Contributors

Sarah Alcott Anderson’s first collection of poetry, We Hold On To What We Can, was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in North American Review and Raleigh Review. A high school English teacher for eighteen years, she lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with her husband and two children, where they run The Word Barn, a space for literary and musical events.

Kathleen Aponick is a former teacher and textbook editor. Her poetry books include The Descendant’s Notebook, Bright Realm, The Port and Near the River’s Edge. With Paul Marion and Jane Brox, she co-edited Merrimack: A Poetry Anthology. Her poems have been in Poetry East, Notre Dame Review, and Potomac Review. She lives in Andover, Mass., with her husband, Tony.

Born in Lowell, Mass., Susan April grew up in the Highlands neighborhood and later in the Collinsville section of Dracut nearby. Recent work has appeared in A Tether to This World: Stories and Poems About Recovery and When Home is Not Safe. Her essay in this issue of TLR, “Another Turn,” won the Shepherd University Common Reading Program essay contest in 2021.

For many years, Alfred Bouchard has lived in Lowell with his wife, the painter Lieby Miedema. His book The Fogg features a probing sequence of poems written in response to artworks in the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, along with other work dealing with the relations between men and women, existential questions that arise on the street, and dreamscapes that beg meaning.

Paul Brouillette is an architect living in Somerville, Mass. His interests include American literature, the design and impact of public monuments, and travels in the desert Southwest. His previous essays appeared in French Class: French Canadian-American Writings on Identity, Culture, and Place.

Patricia Cantwell has taught drama and produced and presented a daily radio program. After twenty years as a lawyer, she sold her solicitor’s practice to concentrate on writing. In 2016, she won the “Emerging Poet” award at Carrick-on-Suir Writers Weekend while two of her poems were short-listed for the prestigious Bridport Prize, UK. Her poems have appeared in local collections.

Sean Casey was born in Lowell a few days before a gnarly nor’easter. His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Massachusetts Review, and The Lifted Brow. He is an MLS candidate at Simmons University and lives in Easthampton, Mass.

Ann Fox Chandonnet grew up in Dracut, Mass., and attended (what was then) Lowell State College. Her new and selected poems, The Shape of Wind on Water, will be published in 2022. Previous poetry collections include Auras, Tendrils, and Ptarmigan Valley. Her latest children’s book is Baby Abe: A Lullaby for Lincoln, which takes the form of a poem. She lives in Missouri.

Charles Coe is the author of All Sins Forgiven: Poems for My Parents, Picnic on the Moon, and Memento Mori. He was selected as a Boston Literary Light by the Associates of the Boston Public Library and is a former artist fellow at the St. Botolph Club of Boston. He has been poet-in-residence at Wheaton College and is an adjunct professor of English at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island and Bay Path University, where he teaches in the MFA programs.

Billy Collins is the author of twelve collections of poetry including The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Sailing Alone Around the Room, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2001, Collins told The Paris Review: “Both of my parents were born in 1901 and both lived into their nineties, the two of them just about straddling the century. My father was from a large Irish family from Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town, incidentally Kerouac’s birthplace and the site of his first novel. I’ve never been to Lowell, but I was just invited by an editor of a magazine to go up there and write about my father and look at the Jack Kerouac place. I have a poem called ‘Lowell,’ which is about the coincidence of my father being born in the same town as Jack Kerouac.”

Pierre V. Comtois, who grew up in Lowell, is the prolific author of Marvel Comics in the 1960s: An Issue-by-Issue Field Guide to a Pop Culture Phenomenon and works of science fiction, horror, and history, as well as a young-adult novel, Sometimes a Warm Rain Falls. He has edited and produced twenty-three issues of Fungi: A Magazine of Fantasy and Weird Fiction. He is the subject of Dick Howe, Jr.’s interview in this issue.

David Daniel is the author of more than a dozen books, including White Rabbit, a novel set in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967, and four entries in the prize-winning Alex Rasmussen mystery series. His most recent book is Inflections & Innuendos, a collection of flash fiction. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Dave DeInnocentis has lived in the Merrimack Valley for five decades. A youthful enthusiasm for a certain native son of Lowell led to eighty-two drives and hitchhikes across country horizontally, east to west, and countless more vertically. And counting . . . .

Joseph Donahue’s most recent volumes of poetry are Wind Maps I-VII and The Disappearance of Fate. He is the co-translator of First Mountain, by Zhang Er. With Edward Foster he edited The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970-2000. Two volumes of his ongoing poetic sequence, Terra Lucida, are forthcoming, and a collection of haiku-inspired poetic suites, Infinite Criteria, is due this year.

Catherine Drea is a contemplative photographer and writer in rural County Waterford, Ireland. Her blog Foxglove Lane, www.foxglovelane.com, has won four awards in photography in the Irish Blog Awards. After working in the Waterford Institute of Technology for ten years, she trained as an Integrative Psychotherapist and co-founded Framework, a community support organisation, NGO, and charity.

Janet Egan is the author of Content for a Creative Revolution, a chronicle of Kerouac activities in Lowell over the years. A writer and photographer, her work is inspired by the rich literary tradition of the Merrimack Valley, nature, and baseball. She has been a steady presence at the Untitled Open Mic at Brew’d Awakening Coffeehaus in Lowell. She lives in North Andover, Mass.

Sheila Eppolito of Chelmsford, Mass., has worked in writing and public relations roles in corporate and educational settings and has published three plays, The MOMologues, MOMologues 2: Off to School, and MOMologues3: The Final Push.

Kevin Gallagher lives in Greater Boston. His poem in this issue of TLR will appear in his poetry collection The Wild Goose, forthcoming in 2022. His previous books are And Yet it Moves, Radio Plays, and Loom. He edits spoKe, a Boston-based annual of poetry and poetics.

Charles Gargiulo grew up in Lowell public housing, joined the Army, went to UMass Lowell on the GI Bill, and graduated summa cum laude in sociology. His memoir about growing up in Lowell’s Little Canada just before most of the neighborhood was demolished is forthcoming. His work has been in Merrimack Valley Magazine and Résonance, a journal about Franco-American culture at UMaine, Orono.

Bob Hodge is the author of Tales of the Times: A Runner’s Story, about his youth in Lowell and his life in athletics. Hodge finished third in the 1979 Boston Marathon and was a member of the United States Track and Field and Cross Country teams in 1982 and 1987. He is the library director in Berlin, Mass.

Co-editor of TLR Richard P. Howe, Jr., created RichardHowe.com, a hyperlocal blog about Lowell that has become a broader platform for ideas and creative writing. His books include a history of veterans’ organizations in Lowell, the photo-documentary Legendary Locals of Lowell, and History as It Happens: Citizen Bloggers in Lowell, Mass., which he coedited with Paul Marion. He lives in Lowell, where he is the Register of Deeds of Northern Middlesex County, an elected position.

Moira Linehan is the author of four collections of poetry, If No Moon, Incarnate Grace, both named Honor Books in the Massachusetts Book Awards, Toward, and & Company. She has been featured in Trasna, which showcases Irish/Irish-American writing at RichardHowe.com

The author of Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems, Carl Little has been featured in Maine Sunday Telegram’s “Deep Water” series and “Poems from Here” on Maine Public Radio, as well as in 3 Nations Anthology: Native, Canadian, & New England Writers and Local News: Poetry About Small Towns. In 2021, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation awarded him a Lifetime Achievement Award for his art writing.

El Habib Louai is a Moroccan Amazigh poet, musician, and high school teacher of English. He has a doctorate in English studies with a focus on the Beat Generation. He studied creative writing at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Colorado. His articles, poems, and translations of the Beat Poets have appeared widely, including in America America: An Anthology of Beat Poetry in Arabic. He contributed with Arabic translations to Seven Countries: An Anthology Against Trump’s Ban. His books in English are Mrs. Jones Will Now Know: Poems of a Desperate Rebel and Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar, a finalist for the 2020 Sillerman Prize for African Poetry.

Photographer Greg Marion’s images of Lowell have been described as “so stunning they look like paintings.” His work has been exhibited at the Lowell Folk Festival and other city venues.

Paul Marion, co-editor of TLR, is the author of Lockdown Letters & Other Poems, Union River, and Mill Power, the story of Lowell’s modern revival. He is the editor of Jack Kerouac’s early writing, Atop an Underwood. Recent work has appeared in Café Review, PoetsReadingtheNews.com, and So It Goes, the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. With his wife, Rosemary Noon, he lives in Amesbury, Mass.

Lowell artist and art educator Richard Marion has been active in Lowell’s cultural life since his student days at Mass College of Art and Chicago School of Design. His Gallery 21 anchored the contemporary art scene through the 1970s. His work is available at RichardMarion.net

Elise Martin lives in Lowell with her husband, Brian, and their basset pup Maisie. She was Dean of Assessment at Middlesex Community College and prior to that a project manager at Education Development Center in Newton, Mass. In her years as an administrator, she said she was an aspiring writer without enough time. Now, with more time, she’s writing.

Mike McCormick grew up in Haverhill, Mass., where he played high school football against Lowell in 1969 and 1970. He moved to Alaska following college graduation from UMass, Amherst. He has worked as an educator, concert promoter, and newspaper columnist.

Neil Miller of Somerville, Mass., was news editor of the Gay Community News, the first weekly gay and lesbian newspaper in the U.S., from 1975 to 1978, and a writer at the Boston Phoenix in the 1980s. Two of his books won Lambda Literary Awards, including In Search of Gay America. His book Kartchner Caverns, about the discovery of limestone caves, won the 2009 Arizona Book Award. In 2010, he published Banned in Boston, documenting 100 years of censorship in the city.

Helena Minton’s poem in this issue, “Daily Walk in the Quarter,” is from the series “Undeterred: Poems on the Life and Paintings of Berthe Morisot, 1849-1895,” in Thinking of the Anhinga: New and Selected Poems, which is due in 2022. Her chapbook The Raincoat Colors was published in 2017. She is a former librarian and lives in Andover, Mass.

Amina Mohammed of Worcester, Mass., is a student at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is the last of four children of immigrant parents Amuda Issifu and the late Johnette B. Dennis. Her parents sacrificed their all to make sure that she and her siblings had a better future, she says. The first Youth Poet Laureate of Worcester, and first person to hold this title in Massachusetts, she served from January 2020 through December 2021.

A retired school psychologist, Carlo Morrissey is an adjunct faculty member at Quinsigamond Community College in Massachusetts. His writing interests include longer fiction and poetry. He has two novels, If You See Your Father, Shoot Him and Lavender Skies.

Dan Murphy teaches at Boston University. He was recently Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. A past Robert Pinsky Global Fellow at Boston University and a Grace Abernathy Scholar at Emory University, his work has appeared in Sugar House Review, The Summerset Review, The Adirondack Review, and Panhandler Magazine.

Joylyn Ndungu was born in Kenya and migrated to the U.S. with her family for unity and a better life, she says. She didn’t always love writing, but discovered this talent when she realized she couldn’t stop. A member of Lowell High School’s Class of 2022, she won the annual Jack Kerouac Student Poetry and Prose Contest in 2021. She was interested in entering the contest in her freshman year, but didn’t have the courage until her senior year, she explains. Although she has written countless poems, she hopes to one day be a bestselling author and impact literature and the many lives that will come across her work.

Former broadcaster and journalist Dairena Ní Chinnéid is a bilingual poet from Ireland who has published eleven collections, the most recent being Tairseach by Éabhlóid. Her books include Deleted, her first collection in English; Fé Gheasa: Spellbound; and Cloithear Aistear Anama, Coiscéim. Among her awards is a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship. She was Irish Language Writer-in-Residence for Dublin City University in 2017-2018. She has performed her poetry at events in Ireland, Europe, and the U.S.

Bill O’Connell has lived in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts between the Connecticut River and Quabbin Reservoir since 1984. A retired social worker, he teaches literature and writing at Greenfield Community College and runs a small handyman business. His books are Sakonnet Point, On The Map To Your Life, and When We Were All Still Alive.

Christine O’Connor is completing a collection of literary-themed essays, as well as a memoir about her grandmother and the Titanic. A former board member of the Henry David Thoreau Society, she recently presented a paper at its Annual Gathering: “In a Lake of Rainbow Light: Where Thoreau and the Irish Meet.” She is chief legal counsel for the City of Lowell.

Stephen O’Connor of Lowell is the author the novels The Spy in the City of Books, The Witch at Rivermouth, and This is No Time to Quit Drinking, as well as the short story collection Smokestack Lightning, now in its third printing. A new collection of stories is due in 2022.

Mark Pawlak is the author of nine poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies. His latest book is My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov, a memoir. His work has been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, and Polish.

Chath pierSath is a farmer in Bolton, Mass., author of three books, and a self-taught painter who has shown his work in Paris and Phnom Penh. His book On Earth Beneath Sky was named a Must-Read title in the Massachusetts Book Awards for 2020. He has poems forthcoming in Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. He says, “There are many ways to be human, as there are many ways to be Cambodian.”

Emilie-Noelle Provost is a writer, magazine editor, avid hiker, and the author of the middle-grade novel The Blue Bottle. A longtime Lowell resident, she lives with her husband, daughter, three long-haired rescue cats, and a well-worn Dyson vacuum cleaner. Her second novel, The River Is Everywhere, the coming-of-age story of a Franco-American teenager, is due in 2023.

Joan Ratcliffe grew up in Dracut, Mass., and lived in Lowell for many years, before going on the road to Las Vegas, and landing later in Providence, Rhode Island, where she founded Newspeak bookstore, Paranoia Magazine, and Huntergatheress Journal. Her stories and articles have appeared in under the pseudonym Joan d’Arc. She has a new short story collection, Friends of Apis Radio: Fabulist Fiction Tales. She lives in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.

Tom Sexton is the author of many collections of poetry including Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems and Li Bai Rides a Celestial Dolphin Home. He is a former Poet Laureate of Alaska. Born in Lowell, Tom graduated from Lowell High School, where he is a Distinguished Alumnus.

Born in Liverpool, England, in 1953, Malcolm Sharps studied sociology before entering the rare postage stamp trade in London. After disillusionment with business life in the capital, he has lived mostly outside England in France, Lithuania, Estonia, and Hungary. His short stories and articles are often based on places he has lived and interests in music, world literature, and social and cultural issues. He taught English as a foreign language for twenty-five years, and now translates Hungarian texts on classical music.

Meg Smith is a writer, journalist, dancer and events producer living in Lowell. Her poetry and fiction have recently appeared in The Cafe Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Raven Cage, and Dark Moon Digest. She is author of five poetry books and a short fiction collection, The Plague Confessor.

Michael Steffen’s fourth book is Blood Narrative. New work has appeared, or will appear soon, in Rogue Agent, Panoply, and the Red Fern Review. He lives in Buffalo, N.Y.

John Struloeff grew up in the high rainforest of northwest Oregon. He teaches English and directs the creative writing program at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. He is the author of The Man I Was Supposed to Be and The Work of a Genius, a life of Albert Einstein in poetry. His poems and fiction have appeared in The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, and Prairie Schooner. He lives in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains.

John Suiter is a writer and photographer in Chicago. From 1975 to 2005, he lived in Cambridge and Boston, Mass., and often visited Lowell, photographing Kerouac locales. He is the author of Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades.

David R. Surette is the author of six collections of poetry including Stable, which was named an Honor Book in the 2016 Massachusetts Book Awards. His poem “Kennedy Compound, Hyannis Port” has been featured in From the Farther Shore: Discovering Cape Cod & the Islands Through Poetry. He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian-American writer and critic. He is the author of three fulllength poetry collections and a chapbook. His work has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Chiron Review, Massachusetts Review, and Atticus Review. He writes for Cultural Daily. Tuon is Associate Professor of English at Union College, in Schenectady, N.Y.

Peuo Tuy is a spoken word poet, creative workshop instructor, and community organizer. Her poetry collection Khmer Girl is inspired by the traumas of her family escaping the killing fields of Cambodia and enduring the inequities of life as immigrants in America. A founder of the Lowell-based Cambodian American Literary Arts Association, she has appeared at Harvard Law School, Miami Book Fair, Minnesota Fringe Festival, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and Harlem Book Fair.

Simon Warner is Visiting Research Fellow in Popular Music Studies at the University of Leeds in the UK. He is the author of Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock

Culture and co-editor, with Jim Sampas, of Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack. In 2021, he launched the web newsletter Rock and the Beat Generation.

Nature, spirit of place, and ecological concern have been themes in Grace Wells’ writing since her debut children’s novel Gyrfalcon, which won the Eilís Dillon Best Newcomer Award. Her first poetry collection, When God has been Called Away to Greater Things, won the Rupert and Eithne Strong Best First Collection Award. With her second collection, Fur, she moved more deeply into eco-poetics and eco-feminism. Her poems are sometimes accompanied by a sequence of eco-poetry-films, Wells’ Home Movies. She lives on the west coast of Ireland.

Photographer and filmmaker Robert W. Whitaker, III, grew up on the South Shore of Boston. Following service in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, he attended Bridgewater State College. He was an award-winning photographer for the Lowell Sun for many years.

Fred Woods has lived in Cambridge, Seattle, and New Mexico, and has practiced law, politics, and filmmaking. Retired, he bikes, sails, poetizes, and recounts tales from the first Tsongas for Congress campaign, a victory for Paul E. Tsongas of Lowell.

THELOWELLREVIEW.COM

The Lowell Review brings together writers and readers in the Merrimack River watershed of eastern New England with people everywhere who share their curiosity about and passion for the small and large matters of life. Each issue includes essays, poems, stories, criticism, opinion, and visual art.

In the spirit of The Dial magazine of Massachusetts, edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840s, The Lowell Review offers a space for creative and intellectual expression. The Dial sought to provide evidence of “what state of life and growth is now arrived and arriving.”

This publication springs from the RichardHowe.com blog, known for its “Voices from Lowell and beyond.” In America, the name Lowell stands out, associated with industrial innovation, working people, cultural pluralism, and some of the country’s literary greats. Sarah Alcott Anderson Kathleen Aponick Susan April Alfred Bouchard Paul Brouillette Patricia Cantwell Sean Casey Ann Fox Chandonnet Charles Coe Billy Collins Pierre V. Comtois David Daniel Dave DeInnocentis Joseph Donahue Catherine Drea Janet Egan Sheila Eppolito Kevin Gallagher Charles Gargiulo Bob Hodge Richard P. Howe, Jr. Moira Linehan Carl Little El Habib Louai Greg Marion Paul Marion Richard Marion Elise Martin Mike McCormick Neil Miller Helena Minton Amina Mohammed Carlo Morrissey Dan Murphy Joylyn Ndungu Dairena Ní Chinnéide Bill O’Connell Christine O’Connor Stephen O’Connor Mark Pawlak Chath pierSath Emilie-Noelle Provost Joan Ratcliffe Tom Sexton Malcolm Sharps Meg Smith Michael Steffen John Struloeff John Suiter David R. Surette Bunkong Tuon Peuo Tuy Simon Warner Grace Wells Robert W. Whitaker, III Fred Woods

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