Breath & Shadow

Breath & Shadow is a collaborative effort by AbilityMaine's staff, Norman Meldrum and Steve Hoad; our fiscal sponsor, Resources for Organizing and Social Change (ROSC); and Breath & Shadow's own editorial staff, led by Sharon Wachsler, the Editor in Chief.

Editorial Board:

Editor in Chief
Sharon Wachsler

Managing Editor
Chris Kuell

Poetry Staff
John Allen
Abigail Astor
Linda Cronin
Arden Hill
Robin Mayhall

Fiction Staff
Dorothy Baker
Erika Jahneke
Chris Kuell
Erin Lewy
Robin Mayhall
Tricia Owsley

Nonfiction Staff
Dorothy Baker
Erika Jahneke
Paul Kahn
Erin Lewy
Robin Mayhall
Tricia Owsley

Theater Editor
Paul Kahn

Contributing Writers
Dorothy Baker
Erika Jahneke
Erin Lewy

Proofreading
Linda Hillyer
Robin Mayhall

Additional Editorial Assistance
Betsy Ames

Technical Assistance
Lisa Gray

About the Editor-in-Chief

Sharon Wachsler is a humorist, disability–rights activist, and dog trainer living in rural western Massachusetts. Ironically, before becoming disabled herself, Sharon worked as a disability information and referral specialist. When she became disabled by chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS), multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), fibromyalgia, and chronic migraines, Sharon started drawing "sick humor" cartoons — http://www.sickhumorpostcards.com — which began appearing in a range of disability, feminist, and queer publications.

In February 2002, she began writing monthly humor columns for AbilityMaine, many of which have been reprinted elsewhere. The columns were the jumping–off point for starting Breath & Shadow.

Sharon has published over a hundred articles, short stories, essays, poems, and cartoons about disability (some of which have won awards) in more than thirty publications across North America and abroad, including translations into Dutch and German. She is frequently solicited for humor essays or for articles or interviews on disability humor. Examples include Abilities, Canada's disability lifestyle magazine; WAMC, the National Public Radio affiliate for much of New York and New England; The Women's Times, a Western Massachusetts newspaper; and Kaleidoscope, the longest–extant disability literature journal. Her writing on disability has also been used in college curricula. One example is the University of California, San Diego, purchasing her 2003 feature from Bitch magazine for 800 textbooks.

Sharon has been successful writing on topics other than disability, too. Her essays, poetry, fiction, and cartoons have appeared in several–dozen magazines, newspapers, chapbooks, and journals. She has been published (or has forthcoming work) in two dozen books, among them the 2004 and 2005 editions of Simon & Schuster's Best American Erotica series. Her fiction has appeared alongside such well-knowns as Kim Addonizio, Dorothy Allison, Steve Almond, Margaret Atwood, Alan Cumming, Molly Ivins, Joyce Carol Oates, Simon Sheppard, and Jane Smiley. Some of her writing credits are Best Lesbian Erotica, Suspect Thoughts, Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Strange Horizons, Pinned Down by Pronouns, Yentl's Revenge, and Restricted Access.

Honors include a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2001 for poetry and the "Best of the Nest" Peregrine Prize award from Amherst Writers and Artists in the same year, also for poetry. Her work has appeared in Lambda Literary Award–winning and nominated anthologies in fiction and nonfiction, respectively. In 2006, the Astraea Foundation honored her with a fiction grant as a "2006 Emerging Lesbian Writer."

Sharon's current big writing goal is to finish compiling her Sick Humor essays and cartoons into a book, Sick Humor: Full–Frontal Disability. To get on Sharon's Sick Humor e–list for sporadic bulletins on her writing, postcard specials, and cool disability humor and culture stuff, email sickhumor2@aol.com. To learn more about Sharon and her dogs, visit her homepage at http://www.sharonwachsler.com.

About the Managing Editor

Chris Kuell is a blind writer and advocate living in Western Connecticut. A former research chemist, he lost his sight at thirty–five as a result of diabetic retinopathy. A few years later, he learned how to use a computer with speech output and turned his efforts to writing. He's had more than two dozen articles about blindness published, and His fiction has appeared in Spillway Review, Breath & Shadow, Apollo's Lyre, Gambit, Mountain Echoes, Decomposition, The Sun, and Dialogue. He was an editor and contributed to the anthology, Mountain Voices: Illuminating the Character of West Virginia. He is currently seeking an agent/publisher for Disconnected, a novel about how Alzheimer's disease affects a family and tests the bonds of love. He is also hard at work on his second novel, Rub It In, a novel about a blind massage therapist caught in a thorny love triangle.