Poet Talk on WMUA

Sara Eddy’s second full-length collection, How to Wash a Rabbit is forthcoming from Cornerstone press. Her third chapbook, Jewelweed: Poems about Plants, is also forthcoming, that one from Finishing Line press. She is author of Ordinary Fissures (Kelsay Books, 2024), Tell the Bees: Poem About Bees & Beekeeping (A3 Press, 2019), and Full Mouth: Poems about Food (Finishing Line Press, 2020).  Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Threepenny Review, Baltimore Review, SWWIM, Raleigh Review, and Spank the Carp, among others.  Sara grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she attended the public schools. She went on to get a BA in English from Connecticut College and an MA/PhD in American Literature from Tufts University. At Connecticut, she studied poetry writing with Charles Hartman; at Tufts she worked with Deborah Digges.After stints in Washington D.C., Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Somerville, Cambridge, Medford, Watertown, and Arlington, Massachusetts, Sara finally returned to Amherst in 2005. She is now Assistant Director of the Jacobson Center for Writing, Teaching, and Learning at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lives in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin with a white dog named Sully and a black cat named Luna.

Poet, public speaker, and long-distance runner dedicated to mental health advocacy, domestic violence awareness, and personal empowerment. A resilient storyteller who uses poetry, performance, and athletics as vehicles for healing and community impact. Experienced in public readings, published anthology work, and culturally rooted creative expression incorporating bilingual elements (English/Spanish).

Robin Becker was born in Philadelphia and earned a BA and MA at Boston University. She taught for many years at the MIT before returning to Pennsylvania in 1994, where she is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State.Becker’s many collections of poetry include Personal Effects (1977); Backtalk (1982); Giacometti’s Dog (1990); All-American Girl (1996), which won a Lambda Literary Award; The Horse Fair (2000); Domain of Perfect Affection (2006); Tiger Heron (2014); and The Black Bear Inside Me (2018), and Midsummer Count: new and selected poems ( 2026).Becker’s range of subjects has been described as a “vibrant miscellany.” Her poems reflect her Russian-Jewish heritage and queer identity, her interest in art history and visual art, the experience of growing up in 1950s America, and the legacy of the 1960s. In The Horse Fair, her subjects range from the painter Rosa Bonheur to the Torah and personal tragedies. Poet Kathleen Aguero has said that Becker’s poems are “richly populated by friends, lovers, family” as they “chronicle a search for community.”Becker’s interest in narrative springs from her family background, including a childhood spent listening to her grandmother’s stories, learning from her the nuances of storytelling and her family’s history in Ukraine. Becker was also greatly influenced by the women writers whose poetry was available in the 1970s, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, and Susan Griffin. Poet Stephen Dunn regards Becker as achieving “what may be one of the early twenty first century’s most difficult accomplishments—to write a credible poetry of affirmation. In the doing, she doesn’t pretty up the world. Rather, she finds language that embraces our dualities, our many-selved presences, regularly demonstrating her kind of perfect affection.”Becker’s work has appeared widely in magazines and journals, including American Poetry Review, the Boston Globe, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is a contributing editor to Ploughshares and poetry editor for the Women’s Review of Books, where she writes a column called “Field Notes.” Becker also teaches workshops at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. She has won fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 she was honored with Penn State's George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, and she served as Penn State Laureate in 2010-11. 

Regine Jackson is a Springfield-born writer and poet now based in Northampton, Massachusetts. Raised in a home filled with books through her mother’s work in Springfield’s libraries, she developed an early love of reading across science fiction, fantasy, horror, and graphic novels.Regine writes across speculative and fantastical genres, alongside poetry and prose shaped by inner-city life, memory, identity, spiritual inquiry, and transformation. Her work draws from lived experience and the realities of marginalized communities, often tracing the difficult terrain between inherited wounds, the search for selfhood, and the possibility of becoming.She is the founder of The Flimsy Quill, a literary initiative dedicated to empowering writers through workshops, literary events, and creative mentorship. In 2022, Regine was awarded the Straw Dog Writers Guild Emerging Writer Fellowship, and in 2025 she became a Board Advisor for Straw Dog Writers Guild. Her work has appeared in Meat for Tea, Thimble Literary Magazine, the 2024 Massachusetts Bards Anthology, Pán•o•ply: Inaugural MultiCreative Anthology, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, Red Rose Thorns Lit Mag, A Queen’s Narrative: Heavy is the Crown Anthology, the 2025 Reimagining New England Histories Project, B’K Lit Mag, and 50-Word Stories. She lives in Northampton with her two cats, Poe and Junji. Regine's webpage is: reginejackson.com & you can find Flimsy Quill on Instagram.

Ellen Doré Watson is the author of five full-length collections of poems, including Pray Me Stay Eager (Alice James Books, 2019); Dogged Hearts (Tupelo Press, 2010); This Sharpening (Tupelo Press, 2006); and Ladder Music (Alice James Books, 2002.  A sixth collection, Mostly, I Tell the Truth, will be out from Alice James in May 2028. Library Journal recognized her as one of "24 Poets for the 21st Century," and her work has been widely published in literary journals including APR, Tin House, Ploughshares, Orion, Field, and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Her translations include the poetry of Adélia Prado—The Alphabet in the Park (Wesleyan University Press), Ex-Voto (Tupelo Press), and The Mystical Rose (Bloodaxe Books)—and 8 Brazilian novels. She’ll spend 8 weeks at the MacDowell Colony this fall working on a new Prado translation. Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College for two decades, Watson currently teaches at Fairfield University’s Low-Residency MFA Program, offers generative writing and critique workshops online, and individual poetry manuscript editing with private clients.

Dara Barrois/Dixon has been making poems since before she could read.She drew pictures of poems before she could write properly with our conventional alphabet in conventional ways. Once she could read and write she wrote poems in imitation of what she could read and she self-published these by putting them in small jars with tight lids and launching them off into the currents of the Mississippi River whose banks bordered the little farm on which she was raisedby her maternal grandparents Euphrazie Zeolide Bayhi Becnel Barrois and Gerard Hippolyte Barrois about 15 miles south of New Orleans, Louisiana. Her early public experiences with poetry were all accidental,coincidental, random and arbitrary, ambiguous and unmethodical.Some of the writers and writing she read who were influential in one wayor another include fairy tales and song lyrics, church songs and catechisms, geography textbooks and William Shakespeare’s sonnets and popular plays, Edgar Allan Poe, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, Kate Chopin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael Faraday’s CHEMICAL HISTORY OF A CANDLE are examples of various eye-opening reading experiences. Her formal education included 13 years of Catholic schools, a few years at two public colleges, one in Louisiana for 3 years, one in Virginia for one, and one in Ohio for two. She’s mostly made herliving teaching reading and writing, once for one year for 7th,8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades in Virginia, and then at various colleges and universities in various kinds of writing programs across the United States.Her first book, BLOOD, HOOK & EYE, a runner-up for the 1977 Yale Younger Poets prize, was published by the University of Texas Press because the Yale’s judge, Stanley Kunitz, sent it to the University of Texas Press. Her other books are published by Wave Books, Conduit Books, Verse Press, and Carnegie-Mellon. Her personal favorites are BLOOD, HOOK & EYE, VOYAGES IN ENGLISH, HAT ON A POND, REVERSE RAPTURE, YOU GOOD THING and TOLSTOY KILLED ANNA KARENINA, and EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES FOR ASTRONAUTS.Writing about her poems in THE BROOKLYN RAIL, Bianca Stone says “The poems in Tolstoy Killed wrench the reader out of the destructive delusion of imposed narrative---ones imposed upon us by others, and ones we impose upon ourselves.Rob McCllennan writes “Barrois/Dixon writes with a remarkable clarity of lyric and emotional purpose, utilizing the lyric as a means through which to examine and re-examine observation and critical thought, writing out the humanity of our concerns and hopes, and the possibilities within.      Her chapbooks have been published by Press Brake, Scram Press, Incessant Pipe, The Song Cave and Paragraphs. Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council and National Endowment for the Arts have all supported her work with generous grants of money and time. She’s served as a visiting poet across the United States, in particular as theRichard Hugo Chair at the University of Montana, and as the Louis Rubin Writer-in-Residence at Hollin University in Roanoke, Virginia.Her poems have been awarded the American Poetry Review’s Shestack Prize ,The American Poetry Center’s book of the year award for REVERSE RAPTURE and a BELIEVER’S reader’s choice selection for YOU GOOD THING. She founded and edits factory hollow press  and lives in western Massachusetts.

Mary A. Koncel's collections of prose poems include Closer to Day (Quale Press, 1999), You Can Tell the Horse Anything (Tupelo Press, 2003), and The Last Blonde (Hedgerow Books/Levellers Press, 2017).  Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies and nominated for several Pushcart Prizes.  Mary was awarded a grant for her poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and You Can Tell the Horse Anything was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. After receiving a Master’s in Animals and Public Policy from the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine, Mary has spent the past 10 years advocating for wild horses and burros and the public lands where they reside.  She is also an Adjunct Instructor at the Center with a research interest in equine welfare. She lives in Worthington, MA with her husband and many animals including Rain, a mustang mare. and Huck and Puck, two adopted burros. 

Diana Whitney is a queer writer & educator embracing a fierce belief in the power of poetry as a means of connection to self and others. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves (Workman, 2021), winner of the Claudia Lewis Award, and the author of three full-length poetry collections: Wanting It (Harbor Mountain Press, 2014) Dark Beds (June Road Press, 2023) and Girl Trouble (CavanKerry Press, 2026). A quintuple Gemini, Diana writes across genres and leads workshops for writers of all ages and experience levels. Her essays, poems, and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, Glamour, and many other outlets. An advocate for survivors of sexual violence in her Vermont hometown and beyond, Diana works as a developmental editor and a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.

Kirsten Mosher is an American artist and author based in Western Massachusetts. Mosher is engaged in video, writing, studio work and art in public places. At once subversive and always playful, Mosher's work draws attention to how context transforms the language of urban scenes, signs and furniture by navigating and challenging everyday boundaries. Mosher often documents the relationships between and beyond seemingly opposing spaces: inside/outside, private/public, natural/artificial: A baseball diamond merges with a busy intersection; a road extends into the interior of a gallery; and in her performance "Carmen," she crosses streets and parks as an amalgamation of human and car. Mosher has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally since the late 1980s, at venues such as the Venice Biennale Aperto, Villa Arson, Nice, France, the Museum of Modern Art, the Public Art Fund, NYC, Boston Center for the Arts, and MUSAC in Leon Spain. Her installation Soul Mate 180° for which she received the LACMA Art+Technology Award was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2020. In 2024 she was invited to participate in an artist residency and exhibition Word is Round at the FRAC Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France.Mosher’s practice includes artist books, stories and poetry. Her Gumhead books were published by MUSAC in Leon, Spain and Revenge of the Nice Dogs by the Villa Arson, Nice France. Her recently published chapbooks are Zero (minutes to) Home, published by Selektion, and Plea$e Steal Me for 100 Plus Dollar-zz, Lily Poetry Review Books. Her stories can be found in Minor Literature[s], and Exacting Clam, Magazine Sonder, Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, HAVE, HAS, HAD and forthcoming in Wigleaf. Her series Automotive Stories occasionally show up in the Automotive sections of local newspapers. Mosher has lectured, conducted professional development workshops, and created publications, and worked as an art educator at institutions such as Dia Art Foundation, LA County Museum, C.C.S. Bard College, Boston Center for the Arts, and Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts de Lyon, France.

María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado was born in Manati, Puerto Rico, and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Colby College, an MA from Tufts University, and an MFA from Pine Manor College.Arroyo Cruzado writes poetry and prose that code-switch between English, Farsi, German, and Spanish—the cultural languages of her experiences. She is the author of Thought Here Would Cure Me of There (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024); Landscapes: photos & poems (MultiCreative Wisdom, 2023); Resistencia: Resilience (Human Error Publishing, 2023), a collection of poems and essays; the chapbook Destierro Means More than Exile (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018); and Gathering Words/Recogiendo palabras (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2008).Arroyo Cruzado has been awarded both a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and New England Public Radio’s Arts and Humanities Award. She is also the recipient of an honorary degree from Smith College. In 2014, Arroyo Cruzado was named the inaugural poet laureate of Springfield, Massachusetts. She is currently a Clark Fellow and is pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at SUNY Binghamton.

Kevin & Ellen read from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass : the first 25 "cantos", in honor of its publication on 4July 1855.Walt Whitman is America’s world poet—a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. In Leaves of Grass (1855, 1891-2), he celebrated democracy, nature, love, and friendship. This monumental work chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul, and found beauty and reassurance even in death. Along with Emily Dickinson, Whitman is regarded as one of America’s most significant 19th-century poets and would influence later many poets, including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Simon Ortiz, C.K. Williams, and Martín Espada. from The Poetry Foundation

Lesle Lewis is the author of six poetry collections:  Small Boat  (2003), Landscapes I & II (2006),  lie down too (2011), A Boot’s a Boot (2014),  Rainy Days on the Farm (2019), John’s Table (2026) and the chapbooks,  It’s Rothko in Winter or Belgium  (2012), and Hydrogen (2025).  A new book, Survival of the Fittest Pronoun, is due out this fall.  She graduated from the UMass MFA program in 1995 .   She lives in the New Hampshire woods. 

Carol Edelstein, with Robin Barber, co-founded Gallery of Readers Press. With Liz George, she edits Switch, a journal of micro fiction. She is the author of three books of poems, most recently Past Repair (Simian Press, 2021). Her poetry and fiction have been featured in numerous anthologies and literary magazines, including The Massachusetts Review, The Georgia Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her collection titled 73 very short stories will appear in the fall.

Samantha Pious translates women's poetry, especially sapphic women's poetry. Her aim is to contribute to a canon—or canons—of our own. So far, she has translated the selected poems of Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney, and Judith Teixeira. Her translations of Teixeira have been shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Award. She has also translated A Lover and His Lady: One Hundred Ballades, by Christine de Pizan, which is forthcoming with The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series through Iter Press. A volume of her original poems, Sappho Is Dead, is available through Headmistress Press. 

Amy Gordon's poems have appeared in Antiques Magazine, The Amsterdam Review,  Ekphrastic Review, The Massachusetts Review, and other journals. She is the author of three chapbooks: Deep Fahrenheit (Prolific Press) and The Yellow Room (Finishing Line Press).  Leaf Town is the winner of the 2023 Slate Roof Press Elyse Wolf Chapbook Prize. Before turning to poetry, she wrote and published primarily for young readers. She taught drama at the Bement School for almost forty years and now she runs an after-school theater program for the elementary school kids in Gill. 

In a career spanning six decades, Ted Pearson has published thirty-two books of poetry, most recently Epistrophy and Trilogy. He also co-authored The Grand Piano, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography; edited Epilogue, a posthumous edition of Craig Watson’s last poems, and co-edited Bobweaving Detroit: The Selected Poems of Murray Jackson. His work has appeared in Canada, England, France, Spain, and India. Ted was born and raised on the San Francisco peninsula, a seventh generation Californian. His musical education began in 1960. His first sa teacher was Lee Konitz. In 1964, he began writing poetry at the suggestion of Paul Desmond, a family friend. He subsequently attended Vandercook College of Music, Foothill College, and San Francisco State University.  His first book appeared in 1976, when he began his life-long association with the San Francisco Language Poets. He has been a visiting lecturer in poetics at Cornell University, and has taught Composition and Rhetoric at Wayne State University and the University of Redlands. He now lives in Northampton. 

Born 1947 in Northampton, Robin Barber, M.A., is a writer, teacher, and photographer.He loves writing workshops--first joined Pat Schneider's workshop in 1987, then Gene Zeiger's, then Carol Edelstein's from 1994 to the present. Certified by Amherst Writers and Artists leadership program,  he's been leading the Wednesday evening and Monday morning workshops since 1997. In 2010, Robin helped Carol Edelstein ( they're married ) establish non-profit Gallery of Readers Press, using a small annual grant and donations to fund Carol's reading series with 18 writers each season, a website with many resources, and the publication of 21 books. Find out more at www.galleryofreaders.org

JK Lawson is a visual artist and poet. Over the past 30 years his work has been exhibited extensively throughout the USA including the American Visionary Museum in Baltimore, the Californian African American Museum in Los Angelos, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Time and Space Limited, Hudson, NY and currently at the New England Visionary Arts museum, in Northanpton, Ma.He is the author of seven books, including Zombie Love, his third collection of poems in the Some Guy Upstairs Trilogy. His novel, Hurricane Hotel, set at the Audubon Hotel in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, has been successfully adapted for the theater with several staged readings both in the USA and UK. JK helped establish a poets/songwriter residency at the Rame Center for the Arts in Cornwall, U.K. and along with the poet Jane Ormerod, hosts the Galerie of Poetic Autopsies. A monthly gathering of poets, songwriters, and other undisrables, held at the Park Theatre in Hudson, NY.He is the recipient of both the Mass Individual Grant and the Berkshire Taconic grant and currently lives in Sheffield,Ma with his wife and son and 16-year-old puppy ,Sunshine. For more information, please visit www.lawsonworks.com or follow him on social media.

Suzanne Stroh’s new book, published last December by Headmistress Press, is the first English translation of the only book length prose poem by Natalie Clifford Barney, one of the Brilliant Exiles living in Paris between the two World Wars. Suzanne’s writing has been anthologized in NPR’s Story Project, edited by Paul Auster, and by Peacock Press in the Defying Gravity Series edited by Richard Peabody. She’s at work on her first poetry collection.

Anthony Walton’s poems have appeared widely, in such magazines and journals as The New Yorker, The American Scholar, The Black Scholar, 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Poetry Ireland, Oxford American, Obsidian, Notre Dame Review, The Library of America, and The Academy of American Poets, among many others. He is the author of a chapbook of poems, 1968, and his full-length collection, Celestial Mechanics, will be published in September by Godine. A celebrated writer of prose, he is the author of Mississippi: An American Journey and The End of Respectability. With the late Michael S. Harper, he edited two landmark anthologies, Every Shut-Eye Ain’t Asleep: African American Poetry Since World War II, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry. He teaches at Bowdoin College.

Heather Treseler is author of Auguries & Divinations, which received the 2025 Massachusetts Book Award in poetry, and two chapbooks, Hard Bargain and Parturition. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize, the W. B. Yeats Prize, and the Editors’ Prize from The Missouri Review, and support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems appear in Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Irish Times, and Kenyon Review, and her essays appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and in eight books about poetry. She is professor of English at Worcester State University and a scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. 

Isa Gitana is a Romani, Indigenous Mexican, and Italian queer femme poet writing about ancestry, survival, and the sacred ordinary. Her work moves between lyric tenderness and cultural critique, exploring life in a body shaped by migration, erasure, and resilience. She has been published in the Dear Sister anthology and in Meat for Tea literary magazine. A lifelong community builder, she treats poetry as woven into kitchens, classrooms, altars, and conversation. She is drawn to work that holds softness as power and storytelling as resistance. Isabella is a non-traditional student at Holyoke Community College, preparing to transfer for her bachelor’s degree. She lives in Western Massachusetts, writing, studying, and tending the small, persistent magic of community.

D M Gordon is the prize-winning author of Fourth World (Adastra Press), Nightly, at the Institute of the Possible(Hedgerow Books)—a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award, and Loosestrife for Porcupines, 2026, finalist for the Blue Light Book Award. Two novels, Gabriel, about a lost boy trying to find himself and home among northern islands in the 1960's, and Edda, about his grandmother and the destructive love of her life during WW II, are slated for publication by Sibylline Press in 2027 and 2028.  Gordon's past history includes, as a classical pianist with a masters from B.U., teaching, and performing chamber music; as political activist, fundraising, campaign staffing for Kamala Harris in Bucks County, PA, and writing a weekly Good News blog for FridayAction, and as an equestrian—schooling high level dressage mounts with Olympic team members. Her oddest job, briefly held, was as a courier for stallion semen. After a major course correction, following aptitude testing with The Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation, she dedicated herself to becoming a writer.  10,000 hours later, she is a novelist, poet, creative non-fiction writer, reader, and editor. She owes her literary skill to the support of many, including professors at Smith College who welcomed her dogged auditing. Poets, authors, and editors who sharpened her abilities include Eleanor Wilner, Ellen Bryant Voight, Tony Earley, Sigrid Nunez and the inimitable Kurt Vonnegut who, for a time, was holed up in a lonely office in the far reaches of Smith’s Neilson Library and dispensing wisdom.  As an editor at Hedgerow Books, she midwifed the publication of ten poetry collections, several of which were honored as finalists for The Montaigne Medal, Eric Hoffer Award and Massachusetts Book Award. Short works have been published widely in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, Poetry Daily, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet—a zine by Small Beer Press, run by local literary heroes Gavin Grant and Kelly Link. Awards include, but are not limited to, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in fiction and Glimmer Train’s First Prize for her short story, “The Work of Hunters is Another Thing." Apart from the novels and latest poetry book, she's also launching a new Substack called Leaf Sheep, offering poems, classic and new, about animals living among us, and how we live among them.  You can find her at www.dmgordon.com. 

Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry has appeared recently or is forthcoming in On the Seawall, Poetry Northwest, and Shō Poetry Journal, and her collaborative visual and written work has been published in multiple journals and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, from Black Lawrence Press. A Women's National Book Association Poetry Award winner, Rebecca’s books include Dressing the Wounds (a dancing girl press chapbook, 2019), Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, and Singing from the Deep End (CavanKerry Press, 2026). Her work has been supported by Straw Dog Writers Guild and the Mass Cultural Council. Rebecca recently served as the James Merrill Visiting Poet at Amherst College, she works with graduate student poets at Wilkes University, and she is the editor/director of Perugia Press, a feminist press publishing emerging women poets. She grew up on Boston’s North Shore and lives in Western Massachusetts.

Maya Janson’s second poetry collection, “On the Mercy Me Planet” was published in 2022 by Blue Edge Books and was selected as a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Janson’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Threepenney Review, Plume, Best American Poetry and elsewhere. She has been a recipient of a Massachusetts Artist Grant and has been a fellow at MacDowell. Janson has been a lecturer in poetry at Smith College and is currently employed as a nurse with Windhorse Integrative Mental Health in Northampton. 

Casper Lucia is a trans artist and writer living in the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts. He grew up in Los Angeles. His work thus far mostly exists in limited and ephemeral forms, like broadsides, drawings, and self-published zines that he no longer has any copies of. Email him at [email protected] to stay updated on his work.

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His new book of poems is called Jailbreak of Sparrows (2025). His previous book, Floaters, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2021. Other poetry collections include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003) and Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). Espada has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer with Su Clínica Legal in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Mydalis Vera is a Puerto Rican writer  and social worker with an MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing from Bay Path University. Her body of work includes the self-published collection Warrior Guerrera: Sayings and Affirmations para las Guerreras and a poetry chapbook titled Warrior Guerreras and Broken Hearts, Burning Suns. She is also the author of the Guerrera Writer Journal.Her writing has appeared in various publications, including Multiplicity Magazine, The Nasiona, The Latino Book Review, A Queen’s Narrative, WordPeace, Zonta, and the MultiCreative Wisdom Anthology. In addition to her published works, she is actively involved in the writing community, hosting the Guerrera Writing Group, a free weekly gathering for writers that meets every Monday evening from 7 PM to 8 PM.She is the founder and owner of Guerrera Writer LLC, a business dedicated to empowering writers and storytellers through workshops, publications, and community initiatives. In recognition of her impact and leadership, Guerrera Writer LLC was recently honored with a 40 Under 40 Business Award in 2025.

Lauren Marie Schmidt is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing; The Voodoo Doll Parade, selected for the Main Street Rag Author’s Choice Chapbook Series; and Psalms of The Dining Room, a sequence of poems about her volunteer experience at a soup kitchen in Eugene, Oregon. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Beloit Poetry Journal, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rattle, The Florida Review, The MacGuffin, The Progressive, and others. Her awards include the So to Speak Poetry Prize, the Neil Postman Prize for Metaphor, The Janet B. McCabe Prize for Poetry, and the Bellevue Literary Review’s Vilcek Prize for Poetry. Her fourth collection, Filthy Labors, a finalist for the Brittingham/Pollak Poetry Prize, chronicles her volunteer teaching experience at a transitional housing program for homeless women in her native New Jersey.  

Born in Westerly, RI, Carla Panciera was raised on her family’s dairy farm. She graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a BA in English and has a graduate degree in poetry from Boston University where she studied with George Starbuck and Derek Walcott. She has published three collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press Award Winner), No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Press Award) and One Trail of Longing, Another of String (Bordighera 2025).  Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines including Poetry, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nimrod, Water~Stone Review, the Carolina Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review. Her collection of short stories, Bewildered, received the 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (Pam Houston, judge) and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in the fall of 2014. Her short stories have appeared in the New England Review, the Clackamas Review, Slice, and other magazines. Her short story, “The Kind of People Who Look at Art” was indexed by Junot Diaz as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories for 2017.Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir was published in the spring of 2023 by Loom Press, Amesbury, MA. Her essays and reviews have appeared in several journals including the Chattahoochee Review, the Georgetown Review, Sugar House Review, and Under the Sun.She has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.A retired high school English teacher, Carla lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts. 

K. T. Landon’s debut collection, Abide, was selected by Kim Addonizio as the winner of the 2025 Richard Snyder Memorial Poetry Prize and will be published by Ashland Poetry Press in 2026.  Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Sun, New Ohio Review,  North American Review,Nimrod, Narrative, and Best New Poets among others.  Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and she is a reader for Lily Poetry Review. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Deborah Gorlin is the author of two previous books of poems, BODILY COURSE, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997, and LIFE OF THE GARMENT, Bauhan Publishing, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize.  Her new book of poems, OPEN FIRE, Bauhan Publishing, has been published this Spring, 2023. She has published in a wide range of journals including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Bomb, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best Spiritual Writing 2000. Recent poemsappear in Plume, On the Seawall, the Ekphrastic Review, Mass Poetry, the Hard Work of Hope, The Common, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies, Swwim. Her lyric essay, “Jack of All Trades,” was published as a finalist in Calyx magazine’s 2022 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing.  Emeritus co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review.

Lori Shine received her MFA from UMass Amherst in 2004. Her poems have appeared in 6x6, APR, Boston Review, Conduit, New American Writing, Tin House, and other magazines, and in the chapbooks Weather Eye (2025) and Coming Down in White (2007), both with artwork by Kathranne Knight. She and Knight have worked together on multiple collaborative projects, including Correspondence Publishing. Lori has given readings at St. Mark's Church, in art studios, backyards, bars, lecture halls, festivals, and at James Turrell's Roden Crater. For twelve years she worked as a managing editor to independent publishers including Wave Books and Catapult. She currently writes for UMass Magazine and other publications. She lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Karen Keough-Huff, also known as ‘Q’, has self-published 4 books and recently published a book of poetry, When I Was 8.  Her background in education and in business includes curriculum and handbook writing, as well as technical writing as a documentation specialist.  She is a member of the Writing Sisters, a group of BIPOC and LBGTQ+ women writers in western Massachusetts. You can find her book When I Was 8, at www.Blurb.com.

Kali Lightfoot lives in Salem, MA. She worked as a teacher, wilderness ranger in Washington state, executive at Road Scholar, and retired from her position as founding Executive Director of the National Resource Center for Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes. Kali earned an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies; been nominated for Pushcart prizes by Lavender Review, and Poetry South, and for Best of the Net by *82 Revies. Her first full-length collection of poems, Pelted by Flowers, was published by CavanKerry Press in April, 2021. The book was chosen as a Must Read book for 2022 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and was selected as a Best-Dressed by Sundress Publications. Kali’s reviews of poetry books have been published by Broadsided Press, The Hopper, and Solstice. Kali's recent poetry collection is Big Band Night at the Good Life Bar, Moon Pie Press.

Poet Eric Wasileski (M.Div), is a long time writer and facilitator for Warrior Writers, a national veterans writing group out of Philadelphia. His poetry book, Live Free (or die) is available from Human Error Publishing. He has also been included in many anthologies including Warrior Writers, Massachusetts Bards, and locally in Silkworm. His second collection Consoling the Weeping Willow is nearing readiness for publication. His Children's book, How the Rainbow Became Truly Beautiful is only available directly. Critics have called him a protest poet. Eric is a lifetime member of Veterans for Peace, DAV and VFW. Rev Wasileski has worked professionally in ministry in Quaker, UU and Buddhist settings. He resides in Pittsfield with his dogs. He is a father, poet, preacher, activist, veteran and man of conscience. 

Darlene’s professional career spans 32 years from working on youth leadership development programs with the United Way, runaway youth and their families for RAP, then a program of the YWCA, a s a social worker for Holyoke DCF, a crisis worker for Mount Tom, a clinician, a Juvenile Probation Officer, and now she works to mediate civil petitions in Family Court, and also by helping individuals with their recovery journey from substances and trauma. Darlene has been known to be on the frontline leading Black Lives Matter marches, advocating for housing, education, and immigrant rights, fighting for labor rights as a union Stewart, also for diversity equity and inclusion in the workplace, she has run for political office both as a city councilor and vice president of the United States with the Green Party. She is currently the treasure for Alianza DV services, a cause that is near and dear to her heart as a survivor. She is now embarking upon a career as an author, as her passion is writing and poetry. She is the 2025 Strawdog Emerging Writer Fellow, and recipient of the Valley Creates Assets 4 Artists Building Capacity grant. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Mount Holyoke College, and a master’s in social work from Springfield College. Her first loves are her children, and grandchildren. She proudly boasts about the Writing Sisters, a collective of BiPOC and LGBTQ writing women who convene regularly to write, share their work, grow as literary artist and make a difference in the community, which she helped co-found. She currently is working on her memoir and a poetry collection, and her family, friends, and writing sisters serve as her daily inspiration as she feels very loved and supported by them. Her favorite saying is “love heals all wounds, so love as much as you can.” Darlene lives in Holyoke with her partner, and their two dogs Bella and Daisy.

Since 2012, Carla Manene Cooke has facilitated writing groups in and from her home in Northampton, Massachusetts.  Her poetry has appeared in the literary journals Emulate, Meat for Tea, Naugatuck River Review, Persimmon Tree, Pineapple, Plum, RavensPerch, Silkworm, and Wordpeace.  She is a freelance copy editor and 2022 Pushcart nominee.

Brad Crenshaw has published four collections of poetry. His most recent book, Chased by Lunacies and Wonders, has won the 2023 Catamaran Poetry Prize. His other books include My Gargantuan Desire, Genealogies, and Memphis Shoals. His work has appeared in a wide range of journals including Catamaran, Shenandoah, Chicago Review, Massachusetts Review, and recent poems appear in Salt, Hawaii Pacific Review, Pacifica Literary Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Phren-Z. His poems have also been anthologized in Bear Flag Republic, The Hard Work of Hope, and California Fire and Water. He can be found at https://wordpress.com/view/bradcrenshaw.me.

Carolyn Zaikowski is a fiction writer, poet, essayist, and death doula. She is the current Poet Laureate of Easthampton, Massachusetts.Carolyn is the author of two prose poetry/experimental novels: A Child Is Being Killed (Aqueous Books, 2013), which poet Eileen Myles called a "saint of a little book", and In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse, which won the Mainline Contest at Civil Coping Mechanisms and was released in 2016.Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published widely, in such publications as Washington Post, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, PANK, Sixth Finch, Heavy Feather Review, DIAGRAM, Dusie, Huffington Post, and Everyday Feminism.​Carolyn holds a BA summa cum laude in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she researched trauma, the psychology of meat eating, and political protest movements. She then earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she studied trauma and narrative, the subversion of Western literary genre constructs, and the roles that poetry and storytelling play in anti-fascist, anti-colonialist, and feminist resistance. She has taught English and gender studies in the USA and abroad, including in Kolkata, India's red light districts and to political exiles in safe houses at the Thai-Burma border.Carolyn works as a creative writing teacher, manuscript consultant, and funeral celebrant/death doula. Sign up for her newsletter here for updates. Webpage:carolynzaikowski.com

Ellen Miller-Mack is a nurse practitioner (retired/rewired) with an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her book reviews have appeared in Rattle, Valparaiso, Bookslut, the Rumpus, the Poetry Cafe, and the Poetry Foundation. Her poems have appeared in Lavender Review ( journal and anthology January 2025), Lily Poetry Review, Antiphon, 5 A.M., Redheaded Stepchild, Affilia, and The Lake Rises: poems to and for our bodies of water. Ellen co-wrote The Real Cost of Prisons Comix ( PM Press) and the comic books are downloadable from the Real Cost of Prisons website.

DeMisty D. Bellinger lives with her family in Central Massachusetts, where she teaches creative writing. She has a BA in English from University of Wisconsin-Platteville, an MFA from Southampton College, and a PhD from the University of Nebraska. She is an alum of Bread Loaf and Marge Piercy’s Intensive Writing Workshop. Also, she was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center on a fellowship and at Gullkistan in Iceland with support from friends and family.

I am the daughter of Lie Chenn Lin and Yin Chou Lin, born in Taiwan into a big extended farming family from which I was taken away when we immigrated to Canada for my father’s graduate education. I’m an interdisciplinary artist, writer/poet and educator in love with the forests of cedar as they burn up in fires stoked by colonialism. Through storytelling and ceremonial activism, I am co-becoming a world of kincentric justice. I pray for the water beings slipping through our fingers. I live in Nonotuck/Nipmuc Land, Western Massachusetts in a town named after a genocidal invader of Turtle Island. I listen to places for ancestral hauntings. I love co-creating kincentric immersive arts with communities restoring and restory-ing good relations with Land, Water, Earth. My burning questions: “how can the arts heal relationships harmed (almost irreparably) by colonization? What is the relationship between healing and justice?” These questions are leading me into unknown territories and becomings where I’m lost in the good company of Bayo Akomolafe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mia Mingus, Zoe Todd, Karen Barad, and many other companions.JuPong was a faculty member in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College for nearly 20 years before the College closed in 2024. She recently completed her doctorate in Environmental Studies at Antioch University New England. JuPong's webpage: www.juponglin.net.

C. Desirée Finley is a writer and artist now living in western Mass. Her poetry is published in Straw Dog Writers Pandemic Poetry, Silkworm Journal (print), Cape Cod Times & Willawaw Journal [Pushcart nomination] Meat For Tea and some local anthologies, and soon to be in The Brussels Review. Finley says, "I've lived on both coasts, in cities and ocean adjacent, but what has influenced my writing most of all is having a mountain in my backyard. In addition to poetry, I write quirky short stories and have experimented with hybrid forms. It all begins, as Ocean Vuong would say, with curiosity."

Jovonna Van Pelt is a writer, a lover of animals and trees, a reader of history, and an enthusiastic volunteer at the LAVA Center (Local Access to Valley Arts) in her home town of Greenfield. She has an M.A. in Ethics and can play the spoons. Her favorite job was running a puppet theater. All of this has helped Jo become a multiple finalist for the Poet's Seat prize and author of Unrelated Questions, from Human Error Publishing; a second collection is in process. She is a frequent participant at area open mics, most recently on the Word Stage at the Garlic & Arts Fest. Her work appears in a variety of anthologies and journals, including Compass Roads, Plum, and Valley and Beyond.--

Born in Brooklyn, NY, Ivy Schweitzer has lived for manyyears in Vermont and taught English and Women’s, Gender,and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. Her poetry hasappeared, most recently, in Passager, Ritualwell, Tikkun,New Croton Review, Mississippi Review, Spoon River PoetryReview, Mid-Atlantic Review and The New England PoetryClub’s Prize Winners’ Anthology 2024. Dividing Rivers isher debut solo collection. For her extensive work, visit herauthor page at https://sites.dartmouth.edu/ivyschweitzer/

Susan Middleton edits science books and writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her work has been published in regional and national literary publications, including most recently Raven's Perch, Silkworm, and WordPeace. Susan is a co-founder of the Northfield-based Slate Roof Press (slateroofpress.com), which in 2007 published her chapbook "Seed Case of the Heart." In 2018 she won 1st prize in the Beals Prize for Poetry. She has a poem in the spring issue of Plum, the literary journal of Greenfield Community College.

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two collections of poetry:  Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019). His third collection, An Optimism, is forthcoming in October 2025 from Persea Books. Cameron’s creative work can be found in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and the Lannan Foundation.Cameron’s critical/scholarly writing can be found, among other places, in Signs, Trans Studies Quarterly, and American Quarterly. His book The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022) was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in LGBTQ literature and cultural studies. Presently, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Beth Filson is a writer, poet and self-taught artist. She earned the MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa in poetry but works in multiple genres including playwrighting. Most recently Beth was awarded a writing fellowship from Hawthornden Foundation in Scotland where she gets to spend a month in a Scottish castle roaming its halls and libraries, meeting other fellows, getting to know the landscape and of course, writing. Beth has been a long time co-host of Writers Night Out with Jacqueline Sheehan and Rick Paar, a program of Straw Dog Writers Guild. She was the winner of the Wild Light Poetry contest sponsored by the Los Angeles Review and Red Hen Press, and the runner up in other contests too many times to count. Her poetry has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Compass Roads Anthology, Amherst Live Magazine, Naugatuck River Review, Meat for Tea, The Perch, and others. Beth’s one woman show, Telling the Story/Untelling the Diagnosis was produced by Pauline Productions and staged at The Blue Room in Easthampton. Her new play in progress was given a staged reading at the Lava Center last year. Beth was raised in Savannah Ga and spent most of her professional life in Atlanta working at the national and international levels to develop and implement Trauma-Informed Approaches and the reduction of seclusion and restraint in psychiatric settings. Beth is very happily at home now in Easthampton where she collects rare and of interest books, and is also a bookseller at Book Moon Books, also in Easthampton.     

Ian Fishman is a poet from Northampton, MA. Recent poems and writings can be found in b l u s h and BOMB. He edits and operates the poetry engine, Press Brake. His new chapbook Calm Down ! was published by Factory Hollow Press. www.factoryhollowpress.com