Venessa Lee-Estevez has been an educator for Miami-Dade County Public Schools for over 21 years. Much of her poetry is inspired by physical pain as she has had surgery for scoliosis, lumbar fusion, and sacroiliac fusion. Writing poetry has been extremely theraputic for Venessa throughout her life and she hopes that her poetry resonates with the people who read her pieces and share similar experiences.
Scott McLean, a physician/writer living in San Antonio, TX, is working on chapbooks of poetry, short fiction, and a book of prescriptive/practical nonfiction – First Steps to Improve Your Genetic Health.
Dave Malone holds degrees from Ottawa University and Indiana State University. He is a poet and screenwriter who lives in the Missouri Ozarks, and his most recent poetry book is Bypass (Aldrich Press, 2023).
Alex Stolis most recent chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife was recently released by Louisiana Literary Press, http://www.louisianaliterature.org/2024/04/11/new-release-announcement-alex-stolis/
CC Hart, is a neurodiversity advocate, artist, and author. She is a founding board member of the International Association of Synaesthetes, Artists, and Scientists (IASAS). CC lives in San Francisco, California, and holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco.
Jean Gordon Kocienda is a former Silicon Valley geopolitical risk analyst. Now retired, she volunteers with refugees in the San Francisco Bay Area, translates Japanese poetry, and finishes up her first novel, Girl in a Box: The Story of Yosano Akiko, Japan’s Feminist Poet. (www.accidentalfeminist.net)
Skip Renker has retired to Petoskey, Michigan after working for many years as an English Professor at Delta College. His poems have been published in numerous journals as well as three books. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
Tara Zafft is a US poet. She is a mother, wife, dancer, seeker, who tried to embrace the ups and downs of life with curiosity, love and wonder.
Matt W Miller is the author of Tender the River, winner of the Independent Publishers of New England Book Award, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Provocateur Award, and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. Other books include The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner. He was a winner of Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize, the Poetry by The Sea Sonnet Sequence Contest, the River Styx Micro-fiction Prize, the Iron Horse Review’s Trifecta Poetry Prize. A former Walter E Dakin Fellow and Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, he lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire.
Mary Jane Philpy-Dollins’ work appears in The Poetry Machine: Volume 2 (2021), The Poetry Machine: Volume 3 (2022), and the Waco WordFest Anthology (2023). She is the 2023 President of the Austin Poetry Society. She is a nurse living in Texas.