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Kelly McQuain (born February 5)
Feb. 5th, 2015 09:17 am
Kelly McQuain is a writer, artist and college professor living in Philadelphia. He grew up in West Virginia surrounded by the wooded mountains of Monongahela National Forest. His family back home still live on a dirt road bearing the McQuain name. He is the author of VELVET RODEO, which won the 2013 Bloom Chapbook Prize, judged by poet C. Dale Young. The collection includes poems published in several national journals, including “Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers”, which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the journal Kestrel.As a writer, McQuain’s poems have been featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer and on National Public Radio’s Tell Me More as part of National Poetry Month. His poems have appeared in Bloom, Chelsea Station, Assaracus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Stone Highway Review, Press 1, American Writing, Texture, Black Heart Magazine, Transient, Certain Circuits, Apiary, Nada and more. His prose has appeared in The Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly/Arkansas Review, The James White Review and Icarus: the Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction. His essays and stories have been anthologized in over a dozen publications, including: Obsessed; Skin & Ink; Rebel Yell 2; Best American Erotica; Best Gay Erotica; Rough Trade; The Journal of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity; and the Lambda Literary Award-winning Men on Men 2000. He is a former contributing editor at the Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly and Art & Understanding (A&U). He has won writing fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and he serves on the “One Book, One Philadelphia” Selection Committee in Philadelphia. Currently a professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia, he formerly worked as an illustrator of superhero comics. His occasional columns on city life debuted in The Philadelphia Inquirer in July 2012.
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Source: kellymcquain.wordpress.com/about/
Further Readings:
VELVET RODEO is now available for $8
from the fine folks at BLOOM.
Copies are limited. Order at:
http://bloomliteraryjournal.org/shop/velvet-rodeo/
VELVET RODEO by Kelly McQuain is the recent winner of the Bloom Chapbook Prize, judged by poet C. Dale Young who wrote of it: “‘The tongue I try to master / is a sticky one, forked and full of tricks,’ is the opening of a poem in Velvet Rodeo, and it becomes a point of return for the collection. These poems understand that to tell the truth, one must lie, play tricks, and even dare to say the unbelievable. Careful and exacting, these poems exact a price from a reader. They linger with you long after you have finished reading them.”
More Rainbow Awards at my website: www.elisarolle.com/, Rainbow Awards/2014
Brent Hartinger is an American author, playwright, and screenwriter, best known for his novels about gay teenagers. Hartinger lives in Seattle with his husband, novelist and writer Michael Jensen. They had a commitment ceremony on July 22, 1996 and married on December 28, 2012. In 1990, he helped co-found Oasis, one of the nation's first support organization for gay teens, in his hometown of Tacoma, Washington. He is a co-founder of AS IF! Authors Support Intellectual Freedom, a group of Young Adult authors supporting intellectual freedom. He also worked as a counselor at a youth group home.
Michael Jensen is the author of two historical horror novels, Frontiers (2000) and its sequel Firelands (2004), which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. In 2005 he co-founded and became the editor of AfterElton.com, which covered pop culture for gay and bisexual men. In 2006, the site was sold along with AfterEllen.com to MTV/Viacom in a multimillion dollar deal. AfterElton.com eventually grew to a million unique visitors a month and won two awards for outstanding journalism from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. In 2011, he left AfterElton.com to return to writing horror fiction full time. 
Days of Love: Celebrating LGBT History One Story at a Time by Elisa Rolle
William Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine.
Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy. According to his own account, he destroyed these later, ashamed of their content. Due to the repressive context where he grew up, and from which he fled, that is, a "family where displays of affection were considered embarrassing," he kept his sexual orientation concealed well into adulthood when, ironically, he became a well known homosexual writer after the publication of 
Days of Love: Celebrating LGBT History One Story at a Time by Elisa Rolle
Playwright and novelist Han Ong (born 1968) is both a high-school dropout and one of the youngest recipients of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Born in the Philippines, he moved to the United States at 16. His works, which include the novels Fixer Chao and The Disinherited, address such themes as outsiderness, cultural clash, and class conflict.
Russell John Dammerall Grant (born 5 February 1951) is a British astrologer and media personality. He has written several books on Astrology, provides syndicated newspaper horoscopes and operates premium rate astrology phone lines. In March 2010, he began offering a "Pet Psychic" service. He is also the author of The Real Counties of Britain. Grant is gay and has been with his partner Doug Beaumont, who is also his manager, since 1974. Grant's original career was as an actor and performed in a variety of productions including Tom Brown's Schooldays with Keith Chegwin who shared a similar career path from acting to television. It is through this work he met Beaumont, who worked as a stagehand in a Blackpool theatre.
Tom Bianchi (born 1945 in Oak Park, Illinois) is an American writer and photographer who specializes in male nude photography. A lawyer by training, he is currently a vice president of CytoDyn, a biotech firm engaged in HIV therapy development. For many years, he lived (and worked) with his life partner, Mark Prunty (born 1965), a computer graphics designer, in Los Angeles, California. They met in 1991 at a book signing party for Bianchi. Two years earlier, Bianchi had buried the man with whom he'd had a long-term monogamous relationship that predated safe sex. Back in circulation, and HIV-positive himself, he thought, "I'm an outcast and nobody will ever touch me again." But Prunty didn't consider him a leper: "I didn't know anybody who had died of AIDS. Of course, I knew it was a death sentence. But it wasn't an issue and I don't know why." Before they met, Bianchi had been severely depressed. Thinking his time was short, he wanted to do something meaningful for his community. Publication of his first of six books, 1990's "Out of the Studio," a photo study of gay relationships, gave him "renewed energy and purpose." Since 2012 he is living with his current partner, Ben, in Palm Springs.
When I submitted this story I knew I was taking a risk. The Next Call is not your conventional boy meets boy love story. Nothing about it is conventional. I’m just lucky that Dreamspinner are prepared to take chances with me and I appreciate it very much. 
