Staff Bios

Editor-in-Chief

M. Dean Cooper

Regular Contributors

Nicholas W. Adams

Ben Crofts

Sarah Dempster

James Dillon

Mark Eldridge

David Schwarz

Jay Shah

Ben Wahrman

Guest/Emeritus Contributors

Kristen Bates Andrew Berg
Rocky Blonshine Matthew Borgard
Eric Brown Vincent Cagliuso
Amanda Cherry Emma Connolly
Haden Cross Randy Cuneo
Saf Davidson Alecia D’Entremont
Mike DeRose Chris Fischer
Ryan Fitzmartin Alexander Gaultier
John Gauthier Tracy Gentile
K.J. Gray Doug Gregory
Thomas Harper Lance Henning
Becca Hughes Lucas Jackson
Avery Kaplan Adam Kranz
Michael Lind Timothy Maddocks
John Maurer Jonathan Maurer
James Mckenna Jim Mello
Mia Moretti Arthur Neis
Ashlee Nelson, PhD. B Petersen
Charles Phipps Pearlann Porter
Brandon Rhea Alex Richardson
Swara Salih Lisa Schap
Kate Sedor, Chris Sedor,
and Kristen Sereci
Mohammed Shakibnia
Timothy Swann David Tayman III
Brittan Tolford Héctor Vives
Chris Werms Tyler Williams


M. Dean Cooper

Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

M. Dean Cooper has roughly two decades of experience in imaginary journalism, depending on where you set the bar. He founded the Unofficial New Jedi Order Homepage in 1999 (just shy of his seventeenth birthday), which he ran until 2002, when he and the site were brought under the wing of TheForce.net’s Books and Comics departments. He continued at TFN until 2007, doing regular news posting and book reviews as well as developing the EU Roundtable feature in 2004. After 2007 he remained something of an armchair journalist, producing the occasional interview or research paper whenever something caught his interest (some of which can now be found here under the A long time ago tag), and in 2013 he founded Eleven-ThirtyEight to bring those varied pursuits back under one roof.

When not trawling Google Images for screencaps and book covers, Cooper is a part-time videographer and resident artist at the Space Upstairs, a performance venue in Pittsburgh, PA, and a full-time operations technician at a small Pittsburgh law firm. His personal writing can be found here, and highlights of his videography work can be found here.

@NoTheOtherLeft

Nicholas W. Adams

The Armchair Admiral

A lifelong Star Wars fan, Nick discovered at an early age his love of fast starfighters, massive capital ships, and all things fleet-related. With a history degree and a deep interest in naval combat, politics, and democracy (flaws and all!), Nick has been a part of the online Star Wars community since 2003, posting under the name AdmiralNick22 at TheForce.Net. An original Fleet Junkie and self-proclaimed world’s greatest Admiral Ackbar fan, Nick focuses on analyzing and cataloging fleet compositions, warship roles, planetary political alignments, and anything Mon Calamari. When not staring at screencaps of fleet battles and counting ships, Nick enjoys a good whiskey, good conversation, and good people.

@AdmiralNick22

Ben Crofts

Obiwomble’s Outlook

Ben Crofts is a philosophy and politics graduate who has been working in business support for regional government in London for over a decade. With wide-ranging interests in fantasy and SF and philosophy, politics and history, his interest in Star Wars is invariably filtered through a wide angle lens that factors these aspects in too. He is a regular contributor to the TheForce.net Jedi Council forums as Jedi Ben and at Millarworld as Ben the Obiwomble, although sometimes active at the latter in the persona of the Dealer, running Dealer Incorporated. Despite being a highly experienced administrator, he doesn’t own any capes and is happily married.

@obiwomble

Sarah Dempster

A Certain Point of View

Sarah Dempster has been a fan of Star Wars since preschool and spent many a day on the playground pretending to be Luke Skywalker. She has a lengthy opinion on nearly anything tangentially related to a galaxy far far away and will explain them at length if given half an opportunity. As a longtime participator in online fandom she is most interested in how media relates to and parallels real world events, as well as issues of representation. She is most interested in history, politics, the arts, and social activism and so tends to filter her love of Star Wars through those lenses. In her spare time she enjoys dressing up as fictional characters, indulging in her inner obsessive collector, and pretending to conduct the Star Wars score in her car. Though she was a movie-only fan for most of her fandom life, in the past few years she has begun wholeheartedly embracing the SWEU, from books to TV shows to video games.

@SarahDemp

James Dillon

DilDev’s Diner

James Dillon was watching Star Wars before he knew how to read. As a librarian, this clearly is a pretty big deal for him. His interest is mostly in literary analyses of the GFFA, queer representation, and how certain characters have reflected or affected him personally. James’ most impressive aspect as a fan is his ability to connect anything back to “Twin Suns” or Dexter Jettster. More of his essays can be found on his WordPress blog.

@aDillonDev

Mark Eldridge

The Works

Mark Eldridge has been a Star Wars fan since first seeing the suns set on Tatooine on VHS in 1998. Growing up with a deep and abiding love of the prequel era, he learned everything he knows about politics from Attack of the Clones. With the beginning of the new canon in 2014, his passion was reignited, and he saw the perfect opportunity to start to experience the galaxy in all its forms – movies, books, comics and television. As a literature graduate, he is particularly interested in the way the themes and characters of the saga fit together in these various media. He lives in the UK and is usually to be found watching tennis or organising bookshelves.

@quigonsmith

David Schwarz

Six on the Wild Die

David Schwarz, known as JoinTheSchwarz on the Jedi Council Forums, is a Spanish freelancer currently living in the United States and totes loving it. He earns money thanks to his questionable literary abilities and his slightly less questionable ability to get little humans to not kill each other. He came to love Star Wars thanks to the old roleplaying game and videogames and has had a (widely documented) love and hate relationship with the Expanded Universe for years. He’s also an avid roleplayer, having been a Game Master without pause for the last twenty years, and has multiple bizarre hobbies to help with his chronic procrastination issues. He’s also an indefatigably optimistic person, having less and less use for cynicism the older he gets. Some people are just weird…

@JoinTheSchwarz

Jay Shah

Imperial Court Circular

Jay Shah, who serves as ETE’s young adult and middle grade book correspondent, has been a Star Wars fan since he was very young. For many of his friends, he is the person that comes to mind whenever a new Star Wars news item is reported and he is the person they ask for commentary. His online presence centers around the Jedi Council Forums of TheForce.net, where he has been registered since 2000 and is the most prolific poster on that board. Known by the moniker GrandAdmiralJello, he combines an appreciation for history, art, politics, and culture with an almost unswerving dedication to the Galactic Emperor that often confuses many people. He is quite happy to provide grandiose propaganda that nobody should quite take seriously, not just because it’s fun but because it serves as a reminder that in fiction, as in real life, history is not a precise science and sifting bias and opinion from fact is a valuable skill. In addition to writing book analyses, he enjoys writing about history, politics, worldbuilding, and characterization. He writes his ETE articles in the royal plural for some reason, but will lapse out of it into regular first person to emphasize when something is personally important.

@admiraljello

Ben Wahrman

Sidelong Glance

Ben Wahrman, known as Cynical_Ben on the JC Forums, is a geek for Star Wars, history and literature. A Star Wars fan since the days when the OT was only out on VHS tapes, Ben was drawn into the EU in the Bantam days and (almost) never looked back. The only thing he enjoys as much as watching movies or reading is writing, a mindset that bleeds into his criticism of most media. Ben aspires to be a professional novelist, editor, or critic, but settles for being an amateur on the internet.

@BenWahrman