Leave Me Not Alone

Louis Flint Ceci was a high school teacher of English and speech in Benton, Illinois; an assistant professor and chair of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communica-tions at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley; a commercial actor and freelance science journalist in the Denver-Boulder area; and a software engineer for several companies, including Skype, where he helped design and implement a user interface for the blind and visually im-paired. His poetry is published in The Colorado-North Review and Impossible Archetype. His scholarly articles on linguis-tics and poetics have appeared in College English, Language and Style, and Literature in Performance.His short stories have appeared in Diseased Pariah News, Jonathan, and Trikone Magazine, and in the an-thologies Queer and Catholic, and Gay City Volume 4: At Second Glance. He has twice been a finalist in the Saints+Sinners: New Stories from the Festival short fiction contest, and was inducted into the Saints+Sinners Hall of Fame in 2017.He is an avid U.S. Masters swimmer and won two gold and three silver medals at the 2020 International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics World Championships in Melbourne, Australia. He won the Gold Medal in the Poetic Justice Poetry Slam at the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney, Australia.He lives in Nevada City, California.