Editors

Thomas Johnson, founder

Thomas Johnson is Editor-In-Chief of Union Spring. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey and studies in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at The New School. He teaches poetry and fiction as an education associate for Teachers & Writers Collaborative, New York, New York. His work appears in Cleaver Magazine, Valparaiso Fiction Review, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and others.

A native Texan, Johnson first graduated The University of Texas at Austin with bachelor’s degrees in journalism and film before enlisting in the United States Army to pay off his student loans. It mostly worked. He completed tours in Europe and the Middle East before returning home and later obtained a Master of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Johnson was reminded recently that ‘every conversation that is not directly about Capitalism is a conversation that abets Capitalism.’ This says something about his love for stories that explore mundane experiences, common suffering, everyday occurrences, and the miraculous joy of our human existence.

The following is an incomplete list of favorites and influences: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the stories of Raymond Carver, the poetry of Kenneth Koch, and the thinking of Slavoj Zizek. Johnson has a soft spot for anything that imagines a way out of our current predicament, and has recently enjoyed reading Honor Moore’s A Termination, Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, and former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya’s op-ed “How I Became a Populist” in The New Republic.

He can be reached directly at ts-johnson.com.

Brian Eckert, founder

Brian Eckert is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He has worked as a substitute teacher, farmhand, dishwasher, landscaper, gravedigger, cook, unlicensed forklift operator, and Graduate Fellow. Brian graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a BA in English and Creative Writing before earning a Master’s of Liberal Arts (MLA) from Johns Hopkins University. He hopes to pursue a career in academia.

Brian grew up in rural, northwest Indiana and will always consider himself a Midwesterner. He was diagnosed with leukemia in June of 2019, prior to his final semester of undergrad. He continued classes while undergoing intensive chemotherapy and proceeded to start his Master’s degree the following year, in August 2020. This experience both informs and inspires his writing and research as he continues to struggle with leukemia and the after-effects of the chemotherapy.

Aside from these experiences, Brian is also interested in how non-academic work informs both academic and creative writing. As a working student, Brian is constantly faced with the dissonant experiences of doing graduate-level research or teaching all day, while cooking or washing dishes in the evening. This has also informed his views on public education, academic culture, and accessibility to educational resources ranging from public libraries to graduate study. He looks for writing that can address these issues or reflect on the experience of students and writers living in and making resonance of these seemingly dissonant spaces.

As a guide, some of Brian’s favorite writers and poets include Ed Dorn, Frank Stanford, Mary Ruefle, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Valerie Hsiung, Etheridge Knight, and Amiri Baraka. His earlier interests include William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, and philosophic poets such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Celan. Brian loves the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Octavia E. Butler, Roberto Bolaño, and Albert Camus. He also deeply appreciates the locality of writers like Lorine Niedecker. Brian seeks out work that provides original and authentic reflection on experiences, either personal or shared, that can reveal and teach the reader something new about themself, or provide new perspectives; especially with the use of experimental, vernacular, or otherwise non-traditional language.