KARTIKA
REVIEw
Contributor Notes
Issue
05 ▪
Spring/Summer 2009
FICTION
Molly Gaudry runs Willows Wept Press, edits Willows
Wept Review, co-edits Twelve Stories,
and is an associate editor for Keyhole
Magazine. Find her online at
http://mollygaudry.blogspot.com.
Beth Kaufka is an assistant professor in University Studies at North Carolina
A&T State University. Her work has appeared in The Portland Review, Mid-American Review, Poets & Writers, Colorado
Review, Panini, 971 Menu, Reflective Practice, and 13th Moon (story forthcoming).
She is a 2007 winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award for fiction and
lives in Greensboro, NC with her husband and two amazing daughters.
Deepak Maini was born in
Agra, India (6.2 miles from the Taj Mahal) and before coming to the US (8,094
miles from Agra) he sojourned in Germany. He is a mechanical engineer by
education and is currently working as a business consultant in Atlanta,
Georgia. He writes short stories and plays cricket and tennis. This is his
first publication.
Jill Widner “Fina’s
Dream” is an excerpt from Jill Widner’s novel in progress, The Smell of
Sulphur, which fictionalizes her experience growing up in Indonesia in the
1960s, the daughter of a petroleum engineer. Other excerpts have appeared
in North American Review, Hobart, and Kyoto Journal.
A longer excerpt was one of two equal runners-up in the 2009 Willesden Herald
international short story competition and appeared in New Short Stories 3,
an anthology published by pretend genius press in the UK. She has new
work forthcoming in Asia Literary Review (Hong Kong) and Bamboo
Ridge: The Hawai’i Writers Quarterly. She was the recipient of a 2007
Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission fellowship, a 2009 Artist Trust
grant for artist projects, has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and the
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’
Workshop.
Geri Lipschultz (Wong) is presently
finishing up her first year as a Ph.D. candidate in Fiction at Ohio
University. She has published work in
the New York Times, College English,
Black Warrior Review, Kalliope, and others.
Her one-woman show was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr. She received her MFA from Iowa. She is
honored to have this second story placed in Kartika
Review; both stories were inspired by her husband’s family stories.
POETRY
Joseph Borja is a 26-year-old
Chamoru from the island of Guam. He has lived there all his life.
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has edited more
than 10 books and co-produced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. His work in lifestyle and
developmental journalism took him to Australia, Cambodia, France, Hong Kong and
Spain, and saw him writing numerous stories, including features on Madonna,
Björk and Morgan Freeman. Trained in book publishing at Stanford, with an
M.T.S. in World Religions from Harvard and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from
Notre Dame, Desmond is the recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant,
awarded to launch at the First Prague International Poetry Festival the
anthology For the Love of God. His poetry and prose have appeared in more than
30 literary journals including AGNI, Confrontation, Faultline, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, New Orleans Review, Seneca Review, Sonora Review and Versal.
Through his Potter Poetics Collection, Desmond has also designed and sculpted
ceramic pieces to commemorate Albert
Camus' 50th Anniversary, Jack Kerouac's 40th Anniversary, the Dalai
Lama’s 50th Year of Exile, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 120th Anniversary, Thomas
Merton’s 40th Anniversary, Edgar Allan Poe’s Bicentennial, Marguerite Porete's
700th Anniversary, Swami Abhishiktananda’s Birth Centennial, Cave Canem’s 10
Years of Service to African American Poets, Grolier Poetry Bookshop’s 80 Years
of Service as the Oldest Continuous Poetry Bookstore in the US, and Poet Lore’s
120th Anniversary as the Oldest Continuously Published Poetry Journal in the
U.S. These works are housed in museums and private collections in India, the
Netherlands, the U.K. and the U.S.
Kimberly Law was born in America
to Mien parents and is a current undergraduate student at UC Davis, completing
her Bachelor’s degree. She has been writing poetry since the third grade
and her poems have been published in her middle and high school’s literary
magazine. Ms. Law plans to attend graduate school after her undergraduate
years and earn her doctorate degree. The Kartika Review is Ms. Law’s first official publication.
Kenji Liu is a 1.5
generation Japanese-born Taiwanese American expatriate of New Jersey suburbia.
Arising from his work as an activist, educator and cultural worker, his writing
explores culture, migration, memory, mourning and joy. Kenji’s poetry chapbook You Left Without Your Shoes is
forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. The cover features his own illustration.
His writing is in the online anthology Flick
of My Tongue (Intersection for the Arts/Kearny Street Workshop), Tea Party Magazine and other
publications, and he has self-published a CD of spoken word poetry, Postcolonial Broadsides. He is currently
working on a multi-genre full-length collection of poetry, prose and visual art.
Vivek Sharma's first book
of verse, The Saga of a Crumpled Piece of
Paper will be published by Writers Workshop, Calcutta in 2009. His work is
published or forthcoming in The Cortland
Review, Bateau, Atlanta Review, Poetry, etc. He writes columns and verses for Divya Himachal (Hindi newspaper in India) and his research is
published in science journals. Vivek grew up in Himachal Pradesh, a state in
the Himalayas, India, and moved to United States to pursue graduate studies in
2001. Vivek is a Pushcart nominated poet, and is currently a post-doctoral
research associate in Mechanical Engineering at M.I.T.
Ocean Vuong was born in
1988 in Saigon, Viet Nam and he currently resides in N.Y.C. as a Creative
Writing student at Brooklyn College. His work has appeared in the North Central Review, the Barnwood Press Review, the Connecticut River Review, Convergence, Ganymede, WordRiot, and Poetalk, among others. He is also a
writer/editor for the Vietnam Literature project in the aspiration to promote
and support the works of Vietnamese authors.
NON-FICTION
Matthea Marquart is
a director of training and instructional design, specializing in education and
nonprofit organizations. She writes articles for training industry
publications and has a blog on the New York Nonprofit Press website, at
http://tinyurl.com/nynpblog. Her humorous stories have been published in 10x10x10,
Altar Magazine, Defenestration, Poor Mojo's Almanac, and Wheelhouse
Magazine.
Brenda Nakamoto lives
in Davis, California. working as a secretary at a local university. She
has written a memoir to be published in 2010 about growing up as a third
generation Japanese American peach farmer’s daughter in a small town in
northern California. She has published in local area literary journals
and has won first prize in category 2 in the 2008 GENEii Family History Writing
contest sponsored by the Southern California Genealogy Society for an essay
about her grandfather’s ship voyage from Japan to California. She is
currently working on a collection of essays and poems about the Japanese
American internment during WW II and is interviewing those connected with that
time period and event. Learning about this experience and writing about
it has set her on the path of a journey to visit the camps.
Richard Oyama was
born in New York City. He has a Bachelor's degree in English from The City
College of New York, and a Master's degree in English: Creative Writing from
San Francisco State University. The
Country They Know (Neuma Books 2005) is his first volume of poetry. Oyama's
poems, short stories and essays have appeared in Premonitions, an anthology of poetry by Asians in North America, Nuyorasian Anthology, Dissident Song, Breaking Silence, Ayumi,
and other literary magazines and small presses. He currently lives in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is working on his first novel.
Akito Yoshikane grew up in the Chicagoland area and
is a freelance writer in New York City.
COVER ART &
PHOTOGRAPHY
Joy Zhu received her B.S. in Business Management
with a concentration in Marketing from Binghamton University in May of 2003.
She has worked in Media/Advertising since graduation, and has recently changed
career paths to work for Marketing in the specialty foods industry. She has a
passion for fine arts and surrounds herself with everything and anything
creative. Photography is one of her many passions. As an amateur photographer
constantly trying to improve, she takes the camera everywhere in hopes to
capture the beauty and essence of life around her.