Contributors

Kathleen Aponick has published two poetry collections: Bright Realm and The Descendant's Notebook. She lives in Andover, Mass., and has worked as a teacher and an editor. Her poems have appeared in Potomac Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, and Still Point Arts Quarterly.

Susan April was born not far from Tyler Park in Lowell. She attended Keith Hall and is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and the University of Chicago. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and is forthcoming in two anthologies. She is an Environmental Consultant and writes from Maryland.

Joe Blair is the author of the memoir By the Iowa Sea. He lives in Coralville, Iowa.

Prudence Brighton may not be a Lowell native, but she has lived there for fifty years. She came to the city as a general assignment reporter for The Sun and stayed when she went to work for Wang Laboratories and other high-tech companies. A freelance writer, she works mostly for The Sun.

Michael Casey is from Lowell and attended public schools there. He received a B.S. in physics in 1968 from UMass Lowell, where poet William Aiken taught modern poetry. The journal of his military experience became the book Obscenities, published in 1972 by the Yale University Press. His book Millrat, on blue collar work in a textilemill dye house, will be reprinted by Loom Press in 2021. Casey taught for many years at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Mass.

Born in Lowell, George Chigas’ paternal grandparents came to the city from Greece in the early 1900s and settled in the Acre neighborhood. His maternal grandparents lived two streets away. Although his parents grew up close together and graduated from Lowell High School, they didn’t know each other until they met and married as college students in Boston. Chigas teaches at UMass Lowell and lives downtown.

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, 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.

Geoffrey Douglas is an author and journalist and former adjunct professor of writing at UMass Lowell. His books include The Grifter, The Poet, and The Runaway Train, a collection of his stories in Yankee Magazine; The Game of Their Lives, about the 1950 FIFA World Cup soccer match between the United States and England, which resulted in a movie of the same name; and The Classmates: Privilege, Chaos and the End of an Era. His article “The Double Life of Laura Shaw” appeared in Best American Sports Writing 2001.

Fred Faust came to Lowell as a radio news reporter and went on to be an assistant to U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas of Lowell and in 1978 the first executive director of the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, U.S. Dept. of the Interior. He helped develop the national park in Lowell. In the private sector, he founded The Edge Group, a real estate consulting firm.

Billy Fenton, from outside Waterford City in Ireland, writes poetry and short stories. His work has appeared in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Crannóg, Honest Ulsterman, Galway Review and others. He was shortlisted for a Hennessy Award in 2018, and for a Write by the Sea Poetry Award in 2019. He was chosen as a mentee for the Words Ireland National Mentoring Programme in 2019.

Emily Ferrara is the author of the poetry collection The Alchemy of Grief, which won the Bordighera Poetry Prize and was published in a bilingual edition. At UMass Medical School she teaches students creative writing as a form of reflective practice. She is the editor and publisher of Pendemic, an online journal. She lives in Lowell.

Charles Gargiulo grew up in Lowell public housing, joined the Army, went to UMass Lowell on the GI Bill, and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in sociology. His memoir about the loss of a longtime ethnic neighborhood in Lowell, “Farewell, Little Canada,” will be published by Loom Press in 2022. His work has appeared in Merrimack Valley Magazine, Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell, and Résonance, a journal about Franco-American culture at UMaine, Orono.

Artist Linda Hoffman lives and works at Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio, a place for agriculture, art, and community in Harvard, Mass., where she is the fruit grower and curator of an annual outdoor sculpture exhibition. A Zen Buddhist, she practices at Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper, N.Y. Her memoir, The Artist and the Orchard, is forthcoming from Loom Press in 2021.

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 co-edited with Paul Marion. He lives in Lowell, where he is the Register of Deeds of Northern Middlesex County, an elected position.

Paul Hudon is the author of The Valley & Its Peoples: An Illustrated History of the Lower Merrimack Valley and a poetry collection, All in Good Time. A former professor of history and museum curator, he earned a Ph.D. at Georgetown University. He lives near Pawtucket Falls in the city, not far from where he grew up.

William Reed Huntington was born in Lowell in 1838 and entered the Episcopal ministry after college. He was the rector of churches in Worcester and New York City from 1862 until his death in 1909. He wrote and edited several books of prayers and a collection of his poetry, Sonnets and a Dream (1899).

Lianna Kushi earned a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. in economic development from UMass Lowell. A director on the Greater Lowell Community Foundation board, she is also an associate member of the U.S.-Japan Council. An advocate for entrepreneurship as a means for social change, in particular to uplift the underconnected and underestimated, she co-founded EforAll’s nonprofit accelerator and is executive director of one of ten sites.

Jacquelyn Malone’s poems have been nominated for the independent presses’ Pushcart Prize three times. Her chapbook All Waters Run to Lethe was published by Finishing Line Press. She is a recent winner of the Tupelo Broadside Prize and has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry. She has played a key role in the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Henri Marchand has written freelance human-interest stories for Merrimack Valley Magazine and the Lowell Sun, essays for WUML’s Sunrise radio program, and fiction for The Bridge Review. He has also written historical pieces on his family’s home and Jeanne d’Arc Credit Union.

Paul Marion 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, SpoKe Seven, PoetsReadingtheNews.com, and So It Goes, the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. He lives in Amesbury, Mass.

Jack McDonough has spent his entire life committing prose and editing the prose of others. His work has appeared in such disparate sites as Foster’s Daily Democrat, Runner’s World, and the wires of United Press International. He makes his home in Tewksbury, Mass., a gated community.

A graduate of Tufts University, Juliet Haines Mofford taught in Japan, Spain, and Puerto Rico prior to a career in museum education. From 1988 to 1995, at the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, she managed the cultural grants and community exhibits programs and served on the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival committee. The author of eighteen books, including two that received American Assoc. for State and Local History awards, she lives in mid-coast Maine.

Clare Mulvany of West Cork, Ireland, leads transformational learning programmes across the globe, weaving strands of creative practice, service leadership, spiritual ecology, and social justice. The author of One Wild Life: A Journey to Discover People Who Change the World, her writing and documentary photography have appeared in On Being and The Irish Times. She teaches at University College Dublin’s Innovation Academy and is a trained classical hatha yoga instructor. Aside from everything else, the sea and her dog bring her infinite joy.

Anthony Nganga is the founder and principal at Studio 26 Associates LLC, an architectural firm in Lowell and also active in the community, serving on the boards of EforAll Lowell-Lawrence, The Lowell Plan, Common Ground, OffBeet Composting, Boys and Girls Club of Greater Lowell, and FreeSoil Arts Collective.

Charles Nikitopoulos (1941-2019) was a professor in the Dept. of Psychology at UMass Lowell for many years. A charismatic community organizer in his day, he co-founded the Hellenic Cultural and Heritage Society in Lowell and promoted the Flowering City environmental project among other local initiatives.

Jean O’Brien has five books of poetry, her latest being Fish on a Bicycle: New & Selected Poems. Among her poetry prizes are the Arvon International and the Fish International. She is taking part in former UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s online Covid Diary with Manchester University (UK). Her poem “Child,” about the scandal of the Irish Mother and Baby Homes, was chosen by Poetry Ireland for their Poems on the Dart (Rail Transport). She holds an M.Phil. in creative writing/poetry from Trinity College Dublin and tutors in same.

Margaret O’Brien lives on the Tipperary/Waterford border in southeast Ireland. She co-founded The Story House Ireland (2014-2018) and lectured at Waterford Institute of Technology. She curates the Brewery Lane Writers’ W/E and runs the open mic Poetry Plus and her workshops, Writing Changes Lives, in Brewery Lane Theatre, Carrick-onSuir. An affiliate of Amherst Writers & Artists, she has had work in Southword, RTE/ O’Brien Press, The Pickled Body, and The Irish Times.

Christine O’Connor is a practicing attorney who serves as chief counsel for the City of Lowell. She co-edits Trasna, which means “across,” a weekly feature on the RichardHowe. com blog that showcases fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Irish writers.

Stephen O’Connor 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. He lives in Lowell.

Dublin-born poet Nessa O’Mahony has published five books of poetry: Bar Talk, Trapping a Ghost, In Sight of Home, Her Father’s Daughter, and The Hollow Woman on the Island. She won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards. She received an Arts Council of Ireland literature bursary in 2004, 2011, and 2018.

Louise Peloquin was born at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Lowell where her father, Laval U. Peloquin, was a physician. Her mother, Marthe Biron Peloquin, a respected local leader, transmitted to her a passion for the French-Canadian bilingual heritage. She studied at Assumption and Middlebury colleges and the University of Paris and enjoyed a career in France, where she published two books. Her novel about a Catholic boarding school in the 1960s is forthcoming. She writes from Groton, Mass., and Paris.

David Perry owns Vinyl Destination, a record shop in Mill No. 5 in Lowell, with his son Dan. A veteran journalist, he writes for the UMass Lowell Alumni Magazine and other publications.

Chath pierSath lives and works on a family farm in Bolton, Mass. His three collections of poetry are On Earth Beneath Sky, After, and This Body Mystery (with his paintings). His artwork is featured this inaugural issue of The Lowell Review.

A poet and photographer, James Provencher was born and grew up in Portland, Maine. He served as an Army journalist and worked in the Artists-in-the-Schools Program in Maine and Florida. A resident of Australia since 1986, he was active in the Sydney Performance Poetry scene and also a poet-in-residence at the Glenaeon School.

Dave Robinson is the author of Sweeney in Effable, a multi-book volume. From Lowell, Mass., he is represented in the anthology Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell.

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. Tom was born in Lowell and graduated from Lowell High School where he is a Distinguished Alumnus.

Doug Sparks is editor-in-chief of Merrimack Valley Magazine and host of The 495 podcast. His many interests include mycology, tea culture and books. He lives in Chelmsford, Mass., with his wife, two children and small chihuahua.

Marie Louise St. Onge was born and grew up in Lowell; she is pleased to be included in this inaugural issue of The Lowell Review. Her writing has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines across the country. A writer and editor, she has read her poetry at universities, art and community centers, and bookstores throughout New England; she now makes her home on the coast of southern Maine.

Marie Sweeney is an original contributor to RichardHowe.com. She is a long-time activist in local community, civic, political, and cultural affairs, as well as an advocate for education, human services, and volunteerism. A retired teacher, she is a graduate of UMass Lowell (Lowell State College).

Nancye Tuttle, a journalist since 1978, is a former staff lifestyle reporter and current arts correspondent for the Lowell Sun and Fitchburg Sentinel. A resident of Wells, Maine, she has interviewed dozens of celebrities, from Tom Hanks and Oprah to Tom Cruise and Fabio. Julia Child, her first, will always be her favorite.

Tooch Van was born in 1975 in Cambodia at the start of the Genocide. The Khmer Rouge killed his entire family because his father was a teacher. He moved to Lowell in 1996 and owned a home in South Lowell for twelve years. He loves and cares deeply about Lowell.

Born in Corpus Christ, Texas, Frank Wagner grew up in his hometown’s racially mixed west side. His father was a chemist for Celanese, and his mother was a civil rights and education advocate who worked to integrate the city’s school system. He earned English and political science degrees at Southwest Texas in San Marcos, where he discovered Beat literature. He spent 36 years in radio and television broadcasting.

Julie Ward is a native of Waterford, Ireland. A mother to two boys, she works as Food and Wine Customer Advisor in Ardkeen Quality Food Store, Waterford, who specialise in Irish artisan & locally produced food. Her writing explores food and drink heritage and happenings in Ireland. She is a wine contributor to the Business Post newspaper.

Born in Clonmel, Ireland, Joe Whelan spent much of his youth on his grandparents’ farm at Harney’s Cross in Co. Waterford, outside Clonmel. He became an apprentice plasterer at fifteen and in 1987, like many others, went to America to work. In 1991, he returned to start a construction company until the financial crash of 2009. On his farm near the Comeragh Mountains, he raises sheep and is building timber-frame glamping pods for people who want to experience country life. A fan of the Moth Radio Hour, he has been on the Dublin Story Slam podcast.

Dana White lives in Ossining, New York, where she was the village historian for five-anda-half years before transitioning to elected office. When she isn’t pondering municipal policy, she is trying to finish a novel.

Chris Wilkinson is a husband, father, and total geek. For the past decade, he’s been teaching and lecturing on food, cryptocurrency, technology, and the intersection of interactive media and politics. In his spare time, he likes to write, play guitar, spin, practice his archery skills, and very much enjoys exploring planet earth with his family.

John Wooding is the author of The Power of Non-Violence: The Enduring Legacy of Richard Gregg and co-author with Kristin G. Esterberg of Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Universities. From Northampton, England, he graduated from the London School of Economics, later earning his doctorate at Brandeis University. He is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

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.

THELOWELLREVIEW.COM

The Lowell Review brings together writers and readers in the Merrimack River watershed of eastern New England with people near and far 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 new publication springs from the RichardHowe.com blog (est. 2007), 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. Kathleen Aponick Susan April Joe Blair Prudence Brighton Michael Casey George Chigas David Daniel Geoffrey Douglas Fred Faust Billy Fenton Emily Ferrara Charles Gargiulo Linda Hoffman Richard P. Howe, Jr. Paul Hudon William Reed Huntington Lianna Kushi Jacquelyn Malone Henri Marchand Paul Marion Jack McDonough Juliet Haines Mofford Clare Mulvany Anthony Nganga Charles Nikitopoulos Jean O’Brien Margaret O’Brien Christine O’Connor Stephen O’Connor Nessa O’Mahony Louise Peloquin David Perry Chath pierSath James Provencher Dave Robinson Tom Sexton Doug Sparks Marie Louise St. Onge Marie Sweeney Nancye Tuttle Tooch Van Frank Wagner Julie Ward Joe Whelan Dana White Chris Wilkinson John Wooding Fred Woods

15 USD / 12 EUR / 10.5 GBP