Joel Peckham has published eight collections of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Bone Music (SFAU) and Body Memory (New Rivers). Individual poems and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Sugar House Review, Cave Wall, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Sun. With Robert Vivian, he is the co-editor of Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Poetry and Prose, recently released by New Rivers Press.

Rachael Peckham is a John Deaver Drinko Academy Fellow and professor of English at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. Her prose poems and essays have won prizes at Briar Cliff Review, Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, The Orison Anthology, Spring Garden Press, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in creative writing from Ohio University.

Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, Barrow Street, The Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere, as well as in numerous anthologies, including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). In 2018, he was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet, and traveled the Midwest in this capacity to teach Middle school and High school-aged students about the concurrence of grief and joy in literature. Atefat-Peckham is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems, (Seven Kitchens Press). He grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, and currently studies English and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard College.

Jack Ridl, Poet Laureate of Douglas, Michigan (Population 1100), in April 2019 released Saint Peter and the Goldfinch. Jack’s Practicing to Walk Like a Heron was awarded the National Gold Medal for poetry by ForeWord Review/IndieFab. His collection Broken Symmetry was co-recipient of The Society of Midland Authors best book of poetry award for 2006. His Losing Season was named the best sports book of the year for 2009 by The Institute for International Sport, and The Boston Globe named it one of the five best books about sports. Jack and his wife Julie founded the visiting writers series at Hope College where he taught for 37 years. The students named him both their Outstanding Professor and Favorite Professor, and in 1996 The Carnegie (CASE) Foundation named him Michigan Professor of the Year. In retirement Jack conducts a variety of writing workshops, welcomes readings, holds one on one sessions, and more.

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Jessica Cuello’s Liar was selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize and her manuscript Yours, Creature is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in spring of 2023. Cuello is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She is a poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches French in CNY.

Rachel Hinton’s debut poetry collection, Hospice Plastics, was selected by Emma Bolden as the winner of the Cowles Poetry Prize and will be published by Southeast Missouri State University Press in October 2021. Rachel’s poems have appeared in The Boiler, Cimarron Review, the Denver Quarterly, The Hunger, Salamander, and many other journals. Originally from Vermont, she holds an MFA in poetry from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA from Kenyon College. She has previously taught at the University of California, Irvine and DePaul University.

Devon Capizzi the author of the story collection My Share of the Body (Split/Lip Press). Their work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Tin House Workshop, and a fellowship from Emerson College. Their writing has appeared or will appear in Pigeon Pages, Foglifter Journal, Passengers Journal, Appalachian Review, Alien Magazine and elsewhere. They live in Boston with their wife and their two cats.

Corey Fant is an American composer, producer, recording engineer, and performer, engaging in numerous collaborations over the years ranging from acoustic and electroacoustic works for a large variety of ensembles and collaborators. Corey sculpts sound into art by blending traditional instruments and professionally recorded and crafted sounds with a focus on the belief that there is music in everything. Corey collaborates and releases projects under the moniker of HDA. HDA Productions focuses on projects that include commercial sounds and composed music for dance, theater, interactive art, ensembles, and producing and composing full albums. HDA Productions' most recent release is the LP, White Nose and Wallpaper.

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Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from American University. Previous publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Wigleaf, Booth, Strange Horizons, and CRAFT Literary. Her fifth book, Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection (www.CabinetOfWrath.com), was released in 2021 by Aqueduct Press. Connect with her at www.taracampbell.com or on Twitter: @TaraCampbellCom or IG: @thetreevolution

Christopher Gonzalez is a queer Puerto Rican writer and the author of the story collection I'm Not Hungry but I Could Eat. A recipient of the 2021 Artist Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, his writing appears in the Nation, Catapult, Best Microfictions, Best Small Fictions, and other places. He currently serves as a fiction editor at Barrelhouse magazine and spends way too much time on Twitter @livesinpages.

Kai Coggin (she/her) is the author of four collections, most recently Mining for Stardust (FlowerSong Press 2021). She is a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award and named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016, 2018, and 2021. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, CulturalWeekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, and many other journals. She lives with her wife in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.

Arden Levine is the author of Ladies' Abecedary (Harbor Editions, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Sycamore Review, Sixth Finch, and other journals, and have been featured in AGNI Online, The Missouri Review’s Poem-of-the-Week, WNYC’s Radiolab, and American Life in Poetry (selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser). Arden is a Foundation Board Member at Beloit Poetry Journal, a former Assistant Editor at Epiphany Magazine, and a Best of the Net nominee. She lives in New York City, where her daily work focuses on housing affordability, homelessness prevention, and equitable community development.

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Jón Özur Snorrason teaches Icelandic and literature at the upper secondary school level and together with his wife runs GULLKISTAN, which is an international residence for creative people. He has worked with texts from an early age in various forms: as a teacher of practical and creative writing, as a critic, as a reviewer, as a consultant and as the author of his own text. He mainly writes flash fiction, memoirs and poems as well as writing short plays. He has published his work in magazines, newspapers and collections. A book by him has been on the road for a long time.

Egill Bjarnason is an Icelandic journalist, based in Reykjavík. His debut nonfiction book, How Iceland Changed the World, was published by Penguin Books in 2021.

Remy Reed Pincumbe is an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas, though they’ve spent the last five months in Iceland writing about volcanos and vikings. They have work in Passages North and Strange Horizons, and can be found online @remypinc.

Chelsea B. DesAutels is the author of A Dangerous Place (Sarabande Books, Oct. 2021). Her work appears in the Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A 2021 Tin House Scholar and winner of the 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize from the Missouri Review, Chelsea earned her MFA from the University of Houston, where she was the recipient of the Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry. Chelsea lives with her family in Minneapolis.

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Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always and anthology A Harp in the Stars were published by the University of Nebraska Press. She is the founding editor of the online literary magazine After the Art and teaches in West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low-Residency MFA Program and Goucher's MFA in Nonfiction Program.

Amy Bowers is a Florida native currently living in Connecticut with her family. Her writing explores domestic culture, the insect and natural worlds, and manufactured places and spaces. She is currently working on an essay collection about growing up in Central Florida among amusement parks, alligators, and hurricanes. She holds an mfa from Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has been published in Bella Grace, Mabel Magazine, [pank], and Centered.

Chelsey Clammer is the author of the award-winning essay collection, Circadian (Red Hen Press, 2017) and BodyHome (Hopewell Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Hobart, Brevity, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Normal School and Black Warrior Review. She teaches online writing classes with WOW! Women On Writing and is a freelance editor. Her next collection of essays, Human Heartbeat Detected, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

Davon Loeb is the author of the memoir, The In-Betweens (West Virginia University Press, 2022). He earned an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Camden University. Davon is an assistant features editor at The Rumpus. His work is featured at Catapult, The Rumpus, Ploughshares Blog, PANK Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, CRAFT Literary, and elsewhere. His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Besides writing, Davon is a high school English teacher, husband, and father living in New Jersey.

Curtis Smith has published more than a hundred stories and essays, and his work has been cited by or appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Spiritual Writing, The Best Short Fictions, and the Norton anthology New Micros. His thirteenth book, The Magpie’s Return, was released last year.

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Allison Blevins is the author of Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021) and the chapbooks Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). Her book Cataloging Pain (YesYes Books, 2022) and her collaborative chapbook Chorus for the Kill (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021) are both forthcoming. She is the Director of Small Harbor Publishing and the Executive Editor at the museum of americana. She lives in Missouri with her spouse and three children.

Liza St. James’s fiction has appeared in New York Tyrant, Wigleaf, The Collagist, Heavy Feather Review, Tin House, and other publications, and her stories have been translated into Finnish. She is an associate editor at Transit Books and a senior editor of the literary annual NOON.

Ethel Rohan's debut novel The Weight of Him was an Amazon, Bustle, KOBO, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book, winner of a Plumeri Fellowship, Silver Nautilus Award, and the Northern California Publishers and Authors’ Award, and was shortlisted for the Reading Women Award. She is also the author of two story collections, Goodnight Nobody and Cut Through the Bone; which were longlisted for The Edge Hill Prize and The Story Prize respectively. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, World Literature Today, PEN America, The Washington Post, Tin House, The Irish Times, and Guernica. Raised in Dublin, Ireland, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Despy Boutris' work has been published or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, AGNI, Copper Nickel, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Currently, she lives in California and serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.

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L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer from Columbus, Ohio. She is a third-year MFA candidate at Indiana University, where she has served as Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review and Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers’ Conference. Her work, nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize, has been anthologized in Women of Appalachia Project's Women Speak: Volume 6. She is the recipient of the Indiana University Guy Lemmon Award in Public Writing, Appalachian Review's Denny C. Plattner Award, and second place winner of the Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize from PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and New Limestone Review. Her poems have been published or forthcoming in Tin House Online, Obsidian, Poet Lore, the minnesota review, Southern Humanities Review, Sheila-na-gig Online, and elsewhere. She has received support from Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and The Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow. L. Renée believes in Black joy, which she occasionally expresses on Instagram @lreneepoems

Jerry Mikorenda's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Herald, The Gotham Center History Blog, and the 2010 Encyclopedia of New York City. His biography America's First Freedom Rider: Elizabeth Jennings, Chester A. Arthur, and the Early Fight for Civil Rights was published in 2020. His short stories have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, BULL, Cowboy Jamboree, and Gravel Magazine as well as other journals. His historical novel, The Whaler’s Daughter was recently published by Regal House in 2021.

Diane DeCillis writes at her desk near Detroit, Michigan. Her poetry collection, Strings Attached (Wayne State Univ. Press) was a Michigan Notable Book for 2015, won the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Award, and was a finalist for the Forward Indie Fab Book Award. Her most recent collection When the Heart Needs a Stunt Double (Wayne State University Press, April 2021) was selected by Publisher’s Weekly as one of eight books for Weathering the Times: Poetry 2021. Four of DeCillis’ poems are included in the Writers on the Moon project to be launched to the moon on the Peregrine Lander, 2022 and will remain there permanently in a time capsule for the future.

Steven Espada Dawson is a writer from East Los Angeles, now working out of Austin, Texas. The son of a Mexican immigrant, his poems appear/appear soon in The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets 2020, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, and Waxwing, among other journals. He is a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.

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Laura Passin is the author of Borrowing Your Body (Riot in Your Throat, 2021) and All Sex and No Story (Rabbit Catastrophe Press). She earned her PhD in English Literature at Northwestern and her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, including Prairie Schooner, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Toast, Rolling Stone, Electric Literature, and Best New Poets. Laura lives in Denver with too many pets.

Kelly Grace Thomas is an ocean-obsessed Aries from Jersey. She is a self-taught poet, editor, educator and author. . Kelly is the winner of the 2020 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award and multiple pushcart prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, Boat Burned, released with YesYes Books in January 2020. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Best New Poets 2019, Los Angeles Review, Redivider, Muzzle, Sixth Finch and more. Kelly is the Director of Education for Get Lit and the co-author of Words Ignite. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband Omid.

Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Orange Blossom Review, Funicular Magazine, ONE ART, Kissing Dynamite, Passengers Journal, HAD, and EcoTheo Review, among others. His debut chapbook, I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He also serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at Solum Literary Press. He can be contacted at matthewjandrews.com.

Robert Fanning is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Severance (Salmon Poetry, 2019), Our Sudden Museum, (Salmon Poetry, 2017), American Prophet (Marick Press, 2009), and The Seed Thieves (Marick Press, 2006), as well as two chapbooks: Sheet Music (Three Bee Press, 2015) and Old Bright Wheel (The Ledge Press, 2001). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, The Atlanta Review, Waxwing, THRUSH, The Cortland Review, The Common, and many other journals. He is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University, as well as the Founder/Facilitator of the Wellspring Literary Series in Mt. Pleasant, MI., and the Founder/Director of PEN/INSULA POETRY, a resource for Michigan poets.

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Megan Pillow is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky. She is co-editor of The Audacity, a new newsletter by Roxanne Gay. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, Brevity, The Believer, and Guernica. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her two children.

Cyndie Randall’s poems appear or are forthcoming in The Minnesota Review, DIAGRAM, Frontier Poetry, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. She works as a therapist in a small town near Lake Michigan and is also a poetry contributing editor at Barren Magazine.

David James Poissant is the author of the novel Lake Life (Simon & Schuster, 2020), a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, Publishers Weekly Summer Read, and a Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2020. His story collection The Heaven of Animals was a winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a Florida Book Award, a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, One Story, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in numerous textbooks and anthologies including New Stories from the South, Best New American Voices, and Best American Experimental Writing. His books are currently in print in six languages. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters.

Ben Kline (he/him) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Author of the chapbooks SAGITTARIUS A* and DEAD UNCLES, Ben was the 2021 recipient of Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry. His work is forthcoming or can be found in THRUSH, The Holy Male, The Indianapolis Review, Limp Wrist, DIAGRAM, Hobart, Impossible Archetype, A&U Magazine, and many other publications. You can read more at https://benklineonline.wordpress.com/.

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James Davis (he/him) is the author of the poetry collection Club Q (Waywiser 2020), which Edward Hirsch selected for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Best New Poets 2011 & 2019, American Literary Review, Copper Nickel, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and elsewhere. His fiction and essays have appeared in NANO Fiction, American Short Fiction, and Cartridge Lit. He is a former writer-in-residence at The Mastheads and a graduate of the University of Florida MFA program in creative writing. He lives in Denton, Texas, where he is a Voertman-Ardoin Fellow and PhD student at the University of North Texas.

Treena Thibodeau's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Able Muse, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Pithead Chapel, and Barrelhouse. The director of the online reading series TGI, Thibodeau's fiction has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Tin House Summer Conference, and the Gulkistan Center in Iceland. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and resides in Queens.

Dr. M.K. Foster is a poet and Renaissance literature scholar from Birmingham, Alabama. Her poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review; The Gettysburg Review; Crazyhorse; Crab Orchard; The Columbia Review; Best New Poets 2017; Best New Poets 2019; and elsewhere. Her poetry has been recognized with the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, Pushcart Prize nominations, and Best of the Net nominations. Foster's academic research, the symbiotic counterpart of her creative work, focuses on spectacular monstrosity and horror in the natural world of early modern Europe, a vein of interests that has led to such diverse subjects as tree monsters, mass extinction, fossils, and Sharknado. Foster is “relieved AF” to have finally finished her PhD at the University of Alabama and would like to give a special shoutout to the TGI community for their love and support.

Kimberly Casey was born and raised in Massachusetts, though she now calls Huntsville, Alabama home. She is the Founder and President of Out Loud Huntsville, a nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring community outreach and activism through written and spoken word. She received her MFA from Pacific University in 2021. Kimberly was a member of the 2017 Out Loud HSV Poetry Slam Team and coached the team from 2017-2019. Kimberly has competed at Southern Fried Poetry Slam, CUPSI, Texas Grand Slam, and more. Her work has appeared in The Southern Women’s Review, Passengers Journal, and Lost Balloon, among others. Through Out Loud Huntsville and independently, Kimberly hosts and organizes a wide array of literary events such as youth poet meet-ups, storytelling events, workshops on craft, voice, performance, and everything in between.

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Kimberly Dark is a writer, professor and raconteur, working to reveal the hidden architecture of everyday life so that we can reclaim our power as social creators. She’s the author of Fat, Pretty and Soon to Be Old; The Daddies; and Love and Errors; and her essays, stories and poetry are widely published in academic and popular online publications alike. Her ability to make the personal political is grounded in her training as a sociologist, and you can find her course offerings in Sociology at Cal State San Marcos and Writing/Arts at Cal State Summer Arts.

Kara Knickerbocker is an internationally published writer and the author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press, 2018) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poetry and essays appeared in or are forthcoming from: Poet Lore, HOBART, Portland Review, Levee Magazine, among others, and the anthologies Voices from the Attic, Crack the Spine, Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets, and Dostoyevsky Wannabe Cities: Pittsburgh Anthology, and more. She won second place in The Nasiona’s Micro-Nonfiction tournament, was a finalist in The Lumiere Review Poetry Contest, and longlisted for the BIFFY50 microfiction award. Her poetry collections won first place in their category at both the 2016 and 2017 Sigma Tau Delta International English Convention. She was a finalist for the Enchanted Travels Travel Writing Award and was shortlisted for the I Must Be Off! Travel Writing Award. Her work has received support from Murphy Writing of Stockton University, the Gullkistan Center in Iceland, and the Arteles Center in Finland. Knickerbocker currently lives in Pennsylvania, where she writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University, and co-curates the MadFridays Reading Series.

Todd Davis is the author of six full-length collections of poetry—Native Species; Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited the anthology Making Poems. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs, Sycamore Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. He teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

Noah Davis grew up in Tipton, Pennsylvania, and writes about the Allegheny Front. Davis’ manuscript Of This River was selected by George Ella Lyon for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Southern Humanities Review, Best New Poets, Orion, North American Review, and River Teeth among others. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Poet Lore and Natural Bridge, and he has been awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the 2018 Jean Ritchie Appalachian Literature Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University. Davis earned an MFA from Indiana University and now lives with his wife, Nikea, in Missoula, Montana.

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Crystal Mercer is just a little girl from Little Rock , Arkansas. An all-around AfroCreative, Mercer is a Textile Artist, Actor, Activist, Poet, Playwright, Author, Founder and Creative Director of Columbus Creative Arts + Activism ,and Lead Designer and Merchant of Mercer Textile Mercantile.  Mercer is the recipient of grants from PEN America and the Dramatist Guild Foundation, which help her continue her charge as a storyteller and a keeper of the culture. She is a graduate of the Clinton School of Public Service (MPS). Mercer’s past credits include a number of plays, musicals, and performances in Arkansas, off-Broadway in NewYork ,and internationally in Canterbury, England and Accra,Ghana. She fuses arts and activism by using theatre, poetry, and textiles to tell social justice narratives, through merchandising artifacts of the culture and storytelling, with an emphasis of uplifting voices of color and making marginalized populations visible. A dedicated public servant, a woman of many creative talents, and the daughter of legendary late civil rights lawyer, Attorney Christopher C. Mercer,Jr., she honors the legacy of her father by using artistic mediums as a tool for empowerment ,education ,and social justice.  From Little Rock, Arkansas to Accra, Ghana, Mercer has made an international impact as an artist and an activist. A gem from The Natural State , Mercer is always looking for the next adventure that will unearth her poetic, textile, and dramatic magic. Activated by arts and activism…She knows, shows, and cares about what’s going on in the hood.

Kimberly Casey was born and raised in Massachusetts, though she now calls Huntsville, Alabama home. She is the Founder and President of Out Loud Huntsville, a nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring community outreach and activism through written and spoken word. She received her MFA from Pacific University in 2021. Kimberly was a member of the 2017 Out Loud HSV Poetry Slam Team and coached the team from 2017-2019. Kimberly has competed at Southern Fried Poetry Slam, CUPSI, Texas Grand Slam, and more. Her work has appeared in The Southern Women’s Review, Passengers Journal, and Lost Balloon, among others. Through Out Loud Huntsville and independently, Kimberly hosts and organizes a wide array of literary events such as youth poet meet-ups, storytelling events, workshops on craft, voice, performance, and everything in between.

2 additional readers TBD

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Kristin Brace’s poetry collection Toward the Wild Abundance received the 2018 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize (Michigan State University Press, 2019). Other books include Fence, Patio, Blessed Virgin and Each Darkness Inside (Finishing Line Press, 2018 and 2019). Brace earned an MFA in Writing from Spalding University and her work has appeared in a variety of literary journals. She makes her home in West Michigan.

A. H. Jerriod Avant is from Longtown, Mississippi. A graduate of Jackson State University, he’s earned MFA degrees from Spalding University and New York University. He’s received scholarships from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. His poems have appeared in Mississippi Review, Callaloo, Ecotone, Boston Review, Virginia Quarterly Review & other journals. A recipient of two Winter Fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Jerriod is currently a PhD English student and teaching assistant at the University of Rhode Island.

Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is the author of Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books, 2020) and the chapbook The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press, 2014). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Hobart, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Rust + Moth, Atticus Review, and Josephine Quarterly among others. A Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, she is a Phd student at Georgia State University and lives in Atlanta with her very loud family.

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Katherine Bode-Lang was born and raised in western Michigan, where she attended Hope College.  As a girl, Katherine was most influenced by two landscapes: Lake Michigan and northwest Washington, where her paternal grandparents lived and where her family now resides.  After graduating with a dual-degree in English and Women’s Studies from Hope, Katherine moved to Tucson, Arizona, where she worked for The Drawing Studio, a non-profit artists’ cooperative. Katherine moved to Pennsylvania to attend graduate school.  She earned her MFA in poetry at Penn State University, where she taught creative writing and composition and later worked as the Assistant Director of the Methodology Center.  She is now the Director of Education and Quality Management in the Office for Research Protections.  She lives in central Pennsylvania with her husband, Andrew, and their daughter.

Laura Donnelly’s second collection of poetry, Midwest Gothic, received the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press and was published in fall 2020. Her first collection, Watershed, won the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize. Her poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Passages North, Mississippi Review, and online at Missouri Review and Poets.org. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Oswego.

Ethel Rohan is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her just-published book, In the Event of Contact, won the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, and she's going to read an excerpt from that tonight. Born in Ireland, she lives in San Francisco.

Tobias Carroll is the author of the books Political Sign, Reel, and Transitory. He is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn and writes a monthly column for Words Without Borders.

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Linda Nemec Foster is the author of twelve collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry), Talking Diamonds (finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year), Living in the Fire Nest, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book). Her work has been published in magazines and journals such as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, Quarterly West, Witness, New American Writing, North American Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Verse Daily. Foster’s poems have also appeared in anthologies from the U.S. and U.K., been translated in Europe, inspired original music compositions, and have been produced for the stage. Her first commissioned libretto, Spirit of the Lake, will have its world premiere in 2022. She has received over 30 nominations for the Pushcart Prize and awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan, ArtServe Michigan, National Writer’s Voice, Dyer-Ives Foundation, The Poetry Center (NJ), and the Academy of American Poets. From 2003-05, she served as the first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan. In the fall of 2019, she was the poet-in-residence at the University of Bielsko-Biala in Poland. Her new book, The Blue Divide, was published in 2021 by New Issues Press. Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.

Courtney Faye Taylor is the winner of the 92Y Discovery / Boston Review Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2020, Joy and Hope and All That: A Tribute to Lucille Clifton, and featured in The Nation, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Courtney is the Poetry Editor of SLICE Magazine.

D. R. James’s latest of nine collections are If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press, 2017) and the chapbooks Flip Requiem (Dos Madres, 2020) and Surreal Expulsion (The Poetry Box, 2019). His micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free, fun, and printable-for-folding at the Origami Poems Project. James has taught college writing, literature, and peace studies for 37 years, and he and his wife, psychotherapist Suzy Doyle, live in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan.

Crystal Stone: bio forthcoming

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After a raising three children and a long, successful business career that took her all over the world, Heidi Seaborn started writing poetry in 2016. Today, she is the author of [PANK] Poetry Award winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021), Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press, 2019) and the Comstock Review Prize Chapbook, Bite Marks (2021), as well as chapbooks, Finding My Way Home (2018) and Once a Diva (2021). Heidi’s won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards. Her work has recently appeared in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, The Cortland Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The Offing, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU.

Nicole Bokat is the author of the novels Redeeming Eve, What Matters Most, and The Happiness Thief. Redeeming Eve was nominated for both the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction. She’s also published The Novels of Margaret Drabble: “this Freudian family nexus,” She received her PhD from New York University and has taught at NYU, Hunter College, and The New School. Her essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times, Parents magazine, The Forward, and More.com. She lives with her husband in NJ and has two grown sons.

Clancy McGilligan is the author of the novella History of an Executioner, winner of the 2019 Novella Prize from Miami University Press. His fiction, nonfiction and interviews have appeared in publications such as Cimarron Review, Slice Magazine, Columbia Journal, Santa Monica Review, Sycamore Review, Wigleaf, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, the Ploughshares blog, Kenyon Review and Kirkus Reviews.

Noah Falck is a poet and educator. He was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, and attended the University of Dayton. He is the author of the poetry collections Exclusions and Snowmen Losing Weight as well as several chapbooks including You Are In Nearly Every Future and Celebrity Dream Poems. He co-edited the anthology My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry, and has received fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, The Ohio State University, and Antioch Writers’ Workshop. His poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Poets.org, and has been anthologized in Poem-A-Day 365 Poems for Every Occasion. For ten years, he taught elementary school, and currently spends his summers mentoring young writers as a faculty member in the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. Now living in Buffalo, New York, he works as Education Director at Just Buffalo Literary Center and curates the Silo City Reading Series, a multimedia poetry series inside a 130-foot high abandoned grain elevator.

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Alonso Llerena is a Peruvian poet, visual artist, educator, and MFA candidate at the Bard: Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His current work, which merges interpretations of historical events and personal history, documents and honors the victims of the Internal Armed Conflict that fractured Peru from 1980 through the year 2000. He is a Tin House Winter and Summer Workshop alumnus. He has received fellowships from The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and Brooklyn Poets. His poetry has appeared in Cream City Review, Inkwell Journal, Magma Poetry, Pigeonholes, ctrl+v journal, and elsewhere. His manuscript La Casa Roja was a finalist for the Prairie Schooner 2020 First book prize in poetry, a finalist for the YesYes Books Poetry Open Reading Period 2019, and a semifinalist for the 2021 Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes.

Meghan Sterling lives in Portland, Maine with her family. Her work has been published in Rattle, Cider Press Review, Inflectionist Review, Glass: Poet’s Resist, Rise Up Review, Sky Island Journal, Literary Mama, Mom Egg Review, Enough: Poems of Resistance and Protest and many others. She is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review, a Dibner Fellow at the 2020 Black Fly Writer’s Retreat, and a Hewnoaks Artist Colony Resident in 2019 and 2021. Her collection These Few Seeds is out in April 2021 from Terrapin Books.

Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry, back-to-back finalist for the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 Glass Chapbook Series, and back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry 2018 and 2019 Chapbook Contests. Lannie currently holds the position of Managing Editor at Barren Magazine and is a member of the MMPR Collective. Her most recent poetry collection, Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, is available through Cephalo Press. She was named a 2020 Best of the Net finalist. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile.

K. Iver is a nonbinary poet born in Mississippi. Their poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, BOAAT, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere.

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Mary South is the author of You Will Never Be Forgotten, which was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize for a Debut Story Collection and longlisted for The Story Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Guernica, NOON, and elsewhere. She has received support from The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The Sewanee Writers Conference, VCCA, and Jentel and is at work on a novel.

Sarah Kersey is a poet and x-ray technologist from New Jersey. She is an Associate Editor for South Florida Poetry Journal, and is an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Columbia Journal (online), The Langston Hughes Review, The Rumpus, The Hellebore, The Harpoon Review, and elsewhere. Kersey will be attending the Tin House Summer Workshop in July, and was recently named a finalist for this year's PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship. She tweets @sk__poet.

Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, a small coal-mining city in China’s mountainous Shanxi Province. He immigrated to the United States when he was six and have lived in ten states and fifteen cities. His debut short story collection won the PEN/Bingham award, and his fiction has appeared in the New England Review, Greensboro Review, and Juked, among many others. He currently lives in Arkansas with his wife and pets.

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of two memoirs: Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl and The Glass Eye. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the New York Times, NewYorker.com, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore.

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Gibson Fay-LeBlanc's first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers. His poems have appeared in magazines including Guernica, The New Republic,Tin House, Slice, FIELD, and The Literary Review. His second book, Deke Dangle Dive, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in 2021. He serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland.

Toya Mary Okonkwo recently became the first Black woman to graduate from the TCU English Department with her Ph.D. of English Literature. Toya always includes her own personal perspective in all of her writing, drawing on her life experience and global travels to understand the places where Black literature and language intersect with the rich and deep cultural traditions of Africa, while also having its own unique and potent distinction because of our legacy and ancestral connection to slavery. A photographic interlude of her dissertation was included in the Dark Laboratory photography exhibit through Cornell University. Her Master’s thesis was a creative collection of short stories on her grandmother’s life and legacy in the Black neighborhood, Stop Six, in Fort Worth, TX. She's written on Beyonce’s Lemonade as a neo-slave narrative and the influence of the Persian poet Tahirih on Western feminist studies. She's also presented papers on Kara Walker and Toni Morrison’s Five Poems, the Black Women’s Club Movement, Mary Prince and a new poetics, and at times her own creative works.

Although she claims Memphis as home, Janet Dale lives in Georgia where she teaches first year writing at Georgia Southern University. In addition to teaching and mentoring students, she is a gender count volunteer for VIDA, a non-profit, intersectional feminist literary organization. Her essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in Hobart, The Boiler, Zone 3, Pine Hills Review, and others. Most recently she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (poetry) by Kissing Dynamite.

Christine Tierney’s first book, chicken+lowercase=fleur was published in January 2021 by Lily Poetry Review Books. Her poems and flash fiction have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Poet Lore, The Yalobusha Review, The Tusculum Review, Permafrost, Sugar House Review and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from The University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Writing Program, and a BA in film from Emerson College. She works as an afterschool director at an arts-based, non-profit afterschool program in Cambridge MA where she teaches kids how to embrace their weirdness. She is a funk and disco lover, as well as a wannabe comedian/photographer/pastry chef. Please note that her dream of being a pastry chef is solely based on her obsession with baking competition shows. She hardly ever bakes.

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Gray Jacobik- bio forthcoming

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of Green (Riot in Your Throat, 2021) and While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), a Kansas Notable Book. She is also the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018), winner of the Vella Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, SWWIM, Whale Road Review, Broadsided Press, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches high school English in Lawrence, KS, where she and her husband live with their dogs.

makalani bandele is an Affrilachian Poet. He’s received fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, Kentucky Arts Council, Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. Currently a candidate for the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky, bandele’s work has been published in several anthologies and widely in literary journals. The author of hellfightin’ and under the aegis of a winged mind, awarded the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, his poems have been most recently published or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and The Common.

Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, & neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. Their debut full-length poetry collection is Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey Press, May 2021). You can find Dani’s poetry in Camas, Figure 1, The Fourth River, LandLocked, & Tule Review, among other publications. Presently a PhD student at Oklahoma State University, they permanently reside in the middle of the Nevada desert.

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Susan J. Tweit--An award-winning writer and plant ecologist, Susan J. Tweit began her career in Wyoming, studying grizzly bear habitat—which meant collecting large piles of bear poop—coring trees to map historic wildfires, and researching big sagebrush and its fragrant communities. Tweit began writing after realizing that she loved writing the stories behind the data as much as collecting the data. She's written a dozen non-fiction books ranging from memoir and nature writing to kids and travel, along with hundreds of magazine articles, columns, and essays. Her “WildLives” nature commentaries were a popular weekly feature on public radio for over a decade; she has also been heard on the Martha Stewart Radio Network. Tweit has written interpretive signs and guides, scientific papers, and management plans. She admits to being a plant nerd focused on the intriguing lives and interrelationships of our indigenous flora. Her passion is re-storying this earth, and we who share the planet. When Tweit is not writing, she's most often outside eradicating invasive weeds—restoring nature, plant by plant. As a Quaker, she walks her talk, and she searches for stories in the Rocky Mountain region, wherever big sagebrush perfumes the air. Her thirteenth book, Bless the Birds: Living With Love in a Time of Dying, is due out in April, 2021.

Chloe Yelena Miller is the author of a poetry collection Viable (2021, Lily Poetry Review Books) and a poetry chapbook, Unrest (2013, Finishing Line Press.) She is a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities (2020.) Miller teaches writing at the University of Maryland Global Campus and Politics & Prose Bookstore, as well as privately. She has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Smith College. Miller lives in Washington, D.C., with her partner and their child.

M. Randal O'Wain is the author of Meander Belt: family, loss, and coming of age in the working class south (Nebraska) and Hallelujah Station and other stories (Autumn House). He teaches creative writing at UNC Chapel Hill.

Marissa Glover lives in Florida, where she teaches at Saint Leo University and serves as co-editor of Orange Blossom Review and a senior editor at The Lascaux Review. Marissa’s poem “The World Asks Too Much of Mothers,” published in Whale Road Review, is a 2020 Best of the Net Finalist. Her full-length poetry collection, LET GO OF THE HANDS YOU HOLD, was released by Mercer University Press on April 1, 2021. You can follow Marissa on Twitter and Instagram at _MarissaGlover_. She’s on Facebook at MarissaGloverWriter.

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Kari O’Driscoll is an author, speaker, and the founder of the SELF Project. Her writing explores the often challenging dynamics of parents and children. Her memoir, Truth Has a Different Shape, explores how her childhood in a family torn by divorce and the loss of a child shaped her own parenting, and ultimately her caregiving for her parents in their twilight years. Her work has appeared in a variety of places such as Ms. Magazine, Healthline, and The Seattle Times Education Lab Ignite Storytelling event, as well as anthologies on cancer and parenting.

Kelly Fordon is the author of a novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind (Wayne State University Press, 2015), a Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist in the short story category. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press, 2019) was a finalist for the 2020 Eric Hoffer Award and the Eyelands International Prize in poetry. A short story collection, I Have the Answer, (WSUP, April 2020) is a Top Kirkus Indie Summer Read for 2020. She is a Best of the Net recipient, and has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction, poetry and nonfiction. She runs a monthly poetry and fiction blog at www.kellyfordon.com and is always interested in hearing from writers who would like to be featured.

Bessie Flores Zaldívar is a writer & poet from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Virginia Tech and a Tin House YA 2021 alumni. Her work has appeared in CRAFT, F(r)iction, The Pinch, [PANK], and elsewhere. Bessie has been nominated for Best New Poets and her fiction has been selected for Best of the Net 2020. Bessie’s chapbook, Rain Revolutions, is forthcoming with Long Day Press in 2021.

Honora Ankong is a queer Cameroonian-American poet. She is currently a Virginia Tech MFA in poetry candidate. Her works exist in and explore the liminal space where her identities intersect. Her work can be found in Lolwe, Glass, Mineral lit, storySouth, and the Maine Review. She has work forthcoming in The Swamp and The Peregrine Journal. She has been featured in Poetry Daily and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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Gina Frangello is the author of four books of fiction and the memoir, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint 2021). Her novel A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014) is currently under development by Charlize Theron’s production company, Denver & Delilah. Her most recent novel, Every Kind of Wanting (Counterpoint 2016) was included on several “best of” lists for 2016, including Chicago Magazine’s and The Chicago Review of Books’. She has nearly 20 years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books, and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, and as the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, the LA Times, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and in many other magazines and anthologies. After two decades of teaching at many universities, including UIC, Northwestern’s School of Continuing Studies, UCLA Extension, the University of California Riverside Palm Desert, Roosevelt University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, and Lake Forest College, Gina is excited to be a student again at the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Program for Writers, where she has returned to complete the PhD she left unfinished twenty years ago.

Kali Lightfoot lives and works in Salem, MA. Kali's poems and reviews of poetry have appeared in journals and anthologies, and been nominated for the Pushcart, and for Best of the Net. Her debut collection, Pelted by Flowers, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in 2021. Kali earned an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts; you can find her at kali-lightfoot.com.

Deirdre Fagan is a widow, wife, mother of two, and associate professor and coordinator of creative writing in the English, Literature, and World Languages Department at Ferris State University. Fagan is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Find a Place for Me, Regal House Publishing, 2022, a collection of short stories, The Grief Eater, Adelaide Books, 2020, a chapbook of poetry, Have Love, Finishing Line Press 2019, and a reference book, Critical Companion to Robert Frost, Facts on File, 2007. Fagan is poetry editor for Orange Blossom Review and lives in Michigan with her charming husband, delightful children, and incredibly friendly golden retriever and tabby in a home surrounded by woods.

Kathy Goodkin is the author of poetry collections Crybaby Bridge, winner of the Moon City Poetry Award (Moon City Press, 2019), and Sleep Paralysis (dancing girl press, 2017). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Field, Denver Quarterly, Cream City Review, RHINO, Redivider, The Volta, and elsewhere. She has served as an editor for feminist publisher Gazing Grain Press and a manuscript consultant for the North Carolina Writer's Network. She lives in North Carolina in a house full of daughters and dogs.

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Gina Troisi received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program in 2009. Her memoir, THE ANGLE OF FLICKERING LIGHT, was published by Vine Leaves Press in April of 2021. The book won the 2018 Autumn House Press Full-Length Contest, was a Semi-finalist for Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award and was awarded Second Place in Memoir for Southwest Writers Competition in 2012. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Fourth Genre, The Gettysburg Review, Fugue, Under the Sun, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, and elsewhere. Her stories and essays have been recognized as finalists in several contests, including the 2020 Iron Horse Literary Review Trifecta Award in Fiction and the 2018 New Letters Publication Award in Fiction.

Andrea Ross's memoir, To Imitate Nature, about her years as a wilderness guide searching for her biological family will be published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Terrain, Mountain Gazette, Pacific Regional Culture, various anthologies and the Dirtbag Diaries podcast. During the 1980s and 1990s, Andrea worked throughout the American West as a wilderness guide, a National Park Service Ranger, and a backcountry Search and Rescue captain. She is a faculty member in the University Writing Program at UC Davis.

Dan Kraines teaches creative writing at the Fashion Institute of Technology. He earned a PhD in poetics from the University of Rochester. And his manuscript Queer Longing won the Susan B. Anthony Dissertation Award, for gender and sexuality studies. His poems appear in The Adroit Journal, The Cortland Review, and Two Peach, among other places.

Kara Lewis is a poet, writer, and editor based in Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in SWWIM, Stirring, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. Currently, she is an MFA candidate in poetry in the low-residency program at New England College, where she received the prestigious Joel Oppenheimer scholarship. She is also a weekly contributor for Andrew McMeel Universal's poetry blog. Previously, she was awarded the John Mark Eberhart Memorial Award for her poetry, and was a finalist in the 2019 Kansas City Poetry on the Move contest.

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Catherine Doty is a poet, artist, and teacher born and raised near Garrett Mountain in Paterson, New Jersey. She is the author of Wonderama (2021), a forthcoming volume of poems from CavanKerry Press; Momentum (2005), a volume of poems; and Just Kidding (1999), a collection of cartoons. She is the recipient of a Marjorie J. Wilson Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her poetry has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, among them Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times (2006) and Billy Collins’ 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (2005). She has worked as a visiting artist for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Frost Place, Murphy Writing, and schools throughout New Jersey.

More than 90 of Jack Ridl’s former students are publishing. He has authored or co-authored/edited 14 books. Four collections were named Poetry Book of the Year by The Center of Book Arts, Independent and University book Publishers, The Society of Midland Authors, and the Institute for International Sport. He was named by the The Carnegie Foundation “Michigan Professor of the Year.”

Dinty W. Moore is author of the award-winning memoir Between Panic & Desire, the writing guides The Story Cure and Crafting the Personal Essay, and many other books. He has published essays and stories in The Georgia Review, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. He is founding editor of Brevity, the journal of flash nonfiction.

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, most recently “Atomizer” (LSU Press). Her second book of poems, “Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances” was a Small Press Bestseller and named a “Books We Love 2016” byThe New Yorker. Her novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

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Donna Kaz is a multi-genre writer currently residing in Fargo, North Dakota. She is the author of “UN/MASKED, Memoirs of a Guerrilla Girl On Tour,” which was named best nonfiction book of 2017 by the Devil’s Kitchen Literary Festival. She is also known as the Guerrilla Girl, Aphra Behn and creates visual work and performance to attack sexism and prove feminists are funny at the same time. She is the recipient of the Venus Theatre Lifetime Achievement Award and the Yoko Ono Courage Award for the Arts. Her latest book is “PUSH/PUSHBACK, 9 Steps to Make a Difference with Activism and Art” available at ggontour.com. All the way from the frozen north please welcome Donna Kaz!

Laura Bogart is the author of Don’t You Know I Love You (Dzanc Books). She is also a non-fiction writer who focuses on personal essays, pop culture, film and TV, feminism, body image and sizeism, and politics (among other topics). Laura is a featured contributor to The Week and DAME magazine; her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, SPIN, The AV Club, Vulture, and Indiewire (among other publications).

Elizabeth Kadetsky’s The Memory Eaters (winner of the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction, U Mass Press, 2020), was named among “great books from small presses to read now” by Buzzfeed during the COVID pandemic, and was featured in the Boston Globe, The Rumpus, She Reads, and elsewhere. She is the author of the memoir FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN (Dzanc Books rEprint series, 2019; and Little Brown, 2004), the novella ON THE ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE CENTER OF THE WORLD (Nouvella, 2015), and the short story collection THE POISON THAT PURIFIES YOU (C&R Press, 2014). She is an associate professor of fiction and nonfiction at Penn State University and a nonfiction editor at New England Review.

DeMisty D. Bellinger lives and teaches in Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in many places, including Contrary Magazine, The Rumpus, Okay Donkey, and Best Small Fictions 2019. Her chapbook, Rubbing Elbows, is available at Finishing Line Press and a full-length collection is forthcoming in 2021 with Mason Jar Press. DeMisty is a poetry editor at Porcupine Literary and with Malarkey Books.

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Christie Towers is a poet living in the Boston area. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and is currently pursuing her M.Div at Boston University. Her work can be found online and elsewhere. She is currently working on a series of poems based on the visions of Hildegard von Bingen.

Sara Pirkle is the author of The Disappearing Act, which won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry and was published by Mercer University Press in 2018. Her poems have been published in Rattle, Reed, Entropy, TAB, The Raintown Review, Emrys, and Atticus Review, among others. In 2019, she was nominated for Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, and in 2020, her short story, "Word Problems" won first place in the Chestnut Review's Stubborn Writers Contest. Sara has received writing fellowships from The Anderson Center, I-Park Foundation, and The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences. She is the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at The University of Alabama, where she also hosts the Pure Products Reading & Lecture Series.

Caroline Earleywine teaches high school English in Central Arkansas where she tries to convince teenagers that poetry is actually cool. She was a semifinalist for Nimrod’s 2018 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and for the 2019 Vinyl 45s Chapbook Contest. She was also a finalist for the 2019 Write Bloody Publishing Contest. Her work can be found in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Barrelhouse, Nailed Magazine, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Queens University in Charlotte and lives in Little Rock with her wife and two dogs. Her chapbook, Lesbian Fashion Struggles, is out now with Sibling Rivalry Press.

Mickey Dubrow is the author of American Judas. For over thirty years, he wrote television promos, marketing presentations, and scripts for various clients including Cartoon Network, TNT Latin America, Tribune Media, and McGraw Hill. His short stories and essays have appeared in Prime Number Magazine, The Signal Mountain Review, Full Grown People, and McSweeny’s Internet Tendency.

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Fred Shaw was named Emerging Poet Laureate Finalist for Allegheny County in 2020. He is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and Carlow University, where he received his MFA. He teaches writing and literature at Point Park University and Carlow University. His first collection. Scraping Away, was recently published by CavanKerry Press. A book reviewer and Poetry Editor for Pittsburgh Quarterly, his poem, “Argot,” is featured in the 2018 full-length documentary, Eating & Working & Eating & Working. The film focuses on the lives of local service-industry workers. His poem “Scraping Away” was selected for the PA Public Poetry Project in 2017. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and rescued hound dog.

Karin Cecile Davidson is the author of the novel Sybelia Drive (Braddock Avenue Books, October 2020). Her stories have appeared in Story, The Massachusetts Review, Five Points, Colorado Review, The Los Angeles Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Fine Arts Work Center Summer Residency, an Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency, a Studios of Key West Artist Residency, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Orlando Prize for Short Fiction, the Waasmode Short Fiction Prize, and a Peter Taylor Fellowship. She has an MFA from Lesley University and is an Interviews Editor for Newfound Journal. Originally from the Gulf Coast, she lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Meg Weber writes memoir about sex, grief, love, family, therapy, and tangled relationships. Meg's writing gives voice to the ways her life continues to unfold outside the boundaries prescribed for her. She is a queer mental health therapist who specializes in gender and sexuality, an adjunct instructor in counselor education, and a clinical supervisor. She lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon with her teenager and their labradoodle named Portland.

Seth Borgen’s first collection of stories, If I Die in Ohio, received the New American Fiction Prize. His work has appeared in Water~Stone, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from the University of Mississippi. Seth teaches creative writing and writes full-time. He lives in Akron, Ohio.

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Charles Malone grew up in rural Northeastern Ohio, headed west to the Rockies, came back to the Great Lakes, and has loved all of it. His first full-length collection, Working Hypothesis is forthcoming with Finishing Line Press in 2020. His chapbook "Questions About Circulation" is out with Driftwood Press as part of the Adrift Chapbook Series. He edited the collection "A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park" with Wolverine Farm Publishing and has work recently published or forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, The Best of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac, The Sugar House Review, The Dunes Review, and Saltfront. Charles now works at the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University coordinating community outreach programs.

Hannah Rousselot Hannah Rousselot (she/her) is a queer French-American poet, writer, and educator. Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including Parentheses Magazine, The McNeese Review, The Blue Nib, and The Broadkill Review. She has published two long works, Fragments of You (Kelsay Press) and Ocean Currents (Finishing Line Press). She also reviews other poet's works on hannahrousselot.com and is the host of Poetry Aloud. You can follow her work on facebook.com/hmrpoetry or @hannahrousselot, or hannahrousselot.com.

Shira Dentz is the author of five full-length books including SISYPHUSINA (PANK, 2020) and door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press, 2013) and two chapbooks. Her poetry, prose, visual and cross-genre writing appear widely in venues such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Iowa Review, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series (Poets.org), and NPR. She’s a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem Award, and Poetry Society of America's Cecil Hemley Memorial Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Shira holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah, and is Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky. More about her writing can be found at www.shiradentz.com.

Kyle Newbridge creates comics and stories with a flair for the melancholy. His current projects are “Of This Light,” a numinous horror epic and “The Punchline Is Death,” a dark humor autobiography.

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Edward Belfar is the author of a collection of short stories called Wanderers, which was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2012. His fiction has also appeared in numerous literary journals, including Shenandoah, The Baltimore Review, Potpourri, Confrontation, Natural Bridge, and Tampa Review. He lives in Maryland with his wife, Kathleen, and his Corgi, Pepin, and works as a writer and editor.

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost, which was reviewed on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review, and was a New York Times Editors' Choice, an NPR Notable Book, and a New Yorker Book to Watch Out For. He is also the author of two other nonfiction books, and three books of poetry. His new nonfiction book, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers (about, among other things, the ways in which carrier pigeons are used by diamond smuggling rings) came out this February 2021. His work appears widely in journals, magazines and anthologies, including The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Guernica, The New Republic, Iowa Review, and The Best American Essays. He teaches creative writing and lives in Marquette, Michigan.

Kevin Carey has published four books – a chapbook of fiction, The Beach People (Red Bird Chapbooks) and three books of poetry from CavanKerry Press, The One Fifteen to Penn Station, Jesus Was a Homeboy which was selected as an Honor Book for the 2017 Paterson Poetry Prize, and the recently released Set in Stone (2020). Kevin is also a filmmaker and playwright. His latest documentary film, Unburying Malcolm Miller, about a deceased Salem, MA poet, premiered at the Mass Poetry Festival in 2016 and his latest stage play “The Stand or Sal is Dead” a murder mystery comedy, premiered in Newburyport, MA. at The Actor’s Studio in June of 2018. Murder in the Marsh (Darkstroke Books) his first crime novel was released in October 2020.

Frannie Lindsay’s sixth volume, The Snow's Wife, was released this fall by Cavankerry Press. Her previous titles are If Mercy, Our Vanishing, Mayweed, Lamb, and Where She Always Was. Her honors include the Benjamin Saltman Award, the Washington Prize, the May Swenson Award, and the Missouri Review Prize, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Lindsay is widely published in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, Field, Plume, and The Adroit Journal. It also appears in The Best American Poetry 2014. She teaches workshops on the poetry of grief and trauma. She is a classical pianist.

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