Contributors
Michael Agugom was born in Nigeria. He was a TV presenter and producer with the largest TV network in Africa. He teaches English language. His work has appeared in The Capra Review and elsewhere.
Saanya Ali is a student in her third year at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a concentration in Mixed Media Storytelling and Human Rights. She was born in Switzerland before moving to Bahrain and France and then to the US, and has grown up traveling all over the world. As a writer, photographer, and filmmaker, her cross-cultural upbringing and international background very directly influences the work that she does. http://alisaanya.wixsite.com/oneaday
Tobi Alfier is a multiple Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. Current chapbooks are The Coincidence of Castles from Glass Lyre Press, and Romance and Rust from Blue Horse Press. Down Anstruther Way is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).
203 of Jan Ball’s poems appear in journals such as Atlanta Review, Calyx, Connecticut Review, Main Street Rag, Nimrod, and Phoebe. Jan’s two chapbooks – accompanying spouse (2011) and Chapter of Faults (2014) – were published with Finishing Line Press.
Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian writer and photographer.
Recent work appears at Fiction International and The Tishman Review.
James Blevins is currently attending the College of Central Florida in Lecanto, Florida, studying English and Creative Writing. He has worked on the college’s literary magazine, In the Write Mind, as well as the campus newspaper, The Patriot Press. He wrote for his local newspaper’s sports page from 2011 to 2014; and, for just short of a year, he wrote for a sports web page called Bolts by the Bay covering the NHL and the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team. His first published short story, “For All the Bending,” appears in the 2016 Scythe Prize collection, available on Amazon.
Yuan Changming, 9-time Pushcart nominee and author of 7 chapbooks, published monographs on translation before moving out of China. With a PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver, and has poetry appearing in Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review and 1209 others across 38 countries.
Kevin Cutrer’s first collection of poems, Lord’s Own Anointed, was published by Dos Madres Press in 2015. More recent work has appeared in Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, and is forthcoming in The Hudson Review. Originally from Louisiana, he lives in Boston.
Holly Day has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota since 2000. Her published books include Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, Piano All-in-One for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, Insider’s Guide to the Twin Cities, Nordeast Minneapolis: A History, and The Book Of, while her poetry has recently appeared in New Ohio Review, SLAB, and Gargoyle. Her newest poetry book, Ugly Girl, just came out from Shoe Music Press.
Robert Fay’s work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, The Chicago Quarterly Review (forthcoming), and The Quarterly Conversation. Follow him at @RobertFay1 or visit his website at robertfay.com.
Melinda Giordano is from Los Angeles, California. Her pieces have appeared in Scheherazade’s Bequest and Vine Leaves Literary Journal among others. She was a regular poetry contributor to CalamitiesPress.com with her own column, ‘I Wandered and Listened’ and was also nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize. Her writing speculates on remarkable things – the secret lives of the natural world.
Benjamin Goluboff teaches English at Lake Forest College. Aside from a modest list of scholarly publications, he has placed imaginative work -- poetry, fiction, and essays -- in numerous small-press journals, most recently Chicago Literati, Kentucky Review, and War Literature and the Arts. Some of his work can be read at www.lakeforest.edu/academics/faculty/goluboff/
James Hannon is a psychotherapist in Acton, Massachusetts. He has worked in hospitals, outpatient programs, methadone clinics, and prisons. Before becoming a therapist he was a professor of sociology at several colleges in New England including Clark University, College of the Holy Cross, Dartmouth College, and Suffolk University. His poems and non-fiction have appeared in Blue Lake Review, Cold Mountain Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Soundings East, and other journals, and in Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets (Sundress, 2013). His collection, The Year I Learned the Backstroke, was published by Aldrich Press (2014).
Kate Healey has been published in several literary journals. This is her first appearance in The Courtship of Winds.
Ann Howells’ poetry has recently appeared in Crannog (Ire), San Pedro River Review, and Spillway among others. She serves on the board of Dallas Poets Community, a 501-c-3 non-profit, and has edited Illya’s Honey since 1999, recently going digital and taking on a co-editor. Her publications are Black Crow in Flight (Main Street Rag), Under a Lone Star (Village Books Press), Letters for My Daughter (Flutter Press), and Cattlemen and Cadillacs, an anthology of DFW poets which she edited (Dallas Poets Community).
M. A. Istvan Jr. worked as a janitor at his high school during high school. Interventions from scarved liberal whites with gluten allergies sent him on a trajectory that, despite failed attempts at Black Vernacular deprogramming, culminated in his earning a PhD. But with the bleak academic job-market, together with a family too ravaged by illiteracy and homelessness to provide any sort of safety net, it looks like he might come full circle. There are signs that he is well on his way. While he has not yet gone back to McDonald’s dumpsters, he steals whatever he can from supermarkets and more and more of his daily calories are coming from sugar packets and those mini jelly trays.
F. X. James is the pen name of Adam Middleton-Watts, who is an oddball British expat writing from South Dakota. When he’s not dissolving in the midst of a savage summer or fattening up for the next brutal winter, he’s writing poems and stories on the backs of unpaid utility bills, and drinking flagons of dark ale. He has had words printed in the laughing dog, into the teeth of the wind, Icon, Illuminations, Art Times, Amoskeag, Iconoclast, Yawp, The Rambunctious Review, Vagabond city, The dying goose, Empty sink publishing, Milo review, The Bangalore Review, Four chambers, Foundling Review, Dewpoint, The Write Place, Delmarva Review, Adirondack Review, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Autumn Sky Poetry, Crack the Spine, The Commonline Journal, and various other publications.
Emory Jones is a retired English teacher who has taught in high school and at several community colleges. He has over two hundred publishing credits, including poems in Voices International, Poets Forum Magazine, The Cotton Boll/Atlanta Review, Number One, Old Red Kimono, Free Xpresssions Magazine, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, and The Pink Chameleon.
Taylor King is a student attending Michigan Technological University.
Following thirty-one years as a musician in the United States Army, Gordon Kippola earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Tampa. After more than a dozen military moves (within and outside the U.S.), he now makes his home in Grapevine, Texas.
Timothy Kercher lived abroad from 2006 to 2012—four years in the country of Georgia and two in Ukraine—and has now moved back to his home in Dolores, Colorado. He continues to translate contemporary poetry from the Republic of Georgia. He is a high school English teacher and has worked in five countries—Mongolia, Mexico, and Bosnia being the others. His essays, poems, and translations have appeared in a number of recent literary publications, including Music & Literature, Crazyhorse, Versal, Plume, upstreet, and others.
John C. Krieg is a retired landscape architect and land planner who formerly practiced in Arizona, California, and Nevada. He is also retired as an International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) certified arborist and currently holds seven active categories of California state contracting licenses, including the highest category of Class A General Engineering. He has written a college textbook entitled Desert Landscape Architecture (1999, CRC Press). Additionally, he has co-published an environmental trilogy with Ivy House Publishing Group, and self-published two volumes of poetry, an autobiography entitled Career In Crisis (2007, Ribbonwood Press), and a collection of novellas and essays entitled Ravings From the High Chaparral (2008, Ribbonwood Press). John has had pieces published in A Gathering of the Tribes, Clark Street Review, Conceit, Palm Springs Life, and Pegasus. In conjunction with filmmaker/photographer Charles Sappington, Mr. Krieg has completed a two-part documentary film entitled Landscape Architecture: The Next Generation (2010).
Robert Lietz's poems have appeared in more than one hundred journals, including Agni Review, Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, The Colorado Review, Epoch, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, The Ontario Review, Poetry, and Shenandoah. Eight collections of poems have been published, including Running in Place, At Park and East Division, The Lindbergh Half-century (L’Epervier Press,) The Inheritance (Sandhills Press), Storm Service and After Business in the West: New and Selected Poems (Basal Books.) Besides the print publications poems have appeared in several webzines. A net search for "Robert Lietz poetry" will provide a representative selection. In addition, Lietz spends a good deal of time taking, post-processing, and printing photographs he has been making for the past several years, examining the relationship between the image-making and the poems he has made and is exploring.
Devi Lockwood is a poet / touring cyclist / storyteller from Boston, currently traveling the world by bicycle to collect 1,001 stories from people she meets about water and climate change (devi-lockwood.com).
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a Pushcart nominee with over a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His latest book out now, An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy, is available on Amazon and through Cawing Crow Press, while in July of this year, another book of poems, Like As If, will be published by Pskis Porch. His poems on video can be viewed on YouTube’s ‘BruceMcRaePoetry’
Sarah Merrow’s poems have been published in the Broad River Review, where she was twice a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry, An Caomhnóir, an Irish publication, The Wilderness House Literary Review, A Quiet Courage, and Passager, where she won an Honorable Mention in the 2016 poetry competition. Her chapbook, Unpacking the China, recently won the QuillsEdgePress chapbook competition and will be published in the fall of 2016.
Petar Parkar is a lifelong Southerner with a dash of spice, specifically the kind of spice you see in those farmer's markets that seems inedible until you actually try it. He spends his days flirting with whatever Muse was assigned the domain of short fiction. She would like him to stop.
Dawn Paul has published work in online and print journals, including Paterson Literary Review (ed. Maria Mazzarotti Gillan) and Apple Valley Review (ed. Leah Browning).
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The B Poems published by Poets Wear Prada, 2016. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
Louis Phillips’ poems have appeared in Saint Ann's Review, South Carolina Review, Light, Briarcliff Review and many other publications. Pleasure Boat Studio issued his new & selected poems last year. His plays have been produced off-Broadway, off-off Broadway, and in regional theaters. Broadway Play Publishers has published 3 full-length plays —The Envoi Messages, The Ballroom in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and The Last of the Marx Brothers’ Writers. His website is: LOUIS-PHILLIPS.COM
Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University, Rome, Georgia. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and more than a dozen other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River magazine and more than sixty other publications.
Jodi Rizzotto is a writer and elementary school teacher living in Riverside, California. She holds a Master’s Degree in Education from California Baptist University, Riverside. Her position as vice president and membership chair of the Inland Empire California Writers Club offers her opportunities to network with other writers in the Southern California area. In addition, she is the editor of The Handlebar Star, an electronic publication of the Inland Empire Harley Owners Group. For the past seven years she has written, directed, and acted in plays for The Grove Community Church’s summer vacation bible school program which serves almost 1,000 elementary school age children for five days each summer. When she’s not on stage, she works on her Young Adult fantasy book titled College of the Crones. Weekends you can find her behind her husband on their Harley named The Black Pearl, following their pack of friends in the HOGs (Harley Owners Group). Her Harley adventures have been published in Cold Noon Travel Diaries and Fresh Ink online magazines. You can read more of her work at www.jrizzotto.com
Fred Rosenblum is a poet living with his wife of 42 years in San Diego, California. He served with the 1st Marines in 1968/‘69, Vietnam, fueling most of what has appeared in a smattering of publications over the years. His first collection of poetry, Hollow Tin Jingles, was released in February of 2014 by the Main Street Rag Publishing Company in Charlotte, NC.
Daniel Lloyd Smith’s short story “Manufactured Consent” was published in Shout Out UK, an online global politics magazine, one of Britain’s fastest growing independent global news networks. www.shoutoutuk.org. In 1966, when he was twelve years old,he listened to the Beatles song “Paperback Writer” and had an epiphany—he decided destiny was singing to him from the radio, calling him to write fiction. Throughout his high school rebellion and his stints as an irrigation specialist, a landscape maintenance technician, a forklift operator, a railroad mechanic, a slaughterhouse mechanic (R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut) and as an aspiring scholar—earning a B.A in Political Science with a Minor in Economics from Washington State University and a Juris Doctor degree from Whittier College School of Law (Los Angeles)—he inked his narratives between cramming sessions and Socratic exchanges. Procreation dutifully addressed, nurturing and sculpting a fine and noble son, he continued to sketch his characters and trot them forth for the cathartic and clarifying effect they brought his soul. Now he capers in the ether at every opportunity, looking for a laugh and a lesson and maybe a story in the antics of his seven brilliant grandchildren and the wider world around them, the scribbled results a dither of scenes and sensory residue.
Daniel James Sundahl is Emeritus Professor in English and American Studies at Hillsdale College where he taught for thirty-two-and-a-half years.
