Kevin McLellan is the author of Hemispheres, Ornitheology which received honors at the 19th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards, [box], Tributary, and Round Trip. He won the 2015 Third Coast Poetry Prize and Gival Press’ 2016 Oscar Wilde Award, and his writing appears in numerous literary journals including Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, Sixth Finch, West Branch, Western Humanities Review, and others.

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and All Things Beautiful Are Bent (forthcoming, Alien Buddha Press, 2021,) as well as the founding Editor of Anti-Heroin Chic.

She lives in Honolulu, Hawai`i. She has degrees in English from the University of Hawai`i at Manoa and Creative Writing from Oregon State University-Cascades. You can reach her at IG and Twitter @AmBusyPoeming.

Barbara Black writes fiction, flash fiction, and poetry. Her work has been published in Canadian and international magazines including The Cincinnati Review, The New Quarterly, CV2, Geist, and Prairie Fire . . .

Robbi Nester is the author of 6 published books of poetry, including a chapbook and three collections, the most recent of which is Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019) . . .

. . . her poems splash their way through an unsteady stream of publications in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., including but by no means limited to these: Ambit, Chestnut Review, Ekphrastic Review, Gargoyle, Gone Lawn, On the Seawall, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM, Stirring, The Lake, and Willawaw Journal . . .

Darrell Epp lives in Ward 3 in Hamilton, Ontario near the shore of Lake Ontario. His fourth poetry collection, Mechanical Monkeys, will be published by Mosaic Press next year. Follow him on twitter at @DarrellEpp

Marsha de la O is the author of three books. Her most recent book, Every Ravening Thing, came out from Pitt Poetry Series in 2019, published through the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her previous book, Antidote for Night, won the 2015 Isabella Gardner Award and was published by BOA Editions. Her first book, Black Hope, was awarded the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and was published by New Issues Press, Western Michigan University. Black Hope won an Editors’ Choice, Small Press Book Award. Other awards include the Morton Marcus Poetry Award and the da Poetry Award, as well as the Ventura Poetry Festival Poetry Award. De La O has received 3 Individual Artist Grants from the City of Ventura, Cultural Affairs Division, and a Tumbleweeds Residency from the California Arts Council.

Clif Mason is a professor of English and Humanities at Bellevue University, in Bellevue, NE. He is the author of one full-length collection, Knocking the Stars Senseless (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), and three chapbooks: The Book of Night & Waking (winner of the Cathexis Northwest Press Chapbook Prize), Self-Portraits in Which I Do Not Appear (Finishing Line Press), and From the Dead Before (Lone Willow Press). His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won prizes from the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest (chosen by Marge Piercy), Writers’ Journal, Plainsongs, the Midwest Writers’ Conference, and the Academy of American Poets. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Rwanda, Africa.

Terry Blackhawk’s life as a poet began in her mid-forties when she was teaching high school English and Creative Writing (1987-1994) for Detroit Public Schools. She received the Foley Poetry Prize in 1990, and her first book, body & field (Michigan State University Press, 1999), was a finalist in a number of first book awards, including the Larry Levis and Brittingham Prizes. She also received awards for teaching from Scholastic, Inc., United Black Artists, and Michigan Youth Arts Festival, which twice named her Michigan Creative Writing Teacher of the year. In 1995 she founded InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a 501©3 that extended her experiences as a classroom teacher of poetry to Detroit teens and continues to serve thousands of young Detroit writers every year. Find out more about Terry and read her poems in our Featured Poet section.

Angelique Zobitz is a poet, raised on the South Side of Chicago. She’s a recent transplant to the intersection of agriculture and academia in West Lafayette, Indiana. Born to a dope-ass, teen mom, word nerd, punk rock singer in the early 80's, she was raised at the knee of farm folks from Louisiana who'd joined the military and moved North during the Great Migration to work in factories. Read her poems and find out about her forthcoming book in her poet feature.

Esteban Rodríguez was raised in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas/Mexican border. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, he worked as a barista and a writing tutor before becoming a high school teacher. A graduate of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s MFA program, his writing seeks to explore they ways in which cultural traditions and expectations shape our understanding of identity, family relationships, and our everyday interactions with the world at large. Read Esteban’s poems on our Featured Poet page.

Chloe Martinez is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. She grew up in New Bedford, MA and attended Barnard College, where she was a Mellon Mays Fellow. She did her graduate work at UC Santa Barbara, Boston University, and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Holden Scholar. Her scholarly articles appear in South Asia and The Medieval History Journal and she is at work on a monograph about religion and autobiography in pre-modern-to-modern South Asia. Her poetry has been nominated for Best New Poets and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications, including Waxwing, The Common, Prairie Schooner and Shenandoah.

Jen Karetnick is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Hunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023); The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, forthcoming August 2020); and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. She is also the author of five poetry chapbooks,

arla Linn Merrifield is a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence. She has had over 500 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies and has eleven books to her credit, the newest of which is Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel to Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry…

Barry W. North is a seventy-five-year-old retired refrigeration mechanic. He lives with his wife, Diane in Hahnville, Louisiana. Since his retirement in 2007, he has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, won the 2010 A. E. Coppard Prize for Fiction, Honorable Mention in the 2011 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, was a finalist in the 2014 Lascaux Poetry Awards, a semi-finalist in the 2014 Palettes & Quills chapbook contest, a finalist in the 2017 Eggtooth Editions Chapbook Contest…

Peter Grandbois is a writer, poet and playwright, who teaches English and Narrative Non-fiction Writing at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Grandbois is the author of eight books. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in…

Angela Jackson-Brown is a writer and poet who teaches Creative Writing and English at Ball State University in Muncie, IN. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Spalding University low residency MFA program. Her work has appeared in literary…