About the Author

Dean Gessie enjoyed a long career as Head of the English Department at Pickering College in Newmarket, Ontario. While there, he was also Director of the award-winning Joshua Weinzweig Creative Writing Program. As a teenager, Gessie's play won best entry for Northern Ontario in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's playwriting contest. Gessie also won Honorable Mention in the 2008 Press 53 Novella Competition. Most recently, one of Gessie's short stories was selected to the list of Highly Commended Stories in the international Manchester Fiction Prize, England's biggest literary award for unpublished creative writing. Gessie has also written and served extensively as a social justice activist. Anna Faktorovich is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press. She is currently teaching college English at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Previously, she taught for three years at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and the Middle Georgia State College. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism. She published two academic books with McFarland: Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson (2013) and The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels (2014). She published two poetry collections Improvisational Arguments (Fomite Press, 2011) and Battle for Athens (Anaphora, 2012). She also released two historical novels: The Romances of George Sand (2014), and The Battle for Democracy (2016). She published two fantasy novellas with Grim's Labyrinth Publishing: The Great Love of Queen Margaret, the Vampire (2014) and The Campaigns against the Olden: Kingdoms of Laruta (2014). She also wrote and illustrated a children's book, The Sloths and I (Anaphora, 2013). She has been editing and writing for the independent, tri-annual Pennsylvania Literary Journal since 2009, and started the second Anaphora periodical, Cinematic Codes Review in 2016. She has presented her research at the MLA, SAMLA, EAPSU, SWWC, BWWC and many other conferences. She won the MLA Bibliography, Kentucky Historical Society and Brown University Military Collection fellowships.

Reviews

"The cryptic, poetic prose of Gessie's near-future novella requires slow, careful reading... Gessie evokes a nightmare scenario of an Orwellian government under which justice, freedom, and equality are antiquated notions, and you can hear 'amendments of the Constitution snapping like tracheal bones...' The message is timely and pertinent." --Publishers Weekly