advisory board

The editorial staff at Paperbark Literary Magazine is advised by a board of UMass faculty members and Paperbark alumni of a variety of different academic departments and disciplines. The Advisory Board primarily mentors Paperbark staff, aids in outreach and recruitment, and provides support and advice to the magazine’s overall development.

For those interested in joining the advisory board, please contact Jennifer Jacobson at jenniferj@hfa.umass.edu.

Madeleine Charney and John Hennessy have recently stepped down from the Advisory Board. We thank them for their years of dedicated service.

Jennifer Jacobson
Associate Director, MFA for Poets and Writers

Co-Chairperson of the Advisory Board

Jennifer Jacobson is the Associate Director of the MFA for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst, where she directs the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and Juniper Institute for Young Writers. Jennifer also teaches at Smith College’s Young Women’s Writing Workshop. Together with Voices From Inside, she created the Family Storybook Project for incarcerated women and their children. She is the founder of When Children Save the Day, a non-profit organization that unites storytelling and social action. Her teaching and collaborative programs have been honored with a Creative Teaching Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, The Brimstone Award from the National Storytelling Network, and awards from the League for the Advancement of New England Storytellers. Jennifer’s writing appears in The Masters Review, jubilat, Chronogram, Linea, MotherWriter! Storytelling Magazine and elsewhere with honorable mentions from Glimmer Train, Symphony Space, Hunger Mountain, and the Tennessee Williams Festival.

Jeff Kasper
Assistant Professor, Undergraduate Program Director, Department of Art

Jeff Kasper teaches foundations and design in the Department of Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and creative activity focuses on public art, design, and social engagement, particularly around topics of social sustainability, and often in partnership with nonprofit organizations and collaborators outside the arts. He was the co-editor of More Art in the Public Eye (Duke University Press), and has contributed to the books, Art As Social Action: The Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art (Allworth Press), Futures Worth Preserving: Cultural Constructions of Nostalgia and Sustainability (Transcript Press), and Bridging Communities Through Socially Engaged Art (Routledge). In addition to his role as Undergraduate Art Program Director, he is an associate of The Institute for Diversity Sciences health research group. With Paperbark, he mentors student designer staff on the editorial design, print and digital production of the publication.

Darci Conner Maresca
Assistant Director, School of Earth & Sustainability

Co-Chairperson of the Advisory Board

Darci Connor Maresca is the Assistant Director for the School of Earth & Sustainability (SES) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For more than a fifteen years, she has worked at the intersection of science, policy, and people for relevant environmental issues and sustainability initiatives. Deeply committed to progress and inclusion, her career focuses on examining complex environmental and societal challenges, and developing practicable solutions through a collaborative, cross-interest approach. Darci’s work has taken her across the country with projects ranging from open space planning, an award-winning coastal resiliency and preparedness program, a stakeholder-drive, science-guided marine spatial planning process, and stakeholder engagement and communications.

In her spare time, she can be found enjoying ice cream cones, playing in streams, and looking under rocks with her big personality, little people, Miles and Charlie, and faithful dog, Jenna. She sees Paperbark as a marvelous example of the outcome of working alongside passionate, productive teams of people.

Katherine O’Callaghan
Lecturer, Department of English

Dr. Katherine O’Callaghan lectures on James Joyce, modernism, Irish literature, and the role of music in novels in the English department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She grew up in Dublin and moved with her family to Western Massachusetts in 2015. She is the editor of Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism (Routledge, 2018, paperback edition 2020), and the co-editor, with Oona Frawley, of Memory Ireland Volume IV: James Joyce and Cultural Memory (Syracuse University Press, 2014). Katherine is intrigued by intersections between literature and other art forms, and between word and world, and she is completing a monograph on Music and Soundscape in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. She recently published “The Riddle of the Brocken Spectre: Reading Finnegans Wake on the top of Croagh Patrick” in the James Joyce Quarterly. Forthcoming this year will be her chapter on the “Sirens” episode in The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes, and an essay entitled “‘The time had come to set out on his journey westward’: Solastalgic Modernism and the West in Irish Literature (1900-1950)” in Malcolm Sen’s groundbreaking edited collection with Cambridge UP A History of Irish Literature and the Environment.

Laurie Simmons
Assistant Campus Sustainability Manager

Laurie Simmons is the Assistant Campus Sustainability Manager at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also a graduate of the Masters in Sustainability Science program and, as a member of the original Paperbark staff, contributed to the vision for the magazine. Her work on campus centers around waste-diversion and student engagement with a long-term vision for sparking and nurturing a culture of sustainability across the campus community. She enjoys serving as a role model for living sustainably and sharing her knowledge and experiences with others to help affect positive change. When Laurie is not working on campus sustainability, she is a mama, through-hiker, and crafter.

Maria Williams

Founding Editor, Shape&Nature Press

Maria Williams is the founding editor of Shape&Nature Press and a longtime member of the English department at Greenfield Community College where she teaches writing, literature, and literary publishing in addition to supporting student voices through the literary journal Plum. Maria is also the author of the chapbook A Love Letter To Say There Is No Love, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and recipient of fellowships and grants from multiple residency programs and writers’ institutions. A heightened awareness of nature, animals, and the landscape exists in her poetry and prose as a way to explore the bond between human experience and the natural world.