Linda Pastan
Linda grew up in New York City, graduated from Radcliffe College in 1954, and received an MA from Brandeis University. She has published 15 volumes of poetry, most recently Insomnia which won the Towson University Literary Award and A Dog Runs Through It. Two of her books have been finalists for the National Book Award, one for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She taught for several years at American University and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference for 20 years. She is a past Poet Laureate of Maryland. Pastan has won numerous awards, including The Radcliffe Distinguished Alumni Award and The Maurice English Award. In 2003 she won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Pastan lives with her husband in Maryland. They have 3 children and 7 grandchildren.
Adrian Blevins
Adrian is the author of the full-length poetry collections Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the Wilder Prize and just released this spring by Two Sylvias Press, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, and The Brass Girl Brouhaha; the chapbooks Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes; and the co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. She is the recipient of many awards including a Kate Tufts Discovery Award for The Brass Girl Brouhahaand a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among others. She teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Robert Crawford
Robert has published two books of poetry, The Empty Chair (2011, Richard Wilbur Award), and Too Much Explanation Can Ruin a Man (2005). His sonnets have twice won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. His poems have appeared in many national journals including The Formalist, First Things, Dark Horse, The Raintown Review, The Lyric, Measure, Light and Forbes.Heco-founded the Hyla Brook Poets, and is a long-time member of the Powow River Poets of Newburyport, MA. Currently, he is the Director of Poetry Activities at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH and is serving as Derry’s first poet laureate. He lives in Chester, NH, with his wife, the poet Midge Goldberg.
Sharon Dolin
Sharon is the author of six poetry books: Manual for Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016); Whirlwind (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); her ekphrastic collection, Serious Pink (Marsh Hawk Press, reissued 2015); Burn and Dodge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry; Realm of the Possible (Four Way Books, 2004); and Heart Work (Sheep Meadow Press, 1995). Her translations from Catalan of Gemma Gorga’s Book of Minutes is forthcoming in The Field Translation Series in 2019. She received the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress in 2013, chosen by Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. She has taught at Eugene Lang College of The New School, Hofstra University, Adelphi, Rutgers, The Cooper Union, the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and Poets House. Founding Director of The Center for Book Arts Annual Poetry Chapbook Competition, she now directs Writing About Art in Barcelona, a 12-day creative writing workshop.
Matthew Guenette
Matthew is the author of three full-length poetry collections, including Vasectomania (2017) and American Busboy (2011) both from University of Akron Press. He is also the author of a chapbook, Civil Disobedience (2017), which won the 2016 Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook Contest, published by Rabbit Catastrophe Press. He teaches writing at Madison Area Technical College in Madison, WI.
Kathleen Aguero’s latest book is After That (Tiger Bark Books). Her other poetry collections include Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth (Cervena Barva Press), Daughter Of (Cedar Hill Books), The Real Weather (Hanging Loose), and Thirsty Day (Alice James Books). She has also co-edited three volumes of multi-cultural literature for the University of Georgia Press (A Gift of Tongues, An Ear to the Ground, and Daily Fare) and is consulting poetry editor of Solstice Literary Magazine. She is a co-winner of the 2012 Firman Houghton Award from the New England Poetry Club and a recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Elgin-Cox Foundation. She teaches in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Pine Manor College and in Changing Lives through Literature, an alternative sentencing program. Kathleen also runs Creative Writing for Caregivers workshops in both private and institutional settings.
Liz Ahl is author of the book of poems, Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017) and four chapbooks, including A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, winner of the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook prize. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, The Lavender Review, and on the Indolent Books online project, “What Rough Beast.” She teaches writing at Plymouth State University.
Educated at Colby (BA), Tufts (MA) and Harvard (ABD) in German, her third language, María Luisa Arroyo writes code-switching poems that speak to the four cultures and four languages that inform her identity and her imagination. Arroyo’s recent poems are or will be published in CHEST, Solstice Literary Magazine, Women Arts Quarterly Journal, and CALYX, among others. Her collections include Gathering Words: Recogiendo Palabras (Bilingual Review Press, 2008) and her chapbook Flight (Thousand Hands Press, 2016). A Solstice MFA graduate, Arroyo is currently an Assistant Professor of Writing and First-Year Studies at Bay Path University.
DeMisty D. Bellinger poetry can be found in many places, including in Blue Fifth Review, Boston Accent Lit, and Anomaly. She is also the author of the chapbook, Rubbing Elbows (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She attended Vermont Studio Center as a fellowship and received an MFA from Southampton College and a PhD from the University of Nebraska. DeMisty teaches creative writing at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts.
Candace Bergstrom’s poems appear in literary journals including Adanna, In the Questions, and Flint Hills Review. Her chapbook Cord was a recent finalist in the Blue Light Press chapbook contest. She’s a professor of English at NHTI, where she teaches creative writing, poetry, and literature. She currently lives in Stoddard, New Hampshire.
Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, farmer, freelance editor, critic, and small-town librarian. She is the author of MIDDEN (Fordham University Press, fall 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). Her poems and book reviews appear in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Muzzle, Salamander, RHINO, River Styx, and other journals. She is the recipient of the 2016-17 Poets Out Loud Prize, the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award, and residencies from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. A former Managing Editor for Alice James Books, Bouwsma currently serves as Book Review Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine.
Cheryl Buchanan is an attorney from Los Angeles who earned her MFA at Emerson College. She is a co-founder of Writers Without Margins, a nonprofit providing free workshops in homeless shelters, addiction rehabs, community health centers, youth services organizations, and prison reentry programs. Cheryl has been the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Boston Mayor’s Poetry Prize and the Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Award as well as nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize and twice for Best New Poets. She is the recipient of the 2018 National Association for Poetry Therapy’s Social Justice Award and a producer of an upcoming documentary with six men in a prison reentry and addiction recovery program whose stories intersect in a creative writing workshop.
Eileen Cleary is a graduate of Lesley University’s MFA program. She is a recent Pushcart nominee and has work published or upcoming in Naugatuck River Review, J Journal, The American Journal of Poetry and Main Street Rag.
Quintin Collins is Boston-area a poet, managing editor, and soon-to-be Solstice MFA program graduate. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Threshold Glass Mountain, Eclectica, and Transition among others.
Poet, translator, and editor Peter Covino is associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author the poetry collections, The Right Place to Jump (2012), recently featured on NPR, and on the Huffington Post and Cut Off the Ears of Winter (2005) both from W. Michigan University Press, New Issues. His prizes include the 2007 PEN American/ Osterweil Award for emerging poets and the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize for his chapbook, Straight Boyfriend (2001). Recent poems appeared in such places as the American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, The Journal, LIT, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and The Penguin Anthology of Italian-American Writing, among others.
Julie Cyr has been published by Smoky Quartz, Five 2 One Magazine, Blood and Thunder Journal, Broad River Review, and Lost Horse Press in the Nasty Women Poets Anthology. She was awarded 2014 Best of Poetry by Blood and Thunder Journal and was a finalist in the 2016 Rash Awards for Poetry. Julie holds an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She works as an editorial assistant for Surreal Poetics and lives in Sharon, NH with her husband and two sons.
Recipient of the Dana Award in Poetry, Tom Daley’s poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Witness, and elsewhere. FutureCycle Press published his first-full length collection of poetry, House You Cannot Reach—Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems, in 2015.
Rachel DeWoskin is the author of Second Circus (Penguin, 2019); Blind (Penguin, 2014); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); and Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005). She is on the core fiction faculty at the University of Chicago, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Centers for East Asian Studies and Jewish Studies. Read her recent essay on Derek Walcott in The New Yorker.
Maggie Dietz is the author of Perennial Fall, which won New Hampshire’s Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry in 2007, and That Kind of Happy (both from The University of Chicago Press). An alumna of the graduate creative writing program at Boston University, Dietz also taught undergraduate creative writing courses at BU for many years while serving as director of the Favorite Poem Project, Robert Pinsky’s special undertaking during his tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate. Her awards include the Grolier Poetry Prize, the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Her work appears widely in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, and Salmagundi. A native of Green Bay, Wisconsin, Dietz earned a B.A. in English from Northwestern University. She is currently Assistant Professor in English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, the poet Todd Hearon, and their two children.
Amy Dryansky’s second book, Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry, Ireland) received the 2014 Massachusetts Book Award for poetry. Her first, How I Got Lost So Close to Home, won the New England/New York Award from Alice James. Individual poems appear in a variety of journals and several anthologies, including Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Memorious, New England Review, Orion, The Sun, and The Women’s Review of Books. She’s received two poetry fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as honors/awards from the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has two children, works for the Culture, Brain & Development Program at Hampshire College and is currently the Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.
Nicole Terez Dutton’s work has appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, 32 Poems, Indiana Review and Salt Hill Journal. Nicole earned an MFA from Brown University and has received fellowships from the Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her collection of poems, If One Of Us Should Fall, was selected as the winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts where she served as the city’s inaugural poet laureate. She teaches in the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program and is an editor at The Baffler, Du Bois Review and Transition Magazine.
Alice B. Fogel is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. In addition to Strange Terrain, a reader’s guide to appreciating poetry without necessarily “getting” it, she is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, A Doubtful House. Others include Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature & the New Hampshire Literary Award in Poetry, & Be That Empty, a national bestseller. A nine-time Pushcart nominee & recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship & other awards, her poems appear in many journals & anthologies, including Best American Poetry. She lives in Walpole, NH, works with learning disabled students at Landmark College in Putney, VT, & hikes mountains whenever possible.
Robbie Gamble holds an MFA in poetry from Lesley University. His poems and essays have appeared in Scoundrel Time, Writers Resist, Stonecoast Review, Solstice, and Poet Lore. He was the winner of the 2017 Carve Poetry prize. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston.
Literary Performer, Regie Gibson, has lectured and performed in the U.S., Cuba and Europe. Representing the U.S., Regie competed for and received the Absolute Poetry Award in Monfalcone, Italy. He’s performed with Boston’s Handel+Haydn Society and has received an MCC award for poetry and is a recent recipient of both a 2017 Brother Thomas Fellowship for Artistic Excellence from The Boston Foundation and a Live Arts Grant from The Boston Foundation. He’s served as a consultant for both the National Endowment for the Arts “How Art Works” initiative & the “Mere Distinction of Color”: an exhibit at James Madison’s Montpelier, examining the legacy of slavery and the U.S. constitution. Regie teaches at Grub Street, Clark University, is part of the Emerson College Summer Faculty and is both Poet-in-Residence for Mass Poetry and head instructor for the Mass Poetry “Poets in the Schools Program.” When Regie is not teaching, he is the lead singer for Atlas Soul: A world music, global funk ensemble and is Artistic Director of Shakespeare to Hiphop’s “Shakespeare Time-Traveling Speakeasy”: a multimedia performance focusing on the life, works & influence of William Shakespeare.
Gail Hanlon’s poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, CutbankOnline, Iowa Review, and Best American Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She edited Voicing Power: Conversations with Visionary Women (Hachette), published SIFT, a chapbook (Finishing Line), was a finalist for the Iowa Review Award (2013), a semi-finalist for the Tomaz Salamun Prize at VERSE magazine (2015), and Top 25 in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers (2017).
A native of Texas, Todd Hearon is the author of two collections of poems, Strange Land (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) and No Other Gods (Salmon Poetry, 2015). His poems, plays and essays have appeared in AGNI, The Common, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, The Southern Review, Southwest Review and other journals. Before moving to New Hampshire, he worked in theater in Boston, co-founding The Bridge Theater Company; his own plays have been produced at the Boston Playwrights Theater and the Boston Center for the Arts. He has received a PEN/New England “Discovery” Award; the Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation; the Rumi Prize in Poetry (Arts & Letters); and The Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (Sarah Lawrence College). Most recently, he served as the Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. He lives and teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Krysten Hill is an educator, writer, and performer who has showcased her poetry on stage at the Boston Book Festival, Merrimack College, The Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and many others. She received her MFA in poetry from UMass Boston where she currently teaches. Her work can be found in apt, The Baltimore Review, B O D Y, Word Riot, Muzzle, PANK, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Winter Tangerine Review and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award. Her chapbook, How Her Spirit Got Out, received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.
Richard Hoffman is the author of seven books, including the celebrated Half the House: a Memoir, published in a 20th Anniversary Edition in 2015, and the 2014 memoir Love & Fury. In addition to the volume Interference and Other Stories, he has published four collections of poetry: Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Book Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; and Noon until Night. He is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University.
Joan Houlihan is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Shadow-feast from Four Way Books. Other books include Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays; The Mending Worm, which received the 2006 Green Rose Award from New Issues Press; The Us, which received a Must-Read distinction from the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and Ay, a sequel to The Us. In addition to publishing in a wide array of journals, including Boston Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Arts, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and Poetry, her poems have been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries; The Book of Irish-American Poetry, 18th Century to Present; and The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Houlihan has taught at Columbia University, Emerson College, and Smith College. She currently serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is Professor of Practice in Poetry at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Houlihan founded and directs the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.
Christine Jones is a graduate of Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing program, Cambridge, MA. She is also founder/chief editor of poems2go, a public poetry project and is on staff at Sugar House Review. Christine’s most recent poetry can be found in 32 Poems, Salamander, Timberline Review, Naugatuck Review, and Cimarron Review.
Hope Jordan’s poetry was recently awarded the Academy of American Poets prize at UMass Boston, where she is an MFA candidate in fiction. Her poems have appeared in Nine Mile, Comstock Review, and Naugatuck River Review, among other publications. Her chapbook, The Day She Decided to Feed Crows, was released by Cervena Barva Press in 2018. A longtime member of the Concord, NH-based Yogurt Poets writing group, she was the first official poetry slam master in New Hampshire, and co-founded what is now Slam Free or Die in 2006.
Ala Khaki is an Iranian-American poet, residing in Amherst, New Hampshire. Imprisoned twice in the infamous Evin Prison in Iran during the Shah’s regime for participation in the student democracy movement, he fled to America in 1978, following a tip from a military relative that he was on a death squad list. That same year all copies of his first book, From Here to Sunrise were destroyed by the Shah’s Secret Police. In 1981, he was the subject of a short documentary film titled “Resident Exile” by the celebrated documentary filmmaker and director Ross McElwee. Ala Khaki’s poems have appeared in Iranian literary journals including The Book Review, Par (Feather), and Thought and Imagination, and in American poetry periodicals and anthologies, including the 2010 Poets’ Guide to New Hampshire, and Poet Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets. “Calling the Dawn”, a selection of his Farsi poems and “Return”, a selection of his English poems, were published in 1994 and 2005 respectively. He was a feature at the New England Poetry Conference in 2004 and 2005, sponsored by the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, and appeared in 2007 and 2012 on New Hampshire Poet Showcase, a project of the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Ala Khaki currently serves as the Treasurer for the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and continues to read throughout New England.
Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry and the Antivenom Poetry Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, Prairie Schooner and many other journals. She has taught creative writing at Boston University, Brandeis University and is currently a visiting writer at Amherst College. Kapur has been awarded fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and MacDowell Colony. She is the director of the New England arts program, The Tannery Series, and serves as Poetry Editor at The Drum Literary Magazine. She was recently named an “Asian-American poet to watch” by NBC news. Kapur grew up in Honolulu and now lives north of Boston.
Joy Ladin is the author of nine books of poetry, including last year’s The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems and Fireworks in the Graveyard, and two Lambda Literary Award finalists Impersonation and Transmigration. Her memoir of gender transition, Through the Door of Life, was a 2012 National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in many periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and North American Review, and has been recognized with a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, among other honors. She holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University. Links to her poems and essays are available at wordpress.joyladin.com.
Jenna Le is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018; 1st ed. pub. by Anchor & Plume, 2016), the latter of which won 2nd Place in the Elgin Awards. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She lives and works as a physician and educator in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
Maura MacNeil is the author of the poetry collections: A History of Water (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and Lost Houses (Aldrich Press, 2016). She is founder of off the margins (offthemargins.com), a website that features writing and reflection on the life of an artist from women who “fearlessly tell the truth and risk vulnerability to give voice to their experience.” Her poetry, prose, and critical writing has been published and anthologized in numerous publications over the past three decades including Poet Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets; Voices from the Frost Place Volume II; On Our Own, and Shadow and Light: An Anthology of Memory. Maura is a professor of creative writing at New England College in Henniker, NH.
Fred Marchant is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Said Not Said (Graywolf Press, 2017.) Earlier books include The Looking House (2009) and Full Moon Boat (2000), both also from Graywolf. House on Water, House in Air (2002), a new and selected collection was published in Dublin, Ireland by Dedalus Press His first book, Tipping Point, won the 1993 Washington Prize, from The Word Works, and was reissued in a 20th anniversary second edition. Marchant has translated works by Vietnamese poets Tran Dang Khoa and Vo Que. He has also edited Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford. An emeritus professor of English, he is founding director of the Suffolk University Poetry Center in Boston. He is the winner of the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club, given to poets “whose work is an inspiration to other writers.”
Jennifer Martelli‘s debut poetry collection, The Uncanny Valley, was published in 2016 by Big Table Publishing Company. She is also the author of the chapbook, Apostrophe and the chapbook, After Bird, forthcoming from Grey Book Press. Her work has appeared in Thrush, [Pank], The Baltimore Review, The Heavy Feather Review, and The Pittsburgh Poetry Review. Jennifer has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes and is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is a book reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, as well as a co-curator for The Mom Egg VOX Blog Folio.
Maggie Martin is the author of the poetry chapbook Old Stories (Niobe Press) and the co-author of Rebel in White, a memoir on the life of Bertha McComish. She is a poet, performer and workshop facilitator who specializes in healing through the practice of poetry. She has served as a poet in residence at a VA Medical Center, been a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative
Arts, and the recipient of numerous grans and fellowships in the arts, including two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She currently lives on the Contoocook River in the foothills of the White Mountains, near her family, and listens to the stories of people’s lives. Her newest manuscript is According to Calderon de la Barca,“Life is a Dream.”
Grace Mattern has been published widely in journals and anthologies, including The Sun, Calyx, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore and Yankee. She has received fellowships from the NH State Arts Council and Vermont Studio Center and has published two books of poetry. The Truth About Death won the 2014 Readers’ Choice NH Literary Award in Poetry. She can be found online at www.gracemattern.com
Kevin McLellan is the author of Hemispheres (Fact-Simile Editions, forthcoming), Ornitheology (The Word Works, 2018), [box] (Letter [r] Press, 2016), Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010). He won the 2015 Third Coast Poetry Prize and Gival Press’ 2016 Oscar Wilde Award, and his writing appears in literary journals including Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Kenyon Review, Western Humanities Review, and many others. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jennifer Militello is the author of A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo Press, 2016), finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named one of the top books of 2013 by Best American Poetry and runner-up for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, Flinch of Song, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her poems have been published widely in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Tin House, and anthologized in Best New Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion, and The Manifesto Project. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.
Born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, Matt W. Miller is the author of the collections The Wounded for the Water (Salmon Poetry), Club Icarus, selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize and Cameo Diner: Poems. He has published poems and essays in The Adroit Journal, Harvard Review, Narrative Magazine, Notre Dame Review, Southwest Review, 32 Poems, Memorious, and Crazyhorse, among other journals. He was winner of the River Styx Microbrew/Microfiction Prize and Iron Horse Review’s Trifecta Poetry Prize. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Poetry at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy and lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire.
Kathy Nilsson earned a BA from Mount Holyoke College and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, Poetry Daily, Columbia, and Volt, among other journals. Her chapbook The Abattoir was published by Finishing Line Press in 2008, and in 2011 she received the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Award. Her first full-length collection, The Infant Scholar was released by Tupelo Press in 2015.
January Gill O’Neil is the author of Misery Islands (2014) and Underlife (2009), both published by CavanKerry Press. A third collection, Rewilding, will be published by CavanKerry Press in November 2018. She is the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and an assistant professor of English at Salem State University. She is a board of trustees member with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and Montserrat College of Art. Misery Islands was selected for a 2015 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. Additionally, it was selected by Mass Center for the Book as a Must-Read Book for 2015, and won the 2015 Massachusetts Book Award.
Ben Pease is the author of Chateau Wichman: A Blockbuster in Verse (Big Lucks Books, 2017). He is a board member of the Ruth Stone Foundation and leading the renovations of Ruth Stone’s property in Goshen, VT. He is finishing up two other projects, Fugitives of Speech, an epic poem following teenage filmmakers in Ludlow, MA and a collection of poetry about the death of his mother. He lives in Brandon, VT with his wife and daughter.
Ralph Pennel is the author of A World Less Perfect for Dying In, published by Cervena Barva Press. Ralph’s writing has appeared in Literary Orphans, F(r)iction, Tarpaulin Sky, Elm Leaves Journal, Rain Taxi Review of Books and various other publications in the U.S. and abroad. He is a founding editor and the fiction editor of the online literary journal, Midway Journal. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart, and he was twice a finalist for Somerville Poet Laureate. Ralph is on the board of the New England Poetry Club, and he teaches poetry and writing at Bentley University, in Waltham, MA.
Willie Perdomo is the author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Smoking Lovely, which won the PEN/Open Book Award, and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, Bomb Magazine, and African Voices. He is currently a member of the VONA/Voices faculty, a Lucas Arts Literary Fellow, and teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy.
Patrice Pinette is inspired by alchemy between the arts and collaborates with artists and musicians in workshops, readings, and exhibits. She teaches creative writing, literature, and eurythmy, which embodies the dance of language, in Waldorf high schools, CFA’s Renewal Courses, and at Antioch University New England in the Healing Arts in Education program. Patrice received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poems have appeared in The Inflectionist Review; The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review; Adanna Literary Journal; Poetica Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine; Poet Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets, and elsewhere.
Kyle Potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water (Finishing Line Press), won the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Measure, JAMA, and others. A member of the Powow River Poets, she is an advisor to Frost Farm Poetry in Derry, NH.
Alison Prine’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Her debut collection of poems, Steel, was chosen by Jeffrey Harrison for the Cider Press Review Book Award and was published in January 2016. Steel has been named a finalist for the 2017 Vermont Book Award. Alison lives in Burlington, Vermont where she works as a psychotherapist.
Saxophonist, composer, actor, director, playwright and poet, Jeff Robinson started the band the Jeff Robinson Trio in 1995 as creative experiment to bridge music and theatre. The Trio has held a residency at the Lizard Lounge for the past 20 years and has accompanied hundreds of poets including Patricia Smith, Amiri Baraka, Quincy Troupe, Regie Gibson. Jeff is an alumnus of Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, where he studied with saxophonists Bill Pierce and George Garzone. Jeff’s one man show about jazz legend Charlie “Bird” Parker entitled “Live Bird” has appeared off-Broadway and Charlie Parker’s hometown of Kansas City Missouri.
Anna V.Q. Ross is a 2018 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Poetry. Her books include If a Storm, winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize (Anhinga Press) and the chapbook Figuring (Bull City Press). Her work appears in The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Harvard Review Online, Southern Humanities Review, AGNI Online, and Provincetown Arts, among otherjournals, and has been recognized with fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She is a contributing editor and reviewer for Salamander and teaches in the Writing, Literature & Publishing Program at Emerson College. She lives with her family in Dorchester, MA, where she hosts the poetry and performance series Unearthed Song & Poetry and raises chickens.
Hilary Sallick is the author of a chapbook, Winter Roses (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and a full-length collection, Asking the Form (forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press). She teaches reading and writing to adult learners in Somerville, MA, and she is vice-president of the New England Poetry Club.
Ralph Sneeden’s poems and essays have appeared in Agni, The Common, Ecotone, Harvard Review, The New Republic, Southwest Review, The Surfer’s Journal, and many other magazines. BARCAROLE, the manuscript for his second book, has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize and the May Swenson Poetry Award. His first book of poems, EVIDENCE OF THE JOURNEY (Harmon Blunt, 2007), received honorable mention for the Shenandoah/Glasgow prize for emerging writers, and the title poem won the Friends of Literature Prize from POETRY magazine. He has held fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the American School in London. Born in Los Angeles, he has been teaching high school English for thirty-five years, in Exeter, NH since 1995.
Frederick Speers’ first book of poems, So Far Afield (Nomadic Press, 2017), is a finalist this year for the Lambda Literary Awards in the category of gay poetry. He lives in Denver, Colorado with his husband and two dogs.
S Stephanie’s poetry, fiction, and book reviews have appeared in many literary magazines such as Birmingham Poetry Review, Café Review, Cease, Cows, Literary Laundry, OVS, One, Rattle, St. Petersburg Review, Solidus, Southern Indiana Review, The Southern Review, The Sun and Third Coast. Her chapbooks include: Throat (Igneus Press), What the News Seemed to Say (Pudding House – re-released by Igneus Press in 2015), So This is What It Has Come To (Finishing Line Press 2015). She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Manchester, NH.
Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. Her books include Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House, 2014), Poetry Comics From the Book of Hours, (Pleiades, 2016), and The Mobius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018). Her poems, poetry comics, and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines including Poetry, jubilat, and Georgia Review. She is creative director at the Ruth Stone Foundation in Goshen, Vermont.
Jacob Strautmann is the Managing Director of the Boston Playwright’s Theater, and his first book of poems, The Land of the Dead is Open for Business, will publish in 2020 from Four Way Books.
Dara Wier is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017), You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013), Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009), Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006), Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005, 2006 SFSU Poetry Center Book Award), Hat On a Pond (Verse Press, 2002), and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon, 2001). Her poetry has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the American Poetry Review. In 2005 she held the Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She teaches workshops and form and theory seminars and directs the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-directs the University of Massachusetts’ Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action.
Anton Yakovlev‘s latest poetry collection is Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017). He is also the author of chapbooks The Ghost of Grant Wood (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Neptune Court (The Operating System, 2015). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Hopkins Review, Amarillo Bay, Prelude, Measure, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and elsewhere. His work has been profiled in The Huffington Post, The Arts Fuse, and At the Inkwell, among others. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Esenin, is forthcoming from Sensitive Skin Books. Yakovlev won the 2016 KGB Poetry Annual Open-Mic Contest and was a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Born in Moscow, Russia, he studied filmmaking and poetry at Harvard University and has also written and directed several short films. He is the current Education Director at Bowery Poetry Club, where he also curates the Triangle Quarterly poetry reading series. He co-hosts the Carmine Street Metrics series in Manhattan and the Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow series in Rutherford, New Jersey.
New Hampshire Poetry Festival 