Craig Goodworth, Koryto #7 (Gallery Statua, Bratislava, Slovakia), 2015
Contributor Notes, Issue #25
Erin O’Neill Armendarez earned her PhD in English with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, Louisiana. Her articles, stories and poems have been published in small magazines like Mississippi Review, Mankato Poetry Review, Arkansas Literary Forum, and others. Since 2014, she has been Editor in Chief of Aji, an online, peer-reviewed magazine for art and literature available here: http://www.ajimagazine.com/
Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal lives in California, works in the mental health field in Los Angeles, and writes poems and draws art on his work calendar. His poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Mad Swirl, and Unlikely Stories. His latest chapbook, Make the Light Mine, was published by Kendra Steiner Editions.
Dmitry Blizniuk is an author from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Pinch Journal, Salamander, Willow Springs, Grub Street, Magma Poetry and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine. He is a member of PEN America and can be found in the Poets & Writers Directory: http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk
Oni Buchanan is the author of four books of poetry: Time Being just released in October from Kuhl House Poets/University of Iowa Press, Must a Violence, Spring, and What Animal. She is the founder and director of Ariel Artists, a management company designed for innovative artists who are expanding and re-contextualizing classical music for the 21st century. In 2020, Buchanan launched the Ariel AVANT innovation platform, as well as the AR/VR/MR performance concourse, ImmerSphere, powered by the Hoverlay publishing platform. Learn more here: http://www.onibuchanan.com/.
Kate Burnham: I am an MFA student attending Arcadia University’s creative writing program in poetry. I’m a single parent to my son, Bob, and I freelance and tutor as a day gig. I previously have had only two short stories published online with Pindeldyboz and Periscope Magazine, both of which are now defunct.
Laurie Doctor is a painter, calligrapher, teacher and writer. Find out more about her at her webpage here: https://www.lauriedoctor.com/
Colin Dodds is a writer with several novels and books of poetry to his name. He grew up in Massachusetts and lived in California briefly, before finishing his education in New York City. Since then, he’s made his living as a journalist, editor, copywriter and video producer. Over the last seven years, his writing has appeared in more than three hundred publications including Gothamist, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Washington Post, and praised by luminaries including Norman Mailer. His poetry collection Spokes of an Uneven Wheel was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in 2018. Colin also writes screenplays, has directed a short film, and built a twelve-foot-high pyramid out of PVC pipe, plywood and zip ties. One time, he rode his bicycle a hundred miles in a day. He lives in New York City, with his wife and daughter. You can find more of his work at https://thecolindodds.com/.
Ralph Earle is a lifelong poet who works the back roads of literary endeavor as a freelance Web Designer, out of his Cary, NC, home. His collection, The Way the Rain Works, won the 2015 Sable Books Chapbook Award. Recent poems have appeared in Red Fez and Tar River Poetry. He was a runner-up for the 2015 Randall Jarrell Award and 2018 NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award.
Massimo Fantuzzi: Born in Milan, lives in Leicestershire. Marcia Gioie, his collection of poems and prose poems published by Alkalea, 1999. Degree in Education. Since 2001, works in supporting SEND individuals in various settings. British resident from 2005, naturalized citizen in 2014. Recently, his poems have been published in LiteLitOne, Poetry WTF?! and Morphrog and are forthcoming in Alba, Poetry Salzburg Review and The Bombay Gin. From his window over the National Forest, he dares to keep detailed score of the lasting proceedings between treetops, low clouds and other liminal frontiers.
Michael Gaspeny’s third chapbook, The Tyranny of Questions, is available now from Unicorn Press. A novella in verse, it dramatizes a suburban mother’s fight to overcome her demons in the 1960s. Gaspeny’s previous chapbooks are Re-Write Men and Vocation. He has won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition and the O. Henry Festival Short Story Contest. He has received the North Carolina Governor’s Award for Volunteer Excellence in recognition of his hospice service.
Sergey Gerasimov lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine. His writings span the gamut from philosophical poetry to surrealism and tongue-in-cheek fantasy. His stories have appeared in Adbusters, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, and other venues. Also, he is the author of several novels and more than a hundred short stories published mostly in Russian and a translator of Russian poetry and prose.
Craig Goodworth is an Oregon-based artist working in installation and poetry. His practice encompasses drawing, object-making, research, teaching and farm 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 and sustainable communities. Originally from Arizona, his interests include land, place, mysticism and folk traditions.
Mary Giudice is a contented wife, mother, and teacher. One of her favorite hobbies is matchmaking people with old books & good poems… and watching the sparks fly.
Alan Gold is the culturally confused son of an Australian and an American missionary to Thailand. He was enrolled in the PhD program in English literature at Emory University until he realized he was happier as a writer than a scholar. So, he dropped out and became an advertising copywriter, learning the trade and eventually bending it to his own interests by co-founding Westfall Gold—a fundraising consultancy helping non-profits all over the world tell their stories. Now and again, in the rare quiet moment, he writes culturally confused poetry.
Charles Hood’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in journals including New England Review, Santa Monica Review, Chautauqua, and Catamaran. An avid outdoorsman, he has seen over 5,000 species of wild bird, 600 species of mammal, has twice visited Antarctica, and has survived being lost in a Tibetan whiteout.
Anastasia Kartavtseva is an author from Russia.
Debra Kaufman is the author of four full-length poetry collections—God Shattered, Delicate Thefts, The Next Moment, and A Certain Light—as well as three chapbooks, four full-length and over three dozen short plays. She was a recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council playwriting scholarship and twice a recipient of a Regional North Carolina Artist Grant and has won poetry prizes from various organizations. She produced Illuminated Dresses, monologues by fourteen women, at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh in 2019. A Midwest native, she has lived in North Carolina for thirty years and serves as an editor for the online journal One and on the Paul Green Foundation’s board of trustees.
Kristina Kryukova is an author from Russia. She lives in Moscow. Her most recent poems have appeared Salmon Creek Journal, Poets Choice. She graduated from the Moscow University of Culture and Arts, has won several national and international poetry awards, and is the mother of two kids.
Kevin LeMaster: Kevin lives in South Shore Kentucky. His poems have been found at The Lakes, Appalachian Heritage, Praxis magazine, Rockvale Review, Inkwell, Birmingham Arts Journal, Constellations, Plainsongs and Coe Review. He has had recent work published in SheilaNaGig online and Heartwood Literary Review and work forthcoming in The Bookends Review, The Wax Paper and Slipstream. Kevin was a finalist for the Mahogany Red Lit Prize. Kevin is also working on a chapbook that should be ready to find a home by January 2021.
Yuliya Malygina: I was born in a village Krasnoe in 1987. I finished faculty of journalism. Now I work as a marketing director . My poems were published in Serbia. I am a participant of “MyFest” festival, “Mytalk” workshop, “Writing on the roof” courses by D. Vidennikov and “Winter poets’ school” workshops by A. Kubrik and T. Shebrina. I am a literary reviewer of “ Baltic championship of Russian poetry”. I am working with the aesthetic concept of “horrible.”
DS Maolalai has been nominated six times for Best of the Net and three 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).
John McKernan—who grew up in Omaha Nebraska in the middle of the USA–is now a retired comma herder after teaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives in Florida. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines.
Bryan Merck is a past winner of the Barkesdale Maynard Prize and the Southern Literary Festival Prize. He has published in America, Pleiades, Seattle Review and others. He lives in Macon, Georgia.
John C. Morrison: His book, Heaven of the Moment, was one of five finalists for the 2008 Oregon Book Award in Poetry, and his book, Monkey Island, will be published in 2020 by redbat books. My poems have appeared in Spillway, Cider Press Review, RHINO, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, and I have work forthcoming in The Spoon River Review and the Midwest Quarterly. He teaches poetry at the Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon, and is an Associate Editor of Phantom Drift.
JB Mulligan has published more than 1100 poems and stories in various magazines over the past 45 years, and has had two chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as 2 e-books: The City of Now and Then, and A Book of Psalms (a loose translation). He has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies.
Dan Overgaard was born and raised in Thailand. He attended Westmont College, ran out of money and dropped out, moved to Seattle and became a transit operator. One turn and another led to a career managing transit technology projects and programs, including voice and data radio communications, real time customer information, electronic fare collection and enterprise applications. He’s now retired and catching up on reading. His poems have appeared in Allegro Poetry, Sweet, Triggerfish Critical Review, Poets Reading The News and elsewhere. Visit his website at https://danovergaard.com/.
Ilari Pass: Originally from Maplewood, NJ, Ilari Pass is a retired maintenance worker of the United States Postal Service. She holds a BA in English from Guilford College of Greensboro, NC, and an MA in English, with a concentration in literature, from Gardner-Webb University of Boiling Springs, NC. Her work appears or forthcoming in Rigorous Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, JuxtaProse Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, Free State Review, Common Ground Review, and others.
Allan Peterson: A visual artist and poet, Allan Peterson’s most recent book is This Luminous, New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Other titles include Precarious; All the Lavish in Common (Juniper Prize); and Fragile Acts, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. www.allanpeterson.net.
Tatiana Retivov received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Montana and an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Michigan.She has lived in Kyiv, Ukraine since 1994, where she runs an Art & Literature Salon and a small publishing press,www.kayalapublishing.com that publishes prose, poetry, and non-fiction in Ukraine.
Julia Samorodova: I was born and live in Novosibirsk, Russia. I like to travel and do landscape photography. I’ve been writing poetry since 2008 and have been published in many Russian magazines.
Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
Tim Suermondt is the author of five full-length collections of poems, the latest JOSEPHINE BAKER SWIMMING POOL from MadHat Press, 2019. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, december magazine, Gargoyle, On the Seawall, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.
James Thurgood was born in Nova Scotia, grew up in Windsor, Ontario, and now lives in Calgary, Alberta. He has been a labourer, musician, and teacher – not necessarily in that order. His poems have appeared in various journals, anthologies, and in a collection (Icemen/Stoneghosts, Penumbra Press). He is also the author of His Own Misfortune, a work-in-progress. (https://thurgoodwordsalad.blogspot.com/)
Melody Wilson teaches and writes poetry in the Portland, Oregon area. She has one Academy of American Poets Award and a number of smaller award and publications from early in her teaching career. Recently, late in her teaching career, she has poems appearing in Mojave He[art], Poeming Pigeon, Windfall, and Cathexis. Upcoming poems will appear in Visions International.
Thom Young is a writer from Texas. A 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has been in Poetry Quarterly, 3am magazine, Thieves Jargon, Word Riot, The Legendary, 48th Street Press, The Zombie Logic Review, Commonline Journal, and many other places. Featured poet and critic of social media poetry on PBS Newshour.