Authors Vol. 1 No. 1

  • Kyle Beachy

    I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. It was interesting. Then I went to Los Angeles for college, which was interesting in an entirely new and disgusting way. After college, I moved to Vail, CO for a year, and witnessed too many things of interest to ponder at once. So I moved back to St. Louis and applied to MFA programs, intent on finding a way to capture everything interesting on paper. I've been in Chicago since, and will finish my MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute in May. I'm also nearly finished with a novel that, with any luck, will be interesting.

  • E. S. Carroll

    E.S. Carroll hatched fully grown from a pecan shell after twenty-seven years spent gestating beneath the downy butt of an arctic puffin. She subsequently earned bachelor's and master's degrees from The University of Chicago.

  • Spencer Dew

    Spencer Dew lives in Chicago. His work has appeared in Denver Syntax, Diagram, Hobart Pulp, Pindeldyboz, Smokelong Quarterly, 3am Magazine, and Word Riot, among others.

  • Tiffany Funk

    Tiffany Funk is originally from Wisconsin, Land of the Misfit Toys. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin back in '03 (pronounced "aught three") with dueling degrees in Spanish Linguistics and Film Studies. She is currently a student in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago where she is studying contemporary art history, particularly digital virtual immersion spaces. However, this is only how she bides her time, lying in wait until the inevitable full-scale zombie invasion. She can usually be found either 1) muttering to herself incoherently about lack of proper ammunition, 2) mulling over maps in order to plan escape routes, or 3) stocking up on Robert Heinlein novels and Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper for her super secret zombie/nuclear warfare shelter, deep in the bowels of the earth. Or so she would have you believe.

  • Jenny Gavacs

    Jenny Gavacs is completing her Master of Arts in the Humanities with an emphasis on creative writing at University of Chicago. Formerly a journalist with House & Garden magazine, she has decided to dedicate herself to the pleasures and pains of creative prose.

  • Merrie Greenfield

    Merrie Greenfield works primarily as an actress in Chicago, working with numerous off-Loop theaters. She has won critical praise for the Neo-Futurists’ “The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen.” She accidentally added “solo performer” to her resume when a friend’s show ran low on talent. She was selected one of three solo artists featured in Great Beast’s solo show “Cordelia Was the Fool,” and has written for Sweetback and Hell in a Handbag Productions. Recently she co-compiled and directed “Naked on the Net”—a play made up entirely of actual internet posts. As an actress, she will next be seen at the Field Museum in “Of Diamonds and Diplomats” about Jackie Kennedy’s White House years. She is often a frequent contributor to “Peep Fiction,” a creative writing blog for WNEP Theater, but lately she spends most of her time writing sappy greeting cards that make her macho brother cry.

  • Jeremy Guttman

    Jeremy enjoys digital photography, architecture and art, even crazy Internet art.

    At one point Jeremy considered double-majoring in Economics and Visual Arts, but the feeling passed and he decided to just take a bunch of art classes.

    One such class was Cybermedia Production Studio, which met once a week and had one other student in it besides Jeremy. The class was never offered before and never offered again; Jeremy contends that it is the most random class ever offered by the University of Chicago.

    For this class Jeremy created a visual-hypertext project and ode to his dormitory, “Shoreland as an Internet/Student Domain.” It treats the Shoreland as if it were an Internet Domain, where each floor is a website, each room is a page on the site, elevators are web browsers and hallways are navigation bars.

  • Melina Kolb

    I am a third year double major in Anthropology and Cinema and Media Studies. I am actively involved with the film club, Fire Escape, and I am the editor for the new fashion magazine, Moda. I am especially interested in documentary filmmaking. Besides drawing and filmmaking, I enjoy taking photographs. My only formal experience in art has been a digital photography course I took from the Nikon School autumn quarter. I often use Photoshop, altering and investigating different looks for my photographs. Since I was little, my peers have encouraged my drawing. I never really took them seriously, but study here at Chicago has pulled me toward artistic pursuits.

  • Chris Libby

    Chris Libby is studying Urban Geography and Economics at Chicago State. Photography is a hobby of his, yet he’s not pursuing a career in it. Chicago is where he calls home, and he doesn’t plan to leave this amazing city anytime in the near future.

  • Pablo Medina

    Pablo Medina was born in Havana, Cuba, where he lived the first twelve years of his life, and moved with his family to New York City in 1960. Since then, he has lived and written in a number of North American cities. He is the author of several works of poetry and prose, most recently The Cigar Roller: A Novel (Grove Press, 2005). Forthcoming in April 2005 is Points of Balance/Puntos de apoyo, a bilingual collection of poems. A Trumpet Sounds is his first published dramatic work. His poetry and prose have been widely published in periodicals and anthologies in the United States and abroad and he has received many awards, among them fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the Cintas Foundation, and the state councils of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Currently on the writing faculty of New School University in New York City, he also teaches at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina.

  • Carmen Peláez

    Carmen Peláez was born in Miami to Cuban parents. Grand-niece to the revered painter, Amelia Peláez and radio star Ernesto Galindo, Carmen continues her family’s artistic expression of life’s challenges filtered through the Cuban experience in her fierce and moving one-person play, rum & coke.

    Ms. Peláez began writing this piece soon after graduating from the prestigious American Academy for the Dramatic Arts in New York. For rum & coke's development, she received a 1997 New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship and was able to launch her first production of the work in New York City.

    The show soon attracted the notice of Area Stage in Miami who invited Ms. Peláez to perform the piece at their space following the close of the New York run. From December 5, 1997–March 8 1998, rum & coke played to packed houses and rave reviews in Miami. Enthusiasm for Ms. Peláez’s work soon caught the interest of Ted Koppel, who chose to feature her and her family on Nightline.

    rum & coke was optioned by Fox Theatricals in 1999-2001 and was performed by Ms. Peláez at Chicago’s Pegasus Theatre. She has also performed it at the HBO workspace in Los Angeles and the PS NBC space in New York. In November she opened the Coconut Grove Playhouses 2003-2004 season with rum & coke in their famed Encore room and was extended due to popular demand.

    Ms. Peláez has starred in three independent films: Stroll, Houseguest and Last Hand Standing, finalist in the Chrysler Extreme Filmmaking competition at the Tribeca Film Festival. She was nominated for the Carbonell Best Actress Award and was featured in W magazine’s May 2000 issue in a photograph by Bruce Weber.

    She was the first PS NBC performer to sign to a talent contract with NBC through 2000-2001. She was featured on several episodes of the critically acclaimed Nightline/PBS show Life 360 and also completed writing work for a film being produced by Emilio Estefan, Jr.

    In 2004 Ms. Peláez was a finalist for the AT&T Onstage grant for el benny and also completed her first short screenplay besame to be produced in the latter part of 2005. In April of 2005, she will begin to develop her play celia & irene with director Geoffrey Scott.

  • William Veeder

    Prof. William Veeder is a professor of English literature at the University of Chicago, where he has focused his research on Henry James. He earned his Ph.D. at University of California-Berkeley and an M.F.A. from The Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

  • Lee Wang

    With affection for the letter ‘e’, bad puns, worse TV and comic books, Lee is trying hard to make everyone forget he was once a high-flying literature geek. Currently enrolled in MAPH and working on the spy-melodrama Alias for his thesis, he is also aiming to replace Roland Barthes as the world’s pre-eminent theorist of pro wrestling.

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