Category: Editorial Team

We’re thrilled to announce the addition of three new editors to the Smoky Quartz editorial team: Brian Evans-Jones, Fred Gerhard, and Ginny Masters.

Brian Evans-Jones is a poet and teacher from Britain who lives in Sharon, New Hampshire. He was Poet Laureate of Hampshire, England, before immigrating in 2014 to do his MFA at UNH. He won the Maureen Egan award from Poets & Writers in 2017, and his poems have been published in journals including The Café Review, Stoneboat, A Book of Matches, Riddle with Arrows, and Outlook Springs. He is an associate editor for The Poet’s Touchstone, and facilitates the Contoocook Writers in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. He teaches poetry online through his website The Poetry Place.

Fred Gerhard is one of the founders of the New Dawn Writers’ Group in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, where he leads monthly poetry workshops and open mics. He is the former editor of The Chelmsford Poetry Review and is currently an editor at Quabbin Quills, a nonprofit supporting New England writers. His poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, Asylum Magazine, Black Moon Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Friends Journal, Harpy Hybrid Review, Heavy Feather Review, Monadnock Underground, Pif Magazine, POETiCA REViEW, Sylvia Magazine, Wild Musette Journal, and other magazines and anthologies. He lives in a small town in rural New England with his wife and son. 

Ginny Masters writes creative and humorous non-fiction but also has a novel in the works called Dying to Live. Before retiring, she wrote Family-Life-Story-Book and held workshops that taught people how to creatively store family keepsakes such as documents, writings, pictures, letters, etc. Her inspirational non-fiction book, Above and Beyond Betrayal: God’s Healing for the Abandoned Heart, was self-published in 2018. She is also a winner of the Mazie Cox Reid Column Award in the Oklahoma Writers’ Federation for her articles under the heading “Mother-Blunders: An Embarrassing Collection of Maternal Miscalculations.”

We’re also pleased to welcome a new production editor, BJ Hertz.

BJ Hertz moved to New England in 2019 and is passionate about poetry, literature (in epic and short form), all things nature, and New Hampshire. As a contractual writer and editor who specializes in web and technical writing, she comes to Smoky Quartz from DailyArt Magazine. After editing state government publications for several years as well, she wrote articles for WikiMotive and published poetry, short stories, plays, and essays in academic literary journals and local periodicals. Her body of work aims to support the creative arts, inclusivity, and positivity through cross-generational endeavors.

We look forward to working with our new team members.

Deni, Deborah, and Linda