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H A M I L T O N S T O N E E D I T I O N S
p.o. box 43 Maplewood, NJ 07040
Our Authors
Initially trained
as a cellist, James Cervantes began
writing poetry while serving in the U.S. Air Force Orchestra
in Washington, D.C. between 1963-1967. He
has published three books of poetry: The Year is Approaching
Snow and The Headlong Future, which was selected
for the 1987 Capricorn Poetry Prize, and Changing the Subject,
co-authored with Halvard Johnson. He has appeared in dozens
of print and electronic magazines, and in 1997 he founded The
Salt River Review, an online publication. Cervantes
earned his B.A. in English/Writing at the University of Washington,
and his M.F.A. at the University of Iowa. He has also studied
and taught in Vermont, California, and Arizona, and has been
Professor of English at Mesa Community College since 1992. Cervantes
can often be found hiking in the mountains of northern Arizona.
Reamy Jansen is Professor of English and Humanities at SUNY Rockland. He is recipient of the 2003 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Creativity and Scholarship and was the 2000 recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle and a Contributing Editor to The Bloomsbury Review of Books.
An essayist, poet, and critic, he has published work in 32 Poems, Fugue, The Evansville Review, Oasis, The Literary Review, The Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, American Book Review, LaPetiteZine, and Ducky.com, to name a few. Eight of his essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He has held residencies at Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany, New York Mills Creative Arts, and Writers & Books. A contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review of Books, he has finished a collection of essays on fathers and sons, Available Light, which is forthcoming from Hamilton Stone Editions.
To learn more and read excerpts from his work, see his website.
Halvard
Johnson was born in Newburgh, New York, and grew
up in New York City and the Hudson Valley. He has received grants
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State
Arts Council, and Baltimore City Arts. He has had several residency
grants at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a poetry
fellowship at the Ragdale Foundation.  He
has published four collections of poetry—Transparencies and
Projections, The Dance of the Red Swan, Eclipse,
and Winter Journey—all from New Rivers Press and, now
out of print, archived at the Contemporary American Poetry Archives
. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Puerto del Sol,
Wisconsin Review, Mudfish, Poetry: New York, For Poetry, CrossConnect,
Salt River Review, Blue Moon Review, Crania, Gulf Stream, The
Florida Review and Synaesthetic. He has lived and
worked in Chicago, Illinois; El Paso, Texas; Cayey, Puerto Rico;
Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland, and New York City. For
many years he taught overseas in the European and Far East divisions
of the University of Maryland. Currently, he resides in New
York City with his wife, the prize-winning fiction writer and
painter Lynda Schor. He teaches from time to time at the Eugene
Lang College of the New School University.
Rebecca Kavaler a
Southerner by birth, has resided in New York City for more than
two decades. During that time, her 
short fiction has won various awards, including two National
Endowment of the Arts fellowships, and is available in three
collections: A Little More Than Kin, Tigers in the
Wood, and The Further Adventures of Brunhild. Doubting
Castle, originally published by Shocken Books,was her first
venture into full-length fiction. Her short stories have
appeared in Antioch Review, Shenandoah, Yale Review, American
Short Fiction, Carolina Quarterly, Other Voices, Mid-American
Review, Perspective, Nimrod, Phoenix, Confrontation, etc.
She won the AWP award in 1978 and has had stories in Best of
Nimrod, and Best American Short Stories. Her
poetry has been published in Prairie Schooner, Atlanta Review,
(including its 10th anniversary issue) and Fantasy and Science
Fiction. Rebecca Kavaler died in 2008. See article in Wikipedia.
Eva Kollisch is a professor emerita at Sarah Lawrence College where she taught German, Comparative Literature and Women's Literature for many years. She is the author of Girl in Movement, a memoir. Her new book is a collection of stories and personal essays dealing with the themes of anti-Semitism, uprooting and outsiderdom. She came to the US as a Jewish refugee during World War II and has been politically active at various times in her life as a Trotskyist, anti-war protester, feminist and lesbian. She has joined a small international group that engages in “dialogue with the enemy” and isinterested in all efforts promoting non-violence.
Edith Konecky candidly acknowledges that her insight into the lives she
depicts in her novels comes from personal experience. Like
her heroine, Konecky was born in Brooklyn. Like her heroines,
she has a brother who is sixteen months older than she. And
like both Allegra and Rachel, she is the daughter of a well-to-do
dress manufacturer. Konecky has said that Jewish
custom made her a feminist before she had a word for it. She
frames her work with that feminist perspective, rejecting
the models of female types available to her: the baleboosteh
grandmother, the mother tamed by social expectations to comply
with the values of her husband. But the biographical data
of her life suggest that the rejection was gradual, keeping
pace with the social movements of her day. Like Allegra, she
began her writing career while still in high school, winning
a short story contest for which she was paid a penny a word.
She enrolled at New York University when she was seventeen,
married when she was twenty-one, lived a suburban life for
twenty years, raising her two sons , the customary housewife/mother
role, and writing occasional short stories. At the age of
thirty-seven, she returned to college, this time to Columbia.
She began to publish her stories, writing many of them at
Yaddo, where she won fellowships from 1964 through 1969. After
twenty years of marriage , she was divorced.
Konecky dramatizes some of the
details of her transformations in the second novel, in which
the heroine, Rachel, reflects on the traumas and triumphs
of her life, marriage, divorce, motherhood, grandmotherhood,
her love of women, and her relationship to her work. The novelist's
own work, writing, occupies a primary place in her current
life. She began writing Allegra Maud Goldman at the MacDowell
colony in 1972, winning frequent fellowships to work there
in succeeding years. The book, in print most of the years
since its first publication, was reissued by The Feminist
Press in 1990 (and is still available from them) with an introduction
by Tillie Olsen and an afterword by Bella Brodzki that pay tribute to the complexity and depth of Konecky's work. A
Place at the Table, widely hailed critically, was recently
re-issued by Hamilton Stone Editions. A collection of Konecky's
short stories, Past Sorrows & Coming Attractions,
was published in 2001. Her newest novel is View from the
North (2004).
(Excerpted from
Jewish Women in America, An Historical Encyclopedia,
Routledge, 1997)
Jane Lazarre is an award-winning writer of fiction, memoir and personal essay. Her most recent books  are Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: A Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, and, Wet Earth and Dreams: A Narrative of Grief and Recovery, both published by Duke University Press. Duke has also reissued her first memoir, The Mother Knot. She has read her work and spoken about writing, race and American identities in many universities, conferences and secondary schools. She is on the faculty of Eugene Lang College, New School University, where she directed the Creative Writing Program for many years and now teaches writing and literature. She is the recipient of the prestigious University Teaching Award. She has recently completed a novel, Three White Women, and edited a collection of essays, Writers Teaching Writing. She is at work on a collection of her own essays entitled, Writing As A Beautiful Resistance. For more information, see Persimmon Tree and her website at at http://www.janelazarre.com/. For a taste of her new novel, visit The Salt River Review.
Nathan
Leslie
has published two prior collections of short fiction, most
recently A Cold Glass of Milk.  Aside from being nominated
for the 2002 Pushcart Prize, Leslie's stories, essays, and
poetry have been published or are forthcoming in over one
hundred literary magazines including North American Review,
Cimarron Review, Del Sol Review, Chattahoochee Review, Sou'wester,
Southern Indiana Review, Fiction International, Gulf Stream,
Tulane Review, Baltimore Review, and Orchid. He
is currently the fiction editor for The Pedestal Magazine
and has also written book reviews and articles for newspapers
such as The Washington Post, The Orange County Weekly,
The Kansas City Star, The Orlando Sentinel, Rain Taxi, and
many others. Leslie received his MFA from The University of
Maryland in 2000 and currently teaches at NVCC/Loudoun.
Rochelle Ratner grew up in Atlantic City, N.J., of which the landscape and tenor of the deteriorating resort in the 1950s and 1960s, before gambling was legalized, form the backdrop for her first novel, Bobby's Girl, as well as the poems in Sea Air in a Grave Ground Hog Turns Toward. Increasingly throughout the 1970s, she  experimented with serial forms in poetry, finding it more and more difficult to see individual poems as units complete in themselves. After 2001, she focused mainly on prose poems, often based on news stories, which provide a link between poetry and fiction. During 1989-1990 she served as ghostwriter for three psychiatry books published by The PIA Press, on Manic Depression, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Co-Dependency. Working on these books, concerned with the problems which survivors of psychological and/or sexual abuse face when they enter into adult love relationships, offered new insights into the characters available to her fiction. Her second novel, The Lion's Share, is the story of a woman who, having been sexually molested as a ten-year-old, becomes involved in her first healthy relationship with a man at the age of thirty-four. Rochelle was also the editor of the anthology Bearing Life: Women’s Writing on Childlessness.
Rochelle Ratner died in 2008.
Carole
Rosenthal is the author of It Doesn't Have To Be Me, a collection
of short stories (Hamilton Stone), and her fiction appears in
a wide variety of periodicals, ranging from literary magazines
like Transatlantic Review, Confrontation, Other Voices,
and The Cream City Review, to Mother Jones, and
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Her frequently anthologized
short stories have been dramatized for radio and television,
translated into eleven languages, and her articles and reviews
published in newspapers and with presses including Dell, Arbor
House, and the Modern Language Association. She teaches at Pratt
Institute, in Brooklyn, where she is a Distinguished Professor.
She lives part-time in New York City and part-time in the Catskills.
To see her website, click here.
Harriet Rzetelny is a  writer, singer and clinical social worker. During the sixties, she was part of the folk music scene and appeared on programs with many folk singers such as Bob Dylan who, she said at the time, was too derivative and would never make it. For over twenty-five years, she has worked with, written and taught extensively about aging people and their families. Her writing reflects her dual interest in music and family relationships. Since 1999 she has published a series of stories in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Most have featured home care social worker Molly Lewin, the heroine of her soon-to-be published novel, Graveyard Blues. The first story in that series centered on an 82-year old blues singer who reappears in this novel. She has been nominated for several awards, including a Derringer Award for her 2003 story, Amazing Grace. Her non-mystery fiction has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, a journal of humanity and human experience, and she was recently anthologized in The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review. She is married, has two sons, and currently lives on Cape Cod.
Lynda
Schor is the recipient
of a Baltimore CityArts grant, and a Maryland State Arts Council
grant for fiction, among many other awards.
She is the author of a collection of short fiction called True
Love & Real Romance. Her stories have appeared
in Redbook, Ms., Mademoiselle, Playboy, GQ, The Village Voice,
and many other publications. She lives in New York with
her husband, the poet Halvard Johnson, and teaches fiction
writing at the New School University.
To see her personal website, click here.
 Leora Skolkin-Smith was born in Manhattan in 1952, and spent her childhood between Pound Ridge, New York, and Israel, traveling with her family to her mother's birthplace in Jerusalem every three years. She earned her BA and MFA and was awarded a teaching fellowship for graduate work, all at Sarah Lawrence. Her first published novel, EDGES was edited and published by the late Grace Paley for Ms. Paley's own imprint at Glad Day books. Excerpts from Leora's first novel, HYSTERA, were published by Persea Books and The Sarah Lawrence Review. Leora has received grants from The New York State Council on the Arts, The Department of Cultural affairs, The Robert Gage Foundation, Patricia Kind Foundation, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, and Art-Without-Walls.EDGES was nominated for the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award and The PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award by Grace Paley. Awarded a Stipend from the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, EDGES was also a National Women Studies Association Conference Selection, a Bloomsbury Review Pick, 2006: “Favorite Books of the Last 25 Years” and a Jewish Book Council Selection, 2005. Leora was recently a panelist, on "Israel in Fiction" at the The Miami International Book Fair, 2006, and a Panelist, on "War in Writing" , at the Virginia Festival of the Book, 2006. She is currently a contributing editor to readysteadybook.com. and her critical essays have been published in The Washington Post, The National Book Critic's Circle's Critical Mass, and other places. A critical essay on the work of Clarice Lispector is forthcoming this fall, published on The Conversational Quarterly. Excerpts from her latest novel-in-progress have recently appeared in Cantaraville Three. EDGES won the 2008 EARPHONES AWARD for an original audio production narrated by Tovah Feldshuh and is currently in development Feature Film, produced by Triboro Pictures.
See Leora Skolkin-Smith's webpage.
 Meredith
Sue Willis is the author
of fourteen books including the Blair Morgan trilogy published by Hamilton Stone Editions (Higher
Ground, Only Great Changes, and Trespassers) and her short story collection, Dwight's House and Other Stories, also published by Hamilton Stone Editions. To learn more, see the HSE catalog. She has also published several
best selling books for teachers with Teachers
& Writers Collaborative. Other recent fiction includes Oradell at Sea (West
Virginia University Press) and The City Built of Starships (Montemayor Press).
She has won many prizes for her writing, including
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the
New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her writing about the
Appalachian Region, particularly her collection of short
stories, In the Mountains of America, was the subject
of the Fourteenth Annual Emory & Henry Literary Festival
in Emory, Virginia, and she was the featured author in the Fall 2006 issue of Appalachian Heritage. Her novels for children include The
Secret Super Powers of Marco and Marco's Monster.
She
teaches novel writing at New York University and also works with children as a writer-in-the-schools. She has two books scheduled for publication in 2010, a new collection of Appalachian stories from Ohio University Press and Ten Strategies To Write your Novel from Montemayor Press.
To read more about Meredith Sue Willis,
visit her
website.
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