The Team

Director, Military Experience & the Arts / JME Managing Editor

Travis L. Martin served two tours of duty in Iraq as a sergeant in the 51st Transportation Company. He holds an MA in English from Eastern Kentucky University, where he founded The Journal of Military Experience. Travis is a McNair Scholar, a Madonna Marsden Writing Award recipient, and was awarded the National Phi Kappa Phi Literacy Grant. His work as a veterans’ advocate and community leader was recognized by the Kentucky state legislature in 2011. Currently, he teaches and is a PhD student at the University of Kentucky. His research interests include trauma, autobiography, and war memoirs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His personal interests include finding ways to cuddle with his dogs, Buddy and Katie, instead of getting out of bed each morning.

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JME Poetry Editor

A past recipient of the Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Fellowship, Wanda Fries earned an MFA in fiction writing from Bennington College and a scholarship at Breadloaf Writing Conference. Her work has appeared in various journals and magazines, including The Michigan Quarterly Review; Sojourners: A Journal of Writing, Politics & Faith; The Louisville Review; and New Southerner, where she won the James Baker Hall Award for poetry. She teaches English at Somerset Community College. Her collection of poems Cassandra Among the Greeks is scheduled for publication in the spring of 2012.

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JME Creative Prose Editor

Brian Mockenhaupt has written extensively about the wars and veterans’ issues for The Atlantic, Esquire, Reader’s Digest and Outside magazines, which has included several reporting trips to Afghanistan and Iraq. He served in the Army from 2002 to 2005 and did two Iraq tours as an infantryman with the 10th Mountain Division. Prior to the Army, he worked as a newspaper reporter in Providence, Rhode Island, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He studied journalism at Northwestern University and holds an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College.

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JME Sketch Artist

Clayton D. Murwin, aka The Hero Maker, aka the founder of Heroes Fallen Studios, aka all-around nice guy, is currently working on two graphic novel projects: the first, “Heavens’ Gate”, is by novelist Jeffery Brown and the second is “The Spirits of All”, by Erica J. Heflin. Clayton currently resides in Timberville, Virginia and holds a degree in computer graphics and design. He works as a freelance artist in his spare time. His first published work in comics was “Mind Hunter Omega”, for which Clayton co-created and developed all of the art, inks, lettering, coloring while performing some story editing. Clayton is currently working on Volume II of Untold Stories from Iraq & Afghanistan, the graphic novel series that Heroes Fallen Studios produces to support our nations troops.

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JME Scholarship Editor / MEA Workshop Coordinator

When her enlistment with the US Army in Germany ended in 2003, Ami Blue pursued a BA in English with an emphasis in creative writing and an MA in English with a focus on American women’s life writing at Eastern Kentucky University before beginning a PhD in English at Michigan State University. She’s currently preparing to write her dissertation on nineteenth-century American Literature and psychoanalytic trauma theory, particularly life writing surrounding the Civil War, and teaching literature at MSU and Women and Gender Studies at EKU. Her academic research delves into the psychoanalysis of literature, bodies and body modification, film, and popular culture while her personal research investigates psychological trauma, health, and wellness.

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JME Art Editor

Dr. Tara Leigh Tappert is an independent scholar and an archives and American art consultant.  In 2010 Tara was awarded a research grant from the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design to study 20th century American military uses of arts-and-crafts making for rehabilitation, vocational training, and soldier well being,. Tara then launched The Arts and the Military, a grassroots organization that produced Arts, Military + Healing: A Collaborative Initiative at major cultural, educational, and medical institutions across the greater Washington, DC area.  She is also the exhibitions curator for Combat Paper Project. Tara holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University.  Her dissertation work focused on the late 19th and early 20th century grand manner American portrait painter, Cecilia Beaux, whose work includes sketches and paintings of war heroes from the Spanish-American war and World War I and  an unusual landscape of a countryside in France that was used by World War I officers as a training tool for recruits studying accurate artillery, machine gun, and rifle fire.

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Mariana GrohowskiJME Assistant Editor

Mariana Grohowski is a PhD student of rhetoric and writing at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). Her research examines the cultural ideologies and literate activities of servicemen and women of the U.S. Armed Forces. She earned her M.S. in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University.

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JME Features Editor / MEA Events Coordinator

Jenny Bell’s fascination with the military culture began as a child, when she would listen to her grandfather’s WWII stories and help to edit his lengthy war memoirs.  Later, she would marry a soldier and begin her journey as a military spouse, supporting him through three deployments to Iraq.  Jenny holds a B.A. in English from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor.  She has worked as a college English instructor and writing consultant, and most recently, she served as the Editor for Unconventional Artists, LLC (Graffiti of War Project).  She and her family now live in Italy, where her husband is serving with the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade.

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JME & MEA Public Relations and Marketing Co-Director

Inge Bakker was born and raised in Amsterdam where she now lives and works in Human Resources. She began reading about the Second World War at the age of fifteen. The words combined with direct experiences with US and Dutch troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, inspiring her to take action on their behalf. Inge has volunteered with the support group “Tell Them Thanks” since 2010, writing letters to forward-deployed troops and taken on international leadership roles for numerous veterans support organizations. She’s also had numerous marriage proposals from her fans on Twitter and Facebook.

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JME / MEA Social Media Team

Jennifer Childress was born in Breaks, Virginia on May 4, 1953.  Her father worked in a CCC camp before serving in the Pacific in WWII. Jennifer is the proud mother of two children—Corey and Daniel—and, in fact, both children and their mother attended college together at Northeastern State University.  As a single mother, Jennifer joined the Air Force in 1978 to support her family and the constitution that made them free. She served four years, achieving the rank of SSgt before her discharge in 1982. Afterwards, Jennifer worked in security and as a secretary in a mental health clinic, where she ultimately decided to go back to school and become a mental health and substance abuse counselor. She now works solely as a volunteer for her church and family functions. Jennifer loves to play the guitar, sing, and write songs and stories for children.

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MEA Veterans Liason

Judy Britt-McNeely grew up surrounded by Louisiana pine trees and books.  As a child, she spent hours listening to the stories grown-ups told around the dining table and over copious cups of coffee.  Consequently, Judy now has a fiendish passion for two things: coffee and stories.  She has taught writing and literature for many years (no, she would prefer not to say how many….) and is currently at work on her doctoral degree through Indiana University of Pennsylvania.  Before joining her family’s tradition of teaching, Judy worked as an office manager and an insurance clerk.  She has occasionally written articles for her local newspaper between teaching terms.  When she isn’t buried under books on war fiction, she likes reading Michael Crichton novels, writing poetry, and rummaging through garage sales in search of unwanted clocks.  She is the daughter of a WWII veteran, sister of a Vietnam veteran, and mother of veteran of the war in Iraq and a former airman; her husband is a retired Army sergeant.  She loves lighthouses, the sound of the ocean, and riding the train.

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MEA Volunteer Coordinator

MAJ (R) William B. Howerton II began his military career by enlisting in the US Army in 1984 and after a brief separation in order to attend Austin Peay State University, retired in 2009 after 22 years of service.  Currently forming a non-profit organization, Horses Healing Hearts to assist Veterans cope with their PTSD using Hippotherapy.

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JME Consulting Editor

Deborah Core is a Professor of English and currently serves as Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Eastern Kentucky University.  During her career at EKU, she has taught composition on all levels, British and American literature surveys, and courses in modern novels and poetry.  In addition to a doctorate in English, she has a master’s degree in religion and has published a handbook of writing instruction used in many seminaries.  Most recently, her teaching and research have focused on the writing of war and especially the war memoir.  She has published in the D.H. Lawrence Review, Southern Quarterly, Kentucky Philological Review, andmany other venues.

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JME Consulting Editor & MEA Financial Director

Brett Morris is the Interim Director of Admission and the Associate Director for Veterans Affairs at Eastern Kentucky University.  In his capacity as the Associate Director for Veterans Affairs he has overseen the development of outreach and fundraising efforts in support of the Journal of Military Experience and the Military Experience and the Arts Symposium.  He created the Remembrance Day National Roll Call event on 11-11-11 in which 183 colleges and universities in all 50 states participated in a synchronized reading of the 6,000 casualties of Iraq and Afghanistan and has served as the NASAP Veterans Knowledge Community Region III represeantive.

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JME Consulting Editor

Lisa Day is an Associate Professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where she serves as Director of Women and Gender Studies. Her primary research and teaching areas are gender and nineteenth-century American literature along with African Caribbean literature. Along with articles in The Explicator and a chapter in a collection of essays on collaborative teaching, she most recently co-edited Journeys Home: An Anthology of Contemporary African Diasporic Experience. In 2011 she was granted the Eastern Kentucky University International Alumni Affairs Award for Teaching Excellence.

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