Pamela Ahlen is program coordinator for Bookstock Literary Festival held each summer in Woodstock, Vermont. She organizes literary events for Osher (Lifelong Education at Dartmouth) and has compiled and edited the Anthology of Poets and Writers: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years at Dartmouth. Pamela is the author of the chapbook Gather Every Little Thing (Finishing Line Press).
KB Ballentine’s fifth collection, Almost Everything, Almost Nothing, was published in 2017 by Middle Creek Publishing. Published in Crab Orchard Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, among others, her work also appears in anthologies including In Plein Air (2017) and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.
Eric Barr taught at UC Riverside for 37 years until illness forced him to retire. He is the founding director of UCR’s Palm Desert MFA and a chief architect of the campus MFA in creative writing and writing for the performing Arts. He has three stories published on-line at connotation press. He co-wrote with Chuck Evered and Marty James on the movie A Thousand Cuts. He is currently touring his one-man show A Piece Of My Mind about My Strokes and Recovery. (www.apieceofmymind.net)
William C. Blome writes poetry and short fiction. He lives wedged between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he is a master’s degree graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. His work has previously seen the light of day in such fine little mags as Poetry London, PRISM International, In Between Hangovers, Fiction Southeast, Roanoke Review, and The California Quarterly.
Amy Katherine Cannon is a writer and writing teacher living in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from UC Irvine, where she was the recipient of the Gerard Creative Writing Endowment. She is the author of the mini-chapbook ‘to make a desert’ (Platypus Press, 2016) and has chapbook forthcoming from Californios Press in Summer 2019. Her work can be found in BOAAT, BODY, Juked, and LIT, among other places. She is Managing Editor of Palaver Arts Magazine, a student publication.
Jerry Chiemeke is an editor, mental health advocate, culture critic and lawyer. His writings and conversations have appeared in Brittlepaper, Agbowo, Bellanaija, Thoughtful Dog, The Pangolin Review and elsewhere. Jerry lives a secluded life in Lagos, Nigeria, where he is currently working on his second book. His craft can be accessed at jerrychiemeke.com
Liam Corley returned to poetry as a way of understanding the world after his deployment to Afghanistan in 2008-2009. He teaches American literature at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and his work on literature and war can be found in Badlands, Chautauqua, College English, First Things, and War, Literature, & the Arts. He lives in Riverside, CA, with his wife and four children.
Patsy Creedy lives and works in san Francisco and was born and raised in California. She took up surfing in her forties and considers herself an intermediate middle-aged lady on a long board. She received an MA and an MFA in creative writing from SFSU. Poetry was and is her first love, but creative nonfiction has captured her attention is really fun to read and write.
Garrett Cotham has always been curious. As a child he loved to spend time poring over maps, globes, and images of the earth, and dreaming about exploring the furthest reaches. As an adult, photography has been his chosen method of attempting to fulfill this curiosity and wanderlust. He aims to bring the same curiosity and wonder that he feels into the images he creates. It is his desire to pique the curiosity of his viewers. To inspire them to ask questions, learn about, and visit the places they dream of, in order to see and hear the stories those places have to tell.
Esther Dalton was raised between Southern California, Canada, and South Asia with many road (and air) trips between. She has a BA in English Creative Writing from Biola University, La Mirada, and an MA in English from Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. She works as an EFL teacher and a freelance curriculum developer.
Jennifer Dickinson is a graduate of Hollins University. Her work has previously appeared in Blackbird, Causeway Lit, and Cosmonauts Avenue. The recipient of a Hedgebrook residency and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Jennifer works as a memoir book coach and writing teacher in Los Angeles. Get in touch with Jennifer through her website, jenniferdickinsoncoaching.com
Tiffany K. Elliott received her BA in English (Creative Writing track) from California State University, San Bernardino, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at New Mexico State University. Her poetry explores issues of abuse, trauma, the lasting scars of PTSD, and how recovery and resiliency allow us to remake ourselves. Her work has been published in MUSE and Pacific Review.
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and numerous grants.
Originally from Los Angeles, Michael Hardin lives in rural Pennsylvania with his wife, two children, and two Pekingeses. He has had poetry published in Seneca Review, Connecticut Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Gargoyle, Texas Review, and Tampa Review, among others. He is currently working on a memoir, Touched.
Griffin James is an actor and poet in Raleigh, North Carolina where he studies Creative Writing at NC State University. His poetry has previously been published in The Windhover Literary Magazine, Roudabout Magazine, and CHER. He is beyond thrilled to share his work with you and would like to thank his mother and cats for their love and support.
Suvi Mahonen is a freelance writer based in Surfers Paradise on Australia’s Gold Coast. Her nonfiction appears on many platforms including The Weekend Australian Magazine, HuffPost and The Establishment. Her fiction has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies including in The Best Australian Stories and Griffith Review. A portion of a longer work-in-progress was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For more from Suvi visit her page here: http://www.redbubble.com/people/suvimahonen
Babitha Marina Justin is from a small town in Kerala, South India and her poems have appeared in Eclectica , Fulcrum: an annual of art and aesthetics (forthcoming), Adolphus Press, Rise Up Review, Constellations, catheXis NW Press, Silver Needle Press, About Place Journal, The Write Launch, Ogazine, The Four Quarters Magazine, Taj Mahal Review, Indian Ruminations, Kritya and Journal of Post-Colonial Literature. Her first collection of poetry, Of Fireflies, Guns and the Hills, was published by the Writers Workshop in 2015. She is also waiting to debut as a novelist with Maria’s Swamp: The Bigness of Small Lies.
Lissa Miller is a writer of fiction and poetry. She was born in San Bernardino and lived there throughout her childhood. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, and Stories on Stage, Davis. She also received Honorable Mention in the May/June 2018 Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. She holds an A.B. from the University of Redlands and an M.A. from the University of California, Davis.
Ana Jovanovska was born in 1991 in Macedonia. She got her Master’s Degree in Printmaking from the Faculty of Fine Arts – University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje in 2016. She spent a semester attending École supérieure d’arts & médias de Caen/Cherbourg. She had 10 solo and over 80 group exhibitions. She currently works as an artist.
W.F. Lantry spent years walking the deserts and climbing the mountains of Southern California. Now he spends time roaming the eastern forests from Maryland to Vermont. His poetry collections are The Terraced Mountain (Little Red Tree 2015), The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree 2012), and winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award in Poetry, The Language of Birds (2011). Honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Editors’ Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (Israel), the Paris Lake Poetry Prize and Potomac Review Prize. He is the editor of Peacock Journal.
Russ Allison Loar was a musician and songwriter for many years then returned to college, earning a journalism degree. He became a newspaper reporter, and wrote for the Los Angeles Times. He left journalism, taught newswriting at a community college and completed graduate work in American literature. He’s always written poetry and short prose and his photographs are used on websites throughout the world.
Marianne Lyon has been a music teacher for 43 years. After teaching in Hong Kong, she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews including Ravens Perch, TWJM Magazine, Earth Daughters and Indiana Voice Journal. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017. She is a member of the California Writers Club and an Adjunct Professor at Touro University in California.
Jayne Marek is author of Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (1995), and, most recently, the full-length poetry books In and Out of Rough Water (2017) and The Tree Surgeon Dreams of Bowling (2018). Her poems and art photos appear in publications such as The Cortland Review, One, Grub Street, Spillway, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Sin Fronteras, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. She has received two Pushcart Prize nominations.
Lisa Masé has been writing poetry since childhood. She is inspired by the natural world, her family and her work with food sovereignty. She is a food as medicine educator, folk herbalist and translator living and homesteading in Central Vermont. Her poems appear in K’in Literary, Open Journal of Arts and Letters, Jacard Press, and Zingara Review among others.
Jeff Mays has been a resident of the Inland Valley for the past fifty years, and has just published his memoir, Teaching in the Twilight Zone, which is available now at Amazon.
Kathleen McClung is the author of The Typists Play Monopoly and Almost the Rowboat. Her poems appear in Southwest Review, Unsplendid, The MacGuffin, Atlanta Review, cahoodaloodaling, California Quarterly, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, and elsewhere. Winner of the Rita Dove, Morton Marr, and Shirley McClure poetry prizes, she teaches at Skyline College and The Writing Salon in San Francisco. In 2018-2019 she is a writer-in-residence at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. http://www.kathleenmcclung.com.
elena minor is the author of TITULADA (Noemi Press, 2014), a book of bilingual poetry. Her work has been published in more than two dozen literary journals and anthologized in Angels of the Americlypse, BAX 2015, Coiled Serpent and Resist Much, Obey Little. Most recently her work has appeared in Uproot, The Santa Ana River Review, Gulf Coast and Hinchas de Poesía. She is the founding editor of PALABRA and teaches community-based creative writing to high school students.
Erik Lloyd Olson was raised both in the Northwest and in California, though he now lives and works in Portland, Oregon. His poetry has been published in literary journals including The Road Not Taken, Asses of Parnassus, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. He studied poetry at Portland State University, as well as at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters under poet David Biespiel. He has always drawn inspiration from the distinct character of places and terrains, especially the Californian deserts.
Douglas Penick has written opera libretti (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), texts for video (Leonard Cohen, narrator) as well as novels on the 3rd Ming Emperor (Journey of the North Star), and about spiritual searches amid social collapse (Dreamers and Their Shadows). He also wrote three book-length episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic on a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation. Wakefield Press published his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. Shorter works appeared in Agni, Chicago Quarterly, New England Quarterly, Kyoto Journal, Levekunst, Utne Reader, Tricycle, etc.
DL Pravda is a teacher, artist and beachcomber. His poems have recently appeared in American Dissident, Aji, Apricity, Dead Mule, Hamilton Stone Review, Vine Leaves and where is the river. His photos have appeared in The Virginian Pilot, The Norfolk Review, All U Can Eat, and are on display at Gallery 410 in Norfolk, Virginia at present. He teaches at Tidewater Community College in Chesapeake, VA and also fronts a rock band called The Dunes (www.thedunes.us).
Artemisio Romero y Carver is a 16-year old, Chicano, writer, and visual artist. He is primarily concerned with the modern collapse of culture and identity. While he was trained in observational realism, his recent visual artwork is a departure into more gestural ink compositions. This recent work explores the processes of trauma with the irregularity and precision of the chosen mediums. His writing reflects those same goals, namely to expose conflict through spontaneity and catharsis.
Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 published books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). which won the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2016. Her blog Miriam’s Well (http://miriamswell.wordpress.com) has 1500 daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places.
John Sierpinski has published poetry widely in literary magazines such as California Quarterly, North Coast Review and Spectrum to name a few. His work is also in five anthologies. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His collected poems, Sucker Hole, were published in 2018 by Cholla Needles Press. He lives in Yucca Valley, California.
Christine Sloan Stoddard is a Salvadoran-American writer and artist living in Brooklyn. She is the author of several books, including Water for the Cactus Woman (Spuyten Duyvil), Belladonna Magic (Shanti Arts), and other titles. Her work has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Bustle, The Feminist Wire, Marie Claire, The Huffington Post, So to Speak, and elsewhere. Most recently, she was the first-ever artist-in-residence at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, a 124-year-old settlement house in Manhattan.
Jesse Arthur Stone’s poems have appeared in: Rabbit: A Journal for Nonfiction Poetry (Australia); Edge; Nimrod; Passager; Ilya’s Honey; Peralta Press; Treasure House; Vermont Voices; North By Northeast; The Observer (London); CrossCountry (Montreal); Artemis; and Hayden’s Ferry Review. He was born in Long Beach, and grew up in the Mojave Desert. He currently lives in West Virginia.
Teresa Sutton’s third chapbook, Breaking Newton’s Laws, won first place in the 2017 Encircle Chapbook Competition. The first poem in the book, “Dementia,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The last poem in the book, “Confiteor 2,” won second prize in the 2018 Luminaire Best Poem Award.
Emma Sywyj has been an artist for fourteen years and has studied at the Camberwell College of Arts. From there she received a BA Honours in Photography & a Foundation Diploma in Art & Design. She has exhibited her artwork in New York, LA, San Francisco & Budapest. She has also exhibited nationally in London several times and has also been published in several magazines. She has exhibited her video art in international film festivals as well.
Max Talley was born in New York City and currently resides in Southern California. Talley’s fiction and essays have appeared in Del Sol Review, Fiction Southeast, Gravel, Hofstra University – Windmill, Bridge Eight, Litro, and The Opiate. His novel, Yesterday We Forget Tomorrow, was published in 2014. Talley is a contributing editor to Santa Barbara Literary Journal and teaches a writing workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. http://www.maxdevoetalley.com
John Taylor Jr. is an artist from Hebron, Maryland. Mr. Taylor graduated from Salisbury University with a bachelor’s degree in art. Mr. Taylor’s work has been published in various literary magazines and online magazines such as: Echoes and Visions, Weirderary, Saturday Morning Comics, Chicago Literati, and recently with Chaleur Magazine. Mr. Taylor can be usually found at home with his wife, Caitlin, and their beagle Belle.
Vivian Wagner is an associate professor of English at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Slice Magazine, Muse /A Journal, Forage Poetry Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Creative Nonfiction, The Atlantic, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, Eyedrum Periodically, 3QR, and other publications. She’s also the author of Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington), The Village (Aldrich Press-Kelsay Books), Making (Origami Poems Project), Curiosities (Unsolicited Press), and Raising (Clare Songbirds Publishing).
John Carr Walker is the author of the story collection Repairable Men (Sunnyoutside, 2014), which was a Small Press Distribution “Best of the Press” pick and a Late Night Library Debut podcast featured title. In 2012, he was awarded a Fishtrap Fellowship for an early draft of his novel Get. His short stories and essays have been appearing in literary journals since 2006. A former high school English teacher in Fresno, he now lives and write full-time in Saint Helens, Oregon.
Amy Wall writes “to get the quirky stories out of her head that seem to pop up out of nowhere.” While she works in Mergers and Acquisitions, her true love, besides her family, comes with the magic of pencil scratching across paper. Having traveled around the world, and living for eight years in Australia and New Zealand, Amy has finally settled down in sunny San Diego.
Megan Williams is a writer based in Pittsburgh. Most recently, she is published in 580 Split, Sonder Midwest, and Emerging Poets of 2018: Northeast Region.
Inlandia: A Literary Journey 