Air: An Anthology

We're happy to introduce our contributors to Air: A Radio Anthology:

Beth R. Barth was born with a silver spoon and grew up in New York City. She was nine when the story (in this book) happened. Now she is eighty. She hasn’t always written, but almost. Her father loved words. He read aloud every night catching her in his enthusiasm. He persuaded her that writing was a good thing. At present colleagues with sharp opinions shape her efforts. Two marriages, two daughters, two grandchildren have brought delights and sorrow. Yet, they haven’t prepared her for the despair of having nothing to say, or the joy of getting it right, just the way she wants.

Brian R. Bland is a retired Associated Press Radio correspondent living in Santa Monica, California, with his wife, Jeanne, a retired RN. Bland earned B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Illinois, majoring in broadcast journalism. His Army service included a year in Vietnam running a combat photo detachment. He began his news career in the San Francisco area, moving to Nevada as a TV reporter, then joining AP Radio in Los Angeles. In his nearly three decades with that network, Bland covered high-profile stories across the country, as well as the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Petrea Burchard is an audiobook narrator and author. In her novel, Camelot & Vine, Hollywood mashes up with the Dark Ages. She drew on her acting experience to write the comic essays in Act As If: Stumbling Through Hollywood with Headshot in Hand. Her short fiction has appeared in print and online. Anime fans know her as the English voice of Ryoko, the sexy space pirate in the anime classic, Tenchi Muyo!

Rob Cardillo decided to leave radio when it stopped being fun. Rob did get a degree in engineering which allowed me to enter the world of a telecommunications company. He admits, though, he’s never had the same amount of fun that radio has provided in his current job, however the skills you acquire working in radio are things he values to this day.

Eileen M. Cunniffe writes mostly nonfiction and often explores identity and experience through the lenses of travel, family, and work. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including Superstition Review, Bluestem Magazine, The RavensPerch, and Hippocampus Magazine. Occasionally, her stories present themselves as prose poems. Three of Eileen’s essays have been recognized with Travelers’ Tales Solas Awards and another received the Emrys Journal 2013 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award. Read more at: www.eileencunniffe.com.

Francis DiClemente lives in Syracuse, New York, where he works as a video producer. He is the author of four poetry collections, and his blog can be found at francisdiclemente.com.

Dagney C. Ernest is a longtime arts and entertainment writer and editor for a small newspaper chain on the coast of Maine. She has not worked a radio shift this century, but still does the occasional spot voiceover, as well as instructional video voiceovers. Her grandfather, originally from the Maine island of Matinicus, was an engineer for many years at WHN in New York City.

Stephanie Feuer is a New York City-based writer and marketing executive. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Organic Life, The Forward, and numerous online publications and anthologies. Her novel for young adults, DRAWING AMANDA, was published by HipsoMedia in 2014. She’s read her work at The Bowery Poetry Club, The Museum of Motherhood, Sarah Lawrence College, KGB Bar, Bluestocking Bookstore, and other venues. She started her media career as a disc jockey and radio news reporter. Find her on Twitter @StephanieFeuer.

John Fisher's radio career spans four decades on the air at music stations in Seattle, Chicago, Columbus, and Toledo. These days he's a writer, painter, voice actor, father of a first-grader, and, most importantly, he still shows up – live – every weekday morning on 94.1 The Sound, a popular adult contemporary station in Seattle.

Jessica Forcier is a native of Bridgeport, Connecticut. She worked or interned at a variety of radio stations in Connecticut and Westchester County, New York. Her fiction has been previously published in New Delta Review, Moon City Review, Lunch Ticket, and others. She received her MFA from Southern Connecticut State University.

James Fox was born in Philadelphia. He joined the Marines at eighteen and served four years. He has been working on a memoir about the experience for longer that he'd like to admit. Today he lives in Ohio with his daughter and teaches English at Ohio University – Zanesville.

Victoria Otto Franzese is the daughter of Victor Bacon Otto, who served as a medic with the 3rd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1945. Now a freelance writer, Victoria spent the bulk of her career writing for the award-winning Insider Travel Guide website, a series of online destination guides she co-founded. She is a graduate of Smith College and New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

Jack C. Heinritz started in radio while still in high school, and continued working in radio to pay for college. While majoring in journalism at Michigan State University he was involved in the damnedest radio station format change ever, which led to an encounter with John Lennon and an experience in bootleg album marketing. After enjoying a 50-year career in broadcast journalism in Detroit, San Francisco, Dallas, and Little Rock, he is now retired and living in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Anne B. Henry earned her MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University. A Jeopardy! nerd, Anne has been spinning yarns since kindergarten and was a winner at the Woodstock Writer’s Festival Story Slam with a story about a shiba-inu webcam. She conducts creative writing workshops for adults in a continuing education program. Having worked as a broadcast journalist, personnel manager, bubble gum factory worker, IRS tax preparer, administrative manager, and Easter bunny, among other occupations, Anne has met a lot of characters. She is hard at work on a collection of character-driven short stories.

Ross Klavan's crime novella I Take Care of Myself in Dreamland was published by Down and Out Books in 2018. Greenpoint Press published his comic novel Schmuck in 2014. His critically acclaimed original screenplay for the film Tigerland was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award and was released by 20th Century Fox, starring Colin Farrell. He’s also written screenplays for InterMedia, Walden Media, Paramount, Miramax, and TNT-TV. A public and intense “conversation about writing” with Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer was both televised and published as Like Shaking Hands With God (Seven Stories Press.) He teaches screenwriting in the Maslow Family Graduate Creative Writing MFA program at Wilkes University.

Ginny MacDonald raises vegetables in heavy soil in a short-season zone, cuts her own hair in a badly-lit bathroom mirror, writes creative nonfiction, and otherwise sets herself high-effort, low-reward tasks of dubious benefit. But she's heard the first hermit thrush song of the season, so there's that. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Brevity, Hobart, Matchbook, and other fine elsewheres.

Scott Manthe teaches public speaking at Indiana University-Kokomo. He has been a journalist, a radio announcer, and an occasional writer. In his spare time he enjoys all things radio, music, trekking, biking, reading, and trying to find different ways to combine those interests. He lives in Indiana with his wife, Eva, and their cats, Humphrey and O.C.

Maggie Martin is a poet, writer, and workshop facilitator who specializes in healing through the practice of poetry. She has served as a poet-in-residence at a VA medical center, been a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships in the arts from her home state of Pennsylvania. Author of the chapbook Old Stories (Niobe Press), her work has been published in literary journals, often anthologized, and twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She now lives on the Contoocook River in southern New Hampshire, near her family.

Vicki Mayk is a veteran journalist and nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in Hippocampus, Literary Mama, and The Manifest-Station and in newspapers and magazines. Vicki edits Wilkes University’s magazine and teaches nonfiction workshops. Her book about Owen Thomas, the late University of Pennsylvania football player who became a key figure in football’s concussion crisis, will be published by Beacon Press in 2020.

Amy M. Miller’s essays have appeared in Salon, Hippocampus Magazine, [PANK], The Louisville Review, MOTIF, and Under The Gum Tree. Her awards include honorable mention in the 2018 Flyway Journal "Notes From the Field” contest and the 2017 Harpur Palate Creative Nonfiction Prize. Currently, she serves as director of communications for the nonprofit cultural center, Louisville Literary Arts. Amy lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her husband and two children.

Anthony J. Mohr's work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Eclectica, Evening Street Review, Front Porch Journal, Hippocampus Magazine, The MacGuffin, Superstition Review,  War, Literature & the Arts, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize and received honorable mention from Sequestrum's Editor's Reprint Award. He is a reader for Hippocampus and an assistant editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal. Once upon a time, he was a member of the L.A. Connection, an improv theater group. By day he is a judge on the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles.

Born and raised near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, J.D. Phillippi has enjoyed a diverse career. Beginning with a degree in Theater, he spent twenty years in commercial radio as newscaster, copywriter, morning personality, and operations manager before heading into a career as a youth minister in the Episcopal church. He continues to do media commentary for a small public radio station in western New York. A published indie author, he continues to find new ways to be a storyteller. He lives with his wife and adult child in Richmond, Virginia.

Colin Rafferty had a 6 to 9 a.m. slot on his college radio station, DB92. Now, he teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and is the author of Hallow This Ground, a collection of essays about monuments published by Break Away Books/Indiana University Press. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Sarah M. Wells is the author of The Family Bible Devotional, the poetry collection Pruning Burning Bushes, and a chapbook of poems, Acquiesce. Essays published in Ascent, Brevity, The Pinch, River Teeth, and Under the Gum Tree have been honored as Notable Essays in Best American Essays. Wells is the director of content marketing for Spire Advertising and lives in Ashland, Ohio, with her husband and three children.

Big Jim Williams, 85, is a lifelong broadcaster and still broadcasts on KZSB Radio, Santa Barbara, California. He is an author, retired publicist, film narrator, and former Voice of America “stringer.” HE also worked in Army television, and is an Antioch University graduate. His radio play, A Close Encounter of the Confederate Kind, aired on many NPR stations. His latest stories are in the anthology, Best of the West (Sundown Press). His Cattle Drive book won the 2014 Peacemaker Award for Best First Novel. His latest novel is Jake Silverhorn’s Revenge. He welcomes emails at bigjimwilliams2@cox.net.

About the Editor
Donna Talarico is the founder of Hippocampus Magazine and Books and its annual creative nonfiction conference HippoCamp. For a living, she’s a full-time independent content writer and strategist in higher education. Donna previously served as director of communications at a small, private liberal arts college, and has also worked in ecommerce, print journalism and, of course, radio. Her writing can be found in The Writer, mental_floss, The Guardian, LA Review, Games Magazine, and many trade and alumni magazines. Her un-bylined work appears on websites and in marketing materials of college and universities of all kinds, from Ivy League to small, niche schools. She serves on the adjunct faculty in the Wilkes University Maslow Family Graduate Creative Writing program and the master’s in publishing program at Rosemont College. She loves word games, national parks, camping, diner breakfasts, quirky roadside attractions, and collecting old office supplies. Follow her on Twitter: @donnatalarico.