Contributors

Estefania Acquaviva is a senior at Villanova University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish literature, with minors in creative writing and business. She grew up in her family’s printing press, El Comercio, in Quito, Ecuador. The passion she has developed for the written word was born at El Comercio, but she now pursues writing because of her love for it.

Heather Bell Adams’ novel, Marantha Road, was published in 2017 by Vandalia Press. Her short fiction appears in The Thomas Wolfe Review, Broad River Review, Clapboard House, Deep South Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, Gravel, and elsewhere.

Christopher Allen is the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins. His short fiction has appeared in [PANK], Juked, Indiana Review, FRiGG, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and others. Allen was both a finalist (as translator) and semifinalist for The Best Small Fictions 2017. A native Tennessean, he now lives somewhere in Europe and is the managing editor at SmokeLong Quarterly.

Cathy Allman entered the writing field as a reporter after attending the school of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. She never stopped writing poetry wile working in advertising and marketing, and eventually earned an MFA from Manhattanville College. She teaches creativity workshops at high schools and at her Connecticut office. Previous work has appeared in Blue Earth Review, The Critical Pass Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Peregrine, Pisgah Review, Sanskrit, and elsewhere.

Eleanor Altman is a writer from Chestertown, Maryland.

Ashlyn Arend is 24 years old and a Bay Area native. When she’s not scribbling in one of her many notebooks or tapping away on her 1920’s typewriter, she’s either knitting or studying foreign languages. You can read more of her work in issue #19 of Zaum magazine.

Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director, and as an art dealer when he couldn’t make a living in theater. He has 11 published chapbooks and two more accepted for publication, as well as numerous novels and short story collections. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines. He currently lives in New York City. For more information about his work, visit garycbeck.com.

Leslee Becker, the winner of the 2017 Rash Award in Fiction, is from Fort Collins, Colorado. Her stories have appeared in Epoch, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.

Trudi Benford is the Director of Creative Services at GMMB, a strategic communications firm in Washington, DC. Writing poetry is one way Trudi keeps her creative life vibrant outside of work. In 2017, two of her pieces were short-listed for Canada’s Magpie Award for Poetry and she completed her first full-length collection, I Want to Know.

J.A. Bernstein’s forthcoming novel, Rachel’s Tomb (New Issues Press), won the 2017 AWP Award Series Novel Prize, and his forthcoming story collection, Stick-Light (Eyewear Editions), was a finalist for the Robert C. Jones and Beverly Prizes. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, Tampa Review, Tin House (web), Shenandoah, and other journals, and won the John Gunyon Prize, Knut House Novel Contest, and Hackney Novel Award. A graduate of U.S.C.’s Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing and Literature, he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth and the fiction editor of Tikkun.

Tim Bleecker is a writer from Manheim, Pennsylvania.

Creighton Blinn’s writing has been published on three continents. His poetry has appeared in The Binnacle, Down in the Dirt, Goldfish Press, Census, Door Is a Jar, From the Depths and (forthcoming) The Helix Magazine. In addition, his prose story “The Fifth Day” has been serialized in the journal Zenite. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and performs his work regularly around the city. Among his featured performances are Son of a Pony (at Cornelia Street Café) and Poetic Theater Productions Presents (at The Wild Project). He was invited to contribute an original piece to the What the Hell Is Love? project. He is a founding member of the Brooklyn Heights Writers’ Workshop. His blog may be viewed at pacingmusings.tumblr.com, and he may be tweeted @creightonblinn.

Ace Boggess is author of three books of poetry, most recently Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017), and the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

Nancy Brock is the 2014 South Carolina Academy of Authors Fiction Fellowship winner. Her short stories have appeared in the literary anthologies Fall Lines 1, Fall Lines 2, and Broad River Review. She is a contributor to State of the Heart, Vol. 2 (USC Press). She placed third in the 2017 Clay Reynolds Novella Competition (Texas Review Press). She is an eight-time finalist or short-listed finalist in the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner-Wisdom Literary Competition

Summer Byers received a Broad River Review Editor’s Prize in Poetry for undergraduate work at Gardner-Webb University. From Forest City, North Carolina, Byers is an English major and a May 2018 graduate of Gardner-Webb University.

Pamela S. Carter studied with Joelle Fraser, and her work has appeared in Midway and Pamplemousse. She graduated with honors from the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law and practiced law briefly after graduation. Pamela now considers herself a full-time writer.

Jona Colson’s poems have been published in The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Subtropics, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

Scott Dockery was a young man once in Asheville, North Carolina, and is now an old man in Knoxville, Tennessee. He has been writing novels and scribbling poems for half a century but leaves them unseen on high shelves in the back of dark closets. He adores Thomas Wolfe and was sitting on the front porch of the Wolfe House in Asheville one day when he thought to himself, “Wolfe never left his tattered manuscripts to rot in closets.”

Hollie Dugas lives and teaches in New Mexico. When she is not writing poetry, she critiques novels and poetry in small writing workshops. Dugas has a knack for making language delicate. Her work was most recently selected to be included in Barrow Street, Fugue, Phoebe, Adrienne, Under the Gum Tree, Folio, Slipstream, Jelly Bucket, Tulane Review, Peregrine, and CALYX. Her poem “As You Are Drying the Red Chili Peppers” was a finalist for the Peseroff Prize at Breakwater Review. She is currently a member on the editorial board for Off the Coast.

Davis Enloe is retired from the South Carolina Army National Guard. After retiring, he graduated from Converse College’s MFA program (Poetry). His poetry has been published in Barrow Street, Cold Mountain Review, New Delta Review, Main Street Rag, Plainsongs, and others. His first short story “A Curious Man,” was recently accepted for publication by the Chariton Review. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina.

D Ferrara’s work has appeared in Green Prints, Stirring, and Crack the Spine. A screenplay, “Arvin Lindemeyer Takes Canarsie,” won the Oil Valley Film Festival Outstanding Feature Screenplay; and a play, “Favor,” won the New Jersey ACT Award for Outstanding Production of an Original Play. Three additional screenplays have been optioned, and several other short plays produced. Ferrara earned an M.A. in creative writing from Wilkes University, J.D. from New York Law School, an LL.M. from New York University, and a B.A. in theatre from Roger Williams.

Gary Galsworth grew up in the New York City area. He spent three years in the Marine Corps before studying painting and filmmaking at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. In addition to writing poetry, he is a professional plumber and a lifelong student of Zen Meditation. He’s published two books of poems: Yes Yes and Beyond the Wire. Gary lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Kathleen Glassburn earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Currently, she resides in Edmonds, Washington with her husband, three dogs, two cats, and a 50-year-old turtle. When not writing or reading, she likes to play the piano and horseback ride. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Cairn, Crucible, riverSedge, SLAB, and elsewhere. Her story “Picnics” was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Best Start contest. Glassburn is Managing Editor of The Writer’s Workshop Review (thewritersworkshopreview.net). Her novel, Making It Work, is now available from Amazon.

Eric Greinke’s most recent book is The Third Voice-Notes on the Art of Poetic Collaboration (Presa Press, 2017). His work has been published in The Aurorean, California Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, Forge, Gargoyle, Ginyu (Japan), The Green Door (Belgium), The Hurricane Review, The Journal (UK), Main Street Rag, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Pinyon, Poem, Prosopisia (India), Schuylkill Valley Journal, The South Carolina Review, The University of Tampa Review, and many others. His book For The Living Dead: New & Selected Poems (Presa Press, 2014; Simon Pulse, 2014) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He is one of twenty American poets included in the international anthology The Second Genesis: An Anthology of Contemporary World Poetry (Anuraag Sharma, Ed., 2014).

Judith Grissmer has been published in The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Alembic, Clare, Midwest Quarterly, Streetlight Magazine, and in other literary magazines. She has attended poetry workshops and classes at universities and writing centers, worked independently with instructors at those centers, and have participated in writers critique groups for over thirty years. She lives with her husband in Charlottesville, Virginia, and spends time on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where she enjoys beach walks, working with wildlife, and managing our vacation rental home.

Megan Nemise Hall teaches English at Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport, Tennessee. She holds an MFA from The University of Tampa and is a poetry editor for Driftwood Press. She has additional work forthcoming in Cider Press Review.

Carol Hamilton has recent publications in Paper Street, Cold Mountain Review, Common Ground, Calliope, Louisiana Review, Birmingham Literary Arts, Sandy River Review, Turtle Island Quarterly, Tipton Poetry and others. She has published 17 books. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has been nominated seven times for a Pushcart Prize.

Patricia L. Hamilton is a Professor of English at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. Recently her work has appeared in Not Very Quiet (Australia), Bindweed (UK), Red River Review, Illya’s Honey, The Windhover, Whale Road Review, and Poetry South. The Distance to Nightfall, her first collection, was published in 2014 by Main Street Rag. She won the 2015 Rash Award in Poetry and has received three Pushcart nominations.

Alani Hicks-Bartlett is a writer and translator who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a Ph.D in Literature and Gender Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She has won awards for her creative work, such as the Emily Chamberlain Cook Prize and The Dorothy Rosenberg Memorial Prize in Lyric Poetry, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Fourth River, Tweetlit, Continuum, and Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation.

Born Anniston, Alabama, Robert W. Hill now resides in Huntington, West Virginia. Hill has taught at many college and universities, with the most recent being Marshall University. He has published poems in Appalachian Journal, Ascent, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cold Mountain Review, Davidson Miscellany, EMRYS Journal, Grand Central Review, McNeese Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Old Red Kimono, Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Shenandoah, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere.

Aaron Hilton received a Broad River Review Editor’s Prize in Poetry for undergraduate poetry at Gardner-Webb University. From Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Hilton is an English major and a May 2018 graduate of Gardner-Webb University.

Lowell Jaeger (Montana Poet Laureate 2017-2019) is founding editor of Many Voices Press, author of seven collections of poems, recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Montana Arts Council, and winner of the Grolier Poetry Peace Prize. Most recently Jaeger was awarded the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award for his work in promoting thoughtful civic discourse.

Rollin Jewett is an award winning playwright, screenwriter, singer/songwriter, poet and author. His songs have won the International Music Software Trade Association (IMSTA FESTA) Award both in 2015 and 2016. Mr. Jewett’s feature film credits include “Laws of Deception” and “American Vampire”. Mr. Jewett’s poems and stories have been seen in several literary magazines and a short story “The Girl in the Forest” was recently published in Ghost Stories: An Anthology by Zimbell House Publishing. His plays have won several awards and have been produced all over the world. They are published by Lazy Bee Scripts. An avid photographer, Mr. Jewett’s photo art has also been published in several magazines online and in print.

Therin Johns lives in Seattle where she works as a writer. Her poetry has appeared in Calyx Journal, Eclipse, inter|rupture, and 5X5. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University.

Sharon Kennedy-Nolle, a graduate of Vassar College, holds an MFA and doctoral degree from the University of Iowa. In addition to attending the Sarah Lawrence Summer Writing Institute for several years, she was accepted to the Bread Loaf Conferences in both Middlebury and Sicily in 2016. She has also been honored to be a scholarship participant at the Frost Place Summer Writing Program. Her interests in history and traveling have informed both her scholarly and creative work.

Olaf Kroneman graduated from the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine with an MD. After interning at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Kroneman attended the University of Virginia to complete a residency in internal medicine. Kroneman participated in a fellowship in nephrology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He entered private practice in 1983. His interaction with patients and other healthcare professionals prompted him to write. His story, “Fight Night,” won the Winning Writers Sports Fiction and Essay Contest, and “The Recidivist,” won the Writer’s Digest short story contest.

Steve Lambert’s work has recently appeared in Into Emrys Journal, The Gambler, and Deep South Magazine. His story, “Love in Sahwoklee,” will be in the Spring 2018 issue of Emrys Journal. Another story, “Fishing with Max Hardy” won third-place in Glimmer Train’s 2015 Very Short Fiction Award. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net award. Lambert’s first poetry collection, Heat Seekers (Cherry Grove Collections), will be released in October. He has an MFA from UTEP. He lives in the uncool, unhistorical part of St. Augustine with his wife and daughter, works in a public library, and teaches part-time at the University of North Florida.

Lee Landau writes with raw honesty about her personal landscape, interaction with family events, those dysfunctional backstories. Her work has been published extensively and received many awards. Recent work has appeared or been honored by New Millennium Writings, Literary Orphans, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Bluestockings Magazine, Wisconsin Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, Broad River Review, Broad Street Magazine, and elsewhere.

After earning graduate degrees from the University of North Carolina, Richard Lebovitz taught college and high school English before entering the fields of journalism and professional conference planning. His poetry springs from his desire to seize on those fleeting moments of beauty the natural world delivers to our doorsteps and to share those experiences on an emotional level with his fellow human beings.

John Linstrom is a doctoral candidate in English and American Literature at New York University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review, This Week in Poetry, Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland, and The Reed. In 2015, Counterpoint Press published his centennial edition of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s ecological manifesto, The Holy Earth, with a new foreword by Wendell Berry. He also holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University.

Iris Litt has taught Woodstock Writers Workshops for twenty years, and has held writing workshops for the New York Public Library, Educational Alliance, and others. She has taught creative writing as an adjunct at Bard College and SUNY-Ulster. She attended Ohio State University and Universidad de las Americas, Mexico City, and obtained a bachelor’s degree. Litt currently lives in Woodstock, New York, and New York’s Greenwich Village, and winters on Anna Maria Island, Florida, which was the inspiration for her book Snowbird. She won an Honorable Mention in Winning Writers’ 2016 short story contest.

Gregory Lobas is an outdoor writer and poet living in the western foothills of North Carolina. He is a retired firefighter/paramedic, and is a partner in a blueberry farm, one of his part-time jobs that cost him money.

Sean Madden is an analyst at the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kentucky and a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. Recently, he was awarded the Emerging Writers Prize by The John Updike Review for an essay on the titular author’s short fiction. Other essays and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Dappled Things, Umbrella Factory Magazine, Alternating Current’s The Coil, and a creative writing textbook by Great River Learning. He lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada with his wife and son, and is currently seeking representation for his first novel.

Sarah McCann has been a Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has worked around the world. She has been published and has work forthcoming in such journals as The Bennington Review, Margie, The Broken Bridge Review, Midway Journal, The South Dakota Review and Hanging Loose. Her poetry has also appeared in Thom Tammaro’s anthology, Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Robert Frost and an anthology from the Academy of American Poets, New Voices. Her translations from the Modern Greek into English have been recognized by the Fulbright Foundation with a grant and published in such anthologies and journals as Austerity Measures, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, and World Literature Today. She has also had the pleasure to edit a collection of poetry from the late American poet Robert Lax, Tertium Quid, and a book of her translations of the Greek poet Maria Laina is forthcoming from World Poetry Books through the University of Connecticut.

Kevin J. McDaniel lives in Pulaski, Virginia, with his wife, two daughters, and two old chocolate Labs. To date, his work has appeared, or forthcoming, in Appalachian Heritage Writers Symposium, Artemis Journal, Broad River Review, Clinch Mountain Review, Common Ground Review, Floyd County Moonshine, Freshwater Literary Journal, GFT Press, Gravel, JuxtaProse, The Cape Rock, The Main Street Rag, and others. His recent chapbook, Family Talks, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017.

Alex McIntosh lives and writes in Kentucky, her favorite place in the world. She received her B.A. in Recreation with an Emphasis in Adventure Leadership from Asbury University, and is currently working on her M.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Northern Kentucky University, and her MFA in Poetry from Miami University. The woods are her favorite place to walk, think, sing, and sleep. You can find photos of her poodle named Grizzly Bear on Instagram @the_real_alexmac

Sarah Merrow grew up in New England and now lives in Baltimore. Her chapbook Unpacking the China won the QuillsEdge Press 2016 chapbook competition. She has twice been a finalist for the Rash Award for Poetry, and received an honorable mention in the 2016 Passager poetry contest. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Passager, Broad River Review, A Quiet Courage, The Courtship of Winds, and WORDPEACE, and she has published essays in The Flutist Quarterly, a trade magazine. In addition to writing poetry, she restores and repairs concert flutes for professional flutists.

Catherine Moore is the author of three chapbooks and the forthcoming Ulla! Ulla! (Main Street Rag Publishing). Her work appears in Tahoma Literary Review, Caesura, Tishman Review, Southampton Review, Still: the Journal, Mid-American Review and in various anthologies. She’s been awarded a Walker Percy and a Hambidge fellowship, her honors also include the Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, a Nashville MetroArts grant, inclusion in the juried “Best Small Fictions of 2015,” as well as Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. Catherine holds a MFA in creative writing and teaches at a community college. She’s tweetable @CatPoetic.

Mallory Moore is co-winner of the 2018 J. Calvin Koonts Poetry Award for senior English majors and minors at Gardner-Webb University. From Maurertown, Virginia, Moore is a May 2018 graduate of Gardner-Webb University.

Cameron Morse taught and studied in China. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2014, he is currently a third-year MFA candidate at UMKC and lives with his wife, Lili, and newborn son, Theodore Ian, in Blue Springs, Missouri. His poems have been or will be published in over 50 different magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, South Dakota Review, Fourth & Sycamore and TYPO. His first collection, Fall Risk, is coming out in January from Glass Lyre Press.

Ray Morrison’s debut collection of short stories, In a World of Small Truths, was published in November of 2012. His short stories have appeared in Ecotone, Beloit Fiction Journal, StorySouth, FictionSoutheast, Carve Magazine, and others.

Stephany L. Newberry-Davis is from Eastern North Carolina and now lives outside of Asheville, North Carolina with her husband and their six children. A graduate of Western Carolina University, she works full-time as an online English professor. She is a member of the Great Smokies Writing Program and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. “The Seahorse,” a 2016 Doris Betts Fiction Prize Finalist and Honorable Mention Winner for The Writers’ Workshop of Asheville 2017 Literary Fiction Contest, was her first publication and finalist for the 2016 Rash Award in Fiction.

Jeanne Obbard received her bachelor’s degree in feminist and gender studies from Bryn Mawr College, and works in clinical trial management. She was granted a Leeway Seedling Award for Emerging Artists in 2001. Her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, Cider Press Review, and The Rumpus. She can be found on the web at jeanneobbard.com.

Luba Ostashevsky is the managing editor of This View of Life, a magazine about human evolution, and a teaching assistant in the chemistry department at Hunter College. She has written for Aeon, Popular Science, Nautilus, among others.

Rosemary Peek is a North Carolina writer and artist living in the beautiful Appalachian mountains. She writes about her life and the world around her and reads pretty much anything she can get her hands on. She is also a photographer and a Lutheran Pastor.

George Perreault is from Reno, Nevada, and his most recent collection, Bodark County, features poems in the voices of characters living on the Llano Estacado. He has received awards from the Nevada Arts Council and the Washington Poets Association, and has served as a visiting writer in New Mexico, Montana, and Utah. His poems have been nominated both for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, as well as selected for fifteen anthologies and dozens of magazines.

Barry Peters is a writer and teacher in Durham, North Carolina. He has published fiction and poetry in Witness, Rattle, Sudden Fiction, Sport Literate, and elsewhere.

Diana Pinckney is the winner of the 2010 Ekphrasis Prize and Atlanta Review’s 2012 International Poetry Prize. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize five times. Cream City Review, Crucible and Persimmon Tree are among the journals that have given her awards. Published in RHINO, Cave Wall, Arroyo, Green Mountains Review, Tar River Poetry, The Pedestal Magazine, Nine Mile Magazine, Still Point Arts Quarterly, & other journals and anthologies, Pinckney has five books of poetry, including 2015’s The Beast and The Innocent.

Phill Provance’s poetry and prose have appeared in The Baltimore Sun, Crab Creek Review, decomP, Word Riot and others. Previously, he wrote for Wizard and InQuest Gamer before scripting MediaTier Ltd.’s comic strip The Adventures of Ace Hoyle. In 2011, Cy Gist Press published his first poetry chapbook, The Day the Sun Rolled Out of the Sky. His second chapbook, Given to Suddenly Laughter, is forthcoming in 2019 (Cy Gist), as is his first full-length work of non-fiction (The History Press). His critical essay “Warring with Whitmania” will appear in The Poetic Legacy of Whitman, Williams, and Ginsberg (PCCC). Among other honors and awards, his “The Stenographers Union” was also recently named one of two finalists for the 2017 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize by Diane Seuss. Phill is completing his MFA in Poetry and Fiction at West Virginia Wesleyan College. When not writing and reading, he prefers spending time with the best little guy in the whole world, his son, Ledger.

Eric Rampson is a Chicago-based writer who spent almost 20 years studying, performing, and teaching improv comedy before getting an MFA in Fiction from The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His comic book work is published by Lonely Robot Comics and Markosia. Fiction has been published in The Logan Square Literary Review, Trembles, Change Seven Magazine, Typishly, and The Matador Review.

Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, including The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

Hannah Ray is co-winner of the 2018 J. Calvin Koonts Poetry Award for senior English majors and minors at Gardner-Webb University. From High Point, North Carolina, Ray is a May 2018 graduate of Gardner-Webb University.

Aparna Sanyal is a writer, theatre producer, and award- winning furniture designer. Holding an M.A. from Kings College, London, she is a semi-finalist in the ongoing Fourth Annual Songs of Eretz Poetry Award, 2017-2018. A popular spoken word poet, she performs at events across venues in India. Her printed poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Poetry Breakfast, Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, The Visitant, The Same, Leaves of Ink, Califragile, Duane’s Poetree, and elsewhere. She lives with her three-year-old son and husband in Pune, India.

Joyce Schmid’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, and other journals and anthologies. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband of over half a century.

Laura Schulkind received her J.D. from New York University, where she focused on public service law, and has since been practicing for thirty years. She is a past president of a statewide professional organization, the California Council of School Attorneys, and is a sought-after speaker throughout the state on issues of diversity and equity in education. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bluestem, Caveat Lector, Crack the Spine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, The Dos Passos Review, Eclipse, Evening Street Press, Forge, Good Men Project, Legal Studies Forum, Light Journal, The MacGuffin, Minetta Review, OxMag, The Penmen Review, Pennsylvania English, Poetry Expressed, Reed Magazine, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Talking River, Tiger’s Eye, and Willow Springs. Her chapbook, Lost in Tall Grass, (Finishing Line Press) was released in May 2014.

Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

Maureen Sherbondy’s most recent book of poems is Belongings. She teaches at Alamance Community College in Graham, North Carolina, and lives in Raleigh.

Duncan Smith’s “Certain Inferences from Natural Phenomena” won the Crucible Writing Content and was published in the Spring 1982 issue of that journal. He wrote his first poem in over three decades while on vacation in Colorado in 2016. Smith is a librarian living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he is the Founder and General Manager of EBSCO’s NoveList Division. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he earned a B.A. in English (1978) and a Master of Science in Library Science (1980). “New Ground” was a finalist in the 2017 Rash Award.

Kerri Vinson Snell works as an assistant professor of English at McPherson College in McPherson, Kansas. Her poems have appeared in Mikrokosmos, Relief Journal, Ruminate, Oklahoma Review and Foothill: a Journal of Poetry. Prior to her poetry life, she worked for 15 years as a journalist.

LeRoy Sorenson graduated from the Loft Literary Center Foreword program and participated in the Loft Mentor Series. Main Street Rag published his debut poetry collection, Forty Miles North of Nowhere, in February of 2016. His work has appeared in Nimrod, Pirene’s Fountain, Naugatuck River Review, Cold Mountain Review and other journals. He was a finalist in the Naugatuck River Review’s 8th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest. Sorenson lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his wife (who is a novelist), where he is working on a second book of poetry.

Matthew J. Spireng’s book What Focus Is was published in 2011 by WordTech Communications. His book Out of Body won the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award and was published in 2006 by Bluestem Press at Emporia State University. Chapbooks include Clear Cut, Young Farmer, Encounters, Inspiration Point (winner of the 2000 Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition), and Just This. Since 1990, his poems have appeared in publications across the United States, including the Broad River Review, North American Review, Tar River Poetry, Rattle, Louisiana Literature, English Journal and Poet Lore. He is an eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

Lisa St. John is a high school English Teacher and published poet. Her newest endeavors include a memoir in progress and, of course, poetry. Her first chapbook, Ponderings, can be purchased at Finishing Line Press. She lives in the beautiful Hudson Valley of upstate New York where she calls the Catskill Mountains home. Lisa has published her poetry in the Barbaric Yawp, Bear Creek Haiku, Misfit Magazine, The Poet’s Billow PKA’s Advocate, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and Chronogram Magazine. The poem “There Must Be a Science to This” won The Poet’s Billow’s Bermuda Triangle Contest and “Mowing the Lawn” was shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize and later published in Fish Anthology 2016. When she is not reading or writing longer pieces, Lisa enjoys thinking out loud on her blog, Random Mind Movements at lisastjohnblog.com.

Max Stephan’s work has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Cimarron Review, New Mexico Review, Appalachia, Blueline, Lyric, Louisiana Review, Potomac Review, Rockhurst Review and Slipstream. Currently he is wooing publishers with his latest collection of poems entitled Mycology. Stephan teaches at Niagara University, specializing in Contemporary American Poetry.

John Stupp’s third poetry collection Pawleys Island was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press. His manuscript Summer Job won the 2017 Cathy Smith Bowers Poetry Prize and will be published in 2018 by Main Street Rag. He lives near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Jo Barbara Taylor lives in North Carolina. Her poems and fiction have appeared in journals, magazines, anthologies and online, more recently in Best of the Boston Literary Magazine and Broad River Review. Her most recent book is How to Come and Go, published by Chatter House Press, 2016. She is a freelance editor and writing coach, leads poetry workshops through Duke Continuing Education, chairs the workshop committee for the North Carolina Poetry Society, and coordinates a poetry reading series for a Raleigh independent bookstore.

Allen Tullos is co-founder and senior editor of the online journal Southern Spaces (southernspaces.org) and author of two books of American Studies: Habits of Industry and Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie. A professor of history at Emory University, his articles and poems have appeared in numerous publications.

Bill Van Every received his B.A. in creative writing from The University of Arizona. He received his MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Bill has published in numerous journals over the years. In 2004, Thomas Lux selected Bill’s manuscript, Devoted Creatures, as the Judges Choice to be published with Tupelo Press. He is currently finishing a second manuscript, The Dog Widow’s Howl.

Sarah Weeks is a writer and teacher from Blairstown, New Jersey. Her work has appeared previously on Typishly and in Projector Magazine.

John Sibley Williams is the editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies and the author of nine collections, including Disinheritance and Controlled Hallucinations. A seven-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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