Laura Paul Watson lives and writes in Pine, Colorado. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Florida. She recently was shortlisted for the 2021 Manchester Poetry Prize, and her work appears in Agni, Boulevard, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of the full-length collection All the
Time in the World and two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks.
She is also a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Court Green and RHINO. She lives in the Upper Midwest
Rishi Doshi, MD is a medical retina specialist with Kaiser Permanente in Orange County, California.
I wrote this poem after seeing dozens of social media posts by medical students who did not match into a residency spot on Monday. The Match is the system by which medical students and residency programs rank each other and then get paired up by a computer algorithm; the results are revealed on Match Day, which can be an emotional tidal wave as students find out where they’re going to spend the next few years, and some find out that their futures are suddenly in question. They can join the Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (SOAP) to try and lock down an unmatched position, or try again next year.
Woods Nash, MPH, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Houston Fertitta Family College of Medicine.
His poems and essays have appeared in Medmic, JAMA, Academic Medicine, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, JGIM, Annals of Internal Medicine, and the Bellevue Literary Review. He is from Glasgow, Kentucky.
Ona Gritz’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, One Art, and many other journals and anthologies. Her books include Geode, a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, Present Imperfect: Essays, and August Or Forever, a middle grade novel forthcoming in February 2023.
Recent honors include two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays, a Best Life Story in Salon,and a winning entry in The Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 project.
Her poem “Office Visit” first appeared in One Art.
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of the full-length collection All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books) and two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks.
She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, Court Green and RHINO. She lives in the Upper Midwest.
Website: https://www.krsamuels.com/
Instagram: @kellyrsamuels
Elizabeth Vignali is the author of the poetry collection “House of the
Silverfish” (Unsolicited Press 2021).
Her work has appeared in Willow Springs, Cincinnati Review,
Poetry Northwest, Mid-American Review, Tinderbox, The Literary
Review, and others. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she
works as an optician, produces the Bellingham Kitchen Session reading
series, and serves as poetry editor of Sweet Tree Review. Find her
on Instagram at Random_Acts_of_Lineness.
Emily Hockaday’s first full-length collection, Naming the Ghost, is available on Barnes & Noble and with Cornerstone Press. Her second book, In a Body, an ecopoetry collection about chronic illness, is forthcoming October 2023 with Harbor Editions.
You can find Emily at www.emilyhockaday.com or tweeting (for now) @E_Hockaday.
Written by Michael Mark
This poem originally appeared in Santa Fe Literary Review