Zelda: Celebrating The Great Gatsby Anthology

WHEN: Friday, August 14, 2015, starting at 7:00pm

WHERE: Books on the Square, 471 Angell Street, Providence, RI 02906

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
Sam Cha received his MFA from UMass Boston in 2013, where he was the 2011 and 2012 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming from) apt, Better, Cleaver, decomP, Memorious, Printer’s Devil Review, and a few other places. Poetry editor at Radius, he lives and writes in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jean L. Kreiling is the author of the recently published collection The Truth in Dissonance (Kelsay Books, 2014). Her work has appeared widely in print and online journals, including American Arts Quarterly, Angle, The Evansville Review, Measure, and Mezzo Cammin, as well as in several anthologies. She is a past winner of the String Poet Prize and the Able Muse Write Prize, and has been a finalist for the Frost Farm Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award.

Kathryn Kulpa fell in love with The Great Gatsby in ninth grade and proceeded to read everything by Fitzgerald she could find. She is the author of the award-winning short story collection Pleasant Drugs (Mid-List Press) and has published fiction in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Monkeybicycle, NANO Fiction, and Smokelong Quarterly. Her short story “Lights Out: Zelda at Highland Hospital,” inspired by Zelda Fitzgerald, was featured in the anthology Up, Do Flash Fiction by Women Writers.

Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives on the south coast of Massachusetts and teaches at Bristol Community College. Her poems, essays, flash fiction, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in American Arts Quarterly, The Raintown Review, Cleaver, Measure, Literary Orphans, and Unsplendid, among others. She won the 2011 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition in Poetry in Galway, Ireland, and her chapbook Nothing In-Between was published by Barefoot Muse Press.

Author Profile: Christina M. Rau, contributor to THE GREAT GATSBY ANTHOLOGY

PHOTOGRAPH: Poet Christina M. Rau reading The Great Gatsby Anthology in a park that overlooks Long Island’s Manhasset Bay — the body of water Gatsby gazed across at Daisy’s green light. Her poem “Once Again, to Zelda” appears in the collection.  (Photo by Anthony Rau.)

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR ABOUT HER POEM: After years of reading The Great Gatsby over and again, and then teaching parts of it here and there, the underlined passages and marginalia have taken over my only copy, and I refuse to get a new one even though this one is pretty over- used and beaten up. That’s how I like my books. In thinking about honoring this book, my favorite for many reasons, I couldn’t find my own words to do it justice. And so, I pored through the pages, copying all the underlined passages. Then I found which lines worked the best with others. Then I focused on rhythm, squaring up quatrains in a neat sequence to retell the essence of Gatsby. The repetition of each strategically chosen quote builds a tone that should mimic the tone by the end of the novel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Christina M. Rau is the author of WakeBreatheMove (Finishing Line Press,  2015)  and For The Girls, I (Dancing Girl Press 2014). She founded the reading circuit Poets In Nassau on Long Island, New York, and her poetry has recently appeared in The Main Street Rag and Till The Tides: An Anthology of Mermaid Poetry (Sundress Publications). She practices yoga occasionally and line dances on other occasions. (Photo by Kaeti Wigeland)

FIND THE AUTHOR AT:

Poets & Writers

 A Life Of We

Yoga, Write, Tea, Repeat

Twitter

Facebook

Goodreads

Instagram 

Author Profile: Marybeth Rua-Larsen, contributor to THE GREAT GATSBY ANTHOLOGY

PHOTOGRAPH: Although poet Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives on the South Coast of Massachusetts, she’s a stone’s throw away from Rhode Island. In fact, she crisscrosses the state line on a daily basis, including this recent visit to Rosecliff, in Newport, to snap a picture at the key location where the 1974 movie version of The Great Gatsby was filmed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Marybeth Rua-Larsen teaches at Bristol Community College. Her poems, essays, flash fiction, and reviews have appeared in American Arts Quarterly, The Raintown Review, Cleaver, Measure, Literary Orphans, and Unsplendid, among others. She won the 2011 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition in Poetry in Galway, Ireland, and her chapbook Nothing In-Between was published by Barefoot Muse Press. Her poem “The Letter G Confiscates the Typewriter to Assert Its POV,” riffing on her favorite character in the novel, Nick Carraway, is featured in The Great Gatsby Anthology.

Author Profile: Shahé Mankerian, contributor to THE GREAT GATSBY ANTHOLOGY

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON THE PHOTOGRAPH: This is Confucius, not the man with the red shirt and glasses, but the eroded one in the back. The man with the red shirt and glasses is the poet Shahé Mankerian whose poem “Hallowed Books” appears in that golden anthology about Gatsby. The photograph is taken at California State University, Los Angeles. The quote on the statue reads: “Among truly educated persons there is no discrimination.” In a strange way, the quote reminds me of the exchange between Jordan and Tom.

“…I said I’d been making a small investigation of his past.”

“And you found he was an Oxford man,” said Jordan helpfully.

“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”

“Nevertheless he’s an Oxford man.”

“Oxford, New Mexico,” snorted Tom contemptuously, “or something like that.”

“Listen, Tom. If you’re such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?” demanded Jordan crossly.

“Daisy invited him; she knew him before we were married – God knows where!”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Shahé Mankerian‘s manuscript, History of Forgetfulness, has been a finalist at four prestigious competitions: the 2013 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, the 2013 Bibby First Book Competition, the Quercus Review Press, Fall Poetry Book Award (2013), and the 2014 White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Shahé serves as the principal of St. Gregory Hovsepian School in Pasadena and co-directs the Los Angeles Writing Project. He has been honored with the Los Angeles Music Center’s BRAVO Award, which recognizes teachers for innovation and excellence in arts education.

Author Profile: Suzanne Rawlinson, contributor to THE GREAT GATSBY ANTHOLOGY

PHOTOGRAPH: Poet Suzanne Rawlinson with her copy of The Great Gatsby Anthology at Hammersmith Bridge in London, the borough where she lives. She picked this location as an homage to The Great Gatsby — specifically how Gatsby and Daisy live across the water from each other.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Suzanne Rawlinson is a full-time teaching assistant who also enjoys writing part time following the completion of her studies in creative writing. Suzanne writes across a variety of genres in the form of blog posts, scripts, and poetry. Occasionally she writes short stories and would love to extend the poetry into songwriting. Currently Suzanne is working on a script for TV/radio and regularly contributes to her blog — writing about real-life experiences, issues, and musings. In 2013 Suzanne had a poem published in an online magazine. Her poem “The Destruction of Desire” appears in the The Great Gatsby Anthology. Visit her at a range of social media links: suzannerawlinson.wordpress.com, saucysuesays.wordpress.com, on Twitter, Facebook, or her YouTube channel.