Issue 18
Contributors
Emilio Aguilera
Emilio Aguilera, generation pixel poet, can be found in the online forums of PFFA or at Venice Beach, California. His work has been published in the Chaparral Online Journal, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and in PFFA’s recent anthology Try To Have Your Writing Make Sense. He lives with his curse and addiction, poetry and coffee, not necessarily in that order.
Matt Babcock
Matthew James Babcock’s debut poetry collection, Points of Reference, will be published by Folded Word in March 2016. His debut fiction collection, Future Perfect, will be published by Queen’s Ferry Press in October 2016. He received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, and his literary criticism can be found in Journal of Ecocriticism and Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis.
Mark Belair
Mark Belair’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Atlanta Review, The Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry East and The South Carolina Review. His most recent collection is Breathing Room (Aldrich Press, 2015). Previous collections include Night Watch (Finishing Line Press, 2013); While We’re Waiting (Aldrich Press, 2013); and Walk With Me (Parallel Press of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2012). He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times. For more information, please visit www.markbelair.com
Jane Blue
Jane Blue has been published recently in , Innisfree Poetry Journal, Ekphrasis, Turtle Island Review, Connotation Press, Pirene’s Fountain, and FutureCycle. In the past she has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Antigonish Review, The Louisville Review, as well as Avatar. A new book of poems, Blood Moon, was published by FutureCycle Press January 1, 2014, available there and on Amazon. She was born and raised in Berkeley, California and now lives near the Sacramento River.
Rose Mary Boehm
A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and a full-length poetry collection (TANGENTS) published in 2011 in the UK, well over 100 of her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a good two dozen US poetry reviews as well as some print anthologies, and Diane Lockward’s The Crafty Poet. She won third price in in the 2009 Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse (US), was semi-finalist in the Naugatuck poetry contest 2012/13 and has been a finalist in several Goodreads poetry contests, winning it in October 2014; a new poetry collection is earmarked for publication in 2016 the US.
Carl Boon
A native Ohioan, Carl Boon lives and works in Izmir, Turkey. Recent or forthcoming poems appear in Neat, Jet Fuel Review, Blast Furnace, Kentucky Review, and many other magazines.
Sarah Carleton
Sarah Carleton writes, edits, plays the banjo and raises her son in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in Houseboat, Burning Word Literary Journal, Avatar Review, Poetry Quarterly, The Bijou Poetry Review, Off the Coast, Shark Reef, Wild Violet Magazine, The Binnacle, The Homestead Review, Cider Press Review, Nimrod, Silver Birch, Ekphrastic and Chattahoochee Review.
Radu Carp
Radu Carp lives in Romania in a mountainous area where he is lucky because he can enjoy and photograph all seasons. He feels nature as part of himself and with his photos he tries to capture not only a simple image but a feeling, a message too. He is just an amateur photographer but he does it with passion and enjoys every moment. Favorite subjects are flowers, ice and snow–water and nature in all its aspects.
Sara Clancy
Sara Clancy is a Philadelphia transplant to the Desert Southwest. She is an Associate Editor for Poetry at Kentucky Review and her poems have appeared in Off the Coast, The Linnet’s Wings, Crab Creek Review, The Madison Review, Antiphon, Verse Wisconsin, Turtle Island Quarterly and Houseboat, where she was a featured poet. She lives in Arizona with her husband, their two dogs and a 23 year old goldfish named Darryl.
Margaret Clapp
Margaret Clapp is a student at Washington University in St. Louis majoring in cognitive neuroscience and history. She is interested in psychology research and its applications to education, and enjoys writing about perception, issues of identity, and the natural world. Her work can be found at redsaltpoems.tumblr.com.
Kurt Cline
Kurt Cline is Associate Professor of English and World Comparative Literature, National Taipei University of Technology. His full-length book of poetry, Voyage the Sun, was published by Boston Poet Press in 2008. Poems and stories have appeared, most recently, in BlazeVOX, Danse Macabre, Shotglass Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, HuesoLoco, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Black Scat, and Clockwise Cat. Scholarly articles have appeared in Anthropology of Consciousness; Concentric, Beatdom Literary Journal; and Comparative Civilizations and Cultures.
Dane Cobain
Dane Cobain is a writer, poet and musician from a place you’ve probably never heard of, somewhere in England. When he’s not writing books, he’s reading and reviewing them on his book blog – SocialBookshelves.com – or working at his day job in social media marketing. Find him at Facebook.com/DaneCobainMusic or follow @DaneCobain on Twitter.
Douglas Collura
Douglas Collura lives in Manhattan and is the author of a spoken-word CD, The Dare of the Quick World, and the book, Things I Can Fit My Whole Head Into,which was a finalist for the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize. He was also the 2008 First Prize Winner of the Missouri Review Audio/Video Competition in Poetry. His work has been published in A Public Space, Alembic, BLACK&WHITE, The Broome Review, Coe Review, Crack the Spine, The Cynic, Dislocate, The Dos Passos Review, Eclipse, The Evansville Review, Forge, Great Weather for Media, Paterson Literary Review, Lips Magazine, Many Mountains Moving, The Monarch Review, Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine, Sierra Nevada College Review, Salt Hill Journal, Soundings East, Spillway, Stickman Review, The Tower Journal,2Bridges Review, and other periodicals and webzines.
Jennifer Cook
(photo credit Madjid Aoudia, www.elmadjphoto.com)
Jennifer Cook’s academic scholarship in social issues and the arts, media, and visual and public cultures is augmented by her intermedial practices in poetry, creative non-fiction essay, and documentary film. Her most recent essays can be found in Salon, PopMatters, and Heide Hatry’s photography book Not a Rose. Jennifer’s poetry has been published in Cedilla Literary Journal (archived at University of Montana), After the Pause, Lunch Ticket and more. Jennifer teaches regularly at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Rachel Dacus
Rachel Dacus is the author of Gods of Water and Air, a collection of poetry, prose, and drama. Her poetry collections are Earth Lessons and Femme au Chapeau, and the spoken word CD A God You Can Dance. Her writing has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Boulevard, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals and anthologies. She’s currently at work on a novel involving the great Baroque sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Carol M. Gore
Carol M. Gore came to Victoria, BC, for a year to do her Masters in English Literature but, captivated by the scenery and outdoorsy lifestyle, never left. Known in her early years as The Girl who Writes Stories, she was distracted for a time by pleasant diversions like marriage, motherhood and an accidental career in labour relations, where she finds people and their bad behaviour endlessly entertaining. However, true love never dies and recently her passion for writing reignited.
Taylor Graham
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the California Sierra. Her poems have appeared in the Iowa Review, the New York Quarterly, the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, and elsewhere. Her latest collections are What the Wind Says (Lummox Press, 2013) and Uplift (Cold River Press, 2016).
Madeleine Guenette
Madeleine Guenette was born in Sudbury, Ontario. She moved to Nelson, British Columbia in 1989 to teach French Immersion in Trafalgar middle school. Her love and passion for photography has allowed her to explore the fine nuances of nature with its various moods, shapes, shades and colours. Water is a favorite subject because of its ever changing properties. Living in the West Kootenay is her playground and her inspiration; it is a paradise for photography.
Nels Hanson
Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 12, and 2014. Poems appeared in Word Riot, Oklahoma Review, Pacific Review and other magazines and received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations.
JC Hopkins
JC Hopkins is a Grammy nominated songwriter and producer plus a playwright, painter and poet. A long term resident of Brooklyn his art reflects on the life of someone committed to telling the story of what it means to be dedicated at all costs to the that endeavor. Willie Nelson and Norah Jones have sung his songs and his plays have been performed in and around NYC. He has had many shows of his abstract expressionist paintings. Right now he is working on a novel that deals with the trials and tribulations of a jazz musician in Kings County Family Court fighting for his rights, as a loving father, against all odds.
Steffen Horstmann
Steffen Horstmann has written more than two hundred ghazals in English. His poems and book reviews have appeared in publications throughout the world, including Baltimore Review, Free State Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Texas Poetry Journal, and Tiferet. His book of ghazals Ujjain will be published in India later this year by Writer’s Workshop.
Nate House
Nate House’s fiction has appeared in Armchair Shotgun, Carve, Methree, Apt, Troika, The Pebble Lake Review and Sentenia. Essays and columns have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Weekly, The Philadelphia Tribune, and The Press of Atlantic City. His novel Float was published in 2011 by Aqueous Books. He teaches English at Community College of Philadelphia and lives with his wife and two dogs along the Jersey Bayshore.
Peter Jordan
Peter Jordan has received various awards, including a literary bursary from The Lisa Richards Agency, while taking an MA in Creative Writing. Two consecutive NI Arts Council grants followed soon after. His work has appeared in Thresholds, Flash500, The Pygmy Giant, Flash: The International Short Story Magazine, The Incubator, The HU, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Sicklit and Crabfat. In addition, three of his stories are in anthologies. He has taken time out from a PhD to complete his short story collection. You will find him mostly in Belfast and Donegal and on twitter @pm_jordan.
Terence Lane
Terence Lane is a certified sommelier and a writer. He lives in Huntington Station, New York.
Jenna Le
Jenna Le is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Anchor & Plume, 2016). Her book reviews have been published by such venues as The Rumpus, Poetry Northwest, and Pleiades.
Iris Litt
Iris Litt has a new book of poems, Snowbird, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She is the author of two previous books of poetry: What I Wanted to Say from Shivastan Publishing and Word Love from Cosmic Trend Publications. She has had poems, short stories and essays in many magazines and anthologies, including the Saturday Evening Post, Confrontation, The Widow’s Handbook, Bryant Literary Review, Pinyon, The New Renaissance, The Rambunctious Review, Scholastic, Atlantic Monthly (special college edition), Travellers Tales, Pacific Coast Journal, Writer’s Digest, The Writer and others. She leads writing workshops in Woodstock, NY and has taught creative writing at SUNY/Ulster, Bard College, New York Public Library, and many other venues in New York City and the Hudson Valley. She lives in Woodstock, N.Y. and New York City’s Greenwich Village and winters on Anna Maria Island, Florida, the inspiration for Snowbird.
Richard Luftig
Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature and a semi-finalist for the Emily Dickinson Society Award. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in Japan, Canada, Australia, Europe, Thailand, Hong Kong and India.
Lee Nash
Lee Nash lives in France and freelances as an editorial designer for a UK publisher. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online journals in the UK, the US and France including Angle, Brittle Star, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Mezzo Cammin, Orbis, Poetry Salzburg Review, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, The French Literary Review, The Interpreter’s House, The Journal (UK), The Lake, The Miscreant and The World Haiku Review. You can find a selection of Lee’s poems on her website: leenashpoetry.com.
Rollo Nye
Rollo Nye has flown airplanes, and worked in supermarkets, department stores and universities. He also teaches Yoga at several studios on Long Island, NY. His poetry has recently appeared in Dali’s Lovechild, The Syzygy Poetry Reviewand the Red River Review.
Jay Patel
Jay Patel is a Landscape and Wilderness Photographer who loves to capture dramatic light. His photographs have been published in various magazines, calendars and advertising materials throughout the world. Website: https://visualwilderness.com/
Neil Scotten
Neil Scotten is a UK-born writer and photographer who is currently living in Montreal, Canada.
Danny Earl Simmons
Danny Earl Simmons is an Oregonian and a proud graduate of Corvallis High School. He is a friend of the Linn-Benton Community College Poetry Club and currently serves on its Poetry Advisory Committee. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals such as The Pedestal Magazine, Little Patuxent Review, IthacaLit, San Pedro River Review, and Off the Coast where he now assists as a member of the editorial staff.
Ron Singer
Poetry by Ron Singer (www.ronsinger.net) has appeared in many publications. His collection of Maine poems, Look to Mountains, Look to Sea (River Otter Press, August 2013), won an award and was nominated for a Pushcart. His eighth book,Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with Pro-Democracy Leaders, was published Feb. 1, 2015 (Africa World Press/Red Sea Press), and can be found in about 100 university and other library systems.
R. S. Stewart
R. S. Stewart is a native Oregonian who taught English at Christopher Newport College (now University) of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he also founded the college theatre, directing ten plays during the first two seasons. Two of his own plays have been produced at Oregon regional theatres. Among others, San Jose Studies, Blue Unicorn, Able Muse, The Raintown Review, Canary, Poetry Salzburg Review, 2 Bridges Review, and The Same have published his poems.
Robert Joe Stout
Robert Joe Stout is a freelance journalist, poet and fiction writer in Oaxaca, Mexico. His work recently has appeared in Garbanzo, Pinyon, Abbey and Exit 13 among many other journals and magazines.
Jonathan Treece
Jonathan Treece is an award winning editor, poet and playwright. His poetry has been published in The Axe Factory, Backbone Mountain Review, and Apeiron Review. He lives in Cumberland, Maryland with his wife, and enjoys the small revolutions that can come from great poetry.
Bill Vernon
Bill Vernon served in the United States Marine Corps, studied English literature, then taught it. Writing is his therapy, along with exercising outdoors and doing international folkdances. Five Star Mysteries published his novel Old Town, and his poems, stories and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Recent publications include stories in Apeiron Review, Scarlet Leaf Review, The Write City, Sweatpants and Coffee, Indiana Voice Journal, The Magnolia Review, Star 82 Review, Dryland Lit, Literally Stories, and Heartbeat Literary Journal. He plays Uncle Sam in Dayton, Ohio’s annual spring festival A World A’Fair.
Kelly Weber
Kelly Weber’s fiction has appeared Rose Red Review and The Judas Goat, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Avatar Review, Aleola, Bird’s Thumb, Agave, and The Judas Goat, for which she was selected as the 2012-2013 Aletha Acers Steel Burgess Poetry Prize Scholarship recipient. Her chapbook All My Valentine’s Days Are Weird was recently published by Pseudo Poser Press, and in 2015 she was the recipient of the Jerry Bradley Award for Creative Writing at the 36th Annual Southwest American/Popular Culture Conference. She has taught composition and poetry at Wayne State College.
Violet Wells
Violet Wells was educated at Oxford and works as a translator in Italy.