contributors

Winter Issue 2022

Harold Ackerman spends creative time in retirement gathering light at the right moments and writing poetry and short fiction.  His poems have appeared in Mason Street, Visitant Lit, and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and his photo art at Uppagus and Pithead Chapel, among others.  In 2020, he published a collection of poems and photographs, February 2.

Mara Ahmed (maraahmed@yahoo.com) is an interdisciplinary artist and activist filmmaker based on Long Island, New York. She was educated in Belgium, Pakistan, and the United States. Her documentary films have been broadcast on PBS and screened at film festivals across the world. Her first film, The Muslims I Know (2008) started a dialogue between American Muslims and people of other faiths. Her second film, Pakistan One on One (2011), is a broad survey of public opinion about America, shot entirely in Lahore. Ahmed’s third film, A Thin Wall (2015), explores the partition of India and possibilities of reconciliation. It premiered at the Bradford Literature Festival, won a Special Jury Prize at the Amsterdam Film Festival, and was acquired by MUBI India. Ahmed is interested in dialogue across both physical and psychological boundaries. In 2017, she gave a Tedx talk about the meaning of borders and nationalism entitled The edges that blur. She is now working on The Injured Body, a documentary about racism in America that focuses exclusively on the voices of women of color. Her production company is Neelum Films.

Jeffrey Alfier’s most recent book, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Journal & Press (2020). Journal credits include The Carolina Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Hotel Amerika, James Dickey Review, New York Quarterly, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. He is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review.

Tobi Alfier is published nationally and internationally. Credits include War, Literature and the Arts, The American Journal of Poetry, KGB Bar Lit Mag, Cholla Needles, Galway Review, The Ogham Stone, Permafrost, Gargoyle, Arkansas Review, and others.  She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).

Sandra Anfang is a poet, writing teacher, editor, and artist who lives in Northern California. Her poems have been published in Rattle, The New Verse News, Spillway, and numerous other journals. Her poetry collections include Looking Glass Heart (Finishing Line Press, 2016), Road Worrier: Poems of the Inner and Outer Landscape (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Xylem Highway (Main Street Rag, 2019). She was nominated for a Best Short Fictions award, Best of the Net, and a Pushcart Prize. She is founder of the monthly series, Rivertown Poets, and a poetry teacher in the public schools. You can see more of her work at sandeanfangart.com.

Artisan baker by trade, Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi has been published in over 50 literary journals worldwide.  Winner of the Scribes Valley Short Story Writing Contest, he was also a finalist in the Blood Orange Review Literary Contest, and was awarded the Popular Vote in the Best of Rejected Manuscripts Competition.  In addition to several short pieces, he is currently working on his debut novel.

Stephen Barile is a Fresno, California native, educated in the public schools, and attended Fresno City College, Fresno Pacific University, and California State University, Fresno. He was a long-time member of the Fresno Poet’s Association. Barile taught writing at Madera Community College, and CSU Fresno. His poems have been published extensively, including North Dakota Quarterly, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Featured Poets, Santa Clara Review, Kathmandu Tribune, Tower Poetry, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Rue Scribe, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, OVUNQUE SIAMO, From Sac Literary Journal, The Heartland Review, Rio Grande Review, The Broad River Review, The San Joaquin Review, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and Pharos.

Ed Coletti is a poet, painter, fiction writer and middling chess player. Previously, he served briefly as an Army Officer, College English Instructor, Counselor, and later as a Small Business Consultant. Recent poems  have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, North American Review, Volt, Spillway, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Inflectionist Review, and So It Goes The Literary Journal of The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Museum.  A fairly new poetry collection is titled The Problem With Breathing (Edwin Smith Publishing -Little Rock- 2015). His book Apollo Blue’s Harp And The Gods Of Song was more recently published by McCaa Books February 2019. Ed also curates the popular twelve-year-old blog “No Money In Poetry”. He lives with his wife Joyce in Santa Rosa, California where they lost their home during the October 2017 firestorm. The Colettis happily have relocated successfully elsewhere in Santa Rosa.

Carol L. Deering was born and grew up in New England, but moved to Wyoming half a lifetime ago. She has twice received the Wyoming Arts Council Poetry Fellowship (2016, judge Rebecca Foust; 1999, judge Agha Shahid Ali). Her poems can be found in traditional and online journals, and in her first book, published in fall 2018: Havoc & Solace: Poems from the Inland West (Sastrugi Press). https://www.caroldeering.com

Jane Desmond is a poet who is also the author/editor of five non-fiction books, and has written for national outlets like Newsweek and The Washington Post. She was selected as an Assistant Editor for Poets Reading the News in 2021, and has had her poetry published in The Shrew Literary Magazine, Persimmon Tree, Words for the Wild (U.K.), and The Intima, among other places. In 2021 she was awarded a poetry residency in beautiful Door County, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan to develop a new series of poems at the Write On Writing Center. 

Monica Fuglei, a Nebraska-native in awe of the mountains, teaches composition and creative writing at Arapahoe Community College in Denver, Colorado. Author of two chapbooks, Parts and Gathering, her work has been recently published in Progenitor Magazine (for which she earned a 2019 Pushcart nomination) and Caustic Frolic.

Robbie Gamble’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Pacifica Literary Review, Slipstream, Spillway, and Rust + Moth. He was the winner of the 2017 Carve Poetry prize. He worked for many years as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people, and now divides his time between Boston and Vermont.

George Grace’s work has been shown in numerous galleries, including the Albright-Knox; the Burchfield-Penney Art Center; the Steel Plant Museum; Nashville’s Parthenon; and North Tonawanda’s Carnegie Art Center, and has been included in many national and regional exhibitions. He also did nine, city-commissioned, works for Community Canvases, which can be seen (underneath graffiti) on electrical utility boxes along Hertel Avenue and on the corner of Elmwood and Bidwell in Buffalo.
His how-to articles have been featured in Pastel Journal, Artis Spectrum, and Art Calendar magazines. In August 2020, he joined 29 other artists in the Buffalo Society of Artists’ Video Archive Project, a program he started in 2009.
He is the author of three poetry anthologies (American Stonehenge; Night
Wanes, Dawn; and Steeling America).

Cordelia Hanemann is currently a practicing writer and artist in Raleigh, NC. A retired professor of English at Campbell University, she has published in numerous journals including Atlanta Review, Connecticut River Review, Southwestern Review, and California Review; anthologies, The Poet Magazine’s new anthology, Friends and Friendship and forthcoming, Adversity, Heron Clan and Kakalak and in her own chapbook, Through a Glass Darkly. Her poems have won awards and been nominated for Pushcarts. Recently the featured poet for Negative Capability Press and The Alexandria Quarterly, she is now working on a first novel, about her roots in Cajun Louisiana. 

Ann Howells edited Illya’s Honey journal for eighteen years, both online and in print. Her most recent books are: Painting the Pinwheel Sky (Assure Press, 2020) and So Long As We Speak Their Names (Kelsay Books, 2019). Two of her four chapbooks were published through contests. Her work appears in Plainsongs, The Langdon Review, and San Pedro River Review, among other small press and university journals.

James Croal Jackson (he/him) is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. He has two chapbooks (Our Past Leaves, Kelsay Books, 2021 and The Frayed Edge of Memory, Writing Knights, 2017) with one forthcoming: Count Seeds With Me (Ethel, 2022). He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, PA. (jamescroaljackson.com)

Victoria Korth’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Stickman Review, Stone Canoe, Ocean State Review, Tar River Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review, Barrow Street and widely elsewhere. Prizes include the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, Streetlight Magazine 2021 Poetry Prize, among others. Cord Color was released from Finishing Line Press in 2015. Tacking Stitch is forthcoming, 2022. She is a grateful MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. She lives in Western New York State where she is a practicing psychiatrist caring for the chronically mentally ill.

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry has appeared in Nimrod International, Peregrine, Paterson Literary Review, Kelsey Review, and other literary journals. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Chicken Fat (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Pounding Cobblestone (Kelsay Books, 2018) as well as the forthcoming bio in verse, Ethel’s Song: Ethel Rosenberg’s Life in Poems (Calkins Creek, Fall 2022). 

Tonya Lailey is a poet living in Calgary with her two daughters and cat Talou. Her poetry has appeared most recently in the fall edition of FreeFall magazine. Her essay Half-Masked can be found in Writing in the Time of Covid, an essay anthology. Tonya is completing her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. 

DS Maolalai has been nominated nine times for Best of the Net and five times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016) and “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019).

Rethabile Masilo was born in 1961 in Lesotho and left his country with his parents and siblings to enter exile in 1981. The co-editor of  Canopic Jar, his poems have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Canopic Jar, With Our Eyes Wide Open, Seeing the Unseen, and others. In 2014 his poem ‘Swimming’ won the Dalro First Prize. The same poem won the Thomas Pringle Award for Poetry in Periodicals in 2015. In October 2016 he was part of the 20th Poetry Africa Festival, where he also represented The World Poetry Movement. That same year, Waslap was awarded the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. In 2018 his fourth book, Qoaling, was published by the Onslaught Press. 

Alison Meyers is a poet and fiction writer, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her creative work may be found in literary journals, the anthology Gathered Light: The Poetry of Joni Mitchell’s Songs, and at www.alisonmeyers.com. She is the Executive Director of Writers & Books, a literary arts center in Rochester, NY. Previously, she served as Executive Director of Cave Canem Foundation (Brooklyn, NY) and Poetry Director and Director of Marketing & Communications at Hill-Stead Museum (CT).  For many years, she owned and managed a Connecticut-based indie bookstore. She consults as a mentor for LitNYS, is treasurer of the board of Kweli Journal, and serves on the Arts and Humanities Board of Monroe Community College. www.alisonmeyers.com

David Mills has published four poetry collections: Boneyarn, The Sudden Country, The Dream Detective, and After Mistic. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Callaloo, Obsidian, Brooklyn Rail, Diode Journal and Fence. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf, The American Antiquarian Society, the Lannan Foundation, Arts Link and a Henry James and Hughes/Diop fellowship. He lived in Langston Hughes’ landmark home for three years. The Juilliard School of Drama commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills. He wrote the audio script for MacArthur-Genius-Award Winner Deborah Willis’ curated exhibition: Reflections in Black:100 Years of Black Photography, which showed at the Whitney and Getty West Museums. He has also recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records.

Anthony J. Mohr‘s  work has appeared in, among other places, Brevity’s blog, Cleaver, DIAGRAM, Eclectica (twice), GHLL (Green Hills Literary Lantern), Harvard ALI Social Impact Review, Hippocampus Magazine, The MacGuffin (twice), North Dakota Quarterly, Superstition Review, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. He has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, received honorable mention in Sequestrum’s 2016 Editor’s Reprint Award, and was a finalist in Living Springs Publishers’ 2019 Stories Through the Ages contest. Currently, Anthony is a fellow at the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard. He served as a sitting judge of the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, where he presided over civil and felony trials. On two occasions, Tony sat for several months as judge pro tem on the California Court of Appeal. Earlier, he was a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court, and in private legal practice. Among his numerous professional affiliations, Tony served on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court and chaired both the Superior Court’s ethics review and response committee and the statewide Committee on Judicial Ethics of the California Judges Association. He serves on the Regional Board of Directors for the Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles Region.

Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review and the author of eight collections of poetry. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is The Thing Is (Briar Creek Press, 2021). He holds an MFA from the University of Kansas City—Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife Lili and (soon, three) children. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.   

Allene Nichols is an avid teacher, writer, backpacker and photographer. Her photography has previously appeared in Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga, Unearthed, and Analogies and Allegories Literary Magazine. Her poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including: Veils, Halos, and Shackles and Impossible Archetype. She has recently re-located from Dallas, Texas to Mississippi, which has given her a whole new world to explore. Her blog is at https://allenen.wordpress.com/author/allenen/.

David O’Connell’s work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Copper Nickel, Southern Poetry Review, and North American Review, among other journals. His first full-length collection, Our Best Defense, is forthcoming from Červená Barva Press.  

Ginger Park is the Korean American author of ‘The Hundred Choices Department Store’, a novel forthcoming by Fitzroy Books, a division of Regal House Publishing (Spring 2022). https://www.regalhousepublishing.com/ginger-park/. Also forthcoming is a children’s book titled “Grandpa’s Scroll” from Albert Whitman & Co (Spring 2023). She’s also authored “To Swim Across the World” (Miramax/Hyperion 2001), a historical novel set during Korea’s most turbulent era, along with five award-winning children’s books published in six countries. Inspired by her heritage, Ginger’s  books for younger readers have received many awards including the 1999 International Reading Association Award, the 2002 Joan G. Sugarman Award, Parents Choice Awards, Rutgers University Economic Award, Bank Street College Awards, Children’s Literature Book Awards, Capitol Choice Awards, Notable Books for a Global Society Awards, and the Paterson Prize. Newsweek magazine called “Good-bye, 382 Shin Dang Dong” (National Geographic Books 2002), ‘The perfect all-American story’. Anthologized by Harcourt Brace, McGraw-Hill, and Stenhouse, her children’s books are used in classrooms all over the country. And while I’ve spoken at the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, Wolf Trap, and the New Executive Office Building, my most meaningful talks take place at schools all over the Washington, DC area. Ginger has been interviewed on ‘Good Morning America’, CNN, the Diane Rehm Show and NPR Weekend Sunday Edition with Liane Hansen.

In addition to MSR a couple of years ago, Robert L. Penick has had work in over 100 literary reviews, including The Hudson Review, North American Review, and Tar River Poetry.  Personally, he’s an old dude who works part-time at the Bon Air Library in Louisville, KY.  More of his work can be found at theartofmercy.net  

Emma Perrone is an artist and writer in Upstate NY currently attending the Creative Writing program at Finger Lakes Community College. Emma’s work is created through a lens that is often deflective of reality. That deflection is often represented through remains of various but interconnected structures. Whether that structure is physical or metaphysical and whether it is manufactured or of the unprocessed, yet processed, natural world, Emma is committed to these remains and the constant summons of grief. 

Claudia Pretelin (claudiapretelin@gmail.com) is an art historian, independent researcher, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BA in communications and received her MA and Ph.D. in art history from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She has lectured in Mexico, Argentina, and the United States and her work has been published in magazines such as Alquimia, Revista de Arte y Diseño, La Palabra y El Hombre, and Terremoto. For more than ten years she worked for the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide and has also assisted and coordinated research and exhibitions in photo collections, museums, and art galleries in Mexico and the U.S. Pretelin is the founder and curator of Instruments of Memory, a site that documents conversations with women in the arts published as interviews and oral history. Its purpose is to give voice to a diverse set of women in different geographical locations and at various stages in their careers, by focusing on their work in progress or a cumulative body of work.

Geoff Sawers published two poetry books in the early 2000s (with Flarestack and Two Rivers Press), then spent fifteen years as a house-husband with young children and didn’t submit work anywhere but has just started again. He has poems forthcoming in Dreich, Eastern Iowa Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Poetry Salzburg Review, Sarasvati and others. Born in 1966, he was only diagnosed as autistic in his fifties. He lives in Reading with his disabled son.

Celeste Schantz is the editor of Mason Street Review. She was the runner-up for the 2018 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry, judged by Terrance Hayes. Her essay “Strata” appears on PBS’s Next Avenue’s “Telling Our Stories” podcast. Her essay “Lake Under the Sea” appears in Fugue. She was the recipient of a full Katharine Bakeless Nason endowment to attend the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, where she studied with the author Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk). Her poems appear in numerous publications. She’s interviewed, among others, Ron Charles, Book Editor of The Washington Post and Maryse Condé, winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize, and as well travelled around Western New York with a tape recorder conducting oral history interviews for Washington College’s National Home Front Project. Celeste lives with her son behind a dairy farm outside of Rochester NY, where she supports his differently-abled schooling and inclusion programs and champions autism rights. In her spare time she hikes, moderates writing workshops (recently at Groveland Correctional Facility), and sits on her patio enjoying mock cocktails and cheap mystery paperbacks.

Ann Marie Sekeres loves to draw and travel. Her work has been published worldwide. From her Bloomfield, NJ home, she manages a punk band and looks for cheap airfares. You can see more of her work at annmarieprojects.com

Steven Ray Smith’s poetry has been published in The Yale Review, Southwest Review, The Kenyon Review, Slice, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, The Hollins Critic and others. His book, a two minute forty second night, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press and was shortlisted for the Steel Toe Books Poetry Award 2020. He is an Assistant Editor for THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays. His web site is www.StevenRaySmith.com.

Kathleen Wedl is a life-long Minnesotan, born in Madison, where well-behaved words rain onto parched notebooks. During and since her 50 years as a nurse specializing in behavioral health, her notebook has help bridge a gap in understanding of herself and her world. Her poetry has been recognized in contests and journals. When not reading, writing, and enjoying nature, you may find her studying the pairings of good food and music, especially in the company of family and friends.

Frederick Wilbur is a writer and an architectural woodcarver. His work has appeared in Appalachian Review, The Atlanta Review, The Aurorean , Cold Mountain Review, The Comstock Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Lyric Main Street Rag, The Midwest Quarterly , Poetry Quarterly, Shenandoah, The South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, and online, Mojave River Review. Rise Up Review, Rotary Dial, and Verse-Virtual.. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Award by Midwest Quarterly, 2017. He is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine (online). His collections of poetry are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. 

Erin Wilson’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The South Carolina Review,Green Hills Literary Lantern, Channel Magazine, Under a Warm Green Linden, and in numerous other publications and anthologies internationally. Her first collection is At Home with Disquiet. She lives in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory in Northern Ontario, the traditional lands of the Anishnawbek.