Doug Roy, 4 Birds in a Tree, Cut Paper
Contributor Notes, Issue #36
Rick Adang was born in Buffalo, New York and graduated from Indiana University with a BA in Psychology and English and a Creative Writing Honors thesis. He taught English as a foreign language for many years and is currently living in Estonia. He has had poems published in many literary magazines, most recently in Eclectica, Willawaw Journal, Hamilton Stone Review, Book of Matches and the Midwest Quarterly.
Manny Blacksher: His poems have been published in many journals, in print and online. They include Poetry Ireland Review, The Guardian’s Online Poetry Workshop, Unsplendid, and Buddhist Poetry Review.
Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Five Points, Rattle, Los Angeles Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine and many others. His poems have been awarded RHINO 2022 Translation Prize and his folio had been selected as a runner-up in the Gregory O’Donoghue Competition and the 2025 Gabo Prize finalist. Directory: http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk
Liv Campbell writes poetry from her home state of Texas. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Does It Have Pockets, Big Whoopie Deal, Earworms Mag, and Filter Coffee Zine.
Carol Casey lives in Blyth, Ontario, Canada. Her work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Gastropoda, Santa Fe Literary Review, Dust Poetry, antilang, Sublunary Review, Popshot Quarterly, Blank Spaces and others, including a number of anthologies, most recently, Stones Beneath the Surface (Black Mallard Press). She has recently published her first collection, What Can Happen: family and other raptures of imperfection.
John Dorroh may have taught high school science for several decades. Whether he did is still being discussed. He’s never caught a hummingbird or fallen into a volcano. Three of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net, and hundreds more have appeared in journals such as Feral, River Heron, North Dakota Quarterly, and Selcouth Station. He is a Southerner living in the Midwest and had two chapbooks published in 2022 – Swim at Your Risk and Personal Ad Poetry.
George Freek’s poetry has recently appeared in numerous journals and reviews. His poem “Night Thoughts” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Michael J. Galko is a scientist and poet who lives and works in Houston, TX. He was a finalist in the 2020 Naugatuck River Review and the 2022 Bellevue Literary Review poetry contests. Recent poems have appeared or will appear in New Plains Review, Spillway Magazine, Hole in the Head Review, Atlanta Review, and Boudin, among other journals.
Craig Goodworth’s practice encompasses installation, poetry, drawing, research, teaching, hunting and manual labor. He has received fellowships in art and writing including a Fulbright to the Slovak Republic (2015). Along with exhibiting his artworks nationally and internationally, he’s engaged in various collaborations and residencies relating art to science and religion. Goodworth holds Master’s Degrees in fine art, sustainable communities as well a Master of Divinity. Residing in Arizona, he serves as an artist in residence at a faith-based nonprofit. His interests include the desert, the human-animal intersection, and ecological and cultural ecotones.
Bill Griffin is a poet, essayist, and nature photographer who explores in his writing themes of ecology, community, and the search for meaning. He lives in the North Carolina foothills; since retiring after 40 years as a small town family physician he has become a full time naturalist. He guides nature hikes, maintains a section of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, and has completed over thirty annual USGS Breeding Bird Surveys. His latest poetry collection, Permanence and Flux, is forthcoming in 2027 from Iron Oak Editions.
Keith Hansen: Husband, father, grandfather, drywall contractor, reader of some books, owner of too many books.
James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet working in film production. His latest chapbook is A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023). Recent poems are in The River, Mangrove Review, and Packingtown Review. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Nashville, Tennessee. (jamescroaljackson.com)
Dan Jacoby is a graduate of St. Louis University, and Governors State University. He has published poetry in Bombay Gin, Euphony, Red Fez, American Poetry Review, Arkansas Review, Black Heart Review, R.K.V.Y, Steel Toe Review and other fine publications. He is a former educator, steel worker, and soldier. His work is influenced by the writers John Knoepfle, Al Montesi, Dobby, and John Logan to name a few. He has been nominated in 2015 and 2020 for a Pushcart and Best of the Net in 2021. He is the author of the book Blue Jeaned Buddhists.
What is there left to say about Marc Janssen, other than he should eat more vegetables? Maybe his verse can be found scattered around the world in places like Pinyon, Orbis, Pure Slush, Cirque Journal, Two Thirds North and Poetry Salzburg also in his book November Reconsidered and his recent book collaboration A Resurrection of Trees. Janssen coordinates the Salem Poetry Project- a weekly reading, the occasionally occurring Salem Poetry Festival and keeps getting nominated for Oregon Poet Laureate. For more information visit, marcjanssenpoet.com.
Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian Danish American poet, humanitarian, and historian. She is a Pushcart Prize–winning poet, a nominee for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a recipient of a United Nations humanitarian award, and a grantee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. Her books include Echoes in Exile (PRA Publishing, 2006), which was listed in Stony Brook University’s Women and Gender Studies curriculum; Seven Valleys of Love (PRA Publishing, 2008); The Poetry of Iranian Women (Reel Content, 2008); Spoon and Shrapnel (Daraja Press, 2024); and Jahan Malek Khatun: The Princess Poet of Fourteenth-Century Persia (Daraja Press, 2026). Her writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and publications by Black Lawrence Press, among others, and has been featured by PEN America, Writer’s Digest, PBS, and NPR. Her poems have been set to music and visual art, adapted into short films, and performed internationally at venues including the Smithsonian National Museum, The Writers Studio, the Tribute World Trade Center, the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP), and the Canadian Parliament.
Phil Kirsch received his MFA in Poetry from Goddard College, and is past president of South Mountain Poets workshop in New Jersey. He has previously been published in Journal of New Jersey Poets, New Jersey Poetry Monthly, Green House, Phantasm and more recently, The Stillwater Review, Voices From Here 2, Triggerfish Critical Review and WayWords Literary Journal.
Brian Jerrold Koester is the author of What Keeps Me Awake and Bossa Nova. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Anthology, and he holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives north of Boston. brianjerroldkoester.com
Michael Manerowski’s writing has seen publication in Jonah Magazine. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University.
My name is Massimiliano Nastri and I was born in Italy in 1973, though I grew up in a German-speaking village. I work as temporary lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast. The works I keep reading are by Zbigniew Herbert, Vittorio Sereni and Ingeborg Bachmann, for how they witnessed history, how they tried to resist it. My works have been published on Honest Ulsterman, Cypher, Ekphrastic Review, Southword among others.
Paul Nelson has twelve books out, for years directed creative writing for Ohio University, while affectedly, maybe competently, working a saltwater farm summers and years off: gardens, greenhouse, sheep, beef critter, some lobstering on Machias Bay. He lives, writes now in Kennebunk, ME. Latest are LEARNING TO MISS, Guernica Editions, Toronto, and his first book of fiction, REFRIGERATOR CHURCH, Tailwinds Press, NYC, in 2019. A chapbook of poems, BLACK DOG, Main Street Press, appeared in 2022. JUST BREATHING, poetry, appeared in May, 2024. Editor’s note: We are sad to note that Paul passed away at the end of February of this year.
Bruce Parker has published two chapbooks, Ramadan in Summer, (Finishing Line Press, 2022) and Tears for Things (Plan B Press, 2024). His work appears in Wild Roof, Cerasus (UK), The Brussels Review (Belgium) Prairie Schooner, Connecticut River Review, and elsewhere; and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he and Diane Corson, his spouse and fellow poet, have hosted a poetry critique workshop for the past decade.
Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and, a Bread Loaf Scholar. She has published three poetry collections with the Broadside Lotus Press and Aquarius Press/Willow Books, as well as two chapbooks of poetry. Her new poetry collection OXYGEN II (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2025) is nominated for the Paterson Poetry Prize.
Jessie Reid
Doug Roy: Since graduating from CSULB in 1972, I have been working as a freelance illustrator. I was obviously unfit to work with others. One of my first clients was Surfing Magazine, where I got to illustrate two poems for Tom Morey, who a few years later went on to invent the boogie board… Yes, I am older than the boogie board.
Mykyta Ryzhykh: Author from Ukraine, now living in Tromsø, Norway. Nominated for Pushcart Prize and Touchstone prize. Published many times in literary magazines in Ukrainian and English: Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal. His book Tombboy will be published in winter by Lost telegram press.
Zeke Sanchez is a writer/poet living in Tennessee. He won in-house competitions in The Critical Poet and has been published here in Triggerfish. His poetry may at times reflect his background: migrant worker, forest firefighter, Vietnam veteran, technical writer. The Shadows of Our Mind, a book of photography, done with professional photographer Doug Stoffer, contains a number of Zeke’s poems. He’s also published The Fire With Two Dragon Smokes, a book about his experiences with a “Hotshot” Forest Crew in the Northwest and beyond.
Elena Semeryak works as a pediatrician and volunteers for the Ukrainian war relief foundation, Chervona Kalyna.
Having grown up on a farm in southeast Missouri, Ben Sloan. His poetry has been collected in two chapbooks, The Road Home (Thirty West Publishing House, 2017) and Then On Out Into a Cloudless Sky (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA.
Lucinda Trew, author of What Falls to Ground (Charlotte Lit Press, 2025), is a poet rooted in the pine forests and red clay of North Carolina’s Piedmont. Her work has been honored with three Pushcart Prize nominations, a Best of the Net nomination, and Boulevard’s 2023 Poetry Contest Award for Emerging Poets. She has also been recognized as a finalist in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s poet laureate competition, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition, and Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series. Her poems appear in Cagibi Literary Journal, The North Carolina Literary Review, Burningword Literary Journal, storySouth, Susurrus, Trace Fossils Review, and other journals and anthologies. https://www.lucindatrewpoetry.com/