Rick Adang was born in Buffalo, New York and graduated from Indiana University with a BA in Psychology and English and a Creative Writing Honors thesis. He taught English as a foreign language for many years and is currently living in Estonia. He has published poems in many literary journals, most recently in Willawaw Journal, Avalon Literary Review, Eclectica, Elevation Review, and Bookends Review. He’s a previous contributor to Hamilton Stone Review.
Priscilla Atkins, after a life in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Indiana and Illinois (not in that order) lives in Michigan, where she substitute teaches in the public schools and picks blueberries one at a time.
Tony Beyer writes in Taranaki, New Zealand. His print titles include Dream Boat: selected poems (HeadworX) and Anchor Stone (Cold Hub Press).
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Cloud Mountain (2024). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell's Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.
Ryan Eshoff recently drafted this essay on the symbiotic relationship between dogs and the literary characters we name them after. His own dog is a female goldendoodle adopted out of Alabama named Scout, because of course. Years into having her now, he’s started to realize that there might have been more to the naming convention than he consciously considered at the time in fact, he’s come to appreciate the ways that his dog redirects him back towards the text, and vice versa. He sees this piece as a light-hearted tribute to our canine besties and to the literary characters whose accessibility we cherish. He was inspired partly by the onsets of time: his Scout turned 5 this year (35 in dog years) and Mockingbird turns 65.
Robert Fillman is the author of The Melting Point (Broadstone Books, 2025), House Bird (Terrapin Books, 2022), and the chapbook, November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). His poems have appeared in such journals as Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry. He lives in eastern Pennsylvania and teaches at Kutztown University.
Seth Fox is an Omaha-based freelance writer and storyteller, spends his days at a food bank and his evenings lost in books or nostalgic game show reruns. A happily married dog and plant dad, he enjoys weaving stories and uncovering life's quiet mysteries.
Kathie Giorgio is the author of a total of fifteen books: eight novels, two story collections, an essay collection, and four poetry collections. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in fiction and poetry and awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, the Silver Pen Award for Literary Excellence, the Pencraft Award for Literary Excellence, and the Eric Hoffer Award In Fiction. Her poem “Light” won runner-up in the 2021 Rosebud Magazine Poetry Prize, and her work has also been incorporated into many visual art and musical events. Kathie is the director and founder of AllWriters’ Workplace & Workshop LLC, an international creative writing studio. She lives with her husband, mystery writer Michael Giorgio, and their daughter Olivia, in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Two of her other adult children, Christopher and Andy, live close by, along with her solo granddaughter, Maya Mae. One adult child has wandered off to Louisiana and lives among the mathematicians and alligators.
Andrey Gritsman, a native of Moscow, emigrated to the United States in 1981. He is a physician who is also a poet and essayist. He has published eight volumes of poetry in Russian. A 2009 Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention, he has also been Short Listed for the PEN American Center Biennial Osterweil Poetry Award and Best of the Net. His poems have appeared in over 90 literary Journals, including Nimrod International Journal, Cimarron Review, New Orleans Review Notre Dame Review, and Denver Quarterly. His work has also been widely anthologized including in Modern Poetry in Translation (UK).
Michael Hettich's most recent book of poetry, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022, was published by Press 53 in 2023. It won the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. A book of interviews with poets, And the Poet Said..., was published in 2024, and a new book of poems, A Sharper Silence, is forthcoming from terrapin Books. He lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
Heather Holliger holds an MFA in creative writing and teaches composition and creative writing at Clark State College. Her creative work has been published in a dozen journals, including the Aurorean, Cold Mountain Review, Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Review, Labletter, SNReview, and Sugar Mule. Her poems have been featured in the Split This Rock Poem of the WeekSeries and in the anthology Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory.
Mary Dean Lee's debut collection Tidal was published April 2024 by Pine Row Press and was shortlisted for the Quebec Writers' Federation 2024 A. M. Klein Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2021, The Fiddlehead, Salvation South, Ploughshares, and MicroLit. She grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia, studied theatre and literature at Duke University and Eckerd College, completed her PhD in organizational behavior at Yale. She lives in Montreal.
Ryan McCarty is a teacher and writer, living in Ypsilanti, MI. His writing has appeared recently or will appear soonish in Coal City Review, Collateral, Door is a Jar, One Art, Pinhole, Rattle: Poets Respond, Trailer Park Quarterly, and Writers Resist. You can find more of his writing at Politics of the Kitchen Table with My Family Crafting Nearby
Abigail Michelini teaches writing at Northampton Community College. Her work can be found in Anthology of Appalachian Writers, The Main Street Rag, and Whale Road Review, among other publications. Her debut chapbook, Brace, was published by Thirty West Publishing House in May 2025. When she's not writing, she can be found playing with her kids and running Pennsylvania roads. Find her at www.abigailmichelini.com.
Roger Mitchell started writing what he thought would be a novel a long time ago, and this was how it started. It has been well-edited for its appearance here, for which he is truly grateful. There's something about the West that seems deeply unreal to him, but fascinating.
Elisa Mishto is a film director and screenwriter from Italy, now based in Berlin. Her films have premiered at international festivals, won several awards, and been distributed across Europe, the U.S., South America, and Asia. She writes lyrics for Moderat and Apparat and runs an alternative boxing promotion in Berlin. "Ships Porn on YouTube" is her first published poem and part of her debut book-in-progress, I Want to Be Alive and Have a Dog as a Friend—a work of autofiction about love, disintegration, and the quiet violence of trying to understand other people.
Sheila E. Murphy's work has appeared in Fortnightly Review, Poetry, Hanging Loose, and others. Her forthcoming book is Escritoire (Lavender Ink), October Sequence 52-122 (Chax Press), and an as-yet untitled collection from Unlikely Books. Her most recent book is Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023). She won the Gertrude Stein Poetry Award for Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003) and the Won the Hay(ha)ku Book Prize for Reporting Live From You Know Where (Meritage Press, 2018). She lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Her Wikipedia page can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Murphy
Paul Nelson has published twelve books of poetry, won the AWP Poetry Award and a University of Alabama Series Selection, an NEA fellowship and was Director of Creative Writing for Ohio University for near a decade. A Downeaster by heritage, he writes now from Kennebunk, Maine.
Kenneth Pobo's new book is called At the Window, Silence (Fernwood Press). Forthcoming is the collection Raylene And Skip (Wolfson Press).
Thomas Palakeel, a bi-lingual writer in Malayalam and English, serves as an Associate Professor of English at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He has published fiction, essays, and poetry in anthologies and in such journals as True Copy Think, Short Story International, Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, North Dakota Quarterly, Dharma World, Journal of Modern Literature,andThe Christian Science Monitor.
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems: The Adventure and Happiness (both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and four collections of shorter poems: A Poverty of Words, (Prolific Press, 2015), Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), The Beautiful Losses (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and The Liberator (Survision Books, 2024). Pollack has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc. Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, Rat's Ass Review, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, and elsewhere. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.
John Repp is a writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. Sheila-Na-Gig Editions will publish his sixth book of poetry, Never Far From the Egg Harbor Ice House, in late 2025.
David Salner worked all over the country, as iron ore miner, steelworker, librarian, baseball usher, and in many other trades. His most recent poetry collections are The Green Vault Heist and Summer Words: New and Selected Poems, both appearing in 2023. His award-winning debut novel is A Place to Hide (2021). His poetry appears in Threepenny Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many other journals. His website is https://DSalner.wixsite.com/salner
Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn't. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters' Journey in Photography and Poetry.
Carolyn Steinhoff's collections Under the World (2016) and History of the Future (2023) were published by Nauset Press. In his blurb for Under the World, the late John Ashbery said, in part, "These are haunting, plangent poems that reverberate in one's consciousness long after reading." Her poems have appeared in Book of Matches, Global Poemic, The Indypendent, Cape Rock, And Then, House Organ, Emerge Literary Journal, The Hat, Conjunctions and many other journals and publications. Her chapbook, Plain English, and her play, The Setting Face to Face with the Clear Light, were published by Texture Press. Her nonfiction articles have appeared in numerous magazines including Multicultural Review, A&U: America's AIDS Magazine, and Today's Latino Magazine, for which she was a staff writer. She has published the paper magazine of art and writing, From Here: Sex, Politics and Power, and she was a recipient of the Jingle Feldman Award for Performance from the Tulsa Arts and Humanities Council and grants from the Oklahoma Arts Council, the MidAmerica Arts Alliance and the Puffin Foundation.
Richie Swanson has lived simply in a boathouse on the upper Mississippi River in Minnesota since 1987. Robert Olen Butler, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner for Literature, tutored him in the art of fiction 1991-1992. Swanson explored North America and Indian reservations by bicycle 1977-2005. He has monitored bird populations on the Mississippi and articulated river ecology most recently in his latest nature-based fiction, Owl’s Myth, in Weber: the contemporary west, Spring/Summer 2023. Birder’s World, Big River, High Country News, Bird Watcher’s Digest, Wisconsin State Journal etc. have published hia nonfiction. https://richieswanson.com/indigenous-writers-illuminate-history-with-pride-resilence/.
Rob Swystun is an author, journalist, freelance writer, ghostwriter, and songwriter, Rob currently lives in Winnipeg and spends time tending to his fish tank, cavorting outdoors, and trying to keep his many houseplants alive to varying degrees of success.
Molly Tamarkin's writing has appeared in many literary magazines, including Poetry, Sewanee Review, New England Review, and Gulf Coast. She received her MFA from the University of Florida and is currently finishing a novel based on her time in Saudi Arabia as well as editing the collected poems of Robert Boardman Vaughn. You can learn more about her at mollytamarkin.com.
Edward Voeller has a background in journalism and university English teaching, including 14 years in Thailand (Peace Corps), Japan, and Oman. His fiction includes two YA novels. Recent stories appear in NUNUM.ca (Pushcart Prize nomination), Oakwood Literary Journal, The Bookends Review (forthcoming), CommuterLit (novel excerpt), others, and has contributed to numerous media, including McGraw-Hill, Macmillan, TC Public Television, and Time-Life Japan.
Danny Williams has been involved in West Virginia and Appalachian regional history, culture, and music for several decades, in roles including building traditional musical instruments, teaching at six different colleges and two prisons, documenting folk artists for the National Endowment for the Arts, musical performance, lectures, editing, and nonfiction writing. "Visitation" is his first published work of fiction since a story in his high school newspaper in 1969. Contact Danny at editorwv@hotmail.com.
Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who writes in English. His work has appeared in over
200 literary journals from 19 countries. His sixth collection, titled The Invisible, was
published in 2024 by Greenwich Exchange (London). For more information, please visit www.alessiozanelli.it.
