Deirdre O’Connor is the author of two books of poems, most recently The Cupped Field, which received the 2018 Able Muse Book Award. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Cave Wall, Fourth River, On the Seawall, and other journals.
She directs the Writing Center at Bucknell University, where she also served for many years as Associate Director of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. She can be found online at deirdre-oconnor.com.
A graduate of Queen’s University Artist In The Community Education Program, Rhonda Melanson has been published in several print and online magazines. She is the author of two chapbooks: Gracenotes (Beret Days Press) and My Name is Mary (Alien Buddha Press). She also co-edits a literary blog Uproar.
Lucy Griffith has published two collections of poetry, We make a Tiny Herd, which won both a Wrangler Award and a Willa Award, and Wingbeat Atlas. A former hospital administrator, she lives on the Guadalupe River near a town called Comfort.
Christine Lacedra is a retired RN who spends her days in her cabin by the McKenzie River in Oregon, writing poems about the healing power of nature.
Kevin Hadduck recently retired from Carroll College in Helena, Montana, ending thirty seven years in academia. He has published poetry in a variety of journals, including Journal of the American Medical Association, Lullwater Review, Appalachian Journal, The Wisconsin Review, Plainsongs, South Dakota Review, Blue Unicorn, The Christian Century, and The Sow’s Ear.
Anthony Borruso is pursuing his Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State University where he is a Poetry Editor for Southeast Review and co-host of the Jerome Stern Reading Series. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and was selected as a finalist for Beloit
Poetry Journal’s Adrienne Rich Award by Natasha Trethewey. His poems
have been published or are forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Spillway, The Journal, THRUSH, Gulf Coast, CutBank, Frontier, and elsewhere.
Hadara Bar-Nadav is an NEA fellow and author of several award-winning books of poetry, among them The Singing Pills (forthcoming), The New Nudity, Lullaby (with Exit Sign), The Frame Called Ruin, and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight, as well as the chapbooks Fountain and Furnace and Show Me Yours. She is also co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. Hadara is a Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Erin Jamieson (she/her) holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University of Ohio. Her writing has been published in over eighty literary magazines, and her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of a poetry collection (Clothesline, NiftyLit, Feb 2023). Twitter: @erin_simmer
Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum was born, raised, and educated in New York City. Mary’s translation of the Haitian poet Felix Morisseau-Leroy has been published in The Massachusetts Review, the anthology Into English (Graywolf Press), and in And There Will Be Singing, An Anthology of International Writing by The Massachusetts Review, 2019. Her work has appeared in Lake Effect, J Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Soundings East, Barrow Street, and other literary journals. In 2022 Mary received two nominations for a Pushcart Prize.
This poem was originally published Watershed Review 2021
Eric Dessner MD is an ophthalmologist in Brooklyn, NY.