Charles Degelman, is a writer, performer, and producer living in Los Angeles. His first screenplay, “FIFTY-SECOND STREET”, garnered an award from the Diane Thomas Competition, sponsored by UCLA and Dreamworks. His first novel, A Bowl Full of Nails, was a finalist in the Bellwether Competition, sponsored by Barbara Kingsolver. His impressions of two trips to Cuba have been published in Cuba by Travelers Tales. Co-founder of Indecent Exposure, a Los Angeles-based theater company dedicated to creating original work for the stage, Degelman has also written and produced a spate of documentary and educational films, including a feature-length biography of filmmaker John Huston and an award-winning biography of Mozart. Degelman recently completed Gates of Eden, a novel set during the anti-war movement of the 1960s. ‘The Crash’, excerpted in Above Ground, is from American Postcards, a collection of narrative snapshots about growing up absurd in 1950s America. Excerpts and short works of Degelman's fiction, memoir, and commentary can be found on his website, "Footprints" at www.charlesdegelman.org.

J. L. Morin grew up in inner-city Detroit. Morin wrote the Japan novel, Sazzae (2nd ed. available at Amazon.com), as a creative thesis for her AB at Harvard, followed by three novels for future publication: Traveling Light; Polis; and Trickster of Phraxos.

     Her fiction has appeared in The Harvard Advocate and Harvard Yisei, and her articles and translations in The Detroit News, Agence France Presse, Livonia Observer Eccentric Newspapers, and The Harvard Crimson.

Morin traded derivatives in New York while studying nights for her MBA at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Her experience includes working for the Federal Reserve Bank posted to the 107^th floor of the World Trade Center, working as a TV newscaster on an island in the Mediterranean, and as adjunct faculty at Boston University.

Guy Kuttner (Harvard '67) was born in Chicago and was the recipient/victim of a dreary public school education. As the Ironies of Fate decreed, he became a public school teacher in a small college town in Northern California. In his unflagging attempt to introduce humanity and environmental wonder into the curricula, he butted heads, crossed swords, and mixed metaphors with one implacable administration after another. After twenty years, he migrated to a small community college nestled in the redwoods, where he happily teaches Academic Literacy.

         He's worked as an education columnist for the local paper and is the author of Tales of the Dolly Llama (Outskirts Press, 2007), a series of vignettes from the classroom liberally intermingled with educational polemic. His next book, More Tales, is being readied for publication. He is the co-founder of the Lost Coast Writers Retreat. Guy is the proud father of three, grandfather of two, and married to a saint.

Margot Singer is the author of The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. Her short stories and essays have appeared in such magazines as Agni, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Western Humanities Review, The North American Review, The Sun, and many others. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Carter Prize for the Essay, and an honorable mention from the judges of the PEN/Hemingway Award.

    Margot is a graduate of the University of Utah (Ph.D. 2005), Oxford University (M.Phil.1986) and Harvard University (B.A. 1984). From 1986 until 1997 she worked for the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where she was a Principal in the New York Office. She currently teaches at Denison University, where she holds the Bosler Endowed Faculty Fellowship, and in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She lives with her husband and two children in Granville, Ohio. 

 Tony Rogers has been a lawyer and a jazz musician and the head of a veteran’s hospital. A collection of his short stories, Bewildered, Harold Faced the Day, won the Writer's Voice Capricorn Prize.  He was a semi-finalist in the Quarterly West novella contest. His fiction has appeared in Pleiades, Worcester Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Painted Hills Review, Thema, Outerbridge, and many others. His non-fiction has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine. He is a Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude graduate of Yale and has a JD from Harvard Law School.  His contribution to this anthology is excerpted from the novel manuscript, End of October, Indian Summer.

Phyllis Helene Mattson’s War Orphan in San Francisco: Letters Link a Family Scattered in World War II won “Best Memoir” by the Bay Area Independent Publishing Association, 2005. Mattson was recognized as an “Achiever in Letters” by the National League of American Pen Women, February, 2006.

        Mattson was a community college teacher of Anthropology and Health Sciences in Silicon Valley. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, received graduate degrees in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin and Public Health from Harvard. She started her career in health research, culminating in a book, Holistic Health in Perspective in 1981, then turned to teaching. In 1989-90 she taught English at Shandong University in China, and in 1994 joined the Peace Corps in Nepal. She has two children and two grandchildren.

        This excerpt is from War Orphan in San Francisco:  Letters Link a Family Scattered by World War II, published in 2004. 

A native Ohioan, Jonathan Facelli received a BA from Ohio State and a JD from Harvard Law School. He spent 2008 in Argentina, working as a volunteer in the slums of Buenos Aires and writing in his spare time.

        He is currently putting the finishing touches on a travel memoir, excerpts of which have been published, and is also working on a novel. Since returning from Argentina, Facelli's work has appeared in the Humanist, Haruah, South American Explorers Magazine, and BiblioFiles, and is slated to appear in the book Global Issues: Local Perspectives. He lives with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jorge Contreras was born in New York, grew up in south Florida and Texas, and has since lived in Boston, London, Mexico City and, most recently, Washington, DC. He collects and writes about nineteenth- century art and literature, and in 2006 won the Pre-Raphaelite Society's John Pickard Essay Prize for his essay "The Best of the Brethren."  His regular column "Works and Days" appears in the Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society and his short story "The Enduring Specimen" appeared in the May 2009 issue of the Historical Novel Society's magazine Solander. Mr. Contreras also occasionally practices and writes about law.

Charity Shumway holds an MFA in creative writing from Oregon State University and a BA in English from Harvard University. She's a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course and is currently working toward a certificate in horticulture at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  Her writing has appeared in Glamour, Oregon Coast Magazine, on glamour.com, LadiesHomeJournal.com, FitnessMagazine.com, and SocialWorkout.com.  Her fiction is forthcoming in Soon Quarterly, and Slice Magazine. Previously, she has held jobs as a speechwriter, lawn care expert, night janitor, LSAT tutor, tuxedo shop girl, farm worker, restaurant hostess, and reader for the blind. She grew up in Centerville, Utah and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Stan G. Duncan (HDS, ‘90) has worked as a protestant pastor, campus minister, college instructor, jazz pianist, and development economist. He has lived in five states and six countries and speaks broken English in three languages. He is married, with three children and four grandchildren.

       He has published one book on human rights in El Salvador, four on economic development in the Third World, and one collection of devotional writings, plus numerous articles, essays, and National Public Radio commentaries. This is his first work of fiction, and it is an excerpt from a novella written for his collection of short fiction, The Fire on Poteau Mountain, that he is compiling for future publication.

Maya Levantini was born and raised in Bucharest, Romania. After a brief stay in Strasbourg, France she relocated to the United States. She currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA where she practices the challenging art of daily living. She is the author of several short stories and has completed two novels for future publication, The Naked and the Nude and The Ideology of Love.

        The excerpt presented in this anthology is from the manuscript of her second novel, The Ideology of Love. The novel examines the last year of Nicolae Ceausescu’s reign in Romania through the eyes of a woman drawn into the entrails of a plot to topple the dictator. 

Tom Dolembo, Harvard '67 English cum laude, MBA '71. David McCord writing scholar. Lives on a farm and bird sanctuary in the village of Kewadin in Northwest Michigan. A native Hoosier born in Michigan City, Indiana, Tom is author of numerous tracts, novels, poems, and articles. His occupation varies with the season and need. Tom is a persistent vehicle driver, farmer, cook, photographer, security consultant for major universities, disaster consultant, former manufacturer of mechanical widgets and complex medical devices, and former due diligence investment company managing director. He can be found often near lakes, rivers, streams, and low marshy places looking for wildlife who are effortlessly avoiding him. His recent writing projects have included an enormous Civil War Trilogy, a much shorter book of children's poems, What Everything Means, and filler articles for rural newspapers on raising chickens and astronomy. The Grapes and the Fox is an excerpt from an unpublished novel by the same name.

Alisa Clements decided at age seven that she would be a writer when she grew up, but this vocation was eclipsed in college by the exploration of other media, primarily electronic music.

         As a student at Harvard University she became a teaching assistant in the electronic music studio and stayed on after graduation, later taking the role of studio manager. She then entered the Studio for Interrelated Media program at the Massachusetts College of Art in order to pursue her interests in experimental music, performance, and film. Upon receiving her MFA degree she became an instructor at the college, teaching classes in electronic sound composition. Her experience in this field ― as a performer, composer, and teacher ― enters into her first (unpublished) novel, All at Once, in the guise of arcane facts about the effects of audio stimuli on human consciousness. A longer excerpt of the novel can be found in the library at www.myebook.com.

Above Ground videos:

Geoffrey Fox was born in Chicago, graduated from Harvard in 1963, and then worked in Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America as a community developer and researcher/writer. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology, Northwestern University, 1975, and taught at universities in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Since September 2006. He lives in Spain with his compañera, Argentine-born architect Susana.

          Fox’s nonfiction books include Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics and the Constructing of Identity (U. Arizona Press); The Land and People of Argentina (HarperCollins); The Land and People of Venezuela (HarperCollins); Working Class Émigrés from Cuba (Ph.D. dissertation and book); Gabriel García Márquez's 100 Years of Solitude (Monarch Notes). Coming up: a book with Susana Torre on the history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America (to be published by W. W. Norton). Fox’s published fiction includes the short-story collection Welcome to My Contri and other stories in print or on-line, and he has a new novel now seeking a publisher. Also, he advises his Venezuelan colleague and alter ego Baltasar Lotroyo on his fiction in Spanish. Web site http://geoffreyfox.com. Geoffrey talks about Above Ground: video.