Support BHQ
Buy books at Blithe House (in association with Amazon.com

about the editors

James Friel has won a Betty Trask prize, an Authors' Foundation Award, a Welsh Arts Council Bursary, The storySouth Million Writers Award, and was nominated for the Mail on Sunday/ John Llewellyn Rhys Prize Fiction Prize. His novels include Left of North, Taking the Veil and Careless Talk. He has contributed to The Writers' Workbook, and has reviewed for Time Out, Harpers & Queen, Fable, The Universe and Cercles. His shorter fiction has appeared in Pretext, Pool 1&2, Boomerang, Harrington's (US) and Blithe House Quarterly (BHQ7.4). He works regularly for radio, and has adapted Saigon: Year of the Cat, Cousin Bette, Villette, As I Lay Dying and, most recently, A Fairly Honourable Defeat for BBC Radio 3, The Remains of The Day and A Pale View of Hills for BBC Radio 4.

    

Aldo Alvarez is the author of Interesting Monsters (Graywolf Press), featured as one of the best short story collections of the Fall 2001 book season by The Washington Post Book World. A nominee for the 2002 Violet Quill Award, City Pages called Interesting Monsters"experimental fiction meant for wide audiences -- very accessible and entertaining...It is also queer fiction that has grown up past adolescence; it's affectionate and funny, but reasonable."

Aldo received a Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University in the city of New York and a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University (SUNY). He was a Fiction Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 1998 and was featured in OUT Magazine's OUT 100 list of "gay success stories of 2001".  In October 2004, he was presented with a Trailblazer Award; the Bailiwick Repertory Trailblazer Awards honor "members of the GLBT community who have had an impact in the fields of arts, journalism, community activism, and sports".

Aldo founded Blithe House Quarterly in 1997 and currently serves as its Executive Editor, Designer and Publisher. He is a professor of English at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago. He loves to get e-mail from BHQ readers.

Visit Aldo Alvarez's homesite at http://www.blithe.com/aa/

Read Kurt Heintz' interview with Aldo Alvarez about "the basics of BHQ and his aspirations for it" at Plain Text.

e-mail: adalvarez@aol.com

Eric Karl Anderson's first novel, Enough, was published in 2004. More info can be found at http://www.pearlstreetpublishing.com. His work has appeared in Blithe House Quarterly (BHQ6.3), BiMagazine, Riverbabble, Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly, Tatlin's Tower and, most recently, the anthology From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up. He lives in London.

about the photographer

Aaron Gang is a professional photographer specializing in actor's headshots -- a photographer with an MA in creative writing (poetry). Who knew?

about the authors

Chaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since he was eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter, and two major fantasy series: The Books of Outremer, based on the world of the Crusades, and Selling Water by the River, set in an alternate Ottoman Istanbul. A winner of the British Fantasy Award, he has also published three books for children and more than 500 short stories in various genres. His time as Crimewriter-in-Residence at the St Peter's Riverside Sculpture Project in Sunderland resulted in the collection Blood Waters. He is a prizewinning ex-poet, and has been writer in residence at the University of Northumbria, as well as tutoring their MA in Creative Writing. He was Northern Writer of the Year 2000, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne with a quantum cat and a famous teddy bear.

Robert Doyle lives amid Victorian splendour in Southport, England,where he is the editor of a fine newspaper. He has had several short stories published in anthologies and is putting the finishing touches to a thilling and shocking comic novel.

Georges-Claude Guilbert is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Tours, France. He is the author of Madonna as Postmodern Myth: How One Star’s Self-Construction Rewrites Sex, Gender, Hollywood and the American Dream. He has also published books and articles on Carson McCullers, gender, Queer Theory, and American popular culture. These days he is especially busy supervising doctoral dissertations on television series.

Website: http://www.georgesclaudeguilbert.com/

Drew Gummerson was born in 1971 and lives in Leicester, England. In 2002 his first novel The Lodger was published. It was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in the States. Drew’s next novel Darts was a finalist in the UKA/PABD Great Read Novel Competition and is due to be published in the future by ENC Press.

Drew’s short fiction has been published in Death Comes Easy; The Gay Times Book of Short Stories 4, Serendipity: The Gay Times Book of New Writing, Best Gay Erotica 2005, Aesthetica Magazine, The Gay Read, www.thisisitmag.co.uk, www.openwidemagazine.co.uk, www.pulp.net, BHQ8.2 , www.megaera.org , www.zygoteinmycoffee.com, www.laurahird.com, www.velvetmafia.com, www.wordriot.org and www.forbiddenfruitzine.com.

Drew’s story "Teeth" won the 2005 Leicestershire Short Story Prize

Drew’s story "Reyka" was a winner in the 2005 Middlesex University Prize

Website: http://freespace.virgin.net/d.gummerson

Jackie Kay lives in Manchester with her son. Her novel Trumpet won the Guardian Fiction Award. Her collection of short stories, Why Don't You Stop Talking, was published by Picador to great acclaim in 2002. Her latest book, Wish I Was Here, was published this June.

Lori L. Lake is the author of six novels: Gun Shy, Under The Gun, Have Gun We’ll Travel, Different Dress, Ricochet In Time, and the forthcoming Snow Moon Rising). She has also written a collection of short stories, Stepping Out, and edited the 2005 Lamdma Literary Award Finalist, The Milk of Human Kindness: Lesbian Authors Write About Mothers and Daughters, as well as Romance for LIFE, an anthology benefiting breast cancer research. Lori and her partner of 25 years live in Minnesota where Lori teaches queer fiction writing at The Loft Literary Center and is currently at work on her eighth novel. You can visit her website at www.lorillake.com.

Michael Langan lives and works in London where he leads the Creative Writing programme at the University of Greenwich. He was a founder member of the Liverpool-based gay writing and performance group QueerScribes and has a PhD in Creative Writing from Liverpool John Moores University. His short sequence of poems, "Elements (of my mother)" appeared in Poetry Pool (Headland Press) in 2003. "Skin" forms part of his first novel, The Vocabulary of Spiders. He is currently working on his second novel, The Futurist, a radio adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, and a collection of short stories.

Shaun Levin is a South African writer living in London. His novella, Seven Sweet Things, came out in 2003, and his collection of stories, A Year of Two Summers - in 2005. His stories appear in anthologies as diverse as Best Gay Erotica, Boyfriends from Hell, The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers, and Modern South African Short Stories. He's also on www.suspectthoughts.com, www.webdelsol.com, and at www.shaunlevin.com.

Paul Magrs is from the North East of England. He has written novels for children, teens and adults. His most recent novel is Never the Bride, published by Headline.

Cherry Smyth's debut poetry collection, When the Lights Go Up was published by Lagan Press, 2001. A pamphlet, The Future of Something Delicate was published by Smith/Doorstop, 2005 and a second poetry collection is forthcoming. Her stories have appeared in several anthologies including The Anchor Book of New Irish Writing, 2000, Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women, Telegram, 2006 and in Chroma magazine. She lives in London.