Mason-Dixon Publishing, LLP is a full service publishing house offering traditional print products such as books and chapbooks as well as Internet and multi-media products such as downloadable prose and poetry and books on DVD.
Mission Statement: Our Mission is to publish high quality material which will both enrich the lives of our customers and meet the need for uplifting, informative, and intelligent prose and poetry in areas which are underserved by mainstream publishing houses.
Ujjvala Bagal-Rahn has published in Nexus, Savannah Literary Journal, Forkroads, and in the anthology The Venomed Kiss. She has edited Chimaera, the undergraduate literary journal at Wright State University. She is a member of Zona Rosa, the writing group lead by Rosemary Daniell. As a practicing chemist, she is currently writing a nonfiction book, tentatively titled Devil's Water. It explores the environmental disaster in Bangladesh where arsenic contamination of drinking water is poisoning millions of people. Ujjvala lives in Savannah, Georgia with her husband, daughter, brother-in-law, and three cats.
Joseph DeMare has a Bachelor's Degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a Master's in teaching English from D'Youville College in Buffalo. He edited the literary magazine Orpheus at the University of Dayton, and has published stories in the Science/Environment section of The Buffalo News. Grant writing was his profession for many years, and he wrote grants that brought in millions of dollars for his clients. In 2005 he won a national short story competition sponsored by MARCON for his story "The Old Spaceman." Joe is currently living in the Toledo, Ohio area with his wife of 25 years, son and two dogs, Beagle-Boy and Helen Gurly Brown.
Joe and Ujjvala have been friends for more than thirty years, ever since they met in Centerville High School in Ohio. They were two rather shy kids in a school that had over 3,000 students. Even then, they shared a love of reading and writing through the creative writing club. After Joe moved away, they kept in touch, sharing their poetry and stories through a correspondence that continues to this day. Eventually Joe moved back and forth between New York and Ohio for college and marriage, while Ujjvala took her first job in Georgia, where she has remained with her own family for the past twenty years.
Joe was a campaign worker in Ohio for Obama, doing his part in the historic achievement of electing our first African-American President. He was inspired to write the account of his trek to the Inauguration posted in the Blog area. As Ujjvala and Joe talked about his piece, Ujjvala remarked that a collection of writings about the Inauguration would be a historical memento. This idea brought Joe back to his own dreams of creating a publishing venue as an alternative to the big players. After a lot of research and some false starts, they finally launched this web site. That is how two friends on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line created a company.
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