Category: Friday Five Writers

Friday Five: Q&A with flash fiction writer and editor Tommy Dean

‘Short stories and novels are the whole nine rounds of a boxing match, while flash is a duck of one punch.’

Tommy Dean, writer.
Tommy Dean

The genre of flash fiction has become more popular and visible in recent years, thanks to the work of people like today’s Friday Five writer, Tommy Dean. A writer of “mostly flash fiction,” as he puts it on his website, Dean also is an editor of the flash fiction literary magazine Fractured Lit and a writing coach who offers editing services and writing workshops. He is the author of Hollows (Alternating Current Press, 2022), a collection of flash stories, and two flash fiction chapbooks, Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021). He has been previously published in The Lascaux Review, New World Writing, and Pithead Chapel. His stories have been included in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020. He lives in Indiana with his wife and two children, and he and I share the common experience of having detasseled corn in our youth.

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Friday Five: Q&A with novelist and poet Melissa Powers

‘The best poems are those that don’t really end.’

Continuing our tribute to poets during National Poetry Month, today’s Friday Five is with Melissa Powers, a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer.

Melissa Powers

Melissa is an award-winning author whose work has appeared in Common Boundary, American Literary Realism, The Quest, Midwest Poetry Review, Writer’s Journal, and Cave Region Review. Her books include The Outsiders (2006), an instructional guide on the novel; Afterthoughts (2012), a collection of poems; and three works fiction, including two young adult science fiction novels, Spark and Surfacing (Amazon, 2012, 2014) . Her awards include the Springfield (Missouri) Writer’s Guild Grand Prize for Poetry (1998), the Johnson Memorial Grand Prize Award — League of Minnesota Poets (2003), the William Stafford Award — Washington Poets Association (2009), and the Writer’s Journal poetry contest (2011). She holds an M.A. from Missouri State University and was a college English instructor for more than 25 years at Drury University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and East Central College. Currently, she is a student success specialist/writing tutor at East Central College, a freelance academic editor specializing in dissertations, theses, journal articles, and book projects, and a staff writer for The Phelps County Focus newspaper. Melissa’s recent poetry can be found on the Facebook group Melissa Ann Poetry.

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