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ISSUE 26 SNEAK PEEK

Mother Of

by Ruth Awad

​

an ascending thoracic 

aortic aneurysm, right above 

the root. First found seven years 

ago. The size of a walnut. She could 

not work. We painted her red walls white. 

Easier to sell. Put her artwork in storage and moved 

her to a farmhouse on a hill. Then the symptoms abated. 

The aneurysm dormant as a winter bear. We thought we’d been 

spared. In summer it’s the size of a ruby plum. The way fruit 

can ripen. The doctors speak in a language unlike my 

mother. Sharp and sterile. A gloved finger draws 

a vertical line down the sternum to explain 

an open-chest approach. Her heart, 

her heart, the mother of my 

whole red world. 

Awad
SHR_issue 26_Summer 23_cover.png

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Evans

After Reading the Poems of Tada Chimako 

by Justin Evans

​

Pine trees announce their death shedding 

all their needles—spending their reserves 

like a child’s allowance 

​

New forest growth requires decades of patience 

waiting for rot to break away from the canopy 

letting sunlight rest on the ground 

​

and sometimes it takes fire 

​

In my dreams I forget my own name while 

running a maze in the darkened dirty streets of Paris 

until I wake in a stranger’s bed 

​

These things are the same 

nothing dividing one from the other 

all answering to the same name 

Jackson

sade & stevie sonnet sequence

by Skye Jackson

​

i listen to sade with men i love 

foolish & wild, i whisper forever 

glistening like diamonds, so wet, in their beds: 

my spent heart, cold, shakes the four posts again 

don’t mock me as i melt into my gin 

it starts with record players and hot nights 

i find the wrong ones & fail to do right 

the wine hugs as you call me a good girl 

desire gussies my throat like ruined pearls 

there are depths to the sorrow her voice holds: 

sometimes i think you’re just too good for me 

i beg for a cage but you set me free 

i know i’m about to have a breakup— 

stevie’s voice through the cvs speakers 

​

the cvs dims as stevie’s voice spins: 

when you build your house / then please call me home 

i buy plan b & pads i hope to need 

the dark blood comes as i drive into work 

the psychic will call it a miscarriage 

my soul will call it an answered prayer 

i look for a man who was never there 

i call in sick as my bent body roars 

there are certain debts only women pay 

who did i destroy? myself, you or us? 

years later, i don’t remember his name: 

the man who stood outside as i shed you 

sade’s voice purrs through my studio walls: 

will you keep bringing out the best in me? 

Mason

On the Winter Solstice in Springdale, Utah, 2021

by Matt Mason

​

When you ask at the candy store

if they felt that, too,

the bump

that shook your whole hotel down the street,

it starts an excited chat

about what it might have been—

earthquake, gas blast, rock drop, truck thump—and

he mentions supersonic jets from the A.F. base, but

that’s farther east, he says,

that’s more around Flying Monkey Mesa,

he says.

 

                                 And

                                 you,

                            remarkably,

                           you now live

                                        on a planet

                       where Flying Monkey Mesa

                                             exists.

 

It’s named after animatronic dummies used to test ejector seats and,

yes, there originally were

monkeys, and, he says, one—only one—bear,

but this is not about your species

and its sometimes too-evident harm, this

is about the wonder of your kind:

in conjuring names that can make minds soar,

in finding that thing you term humanity,

which pushes you to choose to use monkey robots

instead of stirring more terror in actual monkeys

(and bears) with the hard-to-dream technology

   of a machine that flies,

     of supersonic speeds,

           of ejector seats and parachutes,

                  of this world

                            where Flying Monkey Mesa

                                                is just down the highway.

A.

A cube who is growing. and growing unsure of himself. #8  

by Sean Cho A.

​

mid-april: thirty-five degrees. in the absence of clouds: 

the sun is showing even it has limits. two young lovers 

hold bare hands beside the lake: ignoring the logic of 

pockets. we’ve already shown our appreciation for pockets. 

holding everything we hold so dear that we must bring it 

along. didn’t know what to give them for a gift: yesterday’s 

dinner mints stink-y-ing in the heat: a case study on the limitations 

of objections/the space between object and the representative-

thank you. it’s a thankless job. not unlike the jobs of all the other 

object-things. the screams of the june grass/the farm cat 

who wished to never go inside. on the day that a mouth emerges 

from the vased-daylily we will have a new language to learn. 

i imagine i’m sorry & thank you will get all tangled up on our tongues. 

Ellis

Blood Draw 

by Lynne Ellis

 

My phlebotomist’s earrings are upcycled IUDs. I want this kind of joy 

      for all the gear we use to manage our bodies.

​

Fifth grade, after school, I felt warm-wet, and so undressed. 

      I found a mud slick on my Wednesdays.

​

I found my name scratched in red pen on the school’s Kotex machine. 

      I found a kettle drum behind my sternum.

​

I’m taking that shame out of my body and checking it into a Quality Inn 

      with a Welcome Conference Attendees marquee.

​

Shame will stay cuffed to the bed until it learns how to be good. 

      I’m taking the shame out of my body

​

and tossing it in a lockbox with countless other useless objects: 

      ballet slippers, tiaras, bathroom scales. Mirrors, too. Clothes one size too small.

​

All my self-doubt. 

      All the things that no longer fit. Out with the force of my heartbeat.

Vitow

(When No One) 

by Sonja Vitow

​

a soft thing often 

hopes to be touched 

​

(the temptation to take a soft 

thing in your palm 

​

& when no one is looking, 

check to see that it’s really 

so soft) 

​

to tender something 

delicate (when no one is looking) 

what great responsibility 

​

(the temptation to take a soft 

thing in your palm 

​

& spend a finger over it, 

thinking just: how soft, how 

​

fragile) the temptation 

​

to take the soft thing between 

a finger and thumb 

and apply some pressure 

​

(just some) 

​

& when it breaks, pretend 

it was never soft 

​

(the temptation to then say) 

I didn’t know my own strength 

​

Contributors

CONTRIBUTORS

​

Sean Cho A. is the author of American Home (Autumn House, 2021), winner of the Autumn House Press chapbook contest. His work can be found or ignored in Copper Nickel, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, and Nashville Review, among others. Sean is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California Irvine and a PhD Student at the University of Cincinnati. He is the editor in chief of The Account

​

Clarissa Adkins’ poems appear in The Pinch, Whurk Magazine, River City Poets’ anthology: Lingering in the Margins, Hare’s Paw, Solstice, and more. She earned a Best of the Net nomination from Parentheses International Literary Arts Journal in 2018 and was a finalist for the 17th Annual Erskine J. Poetry Prize. Lily Poetry Review Books published her first full-length poetry collection, Building Alexandria, in April of 2021. Clarissa loves being a reader for Sugar House Review

 

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American poet, 2021 NEA Poetry Fellow, and the author of Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the coeditor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. 

 

Shanan Ballam is a senior lecturer at Utah State University where she teaches poetry writing and composition. She survived a massive stroke in January 2022 that left her without speech and without the use of the entire right side of her body. She never quit writing poetry, though, and she was awarded an honorable mention in the Utah Original Writing Contest for her entry "first poems after the stroke." She has published one chapbook, The Red Riding Hood Papers (Finishing Line, 2010) and two full-length poetry manuscripts, Pretty Marrow (Negative Capability, 2013) and Inside the Animal: The Collected Red Riding Hood Poems (Main Street Rag, 2019). Her chapbook first poems after the stroke is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in May 2024. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Plume, I-70 Review, and Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. His most recent books include Arrows and Stone-Garland, a translation of ancient Greek lyric poetry. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar. 

 

Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award, and What Small Sound (Red Hen Press, 2023). She translated Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected 

Poems by Max Sessner (Red Hen Press, 2023). Her poems and translations appear in New Ohio Review, North American Review, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. She lives with her family in Novato, CA. 

 

Matthew Ivan Bennett has been a resident playwright of Plan-B Theatre Company since 2007, where he’s premiered several stage and radio plays, including Eric(a), which won Best Drama at United Solo Theatre Festival in New York. His feature film, The Whole Lot, was an Official Selection at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival. His poetry has been published with Western Humanities Review, unearthed, and Utah Life. Matt is a member of the Dramatists’ Guild. 

 

Emma Bolden is the author of three full-length collections of poetry—House Is An Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2018), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016), and Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013)—and four chapbooks. The recipient of an NEA creative writing fellowship, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, and Greensboro Review. She serves as associate editor-in-chief for Tupelo Quarterly and as editor of Screen Door Review. Her memoir, The Tiger and the Cage, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2022. 

 

Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-nine books including, most recently, Scar (Etruscan, 2020), The Calling (Parlor, 2021), Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, Criterion Books, 2021), Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021), Liberation of Dissonance (Nicholas Schaffner Award for Literature in Music, Schaffner Press, 2022), Choreomania (MadHat, 2022), Invention of the Wilderness (LSU, 2022), and Therapon (coauthor, Dan Beachy Quick, Tupelo Press, forthcoming). 

 

Gaylord Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he founded and for more than 20 years edited the journal Poems & Plays. The most recent of his 16 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and cookery are two collections of poems, The Feral Condition (Negative Capability, 2018) and Worship the Pig (Red Hen, 2020). A book of flash nonfiction, Before the Storm Takes It Away, is forthcoming from Red Hen in spring 2024. 

 

Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Five Points, Florida Review, Zone 3, Redivider, River Heron Review, Split Rock Review, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. Her book reviews have appeared recently in Salamander, EcoTheo Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Los Angeles Review. Sarah’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, including Accommodations (2019), winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com or on Twitter @SayCarey1.

​

Mario Chard is the author of Land of Fire (Tupelo Press, 2018), winner of the Dorset Prize, a notable debut by Poets & Writers Magazine, and the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. His work has appeared widely in journals and magazines, including The Nation, The New Yorker, and Poetry, among others. His honors include the Discovery Poetry Prize and fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Civitella Ranieri Foundation. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and an inaugural fellow for the U.S. Ledbury Poetry Critics, he lives in Atlanta, GA. 

 

Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020) and Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and a PEN Award. He is the editor of the anthology Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project (1913 Press) and his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Progressive, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Adam is the publisher of Action, Spectacle

 

Brock Dethier retired in 2018 from Utah State University, where he taught writing, ran the composition program, and was lucky enough to once have in a poetry writing class three founding editors of Sugar House Review—Jerry, Nano, and Natalie. His poems have been collected in a book, Reclamation, and a chapbook, Ancestor Worship

 

Danielle Beazer Dubrasky is the author of Drift Migration from Ashland Poetry Press, a letterpress book Invisible Shores, and the chapbook Ruin and Light. Her essay “Juliet” won the 2020 Mississippi Review Nonfiction Prize. Danielle has won awards through the Utah Arts Council and been a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her poems have been

published in Chiron Review, Ninth Letter, and South Dakota Review. A professor of English and creative writing at Southern Utah University, she directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values. 

 

Lauren Eggert-Crowe is the author of four poetry chapbooks: Bitches of the Drought, In the Songbird Laboratory, The Exhibit, and Rungs (coauthored with Margaret Bashaar). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Michigan Quarterly Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Gigantic Sequins, and Sixth Finch, among others. She has been awarded residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts and Ragdale. 

 

Lynne Ellis (she/they) writes in pen. Her words appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, The Shore, Pontoon Poetry, and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2021 Perkoff Prize in Poetry and the 2018 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. Lynne’s chapbook, In these failing times I can forget, confronts the human cost of rapid growth in a prosperous American city. Ellis is coeditor at Papeachu Press, supporting the voices of women and nonbinary creators. 

 

Justin Evans was born and raised in Utah. He served in the Army and returned to Utah for his education. For the past two decades, he has lived in rural Nevada with his wife and sons where he teaches at the local high school. He is the author of ten books of poetry. Most recently are Cross Country (Wordtech, 2019), written with the poet Jeff Newberry, and All the Brilliant Ideas I’ve Ever Had (Kelsay Books, 2020). In early 2022, Justin was awarded an artist fellowship from the Nevada Arts Council. 

 

Jana-Lee Germaine’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, Presence, december, Rock & Sling, New South, The Windhover, The Baltimore Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Emerson College and is a senior poetry reader for Ploughshares. Her first poetry manuscript, Learning Curve, was a finalist in the 2021 Barrow Street Book Prize. A survivor of domestic violence in her first marriage, she lives with her very nice second husband, four children, and four rescue cats in semi-rural Massachusetts. 

 

Mia Herman is a Jewish writer and editor living in New York. Her work has appeared in over two dozen publications including Barren Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Ghost City Press, Literary Mama, [PANK], Potomac Review, and Third Coast. Awards for her writing include an honorable mention in the Tom Howard/ John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest, nomination for the Best of the Net, and finalist for the Frontier Poetry New Voices Fellowship. Mia holds an MFA in creative writing from Hofstra University and currently serves as the nonfiction editor for F(r)iction magazine. Follow her on Twitter @MiaMHerman

 

Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods (Milkweed Editions, 2014), awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (UGA Press, 2008), named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book. Hill has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Bush Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, and numerous other journals, and in over two dozen anthologies including Black Nature, Villanelles, and Cascadia Field Guide. A volume of poems selected from Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and Dangerous Goods has been translated and published in Korean. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is a professor of creative writing at the University of Montana. 

 

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is author of Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, and recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in Lake Effect, Smartish Pace, The Los Angeles Review, diode, and elsewhere. CynthiaMarieHoffman.com

 

Katherine Hollander is a poet and historian. Her first book of poems My German Dictionary won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, judged by Charles Wright, and was published by Waywiser Press in 2019; in 2021 she joined Waywiser’s editorial board as an associate editor. She also serves as poetry and reviews editor at Consequence, a journal devoted to illuminating the culture and consequences of war and geopolitical conflict. Her poetry, criticism, and scholarship have appeared in Salmagundi, Hunger Mountain, Literary Imagination, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common Online, New German Critique, and elsewhere. She teaches as a lecturer in poetry at Tufts University. 

 

Skye Jackson was born and raised in New Orleans. She served as a poetry editor for Bayou Magazine and several other publications. Her work appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Green Mountains Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook A Faster Grave won the 2019 Antenna Prize. She was a finalist for the 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize, and in 2021, she won the AWP Intro Journals Award. Her work was recently selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress educational programming. This past spring, she was crowned the winner of the legendary KGB Open Mic Contest in New York City. She currently serves as the 2022 writer-in-residence at the Key West Literary Seminar in Florida. 

 

Richard Jordan is a mathematician and data scientist who also writes poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle (finalist in the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize competition), Valparaiso Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Tar River Poetry, The Atlanta Review, Redivider, upstreet, on the Verse Daily website, and elsewhere. He resides in the Boston area. 

 

Nick Lantz is the author of four books of poetry, most recently You, Beast (University of Wisconsin Press). He teaches in the MFA program at Sam Houston State University and lives in Huntsville, TX. 

 

Susannah Lodge-Rigal is a writer and educator based in Berkeley, CA. She received her MFA from Colorado State University, where she was awarded the 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize. Susannah is the author of Where the Light Feeds (Gasher Press, 2023), and her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Seneca Review, Colorado Review, Missouri Review, Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM, The Journal, Ruminate, and elsewhere. 

 

Michael Malan is editor of Cloudbank (CloudbankBooks.com), a literary journal in Corvallis, OR. He is the author of three books from Blue Light Press: Overland Park (2017, poetry and flash fiction), Tarzan’s Jungle Plane (2019, microfictions), and Deep Territory (2021, poetry). His work has appeared recently in Washington Square Review, New World Writing, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, and Poetry East.

 

Matt Mason is the Nebraska State Poet and former executive director of the Nebraska Writers Collective from 2009–2022. Through the US State Department, he has run workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus. Mason is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and his work can be found in The New York Times, on NPR’s Morning Edition, and in American Life in Poetry. Mason’s fourth book, At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros, was released by the Old Mill Press in 2022. Matt is based out of Omaha with his wife, the poet Sarah McKinstry- Brown, and daughters Sophia and Lucia. 

 

Martha McCollough is a writer living in Amherst, MA. She has an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bear Review, Tammy, Pangyrus, Barrelhouse, Crab Creek Review, and Salamander, among others. Her chapbook Grandmother Mountain was published by Blue Lyra Press. Martha’s poetry collection Wolf Hat Iron Shoes is available from Lily Poetry Review Books. 

 

Stephanie McConnell is from Lancaster, PA. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Worcester Review, River Heron Review, The Dewdrop, BarBar, The Paterson Literary Review, The Under Review, Ponder Review, and Hare’s Paw Literary Journal. She now lives in New England, but still only writes about Pennsylvania. 

 

Michael McLane is the author of the chapbooks Fume and Trace Elements. He is a founding editor of the journal saltfront, the review editor for Sugar House Review, and a poetry editor for Dark Mountain. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Western Humanities Review, Colorado Review, Laurel Review, Interim, Utah Historical Quarterly, and South Dakota Review. He currently lives in rural New Zealand where he is completing a PhD at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. 

 

Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and three chapbooks, including Blue House, for which he was awarded a Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship. He is the founder and editor of the journal Under a Warm Green Linden and Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation. He edited the anthology Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (Green Linden Press, 2021), winner of a Midwest Book Award for best poetry anthology and named by Entropy Magazine as one of the best poetry books of 2020–21. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Boston Review, Image, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, RHINO, Salamander, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. For more information visit ChristopherNelson.info

 

John A. Nieves is a hardcore Sugar House fan. He has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as North American Review, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, Harvard Review, and Massachusetts Review. He won the Indiana Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is associate professor of English at Salisbury University and an editor of The Shore Poetry. He received his MA from University of South Florida and his PhD from the University of Missouri. 

 

Dan O’Brien is a poet, playwright, and nonfiction writer whose recognition includes a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and two PEN America Awards for playwriting. Acre Books published his fourth poetry collection, Our Cancers, in 2021, and will publish a collection of his prose poems, Survivor’s Notebook, in 2023. Also this year, Dalkey Archive Press will publish his memoir, From Scarsdale. He lives in Los Angeles. 

 

Carla Panciera has published two poetry collections, One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Press). Her short story collection, Bewildered, received AWP’s Grace Paley Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her latest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (forthcoming from Loom Press). Panciera’s work has been featured in many journals including Poetry, New England Review, and Clackamas. She is the recipient of a Mass Cultural Council Grant in Creative Nonfiction and lives in Rowley, MA. 

 

Harley Phleger is a labor law attorney and wilderness canoe trip guide from San Francisco. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 2018, where he was awarded the Benjamin B. Wainwright Prize for Poetry. His work has also appeared in The Pinch Journal.

 

Benjamin Pinkard is a socialist who works in elder care. 

 

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, The Pedestal, Acumen, Gradiva, Meniscus, and other journals. Her seventh and most recent book of poetry is EDGES. 

 

Matt Quinn lives in Brighton, England, where he takes frequent rests. His poems have appeared in The Morning Star, Rattle, The North, Modern Haiku, and elsewhere. 

 

Lisa Roullard’s work has appeared recently in TAB Journal, The Broadkill Review, and Revolute. Her chapbook An Envelope Waiting was published in 2020. She resides in Salt Lake City where she also writes for children. 

 

David Salner’s fifth poetry collection, Summer Words: New and Selected Poems, will appear in early 2023 from Broadstone Books. His writing also appears in The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, North American Review, and many other journals. He’s worked as iron ore miner, steelworker, librarian, and in many other trades and lives in Millsboro, DE with his wife, Barbara Greenway.

 

Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won contests published by The Puritan, Meridian, and Passages North. His work has been featured on Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in the Poetry Society of America. He recently opened a modern Mexican restaurant called The Camino in Missoula, MT. 

 

Sonja Vitow (she/they) is a queer Jewish teacher living in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, where they are the editor of a small literary magazine called The Knicknackery and in charge of the soap enterprise I’d Lather Not. They received their MFA in creative writing from Emerson College in 2013, and are currently pursuing their PhD in human sexuality from Widener University. Some of their work can be found in Rattle, Harvard Review, Fugue Journal, The Rumpus, and Carve Magazine, or at SonjaVitow.com

 

Melody Wilson’s work appears or is forthcoming in The Mantle, VerseDaily, The Fiddlehead, Kestrel, Crab Creek Review, and Archetype Magazine. She received 2022 Pushcart nominations from Redactions: Poetry & Poetics and Red Rock Review, and was semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Award. Her chapbook Spineless: Memoir in Invertebrates comes out in August 2023. She’s pursuing her MFA at Pacific University. Find her work at MelodyWilson.com

 

Matthew Woodman writes from Bakersfield, CA and is the founding editor of the literary journal Rabid Oak. His writing has appeared in recent issues of Juked, Puerto del Sol, and Sonora Review, and he is grateful to Jake Skeets, whose craft talk enabled these poems to come into being. 

​

Hong Kong-born and San Francisco-raised, Kenton K. Yee recently placed poetry in The Threepenny Review, The Indianapolis Review, Plume Poetry, and Pembroke Magazine, among others. A former Columbia University faculty member, Kenton writes from northern California. 

 

Holli Zollinger is a self-taught artist who has made a career of her talents: drawing, painting, and surface design. She is continually inspired by her surroundings living in the desert town of Moab, UT. She is highly motivated by the art of creativity and incorporates the color, texture, and pattern she sees in the world around her. Holli’s work has been published and featured worldwide. HolliZollinger.com

 

A native of Utah, Shari Zollinger divides her time between her work as a professional astrologer and independent bookseller. She has been known to write a poetic verse or two with published work in Sugar House Review and Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. She recently published Carrying Her Stone, a collection of poems based on the work of Auguste Rodin. ShariZollinger.com

 

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