They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology Of Contemporary Collaborative Writing

Anne-Marie Akin is a Jubilation Foundation Fellow, a faculty member at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, and a songwriter for Carnegie Hall’s National Lullaby Project.  She has taught writing at Harold Washington College, and received an NEA teaching artist fellowship to Ragdale.  Her work has been published in The Bitter Southerner, Mothers Always Write, Pass it On, About Place, and the anthology The Buddha Next Door.  Collaborative works include the oral history song cycle, “Call and Response,” which was commissioned in 2012.  She holds an MFA in nonfiction creative writing from Northwestern University, and creates music and literature experiences for very young children.

Amy Sayre Baptista’s writing has appeared in The Best Small Fictions (2017), Ninth Letter, The Butter, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals.  Her flash story collection, Primitivity, is a Black River Competition Winner and forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, September 25, 2018.  She was a SAFTA fellow (2015), a CantoMundo Poetry fellow (2013), and a fiction scholarship recipient to the Disquiet Literary Festival in Lisbon, Portugal (2011).  She has performed her work at various venues including The Poetry Foundation in Chicago, and upcoming at The St Louis BookFest.  She is a performer with with Kale Soup for the Soul, a Portuguese-American artist’s collective, and a co-founder of Plates&Poetry, a community arts program focused on food and writing.  She has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and teaches Humanities at Western Governors University. She lives in Illinois.

Tina Jenkins Bell writes fiction, plays, and feature articles, focusing on culture and cultural icons.  Her most recent work, a mini memoir entitled Devil’s Alley will appear in the Love in a Silent Storm anthology (2019).  Finding the Good Boy, Yummy was recently published in They Said, an anthology of collaborative and hybrid writing, and The Last Supper appeared in Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks.  A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council, two municipal grants and several fellowships,  Bell just completed the edits for her novel, Mud Pies. 

Rebecca Hazelton is the author of the forthcoming Gloss, as well as Fair Copy and Vow.  She is the coeditor of The Manifesto Project.  Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Best American Poetry.

Laura Jones has worked in the fields of film, television, and journalism for over 25 years.  Her nonfiction work appears in two anthologies, They Said and daCunha:  Anthology 2.  An excerpt of her graphic memoir My Life in Movies was published this spring in Fourth Genre, along with a companion essay commissioned by the journal.  Her essays are also featured in Creative Nonfiction, Foglifter, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Drum, Litro, About Place Journal, Wraparound South and the Oklahoma Review.  Jones earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Northwestern University, where she also won the 2015 AWP Journals Prize.  In 2017-18, she taught writing at Ohio’s HBCU, Central State University.

Janice Tuck Lively’s fiction and non-fiction celebrates the joys and struggles of Black women’s lives and has appeared in the journals Jet Fuel Review, Obsidian, So to Speak: Feminist Journal of Language and Art, Perspectives on African American Literature, Journal of Black Studies, and the anthologies  They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborate Writing and Ella @ 100.  She is a 2016 Pushcart Award nominee and an Associate Professor of English at Elmhurst College.

Carlo Matos has published ten books of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, most recently The Quitters (Tortoise Books).  His work appears in such journals as Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Diagram, among many others.  Carlo has received grants and fellowships from CantoMundo, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts.  He lives in Chicago, is a professor at the City Colleges of Chicago, and is a former MMA fighter and kickboxer.

Christine Pacyk is a poet and educator living in the Chicago Suburbs.  She holds an MFA in poetry from Northwestern University.  In 2011, she earned 1^st place in the Illinois Emerging Writers Competition, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Poetry Award.  Her work has been published in Jet Fuel Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crannóg Magazine, and Zone 3, among other journals.  Collaborative poems written with Virginia Smith Rice appear in Jet Fuel Review, and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018.)

Virginia Smith Rice is the author of When I Wake It Will Be Forever (Sundress Publications, 2014), and the chapbook Whose House, Whose Playroom (Dancing Girl Press, 2017).  Other collaborative poems written with Christine Pacyk appear in Jet Fuel Review.  She is poetry editor at Kettle Blue Review.

Nina Corwin is the author of two books of poetry, The Uncertainty of Maps and Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. Her work has appeared in ACM, Forklift OH, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, Verse and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Corwin is an Advisory Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and curates readings at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago where she co-edited Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art By Women. She has read and performed her work across the country, at times set with musical or choreographic compositions. In daylight hours, she is a psychotherapist known for her work on behalf of victims of violence.

Angela Narciso Torres’s poetry collection, Blood Orange, won the Willow Books Award. Her work appears in Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, Colorado Review, and other journals. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, she has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she is a poetry editor for RHINO, a reader for New England Review, and a publicity coordinator for Woman Made Gallery Literary Events.

Kurt Heintz once taught computer graphics programming at Columbia College, and worked as an independent web developer. He’s since become the lead video director at Britannica. Heintz is known for his poetry videos, begun in the early 1990s. He also videoconferenced his colleagues’ poetry in the late 1990s — years before Skype and the iPhone. He was a technical advisor to the Electronic Literature Organization in its earliest years, and is the video content editor for Another Chicago Magazine.