Authors

ABP Authors

Dorothy Ellis Barnett

Dorothy Ellis Barnett landed in Austin, Texas, after a hardscrabble childhood growing up on the riverbeds, campgrounds and roads of the Southwest. She is Professor Emerita at Austin Community College, where she founded and created the Creative Writing Department. She is a former Board Member of the Writers’ League of Texas, is a co-founder of Poetry at Round Top held at Festival Hill each Spring, and was founding editor of Borderlands. Dorothy is a renowned poet, short story writer and gifted memoirist. Dorothy and her daughter Cory are both Michener Fellows from The University of Texas, where she received her MFA. Presently, she is teaching courses on writing poetry as therapy.

Patricia Bjorklund

Patricia Bjorklund’s writng has been published in many journals, including The Missouri Review, Connecticut Review, Post Road, and Wilma! Wilmington’s Magazine for Women. Director of the Downtown Writer’s Workshop in historic Wilmington, North Carolina, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from UNC-Wilmington and a BA and an MS from Southern Connecticut State University. She can be contacted at www.coldwarchildhood.com

Sybil Pittman Estess

Sybil Pittman Estess was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and has degrees from Baylor University, the University of Kentucky, and Syracuse University. She is the author of five books of poetry: Like That, Maneuvers, Labyrinth, Seeing the Desert Green, and Blue, Candled in January Sun. She has also written a collection of criticism on Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, and has co-written a multigenre creative writing textbook, In a Field of Words. She has published in well over 100 literary critical essays, reviews, and editorials in journals, magazines, and newspapers including Paris Review, The Texas Review, descant, Concho River Review, Louisiana Literature, Shenandoah, Borderlands, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Manhattan Review, The Mississippi Review, The Jewish Herald Voice, and The Houston Chronicle. Estess has lived in Houston with her spouse, Dr. Ted L. Estess, for 37 years. She is the mother of one son, Benjamin Barrett, and the grandmother of two granddaughters, Himma Lynn Estess and Zollie Be Estess, both of whose mother is Briana Jane Bassler.

Ken Fontenot

Ken Fontenot received an MA in German language and literature from the University of Texas at Austin (with a thesis on Heinrich von Kleist) and studied in Freiburg, Germany under a DAAD fellowship during the school year of 1986-87. His second book of poems, All My Animals and Stars (1988), won the Austin Book Award, and his poetry collection In a Kingdom of Birds won the 2012 Texas Institute of Letters award for best poetry book in Texas. In 2015 a fourth book of poems, Just a Trace of Moon, appeared from Pinyon Publishing. His manuscript titled Collected Translations from the German and his translation of a novel by Wilhelm Genazino have recently been completed. His novel is For Mr. Raindrinker, published in 2015 by Alamo Bay Press. He writes: “I believe the poet has the right to use his entire life as material for his work. The past is never off-limits. Too, poems can be imaginary. Poets should have the same license as novelists. How dull autobiography alone can sometimes be!” This 2022, Alamo Bay Press is pleased to publish his latest book of poetry, To Those Born Later, Selected Poems: 2017-2020.

Lyman Grant

Lyman Grant has taught composition, literature, humanities, and creative writing at Austin Community College since 1978. He has also served in various administrative roles, including department chair of creative writing, dean of arts and humanities, and dean of communications. He has published poems, essays, and reviews in many periodicals and anthologies, including The Dallas Morning News; The Texas Humanist; Texas Observer; Texas Books in Review; descant; Concho River Review; Sulphur River Literary Review; Feeding the Crow; Literary Austin; Is This Forever, or What?; Big Land, Big, Sky, Big Hair; The Beatest State in the Union; and The Great American Wise Ass Anthology. From 1989-1992, he was the editor of MAN! Magazine. Old Men on Tuesday Mornings is his fifth book of poems.

Lee Meitzen Grue (1934-2020)

New Orleans icon, poet and fiction writer Lee Meitzen Grue, wrote about the culture and music of her city. Her books include Trains and Other Intrusions: Poems; French Quarter Poems; In the Sweet Balance of the Flesh; Goodbye, Silver, Silver Cloud; and Downtown. Live! On Frenchman Street, features Lee’s poetry accompanied by jazz musician Eluard Burt. Lee has taught poetry at Xavier University and Tulane University, and has performed her work and conducted workshops around the world. For over thirty years, Lee has edited and published New Laurel Review. Owner of the celebrated B.J.’s Bywater Lounge, Lee Grue was known as Mother of all that is creative in New Orleans, writing fiction and poetry from her Victorian home in the Bywater. Deeply missed, she entered God's Celestial Shores in 2021.

Laura Quinn Guidry

Laura Quinn Guidry was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and grew up in New Orleans. She has lived in Texas for thirty-six years. Laura began writing poetry after the sudden death from heart disease of her son Grant when he was twenty-four. She published her first poem at age fifty-two. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Concho River Review, The Texas Review, Louisiana Literature, and descant. Guidry now lives in Houston, Texas, where she enjoys life surrounded by the arts and museums.

Kathryn Lane

Originally from Mexico, Kathryn Lane writes fiction inspired by Latin American cultures she experienced firsthand during her career as an international finance executive. She is the author of a novel, Waking Up in Medellin, as well as short stories that have been published in New Border Voices, ¡Arriba Baseball!, and Swirl Literary Journal. She lives in The Woodlands, Texas, with her husband, Bob Hurt

Issa Nyaphaga

Issa Nyaphaga is a multimedia artist and human rights activist based in the U.S. He is globally known as a political cartoonist and a critical thinker who has collaborated with many well-known and established artists and institutions around the world. Back in the 1990s, in his home country of Cameroon, Issa published over five thousand cartoons, drawings, illustrations, graphic novels and comics, reaching five million readers—many of whom are marginalized and illiterate. Since 1999 Issa has taught his unique art techniques in universities, colleges, cultural centers and social institutions. He has also conducted art therapy programs for child soldiers and at-risk children and teenagers. Issa Nyaphaga's artwork has inspired the human spirit of thousands of people in dozens of countries. Issa is convinced that the power of art can save lives. This provocative color cartoon book is not only about saving lives; it is about addressing the issue of Free Speech versus Hate Speech. Issa Nyaphaga was a contributing cartoonist for Charlie Hebdo in the late ‘90s in Paris. He was one of the four artists who spoke at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 6, 2015, addressing the issue of freedom of artistic expression. Issa divides his time between Cameroon (where he founded www.hitip.org), France and the United States, where he mentors young artists and shares his work with all of us. He has been living in Santa Fe since 2009.

Dave Oliphant

Born in Fort Worth in 1939, Dave Oliphant is the author of thirteen books of poetry. His 2014 release Cowtown Circle honors the celebrated group of Modernist artists in his hometown, known locally as Cowtown due to its prominence as a ranching and cattle center. He taught and/or edited a scholarly journal at the University of Texas at Austin from 1976 to 2006, is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and won the 2011 Soeurette Diehl Fraser book translation award from the TIL for his version of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s Discursos de sobremesa (as After-Dinner Declarations). A second edition of his translation of a collection of poems by Chilean Enrique Lihn, entitled Figures of Speech, is forthcoming in 2015 from Host Publications. His series of poems entitled Memories of Texas Towns & Cities (begun in1975 and completed in 2000) includes a 140-page poem on Austin that Michael King reported in The Texas Observer “takes its place...as a long poem in a modernist mode which makes an enduring contribution to the literature of its place, time, and country. And that’s a great deal for any city to be proud of.”