Our Authors
Carrie Olivia Adams
Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago with her husband and two cats. She is the Promotions and Marketing Communications Director for the University of Chicago Press and the poetry editor for Black Ocean. Her books include Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and Intervening Absence in addition to the chapbooks “Proficiency Badges,” Grapple,” “Overture in the Key of F,” and “A Useless Window.” When she’s not making poems, she’s making biscuits.
Sarah Adleman
Sarah Abigail Adleman was raised along the bayous of Houston with her two brothers. After working as a watch repair specialist, a project coordinator for a photographer, and a bartender in a downtown dive, she joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Bangladesh where she was stationed near Taliban training camps. She studied in Indian ashrams, taught English in China, and escaped arrest in Mexico for perceived prostitution. She earned her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso, where she lived for ten years, while simultaneously practicing as a Certified Yoga Therapist specializing in Traumatic Brain Injury. Her work has been recognized by Kindred Magazine, Terrene, and Glimmer Train. She is the author of the hybrid memoir The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother Echoes (Tolsun Books, 2019). Sarah currently lives in Colorado with her husband, dog, and newborn son.
Lisa Allen Ortiz & Sara Daniele Rivera
Lisa Allen Ortiz is the author of Guide to the Exhibit, 2016 winner of the Perugia Press Prize, and two chapbooks: Turns Out and Self Portrait as a Clock. Her translations and poetry have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Colorado Review, Beloit Poetry Review and The Literary Review and have been featured on the site Verse Daily and in the anthology series Best New Poets. She was born and raised in Mendocino County and lived with her family in Peru in 2013 and 2014.
Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban/Peruvian artist, writer, translator, and educator from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her poetry has appeared in the Loft Anthology, The Green Mountains Review, spoKe, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Solstice Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of a 2013 Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a 2017 St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award, and the winner of the 2018 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry. Previous translation credits include the prologue and epilogue for Ginza samba: Poemas escogidos by Robert Pinsky (2014) and translations of two poems by Duy Doan into Spanish for La maja desnuda (2019).
Madeleine Barnes
Madeleine Barnes is a writer, visual artist, and Doctoral Fellow in English Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series at Local138 in Manhattan, and teaches at Brooklyn College. Her debut full-length poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, was selected as a winner of Trio House Press’ open reading period, and will be published in 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks: Light Experiments, Porkbelly Press’ first ever zine-style photo chapbook, Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books in 2020, and The Mark My Body Draws in Light (Finishing Line Press, 2013).She is the recipient of a John Woods Scholarship to study poetry in the Czech Republic, a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets Poetry Prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize (judged by Paul Muldoon and C.K. Williams), the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, and the Three Rivers Review Poetry Prize (see publications). She was named an Emerging Writer by the Poetry Ireland Introduction Series, and Brooklyn Poets Poet of the Week.She earned a BHA from Carnegie Mellon University, a Masters of Philosophy in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin, and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, where she taught two undergraduate creative
nicole v basta
nicole v basta is a poet with proud familial roots in the coal mines and garment factories of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Her poems have found homes in Ploughshares, Waxwing, Crazyhorse, Epiphany, The Journal, Tinderbox, Ninth Letter, etc. Her first chapbook V was the winner of The New School's Annual Contest. nicole’s permanent address for the last few years has been her Corolla. She’s learning to stay.
Jennifer Battisti
Jennifer Battisti is a Las Vegas native. She was awarded “Best Local Writer” in 2019 by the readers of Desert Companion. Her chapbook, Echo Bay, was released by Tolsun Books in 2018. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Where We Live, an anthology of writing and graphic arts in response to the October 1 tragedy, Western Humanities Review, Slant, Thin Air Magazine, Coe Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Desert Companion, Helen: A Literary Magazine, El Portal, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been on exhibit in the Nevada Humanities program gallery and the Nevada State College program gallery. She is the co-director of and a Teaching Artist for the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in Clark County.
Erik Bitsui
Erik Bitsui, a Navajo from Blue Gap, Arizona, has an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Hostiin Bitsui lives with his wife and two daughters in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Jeffrey “Boosie” Bolden
Jeffrey Bolden (1987-2020), known as Boosie, was an alumnus of Chatham University’s MFA program. Hailing from many places, Boosie had a deep connection with the South which is demonstrated throughout his language, his poetry, and his creation. He didn’t speak on the sprawling pastoral beauty which the South is known for, but rather the hard-hitting stories of violence and crime with an emphasis on the music that comes from underground, Southern rappers. Boosie created A Collage of Song and Story, conceptual performance pieces that infused elements of fiction, non-fiction, spoken word, and poetry into a narrative told through lyrics of the rappers and other artists that had inspired Boosie so much. As he said, “This is simply my dedication to all of the lyricists that came before me.” Boosie passed away suddenly on June 23rd, 2020.
Angela Brommel
Angela M. Brommel is a Nevada writer with Iowa roots. In 2018, her chapbook, Plutonium & Platinum Blonde, was published by Serving House Books. Her poetry has been published in The Best American Poetry blog, The North American Review, The Literary Review’s (TLR) Share, and many other journals and anthologies. A 2018 Red Rock Canyon Artist in Residence, Angela served as the inaugural poet of the program. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University and an MA in Theatre from the University of Northern Iowa. Mojave in July is her debut full-length poetry collection. Angela is the Executive Director of the Office of Arts & Culture as well as affiliate faculty in Humanities at Nevada State College. You can also find her at The Citron Review as Editor-in-Chief.
Michael Buckius
Michael Buckius is a writer, filmmaker, and educator from Lancaster, PA. He earned his undergraduate degree in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, and his MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University. His work has appeared in Triquarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Maynard, and Ghost City Review, among others. His first chapbook, Future Sarcasm, and his first full-length poetry collection, Mustache in Plain Sight, are both available through Tolsun Books. He currently teaches at Arizona State University and lives in Phoenix.
Dani Burlison
Dani Burlison is the editor and creator of “All of Me: Love, Anger and the Female Body” (PM Press, 2019), an anthology based on her Lady Parts zine series, and “Dendrophilia and Other Social Taboos: True Stories,” a collection of essays which first appeared in her McSweeney's Internet Tendency column of the same name. She has been a staff writer at a Bay Area alt-weekly, a book reviewer for Los Angeles Review and a regular contributor at Chicago Tribune, KQED Arts, The Rumpus and Made Local Magazine. Her writing can also be found at Ms. Magazine, Yes! Magazine, Earth Island Journal, WIRED, Utne, Portland Review, Ploughshares (blog), Hip Mama Magazine, Rad Dad, Spirituality & Health Magazine, Shareable, Tahoma Literary Review, Prick of the Spindle and more. She lives, teaches and writes in Santa Rosa, CA
Robert Campbell
Robert Campbell is a queer poet living and writing in rural Kentucky. He is the author of Monster Colloquia (Hellbox Publications, 2020) and In the Herald of Improbable Misfortunes (Etchings Press, 2018). His poetry and criticism have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Collagist, Columbia Poetry Review, River Styx, Ninth Letter, Asheville Poetry Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Sundog Lit, Zone 3, The Adroit Journal, and many other journals. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, short-listed for the 2015 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest, third place winner of the 2013 River Styx International Poetry Contest, and previous winner of the Flo Gault Poetry Prize through Sarabande Books, Robert holds an MFA in poetry from Murray State University and an MS in library science from the University of Kentucky. He lives with his partner and animals along a winding country road with a great wealth of trees, goats, and old barns.
Elizabeth Chesla
Elizabeth Lukács Chesla is the daughter of Hungarian refugees and a mother of three. After earning her MA from Columbia University, she spent a decade teaching writing and literature in New York City, then moved back home to the Philadelphia suburbs to raise her family. She is the author of multiple books on reading, writing, and critical thinking skills and has served as a managing and developmental editor for nonprofit organizations including the International Committee of the Red Cross. Along the way she developed and taught online writing and literature courses for homeschoolers, became a yoga teacher specializing in support for hypermobility and trauma, and co-founded a weekly embodied writing group for women. She leads writing and yoga workshops, develops humanities content for educational publishers, and serves as an editor for emerging authors. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Quarter After Eight, The Tattooed Buddha, and Flare, a flash fiction anthology.
Morgan Christie
Morgan's work has appeared in Room, Aethlon, Moko, Little Patuxent Review, Obra/Artifact, Blackberry: A Magazine, and has been anthologized in BLF Press’s Black to the Future. Her poetry chapbook Variations on a Lobster's Tale was the winner of the 2017 Alexander Posey Chapbook Prize (University of Central Oklahoma Press, 2018) and her second poetry chapbook Sterling was released in 2019 (CW Books, 2019). She is the winner of the 2018 Likely Red Fiction Chapbook contest, where her third chapbook When Dog Speaks was also published in 2019. Morgan has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of Net and recently completed a Masters in Creative Writing.
Flower Conroy
LGBTQ+ writer and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy is the author of the chapbooks "Facts About Snakes & Hearts," "The Awful Suicidal Swans," and "Escape to Nowhere." Her first full-length manuscript, “Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder” was chosen as the winner of the NFSPS Stevens Manuscript Competition. Her poetry has appeared in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, American Literary Review and other journals.
Vanessa Couto Johnson
Vanessa Couto Johnson’s “Try the yen relish,” a sixteen-page prose poem sequence, was released in a first BoxSet from Oxidant | Engine in early 2018. Softblow, Thrush, Field, Blackbird, Cheat River Review, Cream City Review, and other journals have featured her poetry. Her third chapbook, speech rinse, won Slope Editions’ 2016 Chapbook Contest; her second chapbook is rotoscoping collage in Cork City (dancing girl press, 2016); and her first chapbook, Life of Francis, won Gambling the Aisle’s 2014 Chapbook Contest. A Brazilian born in Texas (dual citizen) and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is currently a Lecturer at Texas State University, where she earned her MFA.
Letisia Cruz
Letisia Cruz is a Cuban-American writer and artist. She is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program and currently lives in Miami, Florida with her boyfriend and two cats. Her poetry chapbook, Chonga Nation, was selected as a finalist in the 2016 Gazing Grain Press Poetry Chapbook Contest, and her writing and artwork have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Acentos Review, Gulf Stream, and Ink Brick, among others. She serves as resident artist and co-editor at Petite Hound Press.
Shome Dasgupta
Shome Dasgupta is the author of i am here And You Are Gone (Winner Of The 2010 OW Press Fiction Chapbook Contest), and The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India, 2013) which has been republished in the UK by Accent Press as The Sea Singer (2016). His first collection of short stories, Anklet And Other Stories was published by Golden Antelope Press in 2017. His novel, Pretend I Am Someone You Like, is forthcoming from the University of West Alabama's Livingston Press. His stories and poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, New Orleans Review, NANO Fiction, Everyday Genius, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. His fiction has been selected to appear in The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing (&Now Books, 2013). Shome's work has been featured as a storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Story, nominated for The Best Of The Net, and longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. He is a high school English teacher, living in Lafayette, LA.
Corinne Dekkers
Corinne Dekkers is a Canadian-American poet. Her writing has appeared through The Carolina Quarterly, Coven Editions, and Smartish Pace, and has been adapted for ritual, performance, and chapbook. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi and is Associate Editor of Mississippi Review.
Katy E. Ellis
Katy E. Ellis grew up under fir trees and high-voltage power lines in Renton, Washington. Her chapbook Night Watch won the 2017 Floating Bridge Press chapbook contest. She is the author of two other chapbooks Urban Animal Expeditions and Gravity (a single poem), which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She studied writing at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada and at Western Washington University. Her poetry appears in a number of literary journals including Pithead Chapel, Literary Mama, MAYDAY Magazine, Calyx: A Journal of Art & Literature by Women, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and the Canadian journals PRISM International, Grain and Fiddlehead. Her fiction has appeared in Burnside Review and won Third Place in the Glimmer Train super-short fiction contest. She has been awarded grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture and Artist Trust/Centrum. From 2014-2019 Katy co-curated WordsWest Literary series, a monthly literary event in West Seattle. She answers phones and files things for Public Health—Seattle & King County and lives on Vashon Island.
Margaret Elysia Garcia
Margaret Elysia Garcia is the author of the eBook Sad Girls & Other Stories and the audiobook Mary of the Chance Encounters, and a forthcoming collection of short stories published by Tolsun Press in 2022, Tales of Other Californias. She’s the co-founder and head writer of Plumas’s own Pachuca Productions—a Latina theatre duo producing original and social justice plays. She’s the author of several poetry chapbooks including: The Alzheimer’s Cul de Sac, When the Ground Tore Open, You in the House of My Heart. My work has been featured in the Akashic Noir Series Santa Cruz Noir, PM Press’ All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body, on Upworthy, and Juked, Catamaran Literary Reader, among others.
Jordan E. Franklin
Jordan E. Franklin is a Black poet from Brooklyn, NY. She earned her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton. Her work has appeared in the Southampton Review, Breadcrumbs, easy paradise, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2017 James Hearst Poetry Prize offered by The North American Review, and a finalist of both the 2018 Nightjar Review Poetry Contest and the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize. Her first poetry collection, when the signals come home, will be published by Switchback Books in Spring 2021.
Brandon French
Brandon French is the only daughter of an opera singer and a Spanish dancer, born in Chicago sometime after The Great Fire of 1871. She has been (variously) assistant editor of Modern Teen Magazine, a topless Pink Pussycat cocktail waitress, an assistant professor of English at Yale, a published film scholar, playwright and screenwriter, Director of Development at Columbia Pictures Television, an award-winning advertising copywriter and Creative Director, a psychoanalyst in private practice, and a mother. Sixty-three of her stories have been accepted for publication by literary journals and anthologies, she’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart, she was an award winner in the 2015 Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Short Story Contest, and she has a published collection of poetry entitled Pie.
Howie Good
Howie Good, Ph.D., a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from Thoughtcrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry, among other books. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.
Robin Gow
Robin Gow is the author of the chapbook Honeysuckle. Their poetry has recently been published in POETRY, Thin Air, and 45th Parallel and has won prizes from Brooklyn Poets, Negative Capability Press, and Fearsome Creatures Magazine. They is the Editor-at-Large for Village of Crickets, Managing Editor at the Nasiona and Social Media Coordinator for Oyster River Pages. Their chapbook, A Museum For That Which No Longer Exists was runner up in New Delta Review’s chapbook contest 2019 and his chapbook, Some Metaphor Are Self-Inflicted was a finalist for Glass Poetry’s chapbook contest 2019. They is an out and proud genderqueer person passionate about LGBT issues. They also runs a non-profit for transgender youth and does LGBT+ inclusivity trainings at schools, colleges, and health care systems across the country. They is a graduate student and professor at Adelphi University. They is the founder of Gender Reveal Party, a trans and queer reading series in New York City.
Allison Gruber
Allison Gruber is an essayist and educator. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Pithead Chapel, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Sonora Review, The Literary Review, Hippocampus, and decomP MagazinE, among others. Gruber’s debut collection, You’re Not Edith (George Braziller, 2015) was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She has also been a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her essay, “A Music in the Head” received a “notable mention” in Best American Essays (2015). She is a regular contributor to Flagstaff Live’s “Letter From Home” series. An earlier version of this manuscript was a finalist for Kore Press’ Memoir Competition, judged by Cheryl Strayed. She holds an MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and now lives and teaches in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Carolyn Guinzio
Carolyn Guinzio is the author of five previous collections, most recently Ozark Crows, a sequence of visual poems (Spuyten-Duyvil, 2018). Her book Spoke & Dark (Red Hen, 2012) was selected by Alice Quinn as winner of the To The Lighthouse/A Room of Her Own Prize. Her work has appeared in Agni, Bomb, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The New Yorker and many other journals. A Chicago native, she lives in Fayetteville, AR
Brittany Hailer
Brittany Hailer is a freelance reporter and educator based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She graduated with Master’s in Fine Arts from Chatham University. She taught creative writing classes at the Allegheny County Jail and Sojourner House as part of Chatham’s Words Without Walls program. She has won several awards for her creative work. In 2017, for PublicSource, she wrote a ten-part series called Voices Unlocked exploring how the U.S. penal system has shaped identity and life of many Pittsburgh residents. That series also aired on local NPR news station 90.5 WESA. For PublicSource, she has also covered stories on drug addiction, race, development, and motherhood.
Hunter Hazelton
Hunter Hazelton was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. He holds a BSED from Northern Arizona University and studied literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Writing from the age of six, his poems have been published by Best New Poets, Scribendi, Storm of Blue Press, among others. I Never Understood Religion Until I Learned Your Name is his debut collection of work. Currently, he teaches high school English. He was born in 1998.
Elizabeth Hellstern
Elizabeth Hellstern is a writer and an artist, working to make word as interactive as possible. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University. Her multi-genre writing work has appeared in Hotel Amerika, American Journal of Poetry, North Dakota Quarterly, Slag Glass City, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Tusculum Review, Inner Child Press and New World Writing. She is the editor of the forthcoming Telepoem Booth Anthology. Her artwork includes national placements of the public art installation the Telepoem Booth, where members of the public can dial-a-poem on a rotary or push-button phone in a vintage phone booth or kiosk. For more information, visit telepoembooth.com.
Jen Hirt
Jen Hirt’s memoir, Under Glass: The Girl With a Thousand Christmas Trees (University of Akron/Ringtaw Press), won the Drake University Emerging Writer Award. Her essay “Lores of Last Unicorns,” published in The Gettysburg Review, won a Pushcart Prize. She is the co-editor of Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers (SUNY Press, 2016), which won “Gold” in the Foreword Reviews INDIE award for 2017. She is the co-editor of Kept Secret: The Half-Truth in Nonfiction (MSU Press, 2017). Her essays have also received the Gabehart Prize for Nonfiction from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, and three notable essay mentions in Best American Essays. She was a finalist at the Zone 3 Creative Nonfiction Book award and the Pleiades Press Prize. She has an MFA from the University of Idaho, an MA from Iowa State University, and a BA from Hiram College. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Penn State Harrisburg.
Pete Hsu
Pete Hsu is a first-generation Taiwanese American writer in Los Angeles. His writing is featured in The Los Angeles Review, The Bare Life Review, F(r)iction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and others. He was a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and PEN in the Community Writer in Residence.
Caitlyn Hunter
Caitlyn Hunter is the inaugural Emerging Black Writer in Residence at Chatham University. She is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at Duquesne University with an emphasis in African American literature, Black food studies, Black comics, and other forms of popular culture. She is a Tin House Writing participant. Her debut book Power in the Tongue was published by Tolsun Books in June 2022.
Korbin Jones
Korbin Jones received his Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and his Bachelor of Arts in Writing: Creative Writing and Publishing from Northwest Missouri State University. He is a current candidate for his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing: Poetry at the University of Kansas. His poetry and translations have been published by Indolent Books, Obra/Artifact, Periphery, and Missouri’s Best Emerging Poets, among others. When not writing, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Fearsome Critters: A Millennial Arts Journal and the Assistant Design Editor of LandLocked.
Kimberly Kralowec
Kimberly Kralowec is an attorney and poet whose work has appeared in journals such as The Night Heron Barks, High Shelf, Star 82 Review, and Birdland. She holds an English degree from Pomona College in Claremont, California and lives in San Francisco. We Retreat into the Stillness of Our Own Bones (Tolsun Books 2022) is her first published collection. Find her at anapoetics.com.
Molly Kugel
Molly Kugel is the author of The Forest of the Suburbs (Five Oaks 2015) and has a forthcoming chapbook, gheasaibh : poems of Rachel Carson (dancing girl press 2021). Her poems have appeared most recently or are forthcoming in The Bennington Review, CALYX, the Mid-American Review, Cider Press Review and Subtropics. She recently completed a PhD at the University of Denver and is the Ecology Editor for Cordella Magazine.
Jake Levine
Jake Levine has edited, authored, translated, or co-translated over a dozen books, including Kim Yideum’s Hysteria (Action Books, 2019), which was the first and only book to win both the National Translation Award and Lucien Stryk Prize. He was a Fulbright fellow to Lithuania in 2010, where he served as program director of Summer Literary Seminars, taught poetry at Vilnius University, and started the Vilnius Bagel Project with Menachem Kaiser. For years he edited poetry at Spork Press with Richard Siken, served as the managing editor and editor-in-chief of Sonora Review, and currently is the series editor of the Moon Country Korean poetry series at Black Ocean. He received his MFA from the University of Arizona, where he was the only student to ever receive both the Johnnie Raye Harper teaching award and Warnock research scholarship. He is currently assistant professor of creative writing at Keimyung University in Daegu and ABD in the comparative literature program at Seoul National University, where he was a Korean Government Scholarship recipient. Beyond literature, he has translated various cultural contents, including the diaries of the Dansaekwha artist Yun Hyong-keun and song lyrics for the K-pop group ENHYPEN.
Kennia Lopez
Kennia Lopez received her MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College. She is pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
Pablo Luque Pinilla
Pablo Luque Pinilla is the author of the poetry books: Cero (Renacimiento, 2014), SFO (photographs by José Luis R. Torrego, Renacimiento, 2013) and Los ojos de tu nombre (Huerga & Fierro, 2004), as well as the anthology: Avanti. Poetas españoles de entresiglos XX-XXI (Olifante, 2009). He has published poems, reviews, studies, articles and interviews in Spanish media and Italian bilingual editions. Also, he created and directed the poetry magazine Ibi Oculus (ibioculus.com, 2008-2018), with the sponsorship of Ediciones Encuentro, and, together with other writers, founded and directed the poetry think-talk Esmirna (esmirna-poesia.blogpot.com, 2007-2012). He has participated in festivals and events of poetry throughout his career, among them the festival AmoBologna Poesia (Centre of Contemporary Poetry of Bologna University); the irish-spanish poetry festival The Well (Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid) or the season El Latido (Cervantes Institute of Rome).
Oscar Mancinas
Oscar Mancinas is Rarámuri-Chicanx writer, teacher, and PhD candidate. He was born and raised in Mesa, Arizona’s Washington-Escobedo Neighborhood. His published works include the poetry chapbooks Jaula and Roto: A Mex-Tape as well as the fiction collection To Live and Die in El Valle. Currently, he’s a PhD candidate in Transborder Studies and splits his time between Mesa and Phoenix.
Amber McCrary
Amber McCrary is Diné poet, zinester and feminist. She is Red House born for Mexican people. Originally from Shonto, Arizona and raised in Flagstaff, Arizona. In the small town of Flagstaff is where she discovered her love for Punk Rock and the Do it Yourself Culture. She earned her BA from Arizona State University in Political Science with a minor in American Indian Studies. She is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at Mills College. She is also the creator of DANG! Zine (Daydreaming, Awkward, Native, Girl) Vol. 1 and Vol.2, Angsty Asdzáá: Tales of an angry Indigenous womxn zine and The Asdzáá Beat. She currently lives in Oakland, California.
Chad Meadows
Chad Meadows lives in New Jersey with his wife and daughter and cat with a high pitched voice. He once dropped a 12-pound shot-put on his head in elementary school. The ground was wet and he did not dry off the shot-put after the previous child attempted to throw it. It slipped out of his tiny hands. Why were they asking that of these children to begin with? He has an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where his story Trivia Barker Can’t Lose was selected for the 2011 Director’s Award for Fiction. His writing has appeared on the Squawkback.com, Crack The Spine Literary Journal, Fixional.com and TLR Online, and in the upcoming Fairleigh Dickinson University Alumni Anthology. He has never been struck by lightning and has read at least 10 Hardy Boys mystery books.
Thomas Mundt
Thomas Mundt is the author of the short-story collections (Intentionally Blank) (Tolsun Books, 2019) and You Have Until Noon To Unlock The Secrets Of The Universe (Lady Lazarus Press, 2011). Representative work can be found in places like Wigleaf, Split Lip Magazine, The Austin Review, Cheap Pop, Four Chambers, Prick of the Spindle, among others. He lives in Chicago.
Sekyo Nam Haines
Sekyo Nam Haines, born and raised in South Korea, immigrated to the U.S. in 1973 as a registered nurse. She received her undergraduate degree in American literature and writing at the Goddard College ADP, and continued her study of English literature at the Harvard Extension school and of poetry with the late Ottone M. Riccio in Boston, MA. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken, Unlocking The Poem, and Beyond Words; and in the poetry journals Off the Coast, Lily Poetry Review, and Constellations. Her translations of Korean poetry have appeared in The Harvard Review, The Seventh Quarry Poetry Magazine, Brooklynrail: InTranslation, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Ezra, Circumference, Massachusetts Review and Notre Dame Review. Her translation of Yuk Sa’s poem “Dire Pinnacle” has appeared in The Massachusetts Review Anthology of Best Works in Translation and International Writing. Sekyo lives in Cambridge, MA with her family.
AJ Odasso
AJ Odasso’s poetry, essays, and short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies since 2005. Their first full poetry collection, Things Being What They Are, an earlier version of The Sting of It, was shortlisted for the 2017 Sexton Prize. The Sting of It was published by Tolsun Books and won Best LGBT in the 2019 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards. Their first novel, The Pursued and the Pursuing, will be published in September 2021 by DartFrog Blue, the traditional publishing imprint of DartFrog Books. AJ holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Boston University. They teach at University of New Mexico and Central New Mexico Community College. They have served as Senior Poetry Editor at Strange Horizons magazine since 2012.
Shawnte Orion & Jia Oak Baker
Shawnte Orion attended Paradise Valley Community College for one day. He is the author of two recent collections of poetry: The Existentialist Cookbook (NYQBooks) and Faithful as the Ground (Five Oaks Press). His poems appear in The Threepenny Review, Barrelhouse, New York Quarterly, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. He serves on the editorial board for Rinky Dink Press and has performed in bookstores, bars, universities, hair salons, museums, and laundromats. Visit batteredhive.blogspot.com.
Jia Oak Baker's poetry chapbooks include Crash Landing in the Plaza of an Unknown City (Dancing Girl Press) and Well Enough to Travel (Five Oaks Press). Her photography can be seen in *82 review, Lime Hawk, Shrew, Rascal, Thimble Literary Magazine, Stirring: A Literary Collection, A Dozen Nothing, and elsewhere. Jia received a 2015 grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and has been awarded residencies from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and Hedgebrook. See more on Instagram @violetsky29.
Steven Ostrowski &
Benjamin Ostrowski
Benjamin Ostrowski is a current PhD student studying Organizational Behavior at Carnegie Mellon University. He has poems published in The Gyroscope Review, Blue Muse, weirderary, The Dark River Review, An Anthology of Emerging Poets, and The American Journal of Poetry. With his father, Steven Ostrowski, he has published a collaborative chapbook called Seen/unseen.
Steven Ostrowski is a poet, fiction writer, painter and songwriter. In 2009, he won Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Award for a single poem. In 2017, he won The Atlantic Road Prize for his long poem, After the Tate Modern, which will be published as a chapbook by Island Verse Editions in 2018. He has published four previous chapbooks, and his work appears widely in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. He teaches in the English Department at Central Connecticut State University.
Eric Paul
Eric Paul is a writer and musician from Providence, Rhode Island. He has been the lyricist and vocalist for the bands Arab On Radar and The Chinese Stars, Doomsday Student, as well as his current band, Psychic Graveyard. Eric has released two full-length volumes of poetry and lyrics: I Offered Myself As The Sea and A Popular Place To Explode, both published by Wesley Eisold’s Heartworm Press. In 2017, Eric was the recipient of the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts Fellowship Award in Poetry. Eric holds a BFA in Philosophy from Rhode Island College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. His work has also appeared in such places as: New York Observer, Impose Magazine, Ninth Letter, The Volta, Word Riot, Lunch Ticket, Spork, Booth, and The Literary Review
Madari Pendas
Madari Pendas is a writer, painter, and poet living in Miami. She has received literary awards from Florida International University, in the categories of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, as well as the 2020 Arkana Editor's Choice Award for Creative Non-fiction. Her work has appeared in Minerva Rising, Pank Magazine, Lambda Literary, Jai-Alai Books, Sinister Wisdom, and more. She was the FIU 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize winner. Her chapbook book, Crossing the Hyphen, will debut in February 2022 with Tolsun Books.
Colin Pope
Colin Pope grew up in the Adirondacks. His poetry, essays, and criticism have appeared in journals such as Slate, Best New Poets, Los Angeles Review, Rattle, Willow Springs, and Denver Quarterly, and his manuscript Prayer Book for an American God was named a finalist for the 2018 Louise Bogan Award. He’s the recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, as well as residencies and scholarships from The Vermont Studio Center, Gemini Ink, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Round Top Poetry Festival, and others. Colin holds an MFA from Texas State University and is currently a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University. He works on the editorial staffs of Cimmaron Review and Nimrod International.
Elizabeth Quiñones-Zaldaña
Quiñones-Zaldaña earned a B.A. in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her poetry has been published in From Snowcaps to Desert Flats: An Anthology of Latino Writers in Nevada; Legs of Tumbleweeds, Wings of Lace: An Anthology of Literature by Nevada Women; Clark: Poetry from Clark County, Nevada; and 300 Days of Sun. Her poetry has also been featured in visual art exhibits through the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery and the Las Vegas Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Elizabeth has served as a judge for the Nevada Arts Council's 2017 youth Poetry Out Loud Recitation Competition, as a panelist for the Las Vegas Book Festival's 2018 "Heart of Poetry: Nevada Voices," and as a poet-educator through other Nevada Arts Council and Nevada Humanities educational programs. She lives in southern Nevada with her husband and three children.
Tazio Ruffilo
Tazio Ruffilo is a born and bred product of Paterson, New Jersey, where he was raised by his jack-of-all-arts dad, undefeatable mom, and desperado big sister. The different hats he’s worn and the cast of characters in his hometown are major influences on his writing. On most weekends you can find him chasing his kids around a park, trying to convince his beautiful baby-mama, Stephany, that Rocket is a suitable name for their next child.
Sarah Sala
SARAH SALA is a poet, educator, and native Michigander. A chapbook of her selected poetry, The Ghost Assembly Line, was published by Finishing Line Press in Spring 2016. Her poem “Hydrogen” was featured in the “Elements” episode of NPR's hit show Radiolab in collaboration with Emotive Fruition. She is the founder of the free poetry workshop, Office Hours, which fosters community among adjunct instructors, and co-produces AmpLit Fest in conjunction with Summer on the Hudson. Currently, she’s Assistant Poetry Editor at the Bellevue Literary Review.
Sarah's awards and honors include: an Academy of American Poets University & College Prize, the Marjorie Rapport Award for Poetry, an Avery Hopwood Award for Nonfiction, and a Roy W. Cowden Memorial Fellowship. She earned her MFA in Poetry from New York University in 2012. She is a 2019 Poets House Fellow, as well as a 2016 & 2018 Home School Fellow. Her work appears in BOMB, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southampton Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and Atlas Review, among others. Sarah is a language lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, and lives in Manhattan.
Johnny Salas
Johnny Salas is a photographer based in Phoenix, AZ. His photos have appeared in Hamburger Eyes and Waxwing.
Jesse Sensibar
Jesse Sensibar is unafraid to die but terrified of dying alone. He loves big bore handguns with short barrels; the clean, uncluttered lines of old outlaw choppers, old pawn jewelry, and small fuzzy critters with equal abandon. He has a soft spot in his heart for The Virgin of Guadalupe, tide pools, house cats, quiet bars, innocent strippers, and jaded children. He has worked as a mechanic, heavy equipment operator, strip club bouncer, repossession agent, tattoo shop owner, private investigator, tow truck driver, snow plow operator, wildland firefighter, and college English teacher. He received an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Northern Arizona University. He currently resides in Flagstaff, Az and Tucson, Az.
Frankie Soto
Frankie A Soto is a 2x winner of the Multicultural Poet of the year award from the National Spoken Word Poetry Awards in Chicago. His (New York Times) performance called him an absolute force. He’s been featured on ABC news & his HIV poem “Guessing Game” was nominated & premiered at the Atlanta Hip Hop Festival. His poem “Spanglish” is widely used as part of the curriculum at Colleges/ Universities around the country. He's featured & Keynoted at over 150 Colleges/Universities across the country . Petrichor was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Hudson Prize with Black Lawrence Press & was a top three finalist for the 2021 Sexton Prize with Black Spring Press in London.
Donna Steiner
Donna Steiner’s writing has been published in literary journals including The Sun, Fourth River, Radar Poetry, Under the Gum Tree, Brevity, and Stone Canoe. She teaches at the State University of New York. A chapbook, Elements, was released by Sweet Publications.
Sarah Anne Strickley
Sarah Anne Strickley is the author of the short story collection, Incendiary Devices: Stories (forthcoming from Tolsun Books), the novella, Sister (Summer Camp Publishing, 2021), and the short story collection, Fall Together (Gold Wake Press, 2018). She’s a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowship, an Ohio Arts grant, a Glenn Schaeffer Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters, the Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize for Prose and other honors. Her stories and essays have appeared in Oxford American, A Public Space, Witness, Harvard Review, Gulf Coast, The Southeast Review, The Normal School, Ninth Letter, Hotel Amerika, Copper Nickel, storySouth and elsewhere. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and earned her PhD from the University of Cincinnati. She’s an Assistant Professor of creative writing at the University of Louisville and serves as faculty editor of Miracle Monocle, UofL’s award-winning literary journal.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. Her most recent book of poetry The Ruined Elegance (2016), published by Princeton University Press, was a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and one of Library Journal’s “Best Books 2015: Poetry.” Her work includes two earlier collections, My Funeral Gondola (2013) and Water the Moon (2010), and several books of translation of contemporary Chinese, American, and French poets. Shortlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry and longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, she lives in Paris and works as a zheng harpist and editor.
Gabriel Welsch
For nearly 15 years, Gabriel Welsch worked in the ornamental horticulture and landscaping industries in roles as a crew grunt, production grower, plant buyer, landscape foreman, and garden designer before working in higher education teaching and administration. He writes fiction and poetry, and is the author of four collections of poems: The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse, The Death of Flying Things, An Eye Fluent in Gray, and Dirt and All Its Dense Labor. His work has appeared widely, in journals including Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, New Letters, Southern Review, Chautauqua, Harvard Review, Ascent, and on Verse Daily and in Ted Kooser’s column “American Life in Poetry.” A native of Maine and a graduate of the MFA program at Penn State, he now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family, and works as vice president of marketing and communications at Duquesne University.
Cody Wilson
Cody Wilson teaches English in Arizona, where he lives with his wife and son. He has an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, where he served as poetry editor of QU. He enjoys making things with his hands, including wooden furniture, shadow puppets, and gestures of approval or disapproval. He has recent poems published in Juked, Juxtaprose, Southampton Review and forthcoming in Emrys.
Emilee Wirshing
Emilee Wirshing is a librarian and lifelong Nevadan. She earned her BA in creative writing and literature from James Madison University and her MLIS from San Jose State University. Emilee advocates for local poets and creativity in the community by hosting various Poetry Open Mic Nights and writing workshops through Henderson Libraries. She has served as a judge for the Library of Congress ‘Letters About Literature’ Contest, and was the founding poetry editor of Noble / Gas Qtrly. Her poetry has been published in 300 Days of Sun, Infinite Rust, Quiddity, Helen, and Thing. Anthologies Clark and Legs of Tumbleweed, Wings of Lace also include her work. Emilee currently lives in Henderson, Nevada with her grandmother’s spaniel.
Amie Whittemore
Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. As part of her laureateship, she founded Dream Geographies: An Arts Collaborative and Write with Pride, a series of writing workshops for LGBT+ teens in middle Tennessee. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.
Yin Lichuan
Poet, fiction writer, essayist, film director, and scriptwriter Yin Lichuan is one of the founders of the “Lower Body” Movement based in Beijing during the early 2000s. Born in 1973 in Chongqing, Sichuan province, she studied French at Beijing University before pursuing a graduate degree in filmmaking at École supérieure libre d’études cinématographiques (ESEC) in Paris. Her publications include several books of prose and fiction, such as a novel Bitch (2002) and a collection of short stories Thirteen Caprices (2003), as well as three volumes of poetry, Karma (2006), Wet Paint (2007), and The Doors (2015). Since 2006, Yin has devoted herself to filmmaking. She lives in Beijing.