Three Candles Press: Poets

Jessica Goodfellow grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but has spent the last twenty years in constant flux between Japan and the United States. She received an MS degree from the California Institute of Technology. She has been employed variously as a teacher of both math and ESL, a financial analyst, a technical writer, a proofreader and an editor, currently working freelance as the last three.

Her poetry chapbook, A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland, won the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in the anthology Best New Poets 2006, on the website Verse Daily, and has been featured on NPR's "The Writer's Almanac". She was a recipient of the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal, and her work has been honored with the Linda Julian Essay Award as well as the Sue Lile Inman Fiction Prize, both from the Emrys Foundation. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

Jessica currently lives in Japan with her husband and sons.

Jeff Mock was born in Sarpy County, Nebraska. He received an MFA from The University of Alabama, where he was a Teaching- Writing Fellow and Editor of Black Warrior Review. He served as Assistant Editor of The Gettysburg Review for seven years before joining the faculty of Southern Connecticut State University. He is the author of a chapbook, Evening Travelers (Volans Press, 1994), and a guidebook for beginning writers, You Can Write Poetry (Writer’s Digest Books, 1998). His poems appear in The Atlantic Monthly, Connecticut Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, New England Review, The North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Margot Schilpp, and their daughters, Paula and Leah.

Jehanne Dubrow was born in Italy and grew up in Poland, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She earned her PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, College Park. She served as a Sosland Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the West Chester Poetry Conference, the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference, the Auschwitz Jewish Center, and the Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization.

Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The New England Review, Shenandoah, Barrow Street, and Gulf Coast. She is the author of a chapbook, The Promised Bride (Finishing Line Press). She currently teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College.

Matthew Shindell was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but now lives and writes in La Jolla, California. He received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop (2001). He also studied poetry while an undergraduate Biology and Society major at Arizona State University. While at ASU he was the recipient of the university's most coveted award for young writers, the Glendon and Kathryn Swarthout Award in poetry. While at the Writers' Workshop he was selected by Tomaz Salamun as the 2001 recipient of the Workshop's annual Academy of American Poets Prize. In Another Castle, Shindell's first full-length book of poems, was a finalist for the 2008 Tupelo Press First Book Award, judged by the editors of Crazyhorse, Carol Ann Davis and Garrett Doherty, and Tupelo Press editor Jeffrey Levine.

Outside of poetry Shindell holds degrees in the sciences and humanities. He has a BS and an MS in Biology and Society from Arizona State University. His academic work focuses on the historical and social study of science, from Victorian ideas of heredity to robotic geologists on the surface of Mars. He is currently in the dissertation stage of a Ph.D. in the history of science at the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation is a scientific biography of the American chemist and Nobel Laureate Harold C. Urey. As a member of UCSD's History Department and Science Studies Program, he is also interested in the fate of Soviet-era cosmonaut heroes in post-Soviet collective memory, and recently embarked on a research trip to Moscow to study the sites of cosmonaut commemoration and memorialization.

Shindell's poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, The American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, FENCE, Hayden's Ferry Review, Jubilat, Melic Review, No Tell Motel, Northwestern Review, Octopus Magazine, Phoenix Downtown Magazine, Pleiades, Tarpaulin Sky, Three Candles Journal, and Unpleasant Event Schedule. His poems were also included in two anthologies — Digerati: 20 Contemporary Poets in the Virtual World (Three Candles Press, 2006) and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel (No Tell Books, 2006). He is also the author of one limited edition chapbook, Were something to happen it would be both funny and interesting, printed in the University of Iowa Type Kitchen in 2001. Shindell is also the author of the Poetry Postcard Project (http://www.poetrypostcardproject.com).

Erin Elizabeth Smith received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Illinois and is currently a PhD candidate at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her poetry has previously appeared in Third Coast, Crab Orchard, Natural Bridge, West Branch, The Pinch, Rhino, and Willow Springs among others. She is the managing editor of Stirring as well as the Best of the Net anthology.

Andrew Demcak is an award-winning poet who has been widely published and anthologized both in print and on-line. He has an M. F. A. in English/Creative Writing from St. Mary's College in Moraga, CA , where he studied with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Michael Palmer, Carol Snow, Frank Bidart, Gary Snyder, Charles Wright, and Sharon Olds. Andrew is also a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, where he studied with Galway Kinnell, Richard Howard, and Lucille Clifton. His poems, including Young Man With iPod (Poetry Midwest, #13), are taught at Ohio State University as part of both its English 110.02 class, "The Genius and the Madman," and in its "American Poetry Since 1945" class. At the age of 23, Andrew published his first chapbook, The Psalms (Big 23 Press), which was favorably reviewed by Dr. Clifton Snider in the Small Press Review (issue 226, vol. 23, no. 11.) When he is not hard at work driving the Bookmobile for Oakland Public Library, he can be found attending "GuyWriters" poetry readings at Anthony's house in San Francisco, or eating Tibetan momos with his partner, Peter. Viva Wallace Stevens! Visit Andrew at: http://www.andrewdemcak.com.

Tony Trigilio's poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Clock, Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, The Iowa Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, three candles journal, and the anthologies Digerati: 20 Contemporary Poets in the Virtual World and America Zen.

A musician as well as a poet, Tony recorded and toured with the avant-pop band Drumming on Glass. He collaborates with Michael Trigilio on The Starve Site (http://www.starve.org), an online home for experimental video, writing, music, and performance.

Tony was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, and has lived most of his life in Boston and Chicago. While in Boston, Tony edited Lotus Arrow, the newsletter of the Kurukulla Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies, and was one of the founding members of the Fenway Skills Exchange, a grass-roots alternative economic system for the Fenway neighborhood.

He teaches at Columbia College Chicago and co-edits the poetry magazine Court Green.

RJ McCaffery was born in Manchester, Connecticut. He attended Providence College from which he graduated magna cum laude with Distinction in English Literature. He subsequently completed his M.F.A. in Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Since that time he has lived in: Providence, Rhode Island; Athens, Georgia; Hartford, Connecticut; and Washington, D.C.

Following the tradition of many writers whose loyalty is first given to writing, he has held a bevy of jobs, working as a technical writer for an environmental engineering group, a public librarian, an immigration interviewer, a census taker, a handy-man, a mortgage processor, a receptionist for a health center, a teaching assistant, a student loan counselor, a warehouse palate-jockey, an eggplant picker, a car-deliverer, a book binder, a photo-developer, a web-site designer, book-store clerk, an office manager, a night shift connivance store clerk, a comic book editor, and a theatre manager.

An avid bicyclist, he builds his own bicycles which range from junkyard recumbents to fixed-gear uprights.

In the fall of 2004, he entered Georgetown University Law Center in D.C., in pursuit of a J.D., and not being able (or willing) to escape from poetry, he's recently been as pleased as punch to take up an editorial position at the New Hampshire Review.