About Us

Phillip Sterling’s most recent book is In Which Brief Stories Are Told, a collection of short fiction (Wayne State University Press, 2011). His story “Home Invasion” won first place in the adult fiction division of the 2009 Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts Literary Awards; his essay “The Relish of Summer” won first place for nonfiction in 2008. He is the author of the poetry collection Mutual Shores (New Issues, 2000) and three chapbook-length series of poems (Significant Others, Quatrains, Abeyance), and is the editor of Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange (Mammoth 2003). Among his awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Fulbright Lectureships, and a P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Award. Sterling is Professor Emeritus at Ferris State University, where he founded and coordinated the Literature In Person Reading Series until his retirement. He currently lives in Ada, Michigan.

Betty Stolarek has recently retired from a thirty-eight year career teaching writing, thirty-one of those years at the university level. Her writing was originally academically-based: she has published a number of journal articles as well as co-authoring two writing textbooks, Classical Techniques and Contemporary Arguments (Pearson, 2007) and American Dreams (Pearson, 2010). While teaching at Ferris State University she founded the Critical Thinking Institute and was a co-founder and the first director of their English Education program.

Several years ago, writing fiction became her passion. In fact, her desire to write motivated her to retire. Her first novel, One Amber Bead (Plain View Press, 2010), was published under the pen name Rebecca Thaddeus, and her second novel, Coming to Be, has an anticipated early 2015 publication date. She is currently doing preliminary research for a third novel set in Natchez, MS, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Betty is Professor Emerita from Ferris State and lives at Three Ponds Farm in Big Rapids, Michigan.