Contributors for Spring 2021 Issue
Robert Beveridge pronouns: he/him identify as QUILTBAG (bi/pan), neurodivergent (anxiety requiring multiple hospitalizations/GAD/SAD/depression/suspected by a number of mental health professionals of being on the autism spectrum but not tested because “the tests are expensive and you’re too old for the treatment methodologies to do anything”), and disabled (arthritis since 1992, now walking with a cane over 90% of the time/chronic bloodborne cellulitis resulting in multiple multi-week hospitalizations/heart attack). [New! Improved! Now officially listed as disabled by the U.S. government as of 3Mar2020!] Now fall into the “older” category (50+). Adopted and entirely unfamiliar with my (birth) family history.
A.S. Callaghan lives and writes in Los Angeles. She has produced stories for public radio and is currently working on a collection of personal essays. You can find her on Twitter at @ascallaghan.
Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), which Publishers Weekly calls a “stirring, original collection.” Her poems have appeared in Ecotone, Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse and The Los Angeles Review. Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. You can learn more about Lauren HERE.
Roxanne Cardona was born in New York City. She has had poems published in Constellations, Writer’s Circle 2, Ethel Zine, Door is A Jar, and elsewhere. She was an elementary school teacher and principal in the South Bronx. She resides in Teaneck, NJ with her husband.
Kersten Christianson is a raven-watching, moon-gazing, high school English-teaching Alaskan. She serves as poetry editor of the quarterly journal Alaska Women Speak. Her latest collection of poetry is Curating the House of Nostalgia (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2020). Kersten holds an MFA from the University of Alaska. You can learn more about her at www.kerstenchristianson.com.
Holly Day is a writer living in Minneapolis MN.
Robbie Gamble’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Cutthroat, RHINO, and Rust + Moth. He was the winner of the 2017 Carve Poetry prize. He worked for many years as a nurse practitioner with Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, and divides his time between Boston and Vermont.
Paul Garson’s work has appeared in many magazine features. He has 12 published books.
Born in Korea and raised in East Africa, Melanie Hyo-In Han currently lives in Boston where she’s a poet and a teacher. She has received awards from “Boston in 100 Words” and The Lyric Magazine, and earned her M.F.A. in Poetry and Translation from Emerson College. Find her on Instagram at @melhan.
Sheryl Guterl, a retired elementary school teacher and counselor from New Jersey, moved to New Mexico for more sunshine, less ice, and taller mountains. She enjoys all things outdoors, including walking her dog, hiking mountain or bosque trails, and gaping at the night sky. When forced to be indoors, Sheryl reads, writes, and bakes bread. Poems by Sheryl can be found in The Teacher’s Voice, Workers Write!, The Ravens Perch, The Bethlehem Writers’ Roundtable, The Iris Literary Journal, Mediterranean Poetry, and several local anthologies.
Cindy Bousquet Harris is a poet, photographer, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and the editor of Spirit Fire Review. Her photography has been published in Inlandia: A Literary Journal and exhibited at Renaissance Artists: Writers Who Art, Artists Who Write. Her poetry can be found in Nostos, Unlost Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Pomona Valley Review, and in several anthologies. Cindy lives in Southern California with her husband and their children.
You can reach her at: SpiritFireReview2@gmail.com
Amanda Hope lives in eastern Massachusetts with her partner and cats. A graduate of Colgate University and Simmons College, she works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Nixes Mate Review, Lily Poetry Review, The Shallow Ends, Impossible Archetype, and more. Her chapbook, The Museum of Resentments, was published by Paper Nautilus in 2020. You can find more information about her work at her website, http://www.amandahope.net.
Paul Ilechko is the author of the chapbooks “Bartok in Winter” (Flutter Press) and “Graph of Life” (Finishing Line Press). His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Juxtaprose, As It Ought To Be, Cathexis Northwest Press, Inklette and Pithead Chapel. He lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ.
Maggie Nerz Iribarne practices her craft in the third-floor attic of a yellow house in Syracuse, NY. Her story, “Somewhere Else,” recently won a finalist prize in the 2021 Zizzle Literary Flash Fiction contest. Her work can be found HERE.
Bisi J Jacobs is a mixed race Black African and White English heritage author from the North East of England. She recently won a place on the Writers Black North East 1 year mentoring for Northern writers program. She completed Inkapture – a 1 year part time creative writing course with St Aiden’s College, Durham University. She has had articles published in the Guardian and the New Statesman
Callista Markotich has been a teacher, principal and Superintendent of Education in Eastern Ontario. Retired, she lives in Kingston, Ontario where Lake Ontario flows into the Saint Lawrence River. Her poetry appears in editions of Prairie Fire, Riddle Fence, The New Quarterly, The Nashwaak Review, Saddlebag Dispatches and Pilgrimage, in anthologies and ezines, and in Room, where it has received a 2019 poetry award.
Karla Linn Merrifield has had 900+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies, with 14 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the newly released full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. She is currently at work on a poetry collection, My Body the Guitar, inspired by famous guitarists and their guitars; the book is slated to be published in December 2021 by Before Your Quiet Eyes Publications Holograph Series (Rochester, NY).
Felicia Mitchell has made her home in the mountains of Virginia since 1987. Her poems, which have been published widely, have appeared recently in two anthologies: Mountains Piled Upon Mountains. Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (WVU Press) and Rewilding. Poems for the Environment (Flexible Press). Waltzing with Horses, a collection of poems, is available from Press 53.
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and adopted by New York even longer. His poems have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Mason Street Review, Spirit Fire Review, The Red Wheelbarrow Review, and The Worcester Review, among others. He work has received an Honorable Mention from the International Human Rights Art Festival, as well as Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net nominations. In addition to this, he published a chapbook of poems in collaboration with Madalasa Mobili, Three Unknown Poets, published by Seranam Press.
Marge Piercy has written 17 novels and 20 volumes of poetry. She’s a favorite of both Garrison Keillor and Bill Moyers. Her works include The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It; and among her 20 volumes of poetry the most recently published is On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. Her critically acclaimed memoir is Sleeping with Cats. Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes.
Find out more about Marge HERE.
Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. He is the advisor for The Chimes, the Shorter University award winning poetry and arts publication. His work appears in print, including Kestrel, Symposium, La Pensee Universelle, Paris, and other art and literature magazines in the United States and abroad.
Poet, Writer, and Arts Educator, Phillip Shabazz is the author of three poetry collections, Freestyle and Visitation, and XYZoom, and Flames in the Fire. He is also the author of a novel in verse, When the Grass Was Blue. His forthcoming collection of poetry is titled: Moonflower. His poetry has been included in the anthologies, Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont: A Guidebook, and Home Is Where: African-American Poetry from the Carolinas. Some of the journals his poems have appeared in include The American Voice, Obsidian, and The Louisville Review.
Celeste Schantz (Editor) was awarded a full scholarship from the Katherine Bakeless Nason Endowment, and studied with Helen Macdonald at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference. She was a finalist in Fugue journal’s 2018 annual prose writing contest. Her essay “Lake Under the Sea” appears in Fugue. Recently her micro-essay “Strata” was selected out of 600 for publication on PBS’s Next Avenue.
Also a poet, Celeste was the runner-up for the 2018 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry, judged by Terrance Hayes. Her poems appear in Solstice, Stone Canoe, One Throne Magazine, Poetry International, and other publications. She has studied with the writers Marge Piercy and Kim Addonizio; and was recently chosen as an Emerging Writer fellow finalist for Lighthouse Literary, where she’ll be studying with Leslie Jamison.
She is the founder and editor of the literary magazine Mason Street Review, which placed in the 2021 finals of The Best of the Net, was featured in Book Riot, has joined CLMP, and showcases guests such as former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera.
She lives with her teenaged son, where she supports his differently-abled schooling and inclusion programs and champions autism rights. In her spare time she runs a virtual book club, teaches creative writing workshops, and hikes in the Finger Lakes region.
Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is a poetry editor at the Worcester Review, and her poems have appeared in Catalyst, the Mizmor Anthology, Baseball Bard, Verse Virtual, Columbia Journal of Arts & Literature, Canary: The Journal of the Environmental Crisis, Silkworm, and The Comstock Review, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been a member of Marge Piercy’s juried poets group and a member of the PoemWorks community in the greater Boston area.
The poems of Anastasia Vassos appear in RHINO, SWWIM, Rust+Moth and Comstock Review and other journals. Her poems “End of Life Directive” and “Self Portrait As Lot’s Wife” received honorable mention from Marge Piercy in the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest. She is the author of Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (Nixes Mate, 2021). A Best of the Net finalist (in Mason Street!), she is a reader for Lily Poetry Review, speaks three languages, and is a long-distance cyclist. She lives in Boston.
A. Whittenberg is a Philadelphia native who has a global perspective. If she wasn’t an author she’d be a private detective or a jazz singer. She loves reading about history and true crime. Her other novels include Sweet Thang, Hollywood and Maine, Life is Fine, Tutored and The Sane Asylum.
Crysta Winter is a German crime novel writer. She lives in Germany in the Lüneburg Heath (similar to England’s mystical Dartmoor) in a village with 5 houses and a water mill. She loves the silence and seclusion. She’s loved photography since her youth, and is fascinated by the view through the lens. It doesn’t have to be a perfect picture. But it has to reflect the sensation she had while taking the picture. At some point Crysta started to write small texts for the photos. This developed into a passion for writing. Coupled with an enthusiasm for Agatha Christie, it was only a matter of time before she began to write mystery crime novels. Crysta has invented an offspring for her great literary love, Hercule Poirot; the grandson; Achille Poirot. On 6.6.2021 Achille will make his first published appearance in English, with “Midnight Soirée” and “The Bride”
This is her website: https://www.crysta-winter.de/en
Nicole R. Zimmerman holds an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. She was a 2019 recipient of the Discovered Awards for Emerging Literary Artists, produced by Creative Sonoma and funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work, nominated for a Pushcart and Best American Essays, appears in Still Point Arts Quarterly, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, Hypertext Review, About Place Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, Cagibi, Toho, Ruminate, Birdland, Origins, and Creative Nonfiction. She lives with her wife on a farm in Northern California and leads writing workshops. https://www.nicolerzimmerman.com/
Mason Street 