Authors

Jim Boan, a Missouri native (Ozarks), is a writer and editor of long standing. While completing a B.S. degree at the University of Missouri in Columbia, he was editor of the University of Missouri Magazine. He worked in advertising for a time, served as Publicity Director for the Missouri State Fair, and was a feature writer for McKelvie Publications. For ten years, Boans was owner and editor of the Vindicator, a weekly newspaper in Southeast Missouri. He is the author of Rising Sun Sinking (Eakin Press 2000), a memoir of his service with the Sixth Marine Reconnaissance Company. The book was reprinted as Okinawa (2005 John Gresham Military Library series). Boans, now freelancing, has over two hundred byline credits. He is completing both fiction and non-fiction book length works. With his wife Clara, he lives in Bloomfield, Missouri.

Update: Finishing Line Press has selected a poetry chapbook by Andrea Fekete for future publication.

Andrea Fekete earned her MA in English from Marshall University in 2005 and currently teaches at Ashland Community College. Her poetry has appeared in over forty literary magazines including The Adirondack Review, The Virginia Adversaria, The Barbaric Yawp and The Smithville Journal, and in such anthologies as Wild Sweet Notes II: An Anthology of WV Poetry, The Appalachian Writer's Guild Anthology, The Appalachian Heritage Anthology of Shepherd College, and Generaton X. In Our Own Words. This is her first novel.

AUTHOR’S STATEMENT

I was born and raised in Appalachia. My grandfather Ojeda, Pepaw, came to Appalachia from Mexico during the Revolution when he was fourteen, to work in the coal mines. He lived in these hills as did his nine children and his wife, who died at a very young age.We all have a love for this place. We have a pride. There’s beauty in Appalachia, not just in the mountains—obvious beauty—but in the so-called ugly places, inside the strife and the struggle, in places where you don’t normally think it’d be, like in hard work.

The Fekete side of my family were immigrants from Hungary and also worked in the coal mines. My father was a coal miner when I was a child and I was raised in a place which we still to this day call a camp even though it hasn’t been one since long before I was born. I grew up with stories about how life was for people who lived in the camps. I wanted to show the beauty in every corner of Appalachia, in the music, in the language, in the nature, in the people, and in their struggles.

Author of Through Eyes of Stone: A Memoir (Vietnam). Except for his years in the military and time traveling in work-related assignments, Michael I. Hobbs has lived in the Crowley's Ridge area of Southeast Missouri, specifically the towns of Bloomfield and Dexter. He is an avid woodsman, huntsman (bow and firearms), fisherman, and a collector of nature and military lore and artifacts.

UPDATE: Finishing Line Press has just released a second chapbook by Jones, The Language of Small Rooms, praising the delicate and evocative beauty of the poems.

Jones spent the majority of her childhood in Caruthersville and Cape Girardeau. She currently lives in Fairway, Kansas. She is the author of Moon Flowers on the Fence (Finishing Line Press 2010), poems, the editors note, that "give voice to the land, to the force of the river and to the strength of relationships, all grounded by her southeast Missouri background." Her poetry and prose have also appeared in Art Times, Buffalo Spree, Potpourri, Short Stuff, The River Road Journal, the Kansas City Star, Kansas City Star Magazine, Sacred Waters (anthology edited by Maril Crabtree)and other publications.

Jones was a founding member of Whispering Prairie Press, and a poetry editor of Kansas City Voices 2001-2008.

Author of The Spring Branch. Tony Shaffer is a poet, teacher, musician, fly fisher, &c. He has taught writing and literature and plays guitar, pedal steel, keyboard, and bass. Shaffer has traveled extensively, touring Europe, Australia, and most of the US with artists ranging from blues icon King Alex to country music legend Leroy Van Dyke. He fishes for trout...and others. [Quoted from the cover of The Spring Branch.]

UPDATE: THe Missouri State Teachers Association has selected Taylor's short-story collection Everyday Wonder or The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog for its recommended reading list for grades 9-12.

James Henry Taylor was born and grew up in Rhode Island. After completing his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Rhode Island, he held a couple of temporary teaching/research positions until joining the faculty at the University of Central Missouri (formerly Central Missouri State University). He joined Cave Hollow Press shortly after their publication of a collection of his short fiction: Honeysuckle and Other Stories (2002). He has also had stories appear in Dragonfly Extravaganza and the Internet journal Sweetgum Notes.

His scientific papers have appeared in such journals as Physical Review, Missouri Journal of Mathematical Sciences, Physica, and Il Nuovo Cimento, and he has had popular articles on physics appear in Warrensburg Free Press.

He is not married, and has no children or pets.