Kim Dana Kupperman: Lilacs at Auschwitz

September 19, 2019 Catherine Lee

Kim Dana Kupperman is the author of *Six Thousand Miles to Home: A Novel Inspired by a True Story of World War II* (2018), *The Last of Her: A Forensic Memoir* (2016), and *I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence* (2010). She is the lead editor of *You: An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person* (2013) and publisher of *Essaying the Essay* (2014). She is the founder of Welcome Table Press.

Visiting Eastern European World War II sites, a writer considers how beauty and evil can exist side by side.

Catherine Lee: Last Months of a Life

September 19, 2019 Catherine Lee

Early on, Catherine Lee learned that the best stories are about relationships, good and bad. While a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, she wrote about a teenager who had shot and killed his abusive father. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, The DC Line, Currents, and Foreign Policy magazine’s Guide to Graduate Education. She covered education for a weekly paper in Washington, DC, and worked for 17 years at the Catholic University of America as a writer, editor, and director of communications. A DC resident for almost 30 years, she returned to her hometown of Philadelphia, where she freelances as a writer and editor. She and her husband have three children and four grandchildren.

While tending to her dying sister-in-law, a journalist discovers beauty in simple acts of care and companionship at a hospice outside Baltimore.

Margaret Luongo: Right Now

September 19, 2019 Catherine Lee

Margaret Luongo is the author of two story collections, *If the Heart is Lean* and *History of Art*, both from LSU Press. Her stories have appeared in *Tin House*, the *Cincinnati Review*, *Granta*, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and other publications. Recipient of the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship, the Hawthornden Fellowship and an Ohio Arts Council grant, she teaches creative writing and contemporary fiction at Miami University in Ohio, where she lives with her husband, artist Billy Simms.

Through the mirror of her town, a fiction writer journeys through sadness and disconnection to a sense of harmony.

Candice Mayhill: Time on Water

September 19, 2019 Catherine Lee

Candice Mayhill is an associate professor of English at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland. Candice’s academic work focuses on Emily Dickinson, while her creative work focuses on the intersection of salt water and the soul. She divides her time between the classroom and the coast, teaching composition and literature at the college while coaching rowing. Candice lives with her husband, Tim, and their two dogs, Amal and Roland, in Annapolis, close to her treasured Chesapeake Bay.

An English professor who coaches rowers finds peace on the water after her mother’s sudden death.

Monica Mische: Democracy Run

September 19, 2019 Catherine Lee

2019-10-07 19.41.20 (1).jpg — Monica Mische is a professor at Montgomery College, where she teaches writing and literature, and works with students with disabilities. Active also in social justice, environmental, and youth outreach programs, Monica lives in Greenbelt, Maryland, with her family and a menagerie of pets. Her recent writing appears or is forthcoming in *HerStry*, the *EcoTheo Review*, *JAEPL*, *Mount Hope*, *Pedagogy*, and *Recreating Our Common Chord*.

A daughter of international peace activists renews her faith in the US while running past memorials on the National Mall.

Walden S. Morton: Sand Spurs

September 19, 2019 Catherine Lee

Walden S. Morton is a writer and teacher whose roots go deep in New Hampshire and Maine, where she spent most of her life teaching literature and humanities in both high school and college while raising three daughters. For a decade, she led writing workshops in poetry and fiction at the University of Southern Maine’s OLLI Institute. For twenty-three years, she has run the Antlers Writing Workshop in Wonalancet, New Hampshire, and taught at the Waynflete School in Portland, Maine. She has published five anthologies of poetry and many short stories. She was a finalist in the 2017 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Literary Awards.

During the Vietnam War, a Navy doctor’s wife from New England copes with racial attitudes in Charleston, South Carolina.

Timothy Muskat: Beauty in a Gash of Changeling Blue—A Poet’s Rumination

September 19, 2019 Catherine Lee

Timothy Muskat is a poet, mountaineer, former professor, and dedicated father to two extraordinary sons. His life was ruffled or disrupted—take your pick—by cancer with a very long name. Though still working his way back literally and figuratively to the trail, he continues to teach and, in wryest manner of speaking, preach whenever possible and is currently at work on a book of mountain-born poems. He loves winter and for the past twenty years has resided with his wife and various loyal dogs in tiny Center Sandwich, New Hampshire.

A poet and mountaineer takes us with him on a winter hike up the highest mountain in the eastern US.

Elena Mustakova: Living in the Presence of the Ancient Beauty

September 19, 2019 Catherine Lee

Elena Mustakova, social scientist, professor in adult developmental psychology, and international lecturer, is a psychotherapist in private practice in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. For the past thirty years, she has pioneered the study of empowered moral consciousness across cultures in our complex historical context. She has developed an integrative spiritually-informed approach to the dynamics of individual and social health. Author of *Critical Consciousness: A Study of Morality in Global Historical Context* (Praeger 2003), she spearheaded a comprehensive rethinking of psychology, as the senior editor of *Towards Socially-Responsible Psychology for a Global Era* (Springer).

A psychologist who grew up under communism celebrates Bulgaria's ancient religion and finds peace in another faith after moving to the US.

Bonnie Naradzay: Henry

September 19, 2019 Catherine Lee

Bonnie Naradzay.JPG — Bonnie Naradzay is a poet and essayist who leads poetry classes and writing workshops at a retirement center and a homeless day shelter, both in Washington DC. In this way, she continues to learn from the wisdom of others. She taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer in South India in the early 1970s after earning an MA in literature from Harvard University. Following a long career with the federal government, she earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Southern Maine and then graduated with an MA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Recently Bonnie had poems published in New Verse News and DCTRENDING.

Bonnie honors a centenarian poet’s determination and wisdom.

Katie O’Connell: My Varanasi Lakshmi

September 19, 2019 Catherine Lee

Katie O’Connell is a former high school and college English teacher who taught creative writing and poetry for fifteen years. Now a full-time yoga teacher and owner of *Dragonfly Yoga Barn, Studio & Retreat* in North Sandwich, New Hampshire, Katie leads yoga and Ayurveda retreats and trainings around the world. It is in these places that she has found so much inspiration as a poet and blog writer, sharing her love of people and culture, and both physical and spiritual places encountered on her path as a yogi, mother, lover, musician, gardener, and teacher. Katie enjoys her sweet life with a humorous Irish husband and amazing partner in everything, their two college-aged kids who are their greatest joy, and three ridiculous singing cats.

A yoga teacher finds beauty amid scenes of poverty, suffering, and death on a visit to the holy city of Varanasi.