Darcy Smith’s debut collection, River Skin, came out in June 2022. Smith was awarded the Please See Me Fourth Annual Mental Health Awareness Poetry Prize. She is a Certified Sign Language Interpreter, Buddhist, kickboxer, wife & mother. Smith lives with her husband & their cat, Miley in New York’s Hudson Valley. For more information visit: www.darcysmith.org
David E. Navarro is a senior medical writer and editor with a global clinical research company. He holds a BS in Interdisciplinary Studies with Purdue University and also has degrees in Communications and Theology. He is an author, poet, essayist, and haikuist whose work has appeared in multiple journals, reviews, and anthologies. His most recent full poetry book is A Tree Frog’s Eyes (San Francisco: Blurb & NW Press, 2020).
Alecia Beymer is an Assistant Professor – Educator in the English Department at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, The Inflectionist Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, and Sugar House Review. Her research is focused on literacies formed by space and place, considerations of the interconnected resonances of teachers and students, and the poetics of education. This poem originally appeared in Radar Poetry.
Jane is an occupational therapist in Jackson, Mississippi, and the poetry editor at Medmic.
This poem originally appeared in Empty House Press.
Dave Malone (he/him) holds degrees from Ottawa University and Indiana State. He is a poet and filmmaker who lives in the Missouri Ozarks. His newest poetry book is Bypass (Aldrich Press, 2023).
Woods Nash is an Assistant Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Houston Fertitta Family College of Medicine. My poems are in JAMA, Bellevue Literary Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
Patricia Cannon has been a Registered Nurse at UCSF since 2001. She has worked in cardiac critical care, neurointensive care, hemeoncology, school nursing, and currently, in research. Her passion is her faith, photography, and the written word in all its forms. Brave Hearts was written during the pandemic and was previously published by Passagers Books.
Theodora Ziolkowski is the author of the novella On the Rocks, winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award, and the short story chapbook Mother Tongues. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Short Fiction (England), among other publications. Previously, she has served as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast and Fiction Editor for Big Fiction. She teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Biographical excerpt from her website: “If this were a resume, I would say that I went to Seattle University intending to become a nurse, but failed emotionally and turned instead to literature. A few years later I earned my Master’s Degree in English. While we lived in Illinois I pursued a Master’s in Library and Information Science and worked as a professional librarian for many years. After caring for my mother through a long illness until her death, I re-careered as a RN specializing in Hospice and Geriatrics, work I continue to practice. I am a wife, a mother and a grandmother.”
Shalini Rana is a poet from Virginia and an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arkansas Program in Creative Writing and Translation. Her poems appear in Copihue Poetry, Salt Hill, Pile Press, Rappahannock Review, wildness, Line Rider Press, Feels Blind Literary, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Find her at shalinirana.com.